Israel’s president Isaac Herzog marked Israeli Jerusalem Day through painting himself as a champion of peace:
The figs and the olives it’s just a symbol of peace together… it is a city of peace
Israel’s settler colonialism in Jerusalem is ‘peace’
Jerusalem Day celebrates Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory in East Jerusalem since 1967. The UN has reaffirmed that Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem are “a flagrant violation under international law”.
Yet from 1 November 2022 to 31 October 2023, Israel expanded settlements in East Jerusalem by advancing 9,670 housing units.
This conquest is hardly peaceful. In 2023, Israel and its settlers killed at least 507 Palestinians in the overall West Bank.
And on Jerusalem Day, thousands of ultranationalist Israelis marched through the city. Video footage shows them attacking Palestinian journalist Saif Kwasmi.
The Israeli outlet Haaretz reported that the march was “the most violent and ugliest” the author had ever seen.
Marchers also put stickers on Palestinian shops that read “war, expulsion, settlement“. And they chanted “death to the Arabs”.
If Palestinian people chanted ‘death to the jews’, there would be international uproar across media and politics.
While there’s no excuse for settler violence, many of the Israeli marchers are young and fresh from Israel’s racist schooling system.
Professor of language and education at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem Nurit Peled-Elhanan studied Israeli text books from 2006-2011.
According to Peled-Elhanan, Israel’s education system indoctrinates children into prejudice against Palestinians:
The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer.
The findings of racism are in line with other studies including one on Israeli children’s books that were published between 1967 and 1985.
520 of the 1,700 books studied contained racist descriptions of Palestinian people. And of those 520:
66 percent… refer to Arabs as violent; 52 percent as evil; 37 percent as liars; 31 percent as greedy; 28 percent as two-faced and 27 percent as traitors.
Rejecting peace in Gaza on Jerusalem Day
The lack of peace on Jerusalem Day and in the West Bank is before one gets to the Israeli government’s approach to a ceasefire in Gaza.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that any permanent peace deal is a “non-starter” for Israel. That’s because Netanyahu wants the complete “destruction of Hamas military and governing capabilities”.
In the genocidal assault, Israel has killed over 15,000 Palestinian children. And ‘peace champion’ Israeli president Herzog said after the 7 October Hamas attack:
It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true.
In George Orwell’s 1984, the government mantra is a contradiction: ‘war is peace’. Israel’s president seems to be taking notes from that dystopian picture.
Featured image via the Canary
