With its high ceilings, soft lighting and brown and turquoise blue cushioned chairs, Juro Coffee House has the appearance of a chic European cafe.
Israeli ministers have previously stated that they planned to use the same methods in the West Bank that have destroyed the Gaza Strip, leading to more than 54,000 Palestinians killed and the majority of buildings damaged or destroyed.Defence Minister Israel Katz
said Israel would apply the “lesson” of “repeated raids in Gaza” to the Jenin refugee camp. The following month, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has control over much of the administration of the West Bank,“Tulkarem and Jenin will look like Jabalia and Shujayea. Nablus and Ramallah will resemble Rafah and Khan Younis,” comparing refugee camps in the West Bank to areas in Gaza that have been devastated by Israeli bombing and ground offensives.“They will also be turned into uninhabitable ruins, and their residents will be forced to migrate and seek a new life in other countries,” Smotrich said.
Hamze Attar, a Luxembourg-based defence analyst, told Al Jazeera these tactics are not new in Palestinian territory, having first been deployed by the British during their mandate over historic Palestine, which preceded Israel’s foundation in 1948.“It’s part of the “counterinsurgency” strategy,” he said. “Bigger roads [mean] easy access to forces – bigger roads, less congested battle management; bigger roads, less ability for fighters to escape from house to house.”
Displacing the displaced
About 75,000 Palestinians live in the Jenin, Nur Shams, Far’a and Tulkarem refugee camps. They were either displaced themselves or descended from those displaced during the Nakba (which means “catastrophe”) when roughly 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes by Zionist forces frombidding America adieu did so defiantly, wielding a righteous pulpit from foreign shores. Even so, symbolism without substance is hollow.
Returning means tackling – head-on – the mess, the contradictions, the tarnished ideals of a battered nation still worth the imagination and effort.Public figures ought to leverage their popular platforms not just to condemn, but to galvanise, to convey resistance not as elitist scorn but as shared obligation. That would impress more than a pointed opinion column in the New York Times or a thread of disparaging tweets ever could.
Zelenskyy knows that hard work is always done on the ground. This is where returnees can make a tangible difference – not as saviours parachuting in, but instead as allies to like-minded collaborators who do that hard work without notice or applause.Trumpism may be ascendant, but it is not invincible. What it fears most is solidarity that bridges class, race, and background – solidarity that declares that America is not Donald Trump’s to disfigure or define.