The Israeli occupation’s master plan against Palestinian Christians

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Five months ago, one of the most brutal killings of a human being took place; a crime was committed by the members of the Israeli occupation forces against the female journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian Christian. Two weeks before her assassination, during Easter, the occupation limited, separated, and violently prevented Palestinian Christians in particular from performing their acts of worship in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the old city of Al-Quds; the holiest of Christian sites that is beyond imagination. 

Holy Christian sites, clergymen, and laymen Christians are being attacked, harassed, and arrested. Categorizing them into “sects” and not as a Nation, the occupation, and for at least seven decades, has craftily been implementing the divide and rule policy (between Christians and Muslims) aiming at ‘gently’ and indirectly emptying Palestine from its original Palestinian Christian community in particular in Eastern Palestine occupied in 1967 and chiefly from East Jerusalem. 

Despite targeting many Palestinian Christian figures including assassinations, the Israeli occupation spread the most vicious propaganda, claiming (chiefly amongst ignorant segments in the West) that it is “protecting” Christians in the Holy Land. 

The criminal lie that the Israeli occupation "protects" Palestinian Christians was smashed yet again in the early hours of October 18, 2022, when Israeli occupation elements, in a group of 12 persons consisting of “soldiers” and Shabak (Secret services), conducted a dawn-raid at the house of Palestinian Christian Maestro Souheil Khoury after breaking the gate at the entrance of the compound where the whole family lives, to arrest his son Shadi Khoury, a sixteen-year-old child, a pupil at the Quakers “Friends School” in Ramallah. They beat him so hard until he was bleeding and dragged him across the room and along the path on the way out of the house barefoot and blindfolded, not allowing the parents to see where the blood was coming from.  Shadi was taken to the interrogation section in the notorious Maskobiyeh "Moscovan" Israeli secret police compound in which they interrogate mainly Palestinian residents of occupied Al-Quds. 

Shadi’s grandmother Samia, 89, told us that Shadi is being “interrogated” without the presence of either his parents or a lawyer; “a tactic used systematically to terrorize children into submission, and ultimately using their own words to incriminate them."

Shadi is a case among so many Palestinian children that are being harassed, tortured, and imprisoned for no reason other than being a Palestinian seeking to live in dignity and freedom in their own country. 

Back in July 2020, the Israeli occupation arrested Shadi’s parents (Souheil and Rania Elias). Rania is the director of the Jebus Cultural Center (Jebus is an ancient name of Al-Quds, given by the Jebusites, the ones who first built the city) and her husband Souheil Khoury is the director of the National Conservatory.

The arrest of Shadi is not a random act; rather, it was “perfectly” calculated. The occupation is working diligently to separate Palestinian cultural organizations (especially those based in Al-Quds) from their international financiers. The easiest thing the occupation can do is describe the Palestinian people as "terrorists" and "murderers", thus reincarnating the Euro-Western anti-Semitic past, triggering Western guilt and preventing the latter from sympathizing with the Palestinian victim. The West would “prefer” to settle its problems “with its own victim” first because it can always be extorted with such accusations. 

The new “regulations” of finance imposed by the EU in early 2020 go well in line with the policies, practices, and decisions of the occupation in October 2021 against Palestinian NGOs and are yet another testament to this kind of pressure policy that can lead to ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in their own home.

This is why the occupation invents ties and fabricates links between “terrorism” and culture, forming fierce campaigns led by Zionist lobbies in the media, demanding an end to what it calls the indirect “financing of Palestinian terrorism,” which constitutes a burden for the backers and financiers of any cultural activity.

Through this dirty game, the occupation attempts to don the robe of the “classy, music-connoisseur intellectual,” the defender of the bastion of civilization against the barbarians.

The occupation has understood that culture, with its many building blocks, is a (political) power that goes hand in hand in the fight alongside another kind of political power (the military), and this is what the occupation dreads. The occupation would love nothing else than to have the Palestinians remain within the confines of military power (the occupation in the “legitimate” uniform of its soldiers – against the “terrorist” Palestinian without an official uniform) because it is easy to attack this kind of power and promote a negative image of the Palestinians. The occupation has invested billions of dollars across the decades in crystallizing this image in order to weaken the other forms of power in the Palestinian’s possession.

Although the occupation reiterates in all international events and before donor states always that Palestinians (in ’67 occupied Palestine) teach their children to be “anti-Semitic” and anti-“Israel”, including in their educational programs (the last time was in a hostile question against Palestine in the UK Parliament in July 2020), with the aim of targeting the backers of Palestine’s educational institutions, the persecution in occupied eastern Al-Quds takes on a different form.

The Israeli occupation hasn’t stopped (since the expulsion of half of the Palestinian people back in 1948) using violent “solutions” against Palestinians, not even sparing cultural leaders, such as poets and writers including the grand uncle of Shadi Khoury the late poet and writer Kamal Butros Nasser in April 1973. In Palestine, cultural counter-hegemony is considered an “act of terror”, whereas the “moralists” of the West call for arming Ukrainians to defend their country against the Russians. Stop looking for “double standards” and start looking for hidden intentional brutality unless we choose to establish yet another mental health global hospital to treat “Western” hypocrites. If we do, we won’t be asking the EU for funding.