COVID Lockdowns An Israeli Plot To Prevent Activists From Serving As Human Shields For Violent Palestinians

“Qui bono?”

Hebron, December 10 – Representatives of international human rights NGOs and of local Palestinian groups observed this week the suspicious convenience of the worldwide pandemic that has hampered international travel and the movement of people and the propaganda benefit that the IDF gains from a lack of volunteers coming from abroad to stand between Palestinian rioters and IDF troops to prevent the latter from firing on the former.

Among contested Israeli-Palestinian locales, this ancient city presents what both sides to the conflict and third-party observers call a unique hotbed of radicalism: hardcore Jewish residents reestablishing a permanent presence in King David’s legendary capital of Judea, the site of a burial shrine to Biblical patriarchs and matriarchs, and of an Arab massacre of the ancient Jewish community in 1929 that effectively kept Hebron Jew-free until 1967 – opposed by some of the most extremist, violent Palestinian clans in the entire Levant.

Confrontations between rock- and firebomb-throwing Palestinian demonstrators in Hebron became commonplace starting in the 1980’s with the first Intifada, a grass-roots Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule. Through Israeli-Palestinian agreements in the 1990’s that many hoped presaged peace between the longtime enemies would break out, Hebron’s clans continued to oppose conciliatory moves of any sort toward Israel, on numerous occasions defying even the radical Hamas leadership to perpetrate suicide bombings and other terrorism to sabotage any moves that might lead to coexistence. The city has therefore served as a magnet for activists from around the world hoping to burnish their human rights credentials, an essential requirement of which has long been antisemitism masquerading as concern for Palestinians. The dedicated activists shield the violent Palestinians from Israeli fire aimed at quelling the unrest and at protecting themselves, twin goals that human rights and Palestinian organizations alike have long considered anathema.

But that avenue of antisemitic and pro-Palestinian human rights synergy has shrunk since nearly a year ago, when the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen began to wreak its current havoc on the world economy and movement. The travel restrictions have dried the influx of activists into Hebron to a trickle, a development that those activists and the rioters insist cannot be coincidental. “Qui bono?” declared Hasan Qawasmeh. “Who benefits? Obviously the occupier, because now they can shoot back at us with impunity, and there are many fewer international activists around to document the confrontations in a tendentious fashion to paint the soldiers and settlers as irredeemably cruel and evil. That’s all any antisem- I mean, that’s all any human rights activist needs to prove anything.”

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