Hands off Palestine: We cannot continue our support of Israeli atrocities
Emily Bi/Senior Staff
Last Updated May 25, 2021
Sheikh Jarrah, the latest flashpoint of violence between government-backed Israeli settlers and Palestinian residents, is a neighborhood in East Jerusalem that’s named after Hussam al-Din al-Jarrahi. He was the personal physician to Saladin, an Islamic general whose armies liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders in the 12th century. Jarrahi’s tomb still rests in Sheikh Jarrah. All these years later, violence continues there — although it is now much more one-sided.
As of press time, at least 230 Palestinians have been killed within the last two weeks due to Israeli aerial and naval bombardment in Gaza alone, with 60 of these casualties being children. In Israel, 12 people were killed as a result of rocket fire from Hamas. Even this roughly 19-1 ratio does not tell the full story — Gaza is a relatively tiny stretch of land (about the size of Detroit), but it hosts more than 2 million people. The vast majority are refugees or descendants of refugees who fled other areas of Palestine during the 1948 Nakba, during which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced by Zionist militias, hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed and Palestinian history was erased.