Israeli Troops Desecrate Al-Aqsa Mosque, Authorities Expel Palestinians from Jerusalem Homes, Furthering Israeli Apartheid

They ask you, O Prophet, about the sacred month, about fighting therein.

(Washington, D.C.; 05/09/2021) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the largest coalition of major national, regional, and local Muslim organizations and Islamic institutions, condemns in the strongest possible terms ongoing Israeli violence at Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan that Friday night (7 May / 25 Ramadan) alone seriously injured more than 200 Palestinian worshippers.

We further denounce:

• The relentless Palestinian holocaust and genocide at the hands of their internationally unlawful apartheid-imposing Israeli persecutors and occupiers
• The nighttime storming and desecration of Al-Aqsa Mosque by Israeli forces at the Gate of Mercy Prayer Hall in the holy month of Ramadan
• The firing of blinding, deafening, potentially lethal stun grenades at worshippers in Ramadan prayer vigil at the Noble Sanctuary
• The Israeli militias’ use of rubber-coated metal bullets deliberately aimed at the eyes, faces, and heads of rightful Palestinian protestors to blind them, or maim them with debilitating head injuries
• The Israeli courts’ continued apartheid sanctioning of armed Jewish colonizers forcibly dispossessing Palestinians of their ancestral homes in the Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Bustan neighborhoods of Jerusalem – as well as in other Palestinian communities in and around Jerusalem and the West Bank – and their gun-wielding, public intimidation and threat to massacre Palestinian residents of Jerusalem if they do not vacate their homes for these foreign intruders – acts recognized by the international community as illegal, according to the  United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

Systematic Israeli suppression of the lives and human rights of Palestinians is now virtually universally recognized and designated as a violation of the International Covenant Against the Crime of Apartheid – including this April by Human Rights Watch, the most respected human rights organization by the international community in a 200-page legal and factual study titled A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution; and even by esteemed Israeli human rights institutions on the ground like B’tselem in January, in a report titled A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid.”

The egregious boldness of these criminal actions by illegal Israeli colonists cannot be overstated, as can this video clearly shows.

We call upon President Joseph Biden and the United States Congress to cease this direct U.S, abetting of these clear crimes against humanity with tens of millions of dollars of American tax-payer funds paid yearly to Israeli governments and institutions by law without any oversight or auditing of its actual uses.

We also call for the United States government to desist from its indirect collaboration with the Israeli authorities in what Human Rights Watch documented in their recent report as official Israeli

intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In the OPT, including East Jerusalem, that intent has been coupled with systematic oppression of Palestinians and inhumane acts committed against them. When these three elements occur together, they amount to the crime of apartheid.

We fully support US Congresswoman Betty McCollum’s recent bill, HR2590, guaranteeing that US aid will no longer go to documented, systematic Israeli abuses against Palestinian children, destroying Palestinian property, removing Palestinians from the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem, or further annexation of Palestinian lands.

We add our voices to the rising chorus of US lawmakers “calling on the State Department to immediately condemn these violations of international law as Palestinians are forcibly being removed from their homes in East Jerusalem,” as Congresswoman Marie Newman tweeted with #SaveSheikhJarrah.

We affirm Senator Bernie Sanders’ statement that “the United States must speak out strongly against violence by government-allied Israeli extremists in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and make clear that the evictions of Palestinian families must not go forward.”

We back Senator Elizabeth Warren’s assertion that the “forced removal of long-time Palestinian residents in Sheikh Jarrah is abhorrent and unacceptable. The Administration should make clear to the Israeli government that these evictions are illegal and must stop immediately.”

We endorse Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s denunciation of these violently forced evictions as “inhumane” and her insistence that “the U.S. must show more leadership in safeguarding Palestinian rights,” in addition to Congressman André Carson’s expressed personal feeling of being “extremely dismayed” and his demand “the U.S. must show more leadership on the issue of Palestinian rights in the Holy Land, the West Bank, and Gaza.”

We add our endorsement to Congresswoman Newman and Congressman Mark Pocan’s letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressing “deep concern about Israel’s imminent plan to forcibly displace nearly 2,000 Palestinians in the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Al-Bustan and Sheikh Jarrah,” and demanding he “exert diplomatic pressure to prevent these acts from taking place” in the name of the American people.

The cynical Israeli plan to build the Gan Hamelech biblical theme park in Al-Bustan – demolishing 100 properties near the walls of the Old City and displacing 1,550 Palestinians, most of whom are children is utterly unconscionable.

This adds to the appalling total of at least 5,349 Palestinian homes the Israeli authorities have demolished in East Jerusalem alone as 2020, flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and an arrogant flouting of Article 8 of the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute, stating that the unjustified and wanton “extensive destruction and appropriation of property” is a war crime.

We at USCMO and American Muslims call on President Biden and Congress to insist that Israeli authorities, the international community, carry out immediately the Human Rights Watch reports, and other, necessary actions:

1. Dismantle all forms of systematic oppression and discrimination that privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians and otherwise systematically violate Palestinian rights in order to ensure the dominance of Jewish Israelis, and end the persecution of Palestinians, including by ending discriminatory policies and practices in such realms as citizenship and nationality processes, protection of civil rights, freedom of movement, allocation of land and resources, access to water, electricity, and other services, and granting of building permits.
2. Repeal its apartheid 2018 Nation-State law that explicitly states Jews and no others, citizens or otherwise, hold the right of self-determination, dispossessing expelled Palestinians anywhere of a right of return to their family homes.
3. Investigate and prosecute individual Israelis in violation of the International Criminal Court’s statute of crimes of apartheid against and persecution of Palestinians.
4. Impose sanctions from all governments of the world on the Israeli government, including travel bans, asset freezes, arms sales, and military aid until it ends and undoes its crimes against Palestinians as human beings.
5. Impose a mandatory cessation by corporations of all business activities that directly contribute to Israeli crimes against humanity inflicted on the Palestinians.
6. Condition all U.S. military aid on the Israeli government executing “concrete and verifiable steps towards ending their commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.”
7. End the de facto exemption of Israeli authorities and institutions by U.S. presidents and lawmakers from existing U.S. law barring U.S. military aid to human rights violators, as is now unequivocally established about the Israeli apartheid system of persecution of Palestinians.
8. Abandon obfuscating U.S. diplomatic language that pretends there are “two parties” equal in perpetrating aggression and violence when the Israelis hold absolute lethal power over an egregiously occupied and besieged Palestinian population, relentlessly instigate asymmetric violence on that subjugated population, and carry out continuously indefensibly provocative acts of repression and dispossession against the captive Palestinians. Pretensions to equivalence abet this persecution.

We beseech God, in these most sacred nights of the year, of Ramadan:

• Protect the Palestinians, their lives, properties, homes, and possessions
• Safeguard Your Holy House, Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa, its sacred space, and the blessed lands that surround it
• Give the people who defend it – and who vindicate their inalienable, God-given right to defend their homes, families, and properties – patience in the face of the horrendously immoral generational persecution they endure

Finally, we pray:

Our Lord! Subject us not to a trial of defeat

to tempt those who disbelieve to exult in their unbelief.

And forgive us, our Lord.

Indeed, it is You who are the Overpowering One, the All-Wise.

– The Quran, Sûrat Al-Mumtaḥanah, 60:5