Palestinian Oppression Quotes

Yes, Marcos is gay. Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalised, oppressed minorities resisting and saying `Enough'. He is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable -- this is Marcos.

Son, make sure you understand the difference between Palestinian Jews who are on our side and Zionist Jews. It is the Zionists who did you an injustice. Jews are believers in Allah, just like us. Our problem is not with Judaism, it is with injustice.

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings. I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.

From Ferguson to Athens, via Mexico, it is clear that many governments are reproducing the tools that Israel uses to repress and oppress the Palestinians. The replication of those same tactics, methods, and often weapons serves as proof that the Palestinians are now used as guinea pigs for experimentation.

Not only do the oppressed lose nothing when people of conscience boycott institutions that are persistently complicit in the system of oppression; in fact, they gain enormously from the ultimate weakening of this complicity that an effective and sustained boycott leads to.

I never carried a rifle on my shoulder, Nor did I pull a trigger. All I have is a flute’s melody. A brush to paint my dreams, A bottle of ink. All I have is unshakeable faith, And an infinite love for my people in pain. Mahmoud Darwish

The way people choose to think and feel about the world. Each ideology has its own version of the truth.” “So, who is right?” Saeed smiled and looked into his son’s eyes. “The one that is just and better still, the one that is just and kind.

The scariest thing for non-Jewish Americans in talking about Palestinian self-determination is the fear of being or sounding anti-Semitic. The people of Israel are suffering, and Jewish people have a long history of oppression. We still have some responsibility for that, but I think it’s important to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel, as a state, and Jewish people. That's kind of a no-brainer, but there is very strong pressure to conflate the two.

The repression of Palestinian resistance offers a profound example of the elasticity of violence as a concept and shows how, while the powerful can wage war on particular communities with impunity and claim innocence, the oppressed can be deemed a violent threat simply for attempting to assert their rights or defend their humanity.

From my personal experience as an analyst and dance choreographer working in the midst of "conflict", I do not think that, in a situation of oppression, intellectuals have a choice of whether or not to reflect the impact of conflict on them and on their society. Oppression, in a way, forces itself upon their work, their creative process. Their basic choice seems to be, then, whether to passively reflect it, or to actively transcend it. Oppression, it seems, has its own way of touching everyone within its reach, irrespective of one’s actual involvement in it or will to get involved in it.

The Committee led the campaign against the oppressive British policy that allowed the incoming alien Jewish immigrants to obtain citizenship under the easiest conditions, while placing numerous obstacles in the face of native-born Palestinians who wanted to return to their country.

You want to prove that the Bible is right? It is not done by self-fulfilling prophecies or by pointing to world events as prophecy fulfillment. That is not how you prove that the Bible is right. We prove that the Bible is right by radical obedience to the teachings of Jesus and by validating that Jesus' teachings actually do work and can make our world better. Let us love our enemies, forgive those who sin against us, feed the poor, care for the needy and oppressed, walk the extra mile, be inclusive not exclusive, turn the other cheek, and maybe then the world will start taking us seriously and believe our Bible!

Human Rights Watch found that the Israeli government has pursued an intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians throughout the territory it controls. 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.

Democrats can cackle all they want about the gaffe-prone Romney’s elitist cultural insensitivity in Jerusalem. Their hero Obama is no more willing to acknowledge and question the racial Darwinism that substitutes culture for genes than he is to recognize and criticize Israel’s racist oppression of the Palestinians. He at once embodies, epitomizes, and embraces that cultural white supremacism in a way that does no small damage to non-white prospects at home and abroad.

White/Western feminism's attempt at erasing the political context of Palestinian women's oppression was evident yet again around the 2017 Women's March on Washington, when liberal feminists objected to the leadership of Palestinian American organizer Linda Sarsour, and the newly minted "Zionesses" complained of "antisemitism" because Palestinian women's circumstances were on the platform, as part of a broader discussion of US President Donald Trump's Muslim ban and the overall Islamophobia he pandered to.

Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past. But to read such a place only for its dark histories is to disallow its possibilities for future life, to deny reparation or hope – and this is another kind of oppression. If there is a way of seeing such landscapes, it might be thought of as ‘occulting’: the nautical term for a light that flashes on and off, and in which the periods of illumination are longer than the periods of darkness. The Slovenian karst is an ‘occulting’ landscape in this sense, defined by the complex interplay of light and dark, of past pain and present beauty. I have walked through numerous occulting landscapes over the years: from the cleared valleys of northern Scotland, where the scattered stones of abandoned houses are oversung by skylarks; to the Guadarrama mountains north of Madrid, where a savage partisan war was fought among ancient pines, under the gaze of vultures; and to the disputed valleys of the Palestinian West Bank, where dog foxes slip through barbed wire. All of these landscapes offer the reassurance of nature’s return; all incite the discord of profound suffering coexisting with generous life.

In contexts of colonial oppression, intellectuals, especially those who advocate and work for justice, cannot be just-or mere- intellectuals, in the abstract sense; they cannot but be immersed in some form or another of activism, to learn from fellow activists through real-life experiences, to widen the horizons of their sources of inspiration, and to organically engage in effective, collective emancipatory processes, without the self-indulgence, complacency, or ivory-towerness that might otherwise blur their moral vision. In short, to be just intellectuals, committed to justice as the most ethical and durable foundation of peace.

Some regard the settlement enterprise as vital for security. 189 Whatever the motive, it is unacceptable to pursue this aim through a strategy of seeking to dominate Palestinians, maintaining a discriminatory system, and engaging in tactics that either have an insufficient security justification or otherwise violate international law. An intent to ensure security neither negates an intent to dominate, nor grants a carte blanche to undertake policies that go beyond what international law permits. While security grounds can justify a range of restrictive measures under international humanitarian and human rights law, a strategy that seeks to promote security by ensuring the demographic advantage of one group of people through discrimination or oppression has no basis under international law.

Moshe Dayan’s closing remarks to the students in Haifa in 1969 echo what Ehud Barak told his audience in 2010. Forty years ago, Dayan – the man who, I was told as a teenager, was “the one-eyed Dajaal,” or Antichrist – uttered words of wisdom that have gone unheeded. “We have to supply the people [Palestinians] with employment and services, give them civil rights, and not treat them as enemies. The question is: What are we aiming for? Shall we be an occupying power, keeping the Arabs as an oppressed population of second- and third-class citizens and tell them: ‘You won’t do this, you won’t do that, you won’t study at the university, and if you protest, we shall impose curfew?’ Or should we aim at a common life, with Jews learning to live together with Arabs? If so, we have to be neighbours, and not conquerors.”16

American progressives cannot wave a magic wand and solve the Israel-Palestine conflict, but we can certainly take action. We can push Israel to allow the people of Gaza the freedom to rebuild their economy. We can put real pressure on Israel to stop expanding its settlements, and to allow Palestinian towns to grow, as well as allow the free movement of Palestinians in the West Bank. We can make it clear that our democratic values demand that we support Palestinians having the same right to a national existence as Israelis do, and the same right to live in peace and security. We can press Israel to stop blocking the rights that Palestinians are just as entitled to as anyone else. In short, we can act on our principles, which maintain that oppressive conditions diminish life for all but the very few who profit from them.

Peace cannot require Palestinians to acquiesce to the denial of what was done to them. Neither can it require Israeli Jews to view their own presence in Palestine as illegitimate or to change their belief in their right to live there because of ancient historical and spiritual ties. Peace, rather, must be based on how we act toward each other now. It is unacceptable for a Palestinian to draw on his history of oppression and suffering to justify harming innocent Israeli civilians. It is equally unacceptable for an Israeli to invoke his belief in an ancient covenant between God and Abraham to justify bulldozing the home and seizing the land of a Palestinian farmer. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which proposes a political framework for a resolution to the conflict in Ireland, and which was overwhelmingly endorsed in referendums, sets out two principles from which Palestinians and Israelis could learn. First “[i]t is recognized that victims have a right to remember as well as to contribute to a changed society.” Second, whatever political arrangements are freely and democratically chosen for the governance of Northern Ireland, the power of the government “shall be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions and shall be founded on the principles of full respect for, and equality of civil, political, social, and cultural rights, of freedom from discrimination for all citizens, and of parity of esteem and of just and equal treatment for the identity, ethos, and aspirations of both communities.” Northern Ireland is still a long way from achieving this ideal, but life has vastly improved since the worst days of “the Troubles” and it is a paradise on earth compared to Palestine/Israel.

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)

In liberation theology—that form of religious thought proclaiming that God has a “preferential option for the poor” and seeking to put biblical pronouncement in service to political and economic ends—Jesus is the pedagogue of the oppressed, the redeemer of the underclass, the hero of the masses. The problem is not the use of Jesus for political ends; the biblical material has always been (and should continue to be) used to promote a more just society. The problem is that the language of liberation all too often veers off into anti-Jewish rants. Jesus becomes the Palestinian martyr crucified once again by the Jews; he is the one killed by the “patriarchal god of Judaism”; he breaks down the barriers “Judaism” erects between Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, male and female, slave and free and so can liberate all today. The intent is well meaning, but the history is dreadful, and the impression given of Judaism is obscene.

In their turn, since 2005 the settlers have become even more brutal and barbarous in their treatment of the people of the West Bank, culminating in the burning alive of a teenager and an entire family. The Palestinians’ steadfastness in the West Bank continues. Popular resistance is a daily occurrence but with limited resources it is easily quashed by the Israeli occupation. However, in its tenacity it suggests that the final chapter to what began in 1967 has yet to be written. Today there are nearly three million Palestinians in the West Bank and almost 400,000 settlers. Zionism as a settler colonial movement was able to colonize Palestine almost in its entirety regardless of its demographic minority. These settlers, however, are much more powerful than the early Zionists and it is unlikely that anyone will prevent them from taking over the rest of the West Bank, by one way or another. During that same period, Israel subjected the Gaza Strip to even harsher oppression and the most callous version of the maximum security prison to date.

If elimination of the native population is not a likely outcome in Palestine, then what of dismantling the supremacy of the colonizer in order to make possible a true reconciliation? The advantage that Israel has enjoyed in continuing its project rests on the fact that the basically colonial nature of the encounter in Palestine has not been visible to most Americans and many Europeans. Israel appears to them to be a normal, natural nation-state like any other, faced by the irrational hostility of intransigent and often anti-Semitic Muslims (which is how Palestinians, even the Christians among them, are seen by many). The propagation of this image is one of the greatest achievements of Zionism and is vital to its survival. As Edward Said put it, Zionism triumphed in part because it “won the political battle for Palestine in the international world in which ideas, representation, rhetoric and images were at issue.”5 This is still largely true today. Dismantling this fallacy and making the true nature of the conflict evident is a necessary step if Palestinians and Israelis are to transition to a postcolonial future in which one people does not use external support to oppress and supplant the other.

When Israel strikes, it's "national security" - when Palestine strikes back, it's "terrorism". Just like over two hundred years ago when native americans resisted their homeland being stolen, it was called "Indian Attack". Or like over a hundred years ago when Indian soldiers in the British Army revolted against the empire, in defense of their homeland, it was called "Sepoy Mutiny". The narrative never changes - when the colonizer terrorizes the world, it's given glorious sounding names like "exploration" and "conquest", but if the oppressed so much as utters a word in resistance, it is branded as attack, mutiny and terrorism - so that, the real terrorists can keep on colonizing as the self-appointed ruler of land, life and morality, without ever being held accountable for violating the rights of what they deem second rate lifeforms, such as the arabs, indians, latinos and so on. After all this, some apes will still only be interested in one stupid question. Do I support Hamas? To which I say this. Until you've spent a lifetime under an oppressive regime, you are not qualified to ask that question. An ape can ask anything its puny brain fancies, but it's up to the human to decide whether the ape is worthy of a response. What do you think, by the way - colonizers can just keep coming as they please, to wipe their filthy feet on us like doormat, and we should do nothing - just stay quiet! For creatures who call themselves civilized, you guys have a weird sense of morality. Yet all these might not get through your thick binary skull, so let me put it to you bluntly. I don't stand with Hamas, I am Hamas, just like, I don't stand with Ukraine, I am Ukraine. Russia stops fighting, war ends - Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends.

In truth, “Arab” terrorism in the Holy Land originated centuries before the recent tool of “the Palestinian cause was invented.” In towns where Jews lived for hundreds of years, those Jews were periodically robbed, raped, in some places massacred, and in many instances, the survivors were obliged to abandon their possessions and run. As we have seen, beginning with the Prophet Mohammad’s edict demanding racial purity—that “Two religions may not dwell together . . .”—the Arab-Muslim world codified its supremacist credo, and later that belief was interpreted liberally enough to allow many non-Muslim dhimmis, or infidels, to remain alive between onslaughts in the Muslim world as a means of revenue. The infidel’s head tax, in addition to other extortions—and the availability of the “non-believers” to act as helpless scapegoats for the oft-dissatisfied masses—became a highly useful mainstay to the Arab-Muslim rulers. Thus the pronouncement of the Prophet Mohammad was altered in practice to: two religions may not dwell together equally. That was the pragmatic interpretation.181 In the early seventeenth century, a pair of Christian visitors to Safed [Galilee] told of life for the Jews: “Life here is the poorest and most miserable that one can imagine.” Because of the harshness of Turkish rule and its crippling dhimmi oppression, the Jews “pay for the very air they breath”.182 Reports like these could be multiplied. The audacity of Haj Amin al-Husseini’s claim that the “Jews always did live previously in Arab countries with complete freedom and liberty, as natives of the country” and that, “in fact, Muslim rule has always been tolerant . . . according to history Jews had a most quiet and peaceful residence under Arab rule,” is shown to be a cynical lie. This simply shows that Haj al-Husseini learned a lot from his visit to Nazis Germany. Adolf Hitler, whom he greatly admired, developed the propaganda tactic of “the Big Lie.

Let me pursue this point briefly with reference to what is described in our media, and by many of our public intellectuals, as “the Islamic roots of violence”—especially since September 2001. Religion has long been seen as a source of violence,10 and (for ideological reasons) Islam has been represented in the modern West as peculiarly so (undisciplined, arbitrary, singularly oppressive). Experts on “Islam,” “the modern world,” and “political philosophy” have lectured the Muslim world yet again on its failure to embrace secularism and enter modernity and on its inability to break off from its violent roots. Now some reflection would show that violence does not need to be justified by the Qur‘an—or any other scripture for that matter. When General Ali Haidar of Syria, under the orders of his secular president Hafez al-Assad, massacred 30,000 to 40,000 civilians in the rebellious town of Hama in 1982 he did not invoke the Qur’an—nor did the secularist Saddam Hussein when he gassed thousands of Kurds and butchered the Shi’a population in Southern Iraq. Ariel Sharon in his indiscriminate killing and terrorizing of Palestinian civilians did not—so far as is publicly known—invoke passages of the Torah, such as Joshua’s destruction of every living thing in Jericho.11 Nor has any government (and rebel group), whether Western or non-Western, needed to justify its use of indiscriminate cruelty against civilians by appealing to the authority of sacred scripture. They might in some cases do so because that seems to them just—or else expedient. But that’s very different from saying that they are constrained to do so. One need only remind oneself of the banal fact that innumerable pious Muslims, Jews, and Christians read their scriptures without being seized by the need to kill non-believers. My point here is simply to emphasize that the way people engage with such complex and multifaceted texts, translating their sense and relevance, is a complicated business involving disciplines and traditions of reading, personal habit, and temperament, as well as the perceived demands of particular social situations.

Statement on Hamas (October 10th, 2023) When Israel strikes, it's "national security" - when Palestine strikes back, it's "terrorism". Just like over two hundred years ago when native americans resisted their homeland being stolen, it was called "Indian Attack". Or like over a hundred years ago when Indian soldiers in the British Army revolted against the empire, in defense of their homeland, it was called "Sepoy Mutiny". The narrative never changes - when the colonizer terrorizes the world, it's given glorious sounding names like "exploration" and "conquest", but if the oppressed so much as utters a word in resistance, it is branded as attack, mutiny and terrorism - so that, the real terrorists can keep on colonizing as the self-appointed ruler of land, life and morality, without ever being held accountable for violating the rights of what they deem second rate lifeforms, such as the arabs, indians, latinos and so on. After all this, some apes will still only be interested in one stupid question. Do I support Hamas? To which I say this. Until you've spent a lifetime under an oppressive regime, you are not qualified to ask that question. An ape can ask anything its puny brain fancies, but it's up to the human to decide whether the ape is worthy of a response. What do you think, by the way - colonizers can just keep coming as they please, to wipe their filthy feet on us like doormat, and we should do nothing - just stay quiet! For creatures who call themselves civilized, you guys have a weird sense of morality. Yet all these might not get through your thick binary skull, so let me put it to you bluntly. I don't stand with Hamas, I am Hamas, just like, I don't stand with Ukraine, I am Ukraine. Russia stops fighting, war ends - Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends. However, I do have one problem here. Why do civilians have to die, if that is indeed the case - which I have no way of confirming, because news reports are not like reputed scientific data, that a scientist can naively trust. During humankind's gravest conflicts news outlets have always peddled a narrative benefiting the occupier and demonizing the resistance, either consciously or subconsciously. So never go by news reports, particularly on exception circumstances like this. No matter the cause, no civilian must die, that is my one unimpeachable law. But the hard and horrific fact of the matter is, only the occupier can put an end to the death and destruction peacefully - the resistance does not have that luxury.

who were not driven away in 1948 have been oppressed by Zionism for decades. The Jewish state confiscated much of their land, trampled many of their rights, and did not accord them real equality. In recent years, oppression lessened, but it was not replaced by a genuine civil covenant that will give Arab Israelis their full rights. To this day there is no definition of the commitments of the Jewish democratic state to its Arab minority, and that of the Arab minority to the Jewish democratic state. On the one hand, there is no real equality for Arabs in Israel, but on the other hand the government does not always enforce the law in their domain and allows their towns and villages to live in partial anarchy. What emerges is a dangerous situation of lawlessness. Many Palestinian Israelis don’t respect central government, but they also don’t feel they belong. Their affinity to the Palestinians outside Israel and the

My fifth point is that, nevertheless, the experience, memory or imagination of enforced abnegation does play a key role. Years of real or imagined oppression — or a solidarity, even an identification, with those who have been oppressed elsewhere — lead to a rebellion. The question missing from most analyses, however, is that the oppression that is resisted is not only a political oppression of a people — for example, the Palestinians (which almost every Islamic state and militant organisation has conspicuously failed to help beyond very limited points) — but a perceived oppression or denigration of a sense of self and a sense of core belief; and it is perceived as applied personally, but also as systemically applied to the collective manifestation of this core belief. To that extent, it is belief that seems as if it is called upon to fight back, because it is belief and philosophy that have been subject to abnegation. It is not, however, just the philosophy that fights back, but, as mentioned above, the philosophy of the means chosen. Does abnegation justify a sacrificium in which huge numbers of innocent people are swept into death? Does the sacrificium necessarily sacrifice others? In so far as the memory or re-created memory of abnegation is strong and made stronger, it triumphs over the memories and values of self held by others. Terror thus becomes a requital and ruthlessness — requital for sins committed perhaps against self but certainly against self’s historical and contemporary cohorts, and ruthlessness in an exploding outwards.

As Palestinians, our legitimacy depends on whether or not we "recognize" Israel. But supporters of Israel are not required to even acknowledge that Palestinians exist. For an Arab to be taken seriously, he must be "tolerant" of Jews (whatever that means). When a Jew is tolerant of Arabs, he is "open-minded" and forward-thinking." At the essence of the Palestinian question lies this complete inequality, this absolute and utter disparity in status. It is almost surreal for the oppressors to be demanding "tolerance" from the oppressed. But it is not without precedent. In America, whites in power demanded that blacks "behave" before they considered "giving" them rights. In South Africa, blacks had to conduct themselves "civilly" before they were taken seriously by the apartheid regime and, indeed, by some powerful political forces here in America. This sort of calculated framing of the debate by Israel and her supporters serves to silence any Palestinian narrative. Well, guess what? I don't need anyone's permission to be Palestinian. I don't need your go-ahead to tell my story. And you thinking I do kind of pisses me off.

In order to oppose racism, we have to actually be concerned with oppression writ large. This means drawing critical connections between the plight of people of color and the poor in the United States and the broader struggle for freedom and tolerance on our small planet. It means fighting ethnic and religious bigotry throughout Asia and standing in solidarity with the Roma in Europe as well as African migrants. It means denouncing the immoral violence of anti-Semitism as well as Israel’s immoral destruction of the Palestinian people. It means taking a stand against ethnocentrism and genocide in Rwanda and standing up against antiblack racism in Brazil, Latin America, and the Arab world. As antiracists, we have to cultivate concern and compassion for the suffering marginalized people in our own communities and on the other side of the world.

The differentiation made by the Zionist Left between the 1967 occupation and the Zionist creation of the Jewish state not only excuses the absence of a moral condemnation against the oppression of the Palestinian citizens, but it is also viewed as compatible with the struggle for “peace.

Thus, in the Jewish-only state, female bulldozer drivers can destroy Palestinian villages, vegan tank commanders can run over wheelchair-bound children, and transgender pilots can bomb wedding receptions.

oppressed’ – the victims of Anglo-American imperialism. Labelling Israel uniquely as a ‘racist state’ was the climax of twenty-five years of lobbying started by Labour MP Peter Hain, the former student anti-apartheid campaigner, who accused Israel of oppressing the Palestinians even more than South Africa had oppressed blacks under apartheid. Over that period, and especially during the year before they met in Durban, the anti-Zionists’ language had become increasingly anti-Semitic. At the beginning of 2001, the groups that were to meet in Durban had celebrated the final collapse of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. To their satisfaction, the Palestinians launched a second intifada, seeking to kill as many Israelis as possible. Eight months later, at the climax of the Durban conference, thousands of activists and delegates marched through the city waving placards reading ‘Kill All Jews’ and ‘The Good Things Hitler Did’.

Coming back to your answer about violence, when I heard what you said in the documentary, I thought about Palestine. The international community and the Western media are always asking, as a precondition, that Palestinians stop the violence. How would you explain the popularity of this narrative that the oppressed have to ensure the safety of the oppressors? Placing the question of violence at the forefront almost inevitably serves to obscure the issues that are at the center of struggles for justice. This occurred in South Africa during the antiapartheid struggle. Interestingly Nelson Mandela—who has been sanctified as the most important peace advocate of our time—was kept on the US terrorist list until 2008. The important issues in the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination are minimized and rendered invisible by those who try to equate Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid with terrorism.

There are various means of resistance available to people who are oppressed by racist or colonial regimes or foreign occupations (that is, according to the Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions), including through the use of armed force. Nowadays, the Palestine solidarity movement has committed itself to the route of nonviolent resistance. Do you think this alone will end Israeli apartheid? Solidarity movements are, of course, by their very nature nonviolent. In South Africa, even as an international solidarity movement was being organized, the ANC (African National Congress) and the SACP (South African Communist Party) came to the conclusion that they needed an armed wing of their movement: Umkhonto We Sizwe. They had every right to make that decision. Likewise, it is up to the Palestinian people to employ the methods they deem most likely to succeed in their struggle. At the same time, it is clear that if Israel is isolated politically and economically, as the BDS campaign is striving to do, Israel could not continue to implement its apartheid practices. If, for example, we in the United States could force the Obama administration to cease its $8 million-a-day support of Israel, this would go a long way toward pressuring Israel to end the occupation.

While I believe that it’s the right of all colonized, occupied, and oppressed people to stand up to their oppressors, I’ve always been convinced that staying alive and conveying our message through unarmed resistance is more powerful and strategic than our dying. I can’t serve the Palestinian cause if I’m dead.

This unusual television moment received much international attention, as did another CNN interview in which I displayed a large map of the Middle East. I “walked” through the Arab countries from Morocco to the Indian Ocean with the open palms of my hands. Then I covered Israel with my thumb.10 For many used to seeing the map of Israel alone on a full screen, a great Israeli Goliath “oppressing” the small Palestinian David, this demonstration came as a shock. It was Israel that was David. This was the best way I could think of to convey that the Arab world was hundreds of times the size of Israel. These interviews may have been seen by some unlikely viewers. When visiting Japan that year, singer Perry Como was asked by the Japanese government how to improve Japan’s image in the United States. He suggested they hire my services.

Today is the celebration of International Children's Day, but it is a day of hell for the Palestinian children under the oppressive forces of Israel. A key perpetrator is the White House because it supports and encourages internal and external genocide and racism.

Ḥamās constantly stresses the international dimension of Islam. In Filasṭīn al-Muslima this is reflected by regular reports on other Muslim countries and the situation of the Islamist movement there. They put the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, even though it is central to the Islamic cause, into a wider framework, it is part of the oppression of Muslims throughout the world. The only means to fight this unacceptable situation is international Islamic cooperation. This is the only way to encounter the world-wide Jewish conspiracy against Islam.

I lived in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem between 2016 and 2020 and regularly saw Israeli police harass and humiliate Palestinians. The daily grind of occupation was oppressive for those who weren’t Jewish.

Seven years after Swirski’s social class explanation of Mizrahim oppression, Ella Shohat, a radical cultural critic, published her essay, “The Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims.”23 After mentioning Swirski’s analysis of the class divisions between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, Shohat discusses the Zionist project as a Eurocentric, Orientalist effort that oppressed its third-world subjects, Palestinians, and Mizrahim alike. Following in the footsteps of Edward Said’s Orientalism,24 Shohat emphasizes the need to consider the negative consequences of Zionism upon Mizrahim, in addition to the Palestinians. “The Zionist denial of the Arab-Muslim and Palestinian East, then, has as its corollary the denial of the Jewish Mizrahim, who like the Palestinians, but by more subtle and less obviously brutal mechanisms, have also been stripped of the right of self representation. Within Israel, and on the stage of world opinion, the hegemonic voice of Israel has almost invariably been that of European Jews, the Ashkenazim, while the Mizrahi voice has been largely muffled or silenced.” Both Edward Said’s book and Shohat’s essay made little impact on the established social sciences in Israel. Additionally, Swirski’s deviation from the cultural-based analysis of mainstream sociology was completely ignored.

The Mizrahim continue to face educational and cultural disadvantages, which mostly reflects class barriers justified by racist ideology. This is fundamentally distinct from the national oppression of the Palestinians.

Since my libertarianism puts me on the side of the victims of the state, I began to understand that the Palestinians were the latest in a long line of groups oppressed by political power. Jews, of course, have been similarly oppressed in many places; now some Jews, the Zionists, were in the role of oppressor. My childhood view of Israel was unraveling.

Acts of terror committed by a government is still terrorism.

Why, then, are the Palestinians—the one group who would be supporting their own oppression with such recognition—expected to offer this unique gift to Israel?

But Israel’s might is useless in a struggle that is not about winning territory but securing democratic rights for all. This is why opposition to the grim realities must be coupled with a battle of ideas in which walls and checkpoints provide no defense. Furthermore, it is why the struggle must take a moral form that offers Israel no excuses for its oppressive measures.

Chesler cites the claim by the Palestinian American writer Suha Sabbagh that Western feminists, simply by writing about Muslim women, exert "a greater degree of domination" over those women "than that actually exercised by men over women within Muslim culture." A brown woman in (say) some Pakistani village, then, is actually more oppressed by some white woman tapping away at a computer at some American university she's never heard of than by a man who's beating and raping her in her home.

Jews have grown so obsessed with Israel that the overt and covert signals of anti-Semitism beamed from the interior of the Trump campaign appeared to be disregarded by people like Adelson and Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot co-founder and Republican mega-donor who seemed wowed by candidate Trump’s solemn promise to immediately move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and to back Likud’s expansive settlement policy on the West Bank. Never mind that both moves were purely symbolic: Netanyahu was going to do what he was going to do regardless of Washington’s feckless policies or the location of its ambassador. What mattered was Israel, pure and simple. It was something of a comeuppance when President Trump immediately backed off his promise of an embassy move, swiftly sent a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu scolding him on settlements, and promised a new push for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. But beyond leaked word that Adelson was really, really, really angry, no apologies or mea culpas were forthcoming from American Jewry. Trump did make Israel a stop on his first trip abroad—the earliest visit to the Jewish state by any American president. But before his arrival, his White House made no comment on the two Israeli-American journalists who were denied visas to follow the president into Saudi Arabia, where he happily danced with swords and his commerce secretary boasted that there had been no protestors. Once he had landed in Jerusalem, Trump did note that he “just got back from the Middle East,” a moment memorialized by Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, covering his face with his hand in frustration or amazement. Trump scheduled all of fifteen minutes for a stop at Yad Vashem, Israel’s revered Holocaust memorial and museum, and in his brief remarks there—from 1:27 to 1:34 p.m.—he managed both to extol the Jewish people and let slip his cherished stereotypes: “Through persecution, oppression, death, and destruction, the Jewish people have persevered. They have thrived. They’ve become so successful in so many places.” Ever solicitous, Netanyahu thanked the president, who “in so few words said so much.” No one took note of the irony that the Holocaust survivor who greeted Trump, Margot Herschenbaum, had been rescued in 1939 by the Kindertransport, which had whisked her out of Germany and had saved thousands of other Jewish children. Refugees like Herschenbaum had been denied entry to the United States during World War II, just as Trump has steadfastly denied the entry of Syrian children fleeing war and death in their own country.

The difficulty Corbyn and his associates have in recognizing and acknowledging antisemitism on the left seems to be rooted in their foundational claim that because being a progressive means being opposed to any form of racism, oppression, or group hate—including antisemitism—therefore, by definition, a true progressive cannot be an antisemite. Their claim runs into trouble when they are confronted by progressive compatriots who include blanket statements about Jews in their excoriation of wealthy capitalists who oppress and exploit the poor, who imply that Jews exert undue influence on the media, who deny that Jews can be the victims of race-based hatred in the same way that people of color are, and who include offensive, hate-filled Jewish stereotyping in their criticism of Israeli government policies regarding the Palestinians.

Indeed, what Donald Trump, the President of the United States stated, relating to Iran, it waves a reality that, “oppressive regimes cannot endure forever.” I agree; however, I realize that Trump has not, a clue of saying it in the face of determination of Palestinian and Kashmiries, as gravely oppressed people, which he ignores to realize and not dare to have a word for their rights of self-determination. The White House humiliates and rejects the unanimous decisions of the member States of the United Nations, even never realized its oppressive behaviour and actions while the US regime considers that, maintaining of law and order and peace in the protest of a few groups against Iran's elected government as oppressive conduct. I can only suggest to the White House, to abide the values of the United Nations Charter, which the United States signed, and refrain from internal issues of other nations since for that the United Nations can notice such matters. A majority of Irani people, enjoy its system and do not want to change it; it is the White House that wants a change in Iran and the Muslim world. The dignified and honourable people build its societies and living standards, with own resources, not the cost of other countries. I wish Donald Trump a long life, sound health, wisdom and Happy New Year.

Arabs are always innocent in the eyes of those who seek to delegitimize Israel. Terrorists become victims. Victims become immoral, and to the insane. When will every Jew understand that this conflict is not about land, oppression or occupation? That Hitler did not hate the Jews because he was an Aryan and a racist –he allied Germany with Italians and Japanese! How Aryan are they? The Nazis and the Arabs both use excuses to justify their actions, but they also share the same base reason for their hatred of the Jews: they hate us simply because we are Jewish.

states like Germany have once again accepted Palestinians as collateral. Their oppression and colonization is a fair price to pay to allow Germany to atone for its past crimes.

Israel’s response to Covid-19 was unprecedented in the Western world. It used its internal security service, the Shin Bet, to track and monitor potential Covid cases (though it had been secretly collecting all mobile phone metadata since at least 200262) and follow social media posts for any evidence of social gatherings. There was an outcry among the Israeli media class and some politicians, angered that a system designed to oppress Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem could be turned on Israeli Jews. Not that any of them said this outright, but the implication was clear: do what you want to monitor Palestinians with the Shin Bet and make their lives hell but do not use it on us.63 There was also silence about Israel’s export of surveillance tools to regimes around the world, with many Israeli critics unable or unwilling to make the connection with the nation’s Covid-19 response and the companies tasked to do it having had years of experience selling these tools to dictatorships and democracies

The Palestine laboratory can only thrive if enough nations believe in its underlying premise. It’s unsurprising that repressive regimes want to mimic Israeli repression, using Israeli technology to oppress their own unwanted or restive populations, but the Jewish state craves Western approval to fully realize its diplomatic and military potential. Aside from the US, Germany is arguably the greatest prize of all. Israel helped Germany rehabilitate its shattered image after World War II, while Berlin grants legitimacy to a country that brutally occupies the Palestinians (a nonpeople in the eyes of successive German governments). Germany purchasing increasing amounts of Israeli defense equipment is just one way it can atone for its historical guilt. When Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas visited Germany in August 2022 and spoke alongside Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he accused Israel of committing “fifty Holocausts” against his people. The German establishment expressed outrage over the comment but the hypocrisy was clear; the Palestinians are under endless occupation but it’s only they who have to apologize. Germany has taken its love affair with Israel to dangerous, even absurd heights. The Deutsche Welle media organization updated its code of conduct in 2022 and insisted that all employees, when speaking on behalf of the organization or even in a personal capacity, must “support the right of Israel to exist” or face punishment, likely dismissal.40 After the Israeli military shot dead Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank city of Jenin in May 2022, German police banned a peaceful public vigil in Berlin because of what German authorities called an “immediate risk” of violence and anti-Semitic messaging. When protestors ignored this request and took to the streets to both commemorate Abu Akleh and Nakba Day, police arrested 170 people for expressing solidarity with Palestine. A Palestinian in Germany, Majed Abusalama, tweeted that he had been assaulted by the police. “I just left the hospital an hour ago with an arm sling to hold my shoulder after the German racist police almost dislocated my shoulder with their violent actions to us wearing Palestine Kuffiyas,” he wrote. “This is the new wave of anti-Palestinian everything in Berlin. Insane, right?” This followed years of anti-Palestinian incitement by the German political elite, from the German Parliament designating the BDS movement as anti-Semitic in 2019 to pressuring German institutions to refuse any space for pro-Palestinian voices, Jewish or Palestinian.41 The Palestinian intellectual Tariq Baconi gave a powerful speech in Berlin in May 2022 at a conference titled “Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.” He noted that “states like Germany have once again accepted Palestinians as collateral. Their oppression and colonization is a fair price to pay to allow Germany to atone for its past crimes.

Our political program, I write, calling for the establishment of a secular, democratic state in the whole of Palestine for both Palestinians and Jews, represents a humanistic vision of a society that recognizes no oppressor-oppressed, occupier-occupied dichotomies. Palestinian violence, I conclude, is the only weapon left to the Palestinians -- a colonized people -- to ensure the hearing for the voice of moderation. Besides, I add, the world recognizes that the violence committed by slaves to break their chains is not the same as the violence committed by the slave master to subdue them.