Palestine Occupation Quotes

ليس وطني دائماً على حق. ولكنني لا استطيع ان امارس حقاً حقيقياً الا في وطني .

There's a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word "occupation" is only restricted to what the dictionary says rather than those plenty of meanings and connotations of death, destruction, pain, suffering, deprivation, isolation and restrictions that Israel has injected the word with.

Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation. "Never let them know they hurt you" was their creed

Palestine. For most of us, the word brings to mind a series of confused images and disjointed associations-massacres, refugee camps, UN resolutions, settlements, terrorist attacks, war, occupation, checkered kouffiyehs and suicide bombers, a seemingly endless cycle of death and destruction.

Occupation, curfew, settlements, closed military zone, administrative detention, siege, preventive strike, terrorist infrastructure, transfer. Their WAR destroys language. Speaks genocide with the words of a quiet technician. Occupation means that you cannot trust the OPEN SKY, or any open street near to the gates of snipers tower. It means that you cannot trust the future or have faith that the past will always be there. Occupation means you live out your live under military rule, and the constant threat of death, a quick death from a snipers bullet or a rocket attack from an M16. A crushing, suffocating death, a slow bleeding death in an ambulance stopped for hours at a checkpoint. A dark death, at a torture table in an Israeli prison: just a random arbitrary death. A cold calculated death: from a curable disease. A thousand small deaths while you watch your family dying around you. Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water. And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and YOU refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine.

A thief never becomes an owner.

I got a number of very thoughtful responses to the email I sent out last night, most of which I don’t have time to respond to right now. Thanks everyone for the encouragement, questions, criticism. Daniel’s response was particularly inspiring to me and deserves to be shared. The resistance of Israeli Jewish people to the occupation and the enormous risk taken by those refusing to serve in the Israeli military offers an example, especially for those of us living in the United States, of how to behave when you discover that atrocities are being commited in your name. Thank you.

Ethnonationalist ideology grows when accountable democracy withers. Israel is the ultimate model and goal.

What's a house when you've lost a country?' she says with a sigh.

I always have believed that we should not call it an Arab-Israeli issue or a Palestinian-Arab dispute or a peace negotiation. I think we should call it what it is: an occupation of Palestine, full stop. This is not a popular position in mixed company.

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.

History will remember this war on Palestinian civilians and their displacement as the moment the world woke up to the Zionist plans of occupation and expansion.

Fucker, I though to myself. So irritated by a stare! I wonder what your reaction would have been if you had lived under occupation for as many years as I had, or if your shopping rights, like all of your other rights, were violated day and night, or if the olive trees in your grandfather's orchards had been uprooted, or if your village had been bulldozed, or if your house had been demolished, or if your sister could not reach her school, or if your brother had been given three life sentences, or if your mother had given birth at a checkpoint, or if you had stood in a line for days in the hot August summers waiting for your work permit, or if you could not reach your beloved ones in Arab East Jerusalem.... A stare, and you lose your mind!

[T]he prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpointed and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair.

Al-Saifi believes that by destroying mosques, “the occupation was erasing the historical proof and evidence of our presence in Palestine.

We would do well to remember that the success of any struggle depends on the determination of its leaders and the clarity of its purpose, not the doubts of naysayers.

Occupation has no place in a civilized society. It is time Palestine redeemed freedom from Israeli occupation, Scotland from British occupation, and Jammu and Kashmir from Indian occupation.

[Israel's military occupation is] in gross violation of international law and has been from the outset. And that much, at least, is fully recognized, even by the United States, which has overwhelming and, as I said, unilateral responsibility for these crimes. So George Bush No. 1, when he was the U.N. ambassador, back in 1971, he officially reiterated Washington's condemnation of Israel's actions in the occupied territories. He happened to be referring specifically to occupied Jerusalem. In his words, actions in violation of the provisions of international law governing the obligations of an occupying power, namely Israel. He criticized Israel's failure "to acknowledge its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as its actions which are contrary to the letter and spirit of this Convention." [...] However, by that time, late 1971, a divergence was developing, between official policy and practice. The fact of the matter is that by then, by late 1971, the United States was already providing the means to implement the violations that Ambassador Bush deplored. [...] on December 5th [2001], there had been an important international conference, called in Switzerland, on the 4th Geneva Convention. Switzerland is the state that's responsible for monitoring and controlling the implementation of them. The European Union all attended, even Britain, which is virtually a U.S. attack dog these days. They attended. A hundred and fourteen countries all together, the parties to the Geneva Convention. They had an official declaration, which condemned the settlements in the occupied territories as illegal, urged Israel to end its breaches of the Geneva Convention, some "grave breaches," including willful killing, torture, unlawful deportation, unlawful depriving of the rights of fair and regular trial, extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. Grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that's a serious term, that means serious war crimes. The United States is one of the high contracting parties to the Geneva Convention, therefore it is obligated, by its domestic law and highest commitments, to prosecute the perpetrators of grave breaches of the conventions. That includes its own leaders. Until the United States prosecutes its own leaders, it is guilty of grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that means war crimes. And it's worth remembering the context. It is not any old convention. These are the conventions established to criminalize the practices of the Nazis, right after the Second World War. What was the U.S. reaction to the meeting in Geneva? The U.S. boycotted the meeting [..] and that has the usual consequence, it means the meeting is null and void, silence in the media.

There wasn’t a question of what compromise there should be or what kind of peace process we should engage in. There was only one discussion: How do we remove the colonial power that is occupying our country?

A little over a year after Hadi’s release, a UN report found that some 700,000 Palestinians had been arrested since the occupation began, equal to roughly 40 percent of all the men and boys in the territories.

The driving forces of this [defense] industry is that they want the conflict with the Palestinians to go forever. Moral considerations are never considered when Israel aids dictatorships. It’s about money and being a powerful nation.

For us, fear comes where terror comes to others because we are anesthetized to the guns constantly pointed at us. And the terror we have known is something few Westerners ever will. Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme. [...] Our sadness can make the stones weep. And the way we love is no exception.

Existence has taught me that a man can live on love and fresh water, on crumbs and promises, but he can never survive insults. And insults are all I've known since I came into the world. Every morning. Every evening. That's all I've seen for my whole life.

The British army’s occupation of Arab territories ended four centuries of Ottoman rule over them. An entirely new political map emerged as six new successor states from the former Ottoman Empire were created: Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan.

We started it. We started it with the occupation, and we are duty-bound to end it—a real and complete ending. We started the violence. There is no violence worse than the violence of the occupier, using force on an entire nation, so the question about who fired first is therefore an evasion meant to distort the picture.

For the Arabs, and the above all for the 1.2 million Arabs of Palestine, the partitioning of the land in which they had been a majority for seven centuries seemed a monstrous injustice thrust upon them by white Western imperialism in expiation of a crime they had not committed. With few exceptions, the Jewish people had dwelt in relative security among the Arabs over the centuries. The golden age of the Diaspora had come in the Spain of the caliphs, and the Ottoman Turks had welcomed the Jews when the doors of much of Europe were closed to them. The ghastly chain of crimes perpetrated on the Jewish people culminating in the crematoriums of Germany had been inflicted on them by the Christian nations of Europe, not those of the Islamic East, and it was on those nations, not theirs, the Arabs maintained, that the burden of those sins should fall. Beyond that, seven hundred years of continuous occupation seemed to the Arabs a far more valid claim to the land than the Jews' historic ties, however deep.

I don’t care what the Gentiles do with the arms. The main thing is that the Jews profit. Israeli advisor in Guatemala from the 1980s

In Palestine almost every situation you can be in is layered. Nothing, not a single thing, is free of the occupation, its instruments, its outcomes.

From Palestine to Kashmir, Occupation is a Crime.

Thy can take everything you own --your property, your best years, all your joys, all your good works, everything down to your last shirt --but you'll always have your dreams, so you can reinvent your stolen world.

They can take everything you own --your property, your best years, all your joys, all your good works, everything down to your last shirt-- but you'll always have your dreams, so you can reinvent your stolen world.

During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world.

. . . published the Road Map to Peace. The premise of this plan, as the Palestinian historians Samih Farsoun and Naseer Aruri point out, "is that the nearly forty-year-old impasse is not caused by an abnormal and illegal occupation but by the Palestinian resistance to that occupation. Progress was thus linked to ending the intifada and all acts of resistance rather than ending the occupation or reversing decades of colonial impoverishment of land, resource, and institutions.

I was to grow used to hearing, around New York, the annoying way in which people would say: 'Edward Said, such a suave and articulate and witty man,' with the unspoken suffix 'for a Palestinian.' It irritated him, too, naturally enough, but in my private opinion it strengthened him in his determination to be an ambassador or spokesman for those who lived in camps or under occupation (or both). He almost overdid the ambassadorial aspect if you ask me, being always just too faultlessly dressed and spiffily turned out. Fools often contrasted this attention to his tenue with his membership of the Palestine National Council, the then-parliament-in-exile of the people without a land. In fact, his taking part in this rather shambolic assembly was a kind of noblesse oblige: an assurance to his landsmen (and also to himself) that he had not allowed and never would allow himself to forget their plight. The downside of this noblesse was only to strike me much later on.

Israel maintains its pressure on the Palestinian population not simply for its own security, then, but because such pressure has for four decades enabled it to maintain control over the territories- and, quite simply, because it encourages Palestinians to leave.

The Palestinians had become fed up with a quarter century of talks that always prioritized Israeli concerns over their own. As these talks dragged on with no end in sight, Israeli settlement construction increased exponentially, and the occupation became ever more repressive.

There are currently some five thousand Palestinian prisoners and we know that since 1967, eight hundred thousand Palestinians—40 percent of the male population—have been imprisoned by Israel. The demand to free all Palestinian political prisoners is a key ingredient of the demand to end the occupation.

What draws me to Palestine, then, is neither nationalism not patriotism, but my sense of justice, my refusal to remain silent in the face of injustice, my unwillingness to just go on living my life -- and enjoying the privileges of a tenured university professor – while trying to block out and ignore what Wordsworth once called the still, sad music of humanity.

This is the real work of woman of color feminism: to resist acquiescence to fatality and guilt, to become warriors of conscience and action who resist death in all its myriad manifestations: poverty, cultural assimilation, child abuse, motherless mothering, gentrification, mental illness, welfare cuts, the prison system, racial profiling, immigrant and queer bashing, invasion and imperialism at home and at war. To fight any kind of war, Kahente Horn-Miller writes. "The Biggest single requirement is fighting spirit." I thought much of this as I read Colonize This! since this collection appears in print at a time of escalating world-wide war--In Colombia, Afghanistan, Palestine. But is there ever a time of no-war for women of color? Is there ever a time when our home (our body, our land of origin) is not subject to violent occupation, violent invasion? If I retain any image to hold the heart-intention of this book, it is found in what Horn-Miller calls the necessity of the war dance. This book is one rite of passage, one ceremony of preparedness on the road to consciousness, on the "the war path of greater empowerment.

This kind of dehumanization is the inevitable result of endless occupation. It is also an export asset. What’s appealing to growing numbers of regimes globally is learning how Israel gets away with politicide. That term was adapted to Israel/Palestine by the late Israeli scholar and professor of sociology Baruch Kimmerling, who argued in 2003 that Israel’s domestic and foreign policy is “largely oriented towards one major goal: the politicide of the Palestinian people. By politicide I mean a process that has, as its ultimate goal, the dissolution of the Palestinian people’s existence as a legitimate social, political, and economic entity. This process may also but not necessarily include their partial or complete ethnic cleansing from the territory known as the Land of Israel.

The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world. Several centuries later, Muhammad and his followers reverted to the uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran or Qur’an, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to spread the faith.

A book was published in 2021 that had received financial backing from Elbit. The Bulgarian Army and the Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews, 1941–1944 is a revisionist history that falsely claims that the Bulgarian state saved Jews during World War Two. Elbit wanted to get a foothold in the Bulgarian arms market. Raz Segal and Amos Goldberg, “Distorting the Holocaust to Boost the International Arms Trade,” Nation, July 26, 2022.

A lot of Israelis have begun to talk of ‘two Jewish societies’ in Israel, some even talk about ‘two Jewish peoples’ within the Israeli Jewish nation. What holds them together? The conflict, of course. The occupation. The perpetual state of war … It is not that the Israeli–Arab conflict has been forced on Israel. Rather, it’s the other way around: Israel keeps up the conflict, because it needs the conflict for its very existence.

Thus throughout the 1990s, the Palestinian negotiators at Madrid and elsewhere operated under imposed rules restricting discussion to the terms of their ongoing colonization and occupation. The prospect of future relief from this interim phase was dangled before them by the sponsors of the Madrid conference, but Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are still living in that temporary interim state over a quarter of a century later.

The extent of the carnage inflicted on the Palestinian population was incalculable. Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 civilians out of a population of 1.9 million were forcibly expelled and made refugees beyond the borders of the new state. Palestinians call it the Nakba, the catastrophe. Over seven months, 531 villages were destroyed and 15,000 people were killed. The remaining Palestinians suffered beatings, rape, and internment.

One of those prominent Jewish dissidents was Ronnie Kasrils, who served as the minister for intelligence between 2004 and 2008 under an ANC government. He told the Guardian that the comparison between the two nations wasn’t accidental. “Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity,” he said. “This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was ‘a land without people for a people without land,’ so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest.

The Israeli government publicly claims that this extraordinary violence - its army fired over a million bullets in the first few days of the intifada alone - was directed against what it called "the terrorist Infrastructure." But, again, various Israeli officials privately acknowledged what was really at stake in dealing with the intifada, and that Israel's response to the uprising was directed not at armed groups but rather against the entire population.

Je ne suis pas pour l'occupation d’un pays arabe par Israël, mais, en revanche, je ne veux pas remplacer Israël par une nation islamique qui s’insta1lerait sur ses ruines, et dont le seul souci serait de promouvoir une culture de mort et d’ignorance parmi ses fidèles, à une époque où nous avons désespérément besoin de ceux qui en appellent à une culture de vie et de développement, propre à cultiver l’espoir dans nos âmes. Regardons tous les pays fondés sur la pensée religieuse, regardons leurs peuples et les générations qui y grandissent; qu’offrent-ils en termes d’humanité et d’humanisme? Rien, c’est certain, sinon la peur de Dieu et l'incapacité à affronter la vie; rien d’autre. De telles pensées ont formé et continuent de former des générations inaptes à toute créativité, à toute culture, incapables même de s’inspirer des civilisations qui leur viennent d’ailleurs, puisqu’elles ne sont pas à même de construire la leur.

Working with present-day genocidal regimes doesn’t bother Israel but it has also refused to publicly acknowledge past genocides. The Armenian genocide, formally recognized by US President Joe Biden in 2021, occurred in 1915 and 1916. Due to relations with Turkey, Israel has refused to recognize the Armenian genocide, and declassified documents prove that Israeli officials worked for decades to pressure countries and individuals around the world who wanted to do so.

Another site of Leftist struggle [other than Detroit] that has parallels to New Orleans: Palestine. From the central role of displacement to the ways in which culture and community serve as tools of resistance, there are illuminating comparisons to be made between these two otherwise very different places. In the New Orleans Black community, death is commemorated as a public ritual (it's often an occasion for a street party), and the deceased are often also memorialized on t-shirts featuring their photos embellished with designs that celebrate their lives. Worn by most of the deceased's friends and family, these t-shirts remind me of the martyr posters in Palestine, which also feature a photo and design to memorialize the person who has passed on. In Palestine, the poster's subjects are anyone who has been killed by the occupation, whether a sick child who died at a checkpoint or an armed fighter killed in combat. In New Orleans, anyone with family and friends can be memorialized on a t-shift. But a sad truth of life in poor communities is that too many of those celebrate on t-shirts lost their lives to violence. For both New Orleans and Palestine, outsiders often think that people have become so accustomed to death by violence that it has become trivialized by t-shirts and posters. While it's true that these traditions wouldn't manifest in these particular ways if either population had more opportunities for long lives and death from natural causes, it's also far from trivial to find ways to celebrate a life. Outsiders tend to demonize those killed--especially the young men--in both cultures as thugs, killers, or terrorists whose lives shouldn't be memorialized in this way, or at all. But the people carrying on these traditions emphasize that every person is a son or daughter of someone, and every death should be mourned, every life celebrated.

There are moments chronicled in political history as pivotal in carving a new political path forward and this genocidal ‘defending of one’s state’ has become one of them. History will remember this war on Palestinian civilians and their displacement as the moment the world woke up to the Zionist plans of occupation and expansion. As a result, never again will the same rhetoric be sufficient in explaining the atrocities they are willing to perpetrate towards its attainment.

When next this happens (and it will happen, again and again, because a people remain under occupation and because the relative compelling powers of both revenge and consequence warp beyond recognition once one has been made to bury their child), this same framing can be used. The barbarians instigate and the civilized are forced to respond. The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history, writes Henry Siegman, the former head of the American Jewish Congress. "Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel's interest in a peace process--other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo--has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land.

If Israel is to survive as a nation state, not a pariah, it will have to get Palestine off its back; otherwise, the prognosis for the two is mutual annihilation. There is no other alternative but to end the occupation, with a complete separation of the two states. For too long, Israel has depended on cheap Palestinian labour to build the very settlements they hate. What is created by this bizarre interaction of profitability and hate is two dysfunctional societies that have put a gun to each other’s heads.

Exact figures are impossible to obtain, since the state never releases them, but today there are over three hundred multinational companies and six thousand start-ups that employ hundreds of thousands of people. Sales are booming, with defense exports reaching an all-time high in 2021 of US$11.3 billion, having risen 55 percent in two years. Israel’s cybersecurity firms are also soaring, with US$8.8 billion raised in one hundred deals in 2021. In the same year, Israeli cyber companies took in 40 percent of the world’s funding in the sector.

Elbit, the biggest private arms manufacturer in Israel today. Established in 1966, it quickly became an essential supplier of equipment for Israeli tanks and aircraft. Years later it had become a major exporter of weapons to both democracies and despots, working closely with the US military and a host of other nations to develop a range of equipment, from drones to night vision googles and land surveillance systems to deadly high-tech munitions. Elbit is still today intimately tied to the Israeli security establishment, and has even moved into the book publishing industry.

The First Intifada, as it became known, erupted spontaneously all over the Occupied Territories, ignited when an Israeli army vehicle struck a truck in the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, killing four Palestinians. The uprising spread very quickly, although Gaza was the crucible and remained the most difficult area for Israel to bring under control. The intifada generated extensive local organization in the villages, towns, cities, and refugee camps, and came to be led by a secret Unified National Leadership. The flexible and clandestine grassroots networks formed during the intifada proved impossible for the military occupation authorities to suppress.

Israeli authorities also maintain primary control over water resources in the West Bank and allocate water in a discriminatory fashion to Palestinians. [...] Military orders established in the first 18 months of the occupation in 1967 and 1968 granted the army full authority over water-related issues in the West Bank, declared water resources state property, and barred Palestinians from establishing or using water installations without a permit. In 1982, Israeli authorities transferred ownership of water resources and supply from the Civil Administration to the national Israeli water company, Mekorot, while continuing to vest the Civil Administration with regulatory control.

By 1976, however, alienation had intensified. Any expression of nationalism—flying the Palestinian flag, displaying the Palestinian colors, organizing trade unions, voicing support for the PLO or any other resistance organization—was severely suppressed, with fines, beatings, and jail. Detentions and imprisonment usually featured torture of detainees. Protesting the occupation publicly or in print could lead to the same result or even to deportation. More active resistance, especially that involving violence, invited collective punishment, house demolitions, imprisonment without trial under the rubric of “administrative detention” that could last for years, and even extrajudicial murder.

Relations with the Palestinian village of Qaffin, however, have been more complicated. "Before 1967," explains Dov Avital, "it was a West Bank village annexed by Jordan. Since, 1967, it has been a Palestinian village of the West Bank occupied by Israel. We share the struggle of our neighbors in Meisar for their civil rights - in principle, our fellow citizens. But it is different with Qaffin. As Israelis on the Left, we are willing to fight against the occupation for peace and for the creation of a Palestinian State. But the people in Qaffin are also struggling for national rights. We support them, but because they are Palestinians and we are Israelis, we cannot really take part in that.

between 1970 and 2001, Israel established twenty-one Jewish-only settlements in the Strip. This not only greatly aggravated the political situation, but also placed pressure on the available land and water resources, which the settlements, whose population never rose above some eight thousand Israeli Jews, used in quantities vastly disproportionate to their demographic representation.15 This was a predictable effect of an occupying power settling its citizens in a territory that it controlled through military rule—and in the midst of some 1.1 million Palestinians.16 It could be similarly anticipated that people living under such conditions would resist occupation, producing tension that would become more pronounced over time.

When Libya fought against the Italian occupation, all the Arabs supported the Libyan mujahideen. We Arabs never occupied any country. Well, we occupied Andalusia unjustly, and they drove us out, but since then, we Arabs have not occupied any country. It is our countries that are occupied. Palestine is occupied, Iraq is occupied, and as for the UAE islands... It is not in the best interest of the Arabs for hostility to develop between them and Iran, Turkey, or any of these nations. By no means is it in our interest to turn Iran against us. If there really is a problem, we should decide here to refer this issue to the international court of Justice. This is the proper venue for the resolution of such problems. We should decide to refer the issue of the disputed UAE islands to the International Court of Justice, and we should accept whatever it rules. One time you say this is occupied Arab land, and then you say... This is not clear, and it causes confusion. 80% of the people of the Gulf are Iranians. The ruling families are Arab, but the rest are Iranian. The entire people is Iranian. This is a mess. Iran cannot be avoided. Iran is a Muslim neighbour, and it is not in our interes to become enemies. What is the reason for the invasion and destruction of Iraq, and for killing of one million Iraqis? Let our American friends answer this question: Why Iraq? What is the reason? Is Bin Laden an Iraqi? No he is not. Were those who attacked New York Iraqis? No, they were not. were those who attacked the Pentagon Iraqis? No, they were not. Were there WMDs in Iraq? No, there were not. Even if iraq did have WMDs - Pakistan and India have nuclear bombs, and so do China, Russia, Britain, France and America. Should all these countries be destroyed? Fine, let's destroy all the countries that have WMDs. Along comes a foreign power, occupies an Arab country, and hangs its president, and we all sit on the sidelines, laughing. Why didn't they investigate the hanging of Saddam Hussein? How can a POW be hanged - a president of an Arab country and a member of the Arab League no less! I'm not talking about the policies of Saddam Hussein, or the disagreements we had with him. We all had poitlical disagreements with him and we have such disagreements among ourselves here. We share nothing, beyond this hall. Why won't there be an investigation into the killing of Saddam Hussein? An entire Arab leadership was executed by hanging, yet we sit on the sidelines. Why? Any one of you might be next. Yes. America fought alongside Saddam Hussein against Khomeini. He was their friend. Cheney was a friend of Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld, the US Defense Secretary at the time Iraq was destroyed, was a close friend of Saddam Hussein. Ultimately, they sold him out and hanged him. You are friends of America - let's say that ''we'' are, not ''you'' - but one of these days, America may hang us. Brother 'Amr Musa has an idea which he is enthusiastic. He mentioned it in his report. He says that the Arabs have the right to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes, and that there should be an Arab nuclear program. The Arabs have this right. They even have the right to have the right to have a nuclear program for other... But Allah prevails... But who are those Arabs whom you say should have united nuclear program? We are the enemies of one another, I'm sad to say. We all hate one another, we deceive one another, we gloat at the misfortune of one another, and we conspire against one another. Our intelligence agencies conspire against one another, instead of defending us against the enemy. We are the enemies of one another, and an Arab's enemy is another Arab's friend.

Mark appears to acknowledge the reality that “no one had the strength to subdue” the demon of Roman military occupation (5: 4)—including the Jewish rebels. Yet he makes his revolutionary stance clear by symbolically reenacting the exodus story through a “herd” of pigs. With the divine command, the imperial forces are drowned in the sea. It is no accident that in the aftermath of this action the crowd, like Pilate, responds with “wonder” (thaumazein; 5: 20). To invoke the great exodus liberation story was, as it has been subsequently throughout Western history, to fan the flames of revolutionary hope (Walzer, 1986). Yet Mark realized that the problem was much deeper than throwing off the yoke of yet another colonizer. After all, biblical history itself attested to the fact that Israel had always been squeezed, courted, or threatened by the great empires that surrounded it. And the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids had only resulted in recycling oppressive power into the hands of a native dynasty, one that in turn became an early victim of a newly ascendent imperial power, Rome. Thus the meaning of Jesus’ struggle against the strong man is not reducible solely to his desire for the liberation of Palestine from colonial rule, though it certainly includes that. It is a struggle against the root “spirit” and politics of domination—which, Mark acknowledges matter of factly, is most clearly represented by the “great men” of the Hellenistic imperial sphere (10: 42).

Israel’s claim to be a thriving democracy in the heart of the Middle East is challenged by the facts. All media outlets in Israel, along with publishers and authors, must submit stories related to foreign affairs and security to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) chief military censor before publication. No other Western country has such a system. It’s an archaic regulation that began soon after Israel was born. The censor has the power to entirely block the story or partially redact it.3 What’s deemed valid is highly questionable, since the priorities of the national security establishment will be very different to what’s required for a healthy, democratic state. This contradiction was clear when Israel’s chief censor, Ariella Ben Avraham, left her position in 2020 and took a job with the country’s leading cyber-surveillance company, NSO Group.

The Palestinian uprising, or intifada, which broke out in December 1987 was a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences.2 Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin had launched the invasion of Lebanon to quash the power of the PLO, and thereby end Palestinian nationalist opposition in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to the absorption of those territories into Israel. This would complete the colonial task of historic Zionism, creating a Jewish state in all of Palestine. The 1982 war did succeed in weakening the PLO, but the paradoxical effect was to strengthen the Palestinian national movement in Palestine itself, shifting the focus of action from outside to inside the country. After two decades of a relatively manageable occupation, Begin and Sharon, two fervent partisans of the Greater Israel ideal, had inadvertently sparked a new level of resistance to the process of colonization. Opposition to Israel’s landgrab and military rule has erupted within Palestine repeatedly and in different forms ever since.

It is over. The long Occupation that created Israeli generations born in Israel and not knowing another ‘homeland’ created at the same time generations of Palestinians strange to Palestine; born in exile and knowing nothing of the homeland except stories and news. Generations who posses an intimate knowledge of the streets of faraway exiles, but not of their own country. Generations that never planted or built or made their small human mistakes in their own country. Generations that never saw our grandmothers quarter in front of the ovens to present us with a loaf of bread to dip in olive oil, never saw the village preacher in his headdress and Azhari piety hiding in a cave to spy on the girls and the women of the village when they took of their clothes and bathed, naked, in the pool of ‘Ein al-Deir. The Occupation has created generations without a place whose colours, smell, and sounds they can remember; a first place that belongs to them, that they can return to in their memories in their cobbled-together exiles. There is no childhood bed for them to remember, a bed on which they forgot a soft cloth doll, or whose white pillows - once the adults had gone out of an evening were their weapons in a battle that had them shirking with delight. This is it. The Occupation has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown beloved; distant, difficult, surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer terror. The long Occupation has succeeded in changing us from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine. I have always believed that it is in the interests of an occupation, any occupation, that the homeland should be transformed in the memory of its people into a bouquet of ’symbols’. Merely symbols, they will not allow us to develop our village so that it shares features with the city, or to move without city into a contemporary space. The Occupation forced us to remain with the old. That is its crime. It did not deprive us of the clay ovens of yesterday, but of the mystery of what we could invent tomorrow.

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.

In the quarter century since the Oslo agreements, the situation in Palestine and Israel has often been falsely described as a clash between two near-equals, between the state of Israel and the quasi-state of the Palestinian Authority. This depiction masks the unequal, unchanged colonial reality. The PA has no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no authority except that allowed it by Israel, which even controls a major part of its revenues in the form of customs duties and some taxes. Its primary function, to which much of its budget is devoted, is security, but not for its people: it is mandated by US and Israeli dictates to provide security for Israel’s settlers and occupation forces against the resistance, violent and otherwise, of other Palestinians. Since 1967, there has been one state authority in all of the territory of Mandatory Palestine: that of Israel. The creation of the PA did nothing to change that reality, rearranging the deckchairs on the Palestinian Titanic, while providing Israeli colonization and occupation with an indispensable Palestinian shield.

In first-century Palestine, nearly every claimant to the mantle of the messiah neatly fit one of these messianic paradigms. Hezekiah the bandit chief, Judas the Galilean, Simon of Peraea, and Athronges the shepherd all modeled themselves after the Davidic ideal, as did Menahem and Simon son of Giora during the Jewish War. These were king-messiahs whose royal aspirations were clearly defined in their revolutionary actions against Rome and its clients in Jerusalem. Others, such as Theudas the wonder worker, the Egyptian, and the Samaritan cast themselves as liberator-messiahs in the mold of Moses, each would-be messiah promising to free his followers from the yoke of Roman occupation through some miraculous deed. Oracular prophets such as John the Baptist and the holy man Jesus ben Ananias may not have overtly assumed any messianic ambitions, but their prophecies about the End Times and the coming judgment of God clearly conformed to the prophet-messiah archetype one finds both in the Hebrew Scripture and in the rabbinic traditions and commentaries known as the Targum.

Israel’s constant drone surveillance over Gaza also impressed President Vladimir Putin. Moscow needed reliable surveillance drones after it lost many planes during its war in 2008 against Georgia in South Ossetia. Tbilisi had used Israeli drones, and years later Moscow decided to follow suit. Having seen Israeli operations over Gaza, Russia licensed the Israeli Aerospace Industries Searcher II, renamed “Forpost” by its new owners, and it became a key asset in Russian support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.33 Israel trained Russian pilots to operate the drones. Russia and Israel maintained a close relationship during the Syrian civil war despite the former supporting Assad and the latter worrying about the growing presence of Russian allies Iran and Hizbollah in the country. This led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (and Naftali Bennett) to routinely attack Iranian and Syrian military positions in Syria to stop the transfer of weapons to Hizbollah. However, Moscow usually turned a blind eye to these attacks, assisted by a de-escalation hotline between the two governments.

The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world. Several centuries later, Muhammad and his followers reverted to the uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran or Qur’an, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to spread the faith. Christianity, too, was spread by the sword, wielded first by Roman hands after the Emperor Constantine raised it from eccentric cult to official religion, then by the Crusaders, and later by the conquistadors and other European invaders and colonists, with missionary accompaniment.

The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world. Several centuries later, Muhammad and his followers reverted to the uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran or Qur’an, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to spread the faith. Christianity, too, was spread by the sword, wielded first by Roman hands after the Emperor Constantine raised it from eccentric cult to official religion, then by the Crusaders, and later by the conquistadores and other European invaders and colonists, with missionary accompaniment.

COULD WE HAVE LIVED OUR lives ignoring politics? The Occupation determined the crops that the fallah planted, it stood in the face of every industrial project, it prevented us from establishing our own financial institutions, it hampered our wishes for education, it censored what could be published, it deprived us of a voice in the Ottoman parliament, it dictated what jobs our men could hold and it held back the emancipation of our women. It put each one of us in the position of a minor and forbade us to grow up. And with every year that passed we saw our place in the train of modern nations receding, the distance we would have to make up growing ever longer and more difficult. It sowed distrust among our people and pushed the best among them either to fanatical actions or to despair. And in Palestine we saw a clear warning of what the colonialist project could finally do: it could take the land itself from under its inhabitants. Could we have ignored all this? And what space would have been left for our lives to occupy? And what man with any dignity would have consented to confine himself to that space and not tried to push at its boundaries? And what woman would not have seen it as her duty to help him?

Thus, in the course of the civil war the Palestinian Arabs, besides killing the odd prisoner of war, committed only two large massacres-involving forty workers in the Haifa oil refinery and about iso surrendering or unarmed Haganah men in Kfar `Etzion (a massacre in which Jordanian Legionnaires participated-though other Legionnaires at the site prevented atrocities). Some commentators add a third "massacre," the destruction of the convoy of doctors and nurses to Mount Scopus in Jerusalem in mid-April 1948, but this was actually a battle, involving Haganah and Palestine Arab militiamen, though it included, or was followed by, the mass killing of the occupants of a Jewish bus, most of whom were unarmed medical personnel. The Arab regular armies committed few atrocities and no large-scale massacres of POWs and civilians in the conventional war-even though they conquered the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and a number of rural settlements, including Atarot and Neve Ya`akov near Jerusalem, and Nitzanim, Gezer, and Mishmar Hayarden elsewhere. The Israelis' collective memory of fighters characterized by "purity of arms" is also undermined by the evidence of rapes committed in conquered towns and villages. About a dozen cases-in Jaffa, Acre, and so on-are reported in the available contemporary documentation and, given Arab diffidence about reporting such incidents and the

The Intifada shattered the illusion that the occupation was external to Israel’s “social system” and “democratic” political regime. A number of Zionist Left intellectuals gradually came to recognize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as central to Israeli history and the formation of Israeli society. The

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.

Despite this sentiment running through the Jewish community in most of the world, I soon became uncomfortable with both the explicit racism against Palestinians that I heard and knee-jerk support for all Israeli actions. It was like a cult where opposing voices were condemned and cast out. I remember my Jewish friends during my teenage years, who mouthed what they had heard from their parents and rabbis. Few of them had been to Israel, let alone Palestine, but the dominant narrative was based around fear; Jews were constantly under attack and Israel was the solution. No matter that Palestinians had to suffer to make Jews feel safe. This felt like a perverted lesson from the Holocaust.

Israel’s leading human rights group, B’Tselem, released a report in early 2021 that concluded that there is a “regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. This is apartheid.” Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International followed suit soon after.

Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 civilians out of a population of 1.9 million were forcibly expelled and made refugees beyond the borders of the new state. Palestinians call it the Nakba, the catastrophe. Over seven months, 531 villages were destroyed and 15,000 people were killed. The remaining Palestinians suffered beatings, rape, and internment.

Zionism is the ideology that says that historic Palestine must be a country for Jews only. Zionism is what led to the dispossession of our land, which continues to be seized and occupied. But more dangerous than that is how Zionism has occupied the minds and the humanity of far too many Israelis. That occupation is truly more frightening and intractable.

Reference in this chapter is primarily to the First Intifada, the unarmed and mainly nonviolent uprising that lasted in full force from 1987 to 1993, in distinction from the second, which started in 2000, and which eventually became an armed uprising featuring the use of suicide bombers by the Palestinians, and the employment of tanks, helicopters, and other heavy weapons by the Israeli occupation forces.

Sales are booming, with defense exports reaching an all-time high in 2021 of US$11.3 billion, having risen 55 percent in two years. Israel’s cybersecurity firms are also soaring, with US$8.8 billion raised in one hundred deals in 2021. In the same year, Israeli cyber companies took in 40 percent of the world’s funding in the sector.

Both Israel and the US trained and armed death squads in Colombia well into the 2000s. The former drug trafficker Carlos Castaño, who ran a far-right paramilitary force, explains in his ghost-written autobiography, “I learned an infinite amount of things in Israel [in the 1980s], and to that country I owe part of my essence, my human and military achievements. I copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis.”23 He reportedly arrived in Israel in 2004 after fleeing his own country.

The Global South has been controlled and pacified with (principally) Israeli and US weapons.

The most notorious massacre occurred at the small village of Dos Erres on December 6, 1982, where around three hundred people were slaughtered. The brutality was shocking. Skulls were smashed with sledgehammers and bodies were thrown down a well. Israel had played its part in the Dos Erres massacre. The 1999 UN Truth Commission, after visiting the area to exhume the bodies, detailed in its forensics report that “all the ballistic evidence recovered corresponded to bullet fragments from firearms and pods of Galil rifles, made in Israel.”49

Then there are the less publicized horrors including the torture prison at Khiam run by Israel’s proxy, the South Lebanese Army (SLA), the IDF, and Shin Bet between 1985 and 2000. Some five thousand prisoners passed through the former French army barracks.

Mack was also behind a petition filed in the Israeli High Court in October 2020 for more evidence of Mossad’s support for the brutal Christian militias in Lebanon, who killed thousands of Palestinians between 1975 and 1982, including at Tel al-Zataar in August 1976 where up to three thousand Palestinians, mostly civilians, were massacred during a siege that lasted several weeks.

From Beirut to Jerusalem, the New York Times

Two targets in particular seemed to interest [Ariel] Sharon’s army. One was the PLO Research Center. There were no guns at the PLO Research Center, no ammunition and no fighters. But there was something more dangerous—books about Palestine, old records and land deeds belonging to Palestinian families, photographs about Arab life in Palestine, historical archives about the Arab life in Palestine and, most important, maps—maps of pre-1948 Palestine with every Arab village on it before the state of Israel came into being and erased many of them. The Research Center was like an ark containing the Palestinians’ heritage—some of their credentials as a nation. In a certain sense, this is what Sharon most wanted to take home from Beirut. You could read it in the graffiti the Israeli boys left behind on the Research Center walls: [/block]Palestinians? What’s that?[block] And [/block]Palestinians, fuck you[block], and [/block]Arafat, I will hump your mother[block]. (The PLO later forced Israel to return the entire archive as part of a November 1983 prisoner exchange.)

Israel remains the biggest recipient of US aid, although the Jewish state is now less reliant on that aid than it once was. While this is true financially, it’s protected diplomatically by the US from a tsunami of global condemnation after decades of occupation and frequent wars on Gaza. US backing remains vital to Israel’s relative strength. Nonetheless, in 1981 US aid was equivalent to roughly 10 percent of Israel’s economy, but by 2020, at close to US$4 billion annually, it was down to around 1 percent.2 For this reason, Israel cares far less about even the mildest American pressure to curtail illegal Jewish colonies in the West Bank, attacks on Gaza, or house demolitions in East Jerusalem.

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle,

defense companies whose primary aim was to monetize the occupation and sell that experience in controlling another people to a global market.

Israeli technology was sold as the solution to unwanted populations at the US–Mexico border where the Israeli company Elbit was a major player in repelling migrants. European governments also wanted to monitor refugees, so Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) drones were employed for the task.

More than two decades after September 11, 2001, Israel’s gamble paid off with surging global interest in its defense and surveillance sectors. In 2020, Israel spent US$22 billion on its military and was the twelfth biggest military supplier in the world, with sales of more than US$345 million.

A survey in 2021 conducted by Jewish Electorate Institute, a group led by leading Jewish Democrats, found that 34 percent of Jews agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States,” 25 percent agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state,” and 22 percent agreed that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.” A 2022 survey by the major pro-Israel lobby group, the American Jewish Committee, confirmed this trend. Nearly 44 percent of young Jewish Americans didn’t feel very connected to Israel and more than one in five millennial American Jews backed one democratic state in Israel and Palestine. Another study in the same year, conducted by Pew Research Center, found that young Americans under the age of thirty viewed both Israelis and Palestinians equally favorably.

Israel has thus fully embraced the “war on terror” and richly profited from it. One of the most successful though bloody counterinsurgency battles of the early twenty-first century was the Sri Lankan government’s destruction of the Tamil Tigers militant group. Israel played a key, though largely unpublicized, part in Colombo’s successful campaign in a civil war that killed and disappeared more than 200,000 people, mostly Tamils, over a quarter-century that ended in 2009. Israel sold Kfir fighter jets and trained the Special Task Force, a brutal unit of the Sri Lankan police.

The point I am making is that for a very long time, Mandela and his comrades shared the same status as numerous Palestinian leaders and activists today and that just as the US explicitly collaborated with the SA apartheid government, it continues to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine, currently in the form of over $8.5 million a day in military aid. We need to let the Obama administration know that the world knows how deeply the US is implicated in the occupation.

This kind of IDF information war strategy is now routinely copied by the US military. The CIA launched a social media campaign, Humans of CIA, in 2021 that aimed to recruit from more diverse communities into its ranks. It felt deeply inspired by the IDF’s woke posturing. One of the most discussed (and mocked) campaigns, considering the CIA’s role in destabilizing and overthrowing governments since World War II, was the video of a Latina intelligence officer declaring: “I am a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise. I used to struggle with imposter syndrome, but at 36 I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be.

Israel’s social media strategy is a sophisticated attempt to link the Jewish state’s operations with Western values, or at least those policies supporting a militarized response to terrorism (or resistance, depending on your perspective), hoping to engender it to global audiences. “Social media is a warzone for us here in Israel,” said Lt. Col. (Ret.) Avital Leibovich, creator of the IDF social media unit and director of the American Jewish Committee in Israel, during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge. It was a seven-week battle between Israel and Hamas that killed more than 2,250 Palestinians, many of them civilians, including 500 children, and 70 Israelis, most of whom were soldiers.