Palestinian Liberation Quotes

Racism towards Muslims is as evil as anti-Semitism, but try to express this simple truth on a partisan Palestinian or Israeli website.

Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: 'Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It’s not that I terribly sympathize with them or anything—it's just that the Soviets have never done anything to harm me, or us.' At the time I thought this a rather naïve statement, even perhaps a slightly contemptible one, but by then I had been in parts of the Middle East where it could come as a blessed relief to meet a consecrated Moscow-line atheist-dogmatist, if only for the comparatively rational humanism that he evinced amid so much religious barking and mania. It was only later to occur to me that Edward's pronounced dislike of George Orwell was something to which I ought to have paid more attention.

How can we in the United States and Europe, as well as in much of Israel, comfortably enjoy our liberal privileges and democratic governments, while Palestinians are deprived of the most basic rights?

Again, we are talking about a woman with Palestinian heritage expected to show deference, if not all-out reverence, to a politician who has shown little concern for her people simply because that politician is a (white) liberal woman. Predictably, Tlaib was hounded online and off until she apologized. Never mind that her own actions came after months of Clinton injecting herself into the 2020 campaign by repeatedly taking swipes at Sanders.

Before 1969 came to an end, Palestinian terrorists trained at the KGB’s Balashikha special-operations school east of Moscow had hijacked their first “Zionist” El Al plane and landed it in Algeria, where its thirty-two Jewish passengers were held hostage for five weeks. The hijacking had been planned and coordinated by the KGB’s Thirteenth Department, known in Soviet bloc intelligence jargon as the Department for Wet Affairs (wet being a KGB euphemism for bloody). To conceal the KGB’s hand, Andropov had the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (created and financed by the KGB) take credit for the hijacking. The

It would be the Zionist Left who led the Jewish army in the 1948 war and, after committing the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, established the state of Israel. Their governance lasted until 1977 when the Labor Party lost its governmental monopoly to the right-wing Herut Party—later the Likud—headed by Menachem Begin.31 Though

What can Black feminism and the Black struggle offer to the Palestinian liberation movement? I don’t know whether I would phrase the question in that way, because I think that solidarity always implies a kind of mutuality. Given the fact that in the US we’re already encouraged to assume that we have the best of everything, that US exceptionalism puts us in a situation as activists to offer advice to people struggling all over the world, and I don’t agree with that—I think we share our experiences. Just as I think the development of Black feminism and women-of-color feminisms can offer ideas, experiences, analyses to Palestinians, so can Black feminisms and women-of-color feminisms learn from the struggle of the Palestinian people and Palestinian feminists.

While Rabin had done something no other Israeli leader had ever done by formally conceding that there was a Palestinian people, accepting the PLO as their representative, and opening negotiations with it, obtaining in return its recognition of the state of Israel, this exchange was neither symmetrical nor reciprocal. Israel had not recognized a Palestinian state or even made a commitment to allow the creation of one. This was a peculiar transaction, whereby a national liberation movement had obtained nominal recognition from its oppressors, without achieving liberation, by trading its own recognition of the state that had colonized its homeland and continued to occupy it. This was a resounding, historic mistake, one with grave consequences for the Palestinian people.

These included repeated cuts in aid to the Palestinian Authority, the closure of the Palestine Liberation Organization offices in Washington, a specific declaration by the State Department that settlements were legal, and the passage of a law forbidding aid until the Palestinians ended a fund that paid families of Palestinians imprisoned for acts of resistance, including violent ones, against Israel.

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.

People here talked about the pre-1967 borders. To tell you the truth this is astonishing. Whatever happened to the (Palestinian) cause we had before 1967? Were we lying to ourselves or to the world? Thousands of martyrs fell before 1967. What for? How can you say that Palestine was occupied only in 1967, and that (Israel) must return to the pre-1967 borders? Does Palestine consist of only the West Bank and the Gaza Strip? If so, it means that the Israelis did not occupy it in 1948. They left it to you for twenty years, so why didn't you establish a Palestinian state? Wasn't the Gaza strip part of Egypt, and the West Bank part of Jordan? The Jews left them to you for twenty years - from 1948 to 1967. If that is Palestine, why didn't you establish a state there? What is the justification for all the wars, the sacrifices, and the economic embargo on Israel before 1967? The Israelis can sue the Arabs now, and demand billions or even trillions in compensation for the damage caused them in 1948-1967. You Arabs admitted that the (Palestinian) cause began after 1967. So the Israelis can ask: "Why did you fight us before that?" They will demand Arab compensation for the so-called embargo on Israel, and for the economic damage caused to the Israelis. If the Israelis sue you, they will win. They will say: We suffered an injustice. We are like an innocent lamb surrounded by wolves. We've been saying this since 1948. Now the Arabs themselves have admitted that Palestine was occupied in 1967. Now they demand that Israel return to the pre-1967 borders, saying this will resolve the problem, and they will recognise Israel. Why didn't you recognise Israel before 1967? There is no God but Allah. By Allah, this is unacceptable. It doesn't make sense. You say that you will recognise Israel within the pre-1967 borders?! Maybe Israel will occupy more Arab land in, say, 2008, and a few years later, you will demand that it return to the pre-2008 borders, in exchange for recognizing Israel. This is exactly what's going on now. We gave negotiations a serious try. The Jews used to say: "Meet with us only once for direct negotiations, and we will resolve this issue." This is what they used to say in the 1950s and 1960s. They used to say: "Please, Arabs, sit down with us just one time, and our problem will be over." But you saw what happened. We met with them a thousand times - from the stables of (camp) David to Annapolis. We've been through all these negotiations - the stables of (camp) David, the Oslo negotiations of our brother Abu Mazen... He was, of course, the hero of Oslo - just like Sadat was the hero of the stables of (camp) David. When Algeria was fighting, donations and volunteers were coming in broad daylight - from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf. From here, from Syria, Dr. IIbrahim Makhous came with a group of volunteers, and fought alongside the Algerian Liberation Front. They were not considered terrorists, and no measures were taken against Syria.

Starting in the early 1970s, members of the PLO responded to these pressures, in particular to the urging of the Soviet Union, by floating the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, in effect a two-state solution. This approach was notably promoted by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (which had split off from the PFLP in 1969), together with Syrian-backed groups, discreetly encouraged by the leadership of Fatah. Although there had been early resistance to the two-state solution by the PFLP and some Fatah cadres, in time it became clear that ‘Arafat, among other leaders, supported it. This marked the beginning of a long, slow process of shifting away from the maximalist objective of the democratic state, with its revolutionary implications, to an ostensibly more pragmatic aim of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, to be achieved via negotiations on the basis of SC 242.

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.

He was moved by the monologue of a soldier who wrote in his kibbutz journal (every kibbutz in Israel has a kind of ‘village voice’) of what he had seen and done in the occupied West Bank. The soldier told how he and his comrades entered a Palestinian school, locked about twenty eight-year-old boys in a classroom, threw in some gas grenades and kept the children in there for quite a while, causing such panic that at least half of them jumped out of the windows, breaking their legs in the fall. This was a punishment for stone throwing by students from a nearby college, who were not caught. What drew Evron’s attention was not so much the horrific story itself, but the fact that the soldier who published the story in a kibbutz publication seemed to believe that telling the story absolved him and his friends from his actions. The same applied to a group of soldiers in a famous publication, soon after the June 1967 war, entitled Conversations Between Soldiers. The uneasiness Evron felt in 1967 became a review of liberal Zionism and its role in sanitizing and disguising the horrors of Zionist colonization and occupation since 1882

First, the biblical descriptions regarding the coming of Jesus the Jewish Messiah bear many striking resemblances to the coming Antichrist of Islam, whom Muslims refer to as the al-maseeh al-dajjaal (the counterfeit Messiah). Second, the Bible’s Antichrist bears numerous striking commonalities with the primary messiah figure of Islam, who Muslims call the Mahdi. In other words, our Messiah is their antichrist and our Antichrist is their messiah. Even more shocking to many readers was the revelation that Islam teaches that when Jesus returns, He will come back as a Muslim prophet whose primary mission will be to abolish Christianity. It’s difficult for any Bible believer to read of these things without becoming acutely aware of the satanic origins of the Islamic religion. In 2008, I also had the opportunity to coauthor another book on the same subject with Walid Shoebat, a former operative for the Palestine Liberation Organization. This book, entitled God’s War on Terror, is an almost encyclopedic discussion of the role of Islam in the last days, as well as a chronicle of Walid’s journey from a young Palestinian Muslim with a deep hatred for the Jews, to a Christian man who spends his life standing with the Jewish people and proclaiming the truth concerning the dangers of radical Islam. Together these two books have become the cornerstone of what has developed into a popular eschatological revolution. Today, I receive a steady stream of e-mails and reports from individuals expressing how much these books have affected them and transformed their understanding of the end-times. Students, pastors, and even reputable scholars have expressed that they have abandoned the popular notion that the Antichrist, his empire, and his religion will emerge out of Europe or a revived Roman Empire. Instead they have come to recognize the simple fact that the Bible emphatically and repeatedly points us to the Middle East as the launchpad and epicenter of the emerging empire of the Antichrist and his religion. Many testify that although they have been students of Bible prophecy for many years, never before had anything made so much sense, or the prophecies of the Bible become so clear. And even more important, some have even written to share that they’ve become believers or recommitted their lives to Jesus as a result of reading these books. Hallelujah!

Target killing of Palestinian leaders, including moderate ones, was not a new phenomenon in the conflict. Israel began this policy with the assassination of Ghassan Kanafani in 1972, a poet and writer, who could have led his people to reconciliation. The fact that he was targeted, a secular and leftist activist, is symbolic of the role Israel played in killing those Palestinians it ‘regretted’ later for not being there as partners for peace. In May 2001 President George Bush Jr appointed Senator George J. Mitchell as a special envoy to the Middle East conflict. Mitchell produced a report about the causes for the second Intifada. He concluded: ‘We have no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity; or to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the [Government of Israel] to respond with lethal force.’13 On the other hand, he blamed Ariel Sharon for provoking unrest by visiting and violating the sacredness of the al-Aqsa mosque and the holy places of Islam. In short, even the disempowered Arafat realized that the Israeli interpretation of Oslo in 2000 meant the end of any hope for normal Palestinian life and doomed the Palestinians to more suffering in the future. This scenario was not only morally wrong in his eyes, but also would have strengthened, as he knew too well, those who regarded the armed struggle against Israel as the exclusive way to liberate Palestine.

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.

Arafat himself sometimes spoke even more candidly. On January 30, 1996, he said in a closed meeting to forty Arab diplomats in Stockholm’s Grand Hotel, “We intend to destroy Israel and to establish a pure Palestinian state…. We will make the life of the Jews miserable and take everything from them…. I don’t need any Jews.”12 In a radio address on the Voice of Palestine on November 11, 1995, he said, “The struggle will continue until all of Palestine is liberated.” Lest anyone had doubts that by “all of Palestine” he meant not only Judea and Samaria and Gaza but all of Israel, he had proclaimed two months earlier, on September 7, 1995, “O Gaza, your sons are returning. O Lod, O Haifa, O Jerusalem, you are returning, you are returning,” in Arabic to a Palestinian audience. True to his deceptive character, he was careful not to mention places like Haifa and Lod, which were well within pre-1967 Israel and ostensibly not in the PLO’s plan for a state, when he spoke before Western audiences. On September 13, 1993, the day he signed the Oslo Accords, Arafat used more oblique language in explaining to a Palestinian audience that the agreement was nothing more than the PLO’s “Phased Plan.” This plan, calling for the destruction of Israel in stages, had been adopted by the PLO in 1964 and was well familiar to Palestinians. The unchanging and thinly disguised PLO strategy of destroying Israel in stages completely contradicted Oslo’s ostensible message of peace and reconciliation. So did the post-Oslo flood of official Palestinian exhortations dehumanizing Jews as pigs and teaching schoolchildren to glorify Palestinian suicide bombers. As usual, little of this entered the international discourse or caused governments to rethink the much-vaunted Oslo Accords. There was supposedly a honeymoon between the PLO and Israel under Prime Minister Rabin; Arafat and Rabin were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.” It was inconceivable that the prizewinning Arafat could be swindling the entire world. Of course, anybody with a sober view of the facts could see that this was precisely what was happening. But what Yoni had written years earlier about some in Israel was now true of many in the international community: “They want to believe, so they believe. They want not to see, so they distort.”13

As I noted in Chapter 14, “The Earthquake,” there was a supermarket in Jerusalem where I shopped for fruits and vegetables almost every day. It was owned by an Iraqi Jewish family who had immigrated to Israel from Baghdad in the early 1940s. The patriarch of the family, Sasson, was an elderly curmudgeon in his sixties. Sasson’s whole life had left him with the conviction that the Arabs would never willingly accept a Jewish state in their midst and that any concessions to the Palestinians would eventually be used to liquidate the Jewish state. Whenever Sasson heard Israeli doves saying that the Palestinians really wanted to live in peace with the Jews, but that they just couldn’t always come out and declare it, it sounded ludicrous to him. It simply ran counter to everything life in Iraq and Jerusalem had taught him, and neither the Camp David treaty with Egypt nor declarations by Yasir Arafat—nor the Palestinian uprising itself—had convinced him otherwise. As I said, as far as Sasson was concerned, the problem between himself and the Palestinians was not that they didn’t understand each other, but that they did—all too well. Sasson, I should add, did not appear to be ideologically committed to Israel’s holding the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was a grocer, and ideology did not trip easily off his tongue. I am sure he rarely, if ever, went to the occupied territories. Like a majority of Israelis, he viewed the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip primarily in terms of security. I believe that Sasson is the key to a Palestinian–Israeli peace settlement—not him personally, but his world view. He is the Israeli silent majority. He is the Israeli two-thirds. You don’t hear much from the Sassons of Israel. They don’t talk much. They are not as interesting to interview as wild-eyed messianic West Bank settlers, or as articulate as Peace Now professors who speak with an American accent. But they are the foundation of Israel, the gravity that holds the country in place. And, more important, years of reporting from Israel have taught me that there is a little bit of Sasson’s almost primitive earthiness in every Israeli—not only all those in the Likud Party on the right side of the political spectrum, but a majority of those in the Labor Party as well; not only those Israelis born in Arab countries, but those born in Israel as well. Indeed, the Israeli public is not divided fifty-fifty on the question of peace with the Palestinians. The truth is, the Israeli public is divided in three. One segment, on the far left—maybe 5 percent of the population—is ready to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza tomorrow, and sincerely believes the Palestinians are ready to live in peace with the Jews. Another segment, on the far right—maybe 20 percent of the population—will never be prepared, for ideological reasons, to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. They are committed to holding forever all the Land of Israel, out of either nationalist or messianic sentiments. In between these two extremes you have the Sassons, who make up probably 75 percent of the population. The more liberal Sassons side with the Labor Party, the more hard-line Sassons side with the Likud, but they all share a gut feeling that they are locked in an all-or-nothing communal struggle with the Palestinians. Today the

Throughout history there have been populations that have lived in desperation, and none of them have resorted to the intentional targeting and murder of children as an officially practiced and widely praised mode of achieving political ends. When extremist elements of otherwise legitimate liberation movements such as the Republican Sinn Fein have committed such atrocities, their actions have been unconditionally condemned by the civilized world, and their political objectives have been discredited by their vile crimes. This is not so with the Palestinians. Once upon a time there was a special place in the lowest depths of hell for anyone who would intentionally murder a child. Now that place is in the pantheon of Palestinian heroes. Now that behavior is legitimized as ‘armed struggle’ against Israeli ‘occupation’ by, among others, the United Nations General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Commission, and the European Union. Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the rise of Hamas in 1987, the campaign to destroy Israel has taken on an ugly, fanatic religious tone. Holy obligation reinforces (and is replacing) Palestinian nationalism as the motivation for committing terrorist murder. As we have seen the secular, ‘moderate’ factions of the Palestinian nationalist movement (such as Abbas’s Fatah Party) will shrink into insignificance, and is replaced by terrorist Islamic factions such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Hamas receives financial and material support from the same sources as al Qaeda, and from al Qaeda directly. Islamic Jihad receives financial and material support from Iran, directly and through Hezbollah. These are the same international criminal entities that wage religion-based terror war against the United States. They do it for the same reason and by the same means: to make Islam supreme in the world, by the sword or the suicide bomb.

I also testify that charity is essential for our spiritual well-being. It is essential not only because it is a commandment from God to love others but also because letting go of anger and hate is liberating… [My friend asked] How can you deal with this injustice and not get angry?” I told her that if I let myself get angry each time something like this happened, I would be angry all my life. As I have learned to love my enemies, I have also realized that at some point in your life, you have to learn to let go. Being angry and hateful toward others only hurts you. My faith and feelings of peace intensified by learning to love and forgive as exemplified by our Savior Jesus Christ.

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. More than half a century of occupation and these prominent reports made a difference. Although Palestinians had been saying it for decades, the shift took time to filter through to Western elites and populations. Israel’s illiberalism is now impossible to deny, and many Western liberals no longer feel constrained in saying it.1

Netanyahuism aims to crush Palestinian aspirations. During President Barack Obama’s term, he argued that it was “unsustainable” to indefinitely occupy another people because racism and colonialism were relics from a different era. Netanyahu vehemently disagreed. According to Netanyahu, Jewish writer Peter Beinart explained, “the future belonged not to liberalism as Obama defined it—tolerance, equal rights, and the rule of law—but to authoritarian capitalism: governments that combined aggressive and often racist nationalism with economic and technological might. The future, Netanyahu implied, would produce leaders who resembled not Obama, but him.”9

The world indeed took notice. Global public opinion in the US toward Israel has taken a nosedive since 2001. Liberal and Democratic voters are increasingly skeptical of Israeli actions. Consensus in the Jewish community has become impossible. 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.

The liberation of Palestine through military means, to secure the right to self-determination and the right of return, was central to the Palestinian revolution. “Our correct understanding of the reality of the Zionist occupation confirms to us that regaining the occupied homeland cannot happen except through armed violence as the sole, inevitable, unavoidable, and indispensable means in the battle of liberation.

the Israelis and Palestinians were at a demographic tipping point, with more-or-less parity in the number of Jews and Arabs living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The century-long struggle over the land was only becoming more intractable. The Israeli Zionist left had long warned that the dream was at stake and that Israel could not have it both ways: Without partition into two separate homelands for Jews and Palestinians, Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish democracy, however compromised those terms were, could not be sustained and Israel would inevitably become a binational country. If all the Palestinians were given equal rights and the vote in Israel, it would not have a Jewish majority. Without partition and without allowing Palestinians to vote for the government that controlled fundamental aspects of their lives, Israel’s claim to be a democracy would eventually implode. The temporary occupation had gone on so long that many critics were already describing the separate statuses of Israel and the occupied territories as a fiction meant to obscure what was already a binational, one-state reality. Instead of a light unto the nations, Israel was being cast by its harshest liberal-left critics and human rights groups such as B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International as a single-state entity and territory that had already veered into a system of varying degrees of “Jewish supremacy” or racial “domination” over the Palestinians in different geographical areas that, they asserted, fit international definitions of apartheid and crimes against humanity. With a weak Palestinian leadership split between the increasingly autocratic Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas-run Gaza, and after years without any semblance of a peace process, Israel, more than seventy years after its founding, was more divided over its endgame than it was on the eve of its independence. Esh Kodesh and a rash of other settlement outposts had stepped into the void to try to determine the outcome and doom Israel to victory, or at least to deepen the entanglement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Arabia.” At Birzeit, the Palestinians’ most liberal and secular college, Islamic movements such as Hamas and Jihad had made less headway than at any other school, but still their influence was being felt. “They are like mushrooms,” said Lily Feidy, one of Islah’s colleagues. “They grow up in certain conditions, and then when the conditions change, they die out. Right now, their resurgence is a sign of pessimism. Because people are desperate, they are resorting to the supernatural.” Lily Feidy, who taught linguistics at Birzeit, had never set foot on the campus of the Gaza Islamic University. “I can’t go there because I won’t put on the veil. And anyway, I’m not interested in sitting and arguing with them. What was true fourteen hundred

Hamas is not part of that world of Jihadi terror with no clear vision or goals. The Palestinian liberation movement from its very inception had a political Islamic group within it. In fact, all the anticolonialist movements in the Arab and Muslim world included a vein of political Islam.

Historically, the Palestinian liberation movement trended for many years toward the secular and leftist, and always contained a strong Christian component. The failure of secular forces to deliver liberation moved some people toward the political Islamic groups, some Christians as well, not necessarily in support of their dogma but simply in order to try a new approach.

Whatever connections formed in my mind between the Israeli oppression and American segregation, Israel’s version did not make the case for itself in the language of Jim Crow but in the dialect of liberal expansionism—with its descriptions of barbaric natives and promises of the great improvements brought to the savages by their betters. The father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, first considered Argentina, believing that it would be in that “sparsely populated” country’s “highest interest…to cede us a portion of its territory.” When Herzl turned to Palestine, he viewed Palestinians, as historian Benny Morris puts it, as little more than “part of the scenery.” The scenery was savage: “We should form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia,” Herzl wrote in his 1896 manifesto, The Jewish State. “An outpost of civilization against barbarism.

It seems a fair inference (I have heard even anti-Zionist Israeli liberals implying it) that terrorizing the Palestinian population into flight was a deliberate policy.

You do not represent Palestine as much as we do. Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people, Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people. [Addressing the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat]

Ultimately, though, neither refocusing on the Holocaust nor reenergizing Tikkun Olam could dilute the lure of the melting pot. Assimilation, according to surveys, soared, with as many as 70 percent of all non-Orthodox Jews marrying outside the faith. The younger the Jews, statistics showed, the shallower their religious roots. The supreme question asked by post–World War II Jewish writers such as Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, “How can I reconcile being Jewish and American?” was no longer even intelligible to young American Jews. None would feel the need to begin a book, as Saul Bellow did in The Adventures of Augie March, with “I am an American, Chicago born.” Bred on that literature, I saw no contradiction between love for America and loyalty to my people and its nation-state. But that was not the case of the Jewish twenty-somethings, members of a liberal congregation I visited in Washington, who declined to discuss issues, such as intermarriage and peoplehood, that they considered borderline racist. Israel was virtually taboo. For Israel had also changed. From the spunky, intrepid frontier state that once exhilarated American Jews, Israel was increasingly portrayed by the press as a warlike and intolerant state. That discomfiting image, however skewed, could not camouflage the fact that Israel ruled over more than two million Palestinians and settled what virtually the entire world regarded as their land. The country that was supposed to normalize Jews and instill them with pride was making many American Jews feel more isolated and embarrassed. I shared their discomfort and even their pain. Yet I also wrestled with the inability of those same American Jews to understand Israel’s existential quandary, that creating a Palestinian state that refused to make genuine peace with us and was likely to devolve into a terrorist chaos was at least as dangerous as not creating one. I was frustrated by their lack of anguish in demanding Israel’s withdrawal from land sacred to their forebears for nearly four millennia. “Disagree with the settlers,” I wanted to tell them, “denounce them if you must, but do not disown them, for they—like you—are part of our people.

The Bible is a profoundly liberating document, but there is no denying that it also contains deeply problematic texts—indeed, “texts of terror”2 that have adversely impacted the lives of women, slaves, Jews, Palestinians, Native Americans, and gays (to mention but a few). Such texts and prevalent interpretations of them may be described as “tyrannical” in the sense that they have legitimated the right of some to exercise unjust power or control over others. They

May 14, 1948. Within a day of proclaiming its statehood, Israel was invaded by neighboring Arab states with the help of Arab Palestinians who were already fighting Jewish Palestinians.243 This began the First Arab-Israeli War.244 By 1949, Israel had defeated the Arab coalition, and the resulting armistices gave Israel control over most of the land of the Mandate.245 Only the Gaza Strip and so-called West Bank remained in Arab hands. The West Bank was occupied by Jordanian military forces, and the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egyptian forces until the Six-Day War in 1967, when those territories also came under Israeli control.246 Jordan continued to formally claim control over the West Bank until 1988, when King Hussein granted the request of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to renounce any Jordanian claims to the West Bank, after which the PLO became the sole Arab claimant of that territory.247 It is important to note that from 1967 until today, neither the PLO, the current Palestinian Authority (PA), nor any other Arab Palestinian political entity has exercised sovereign control over the West Bank. Further, prior to Israel’s acquisition of the territory in 1967, dating back to the rule of the Ottoman Turks, there had never been a lawfully recognized Arab Palestinian sovereign over the territory in the former Mandate for Palestine.248 Today, one can hardly talk about the Middle East without bringing up war, terror, and unrest. The region has become synonymous with geopolitical instability and territorial conflicts, specifically with regard to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian issue. Despite the fact that Arab Palestinians have no greater historical claim to the territories for which they are fighting than do Jewish inhabitants of the land of Palestine, the majority of the international community continues to demand that Israel relinquish control of these territories to allow the establishment of an independent Arab state ruled by a political entity whose ultimate goal is the utter destruction of Israel.249

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.

Part of this myth related to assertions about the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)—assertions promoted by liberal Zionists in both the US and Israel and shared with the rest of the political forces in Israel. The allegation is that the PLO—inside and outside of Palestine—was conducting a war of terror for the sake of terror. Unfortunately, this demonization is still very prevalent in the West and has been accentuated after 2001 by the attempt to equate Islam, terrorism, and Palestine.

One of the great ironies of history is that the more similar two groups are, the greater the potential for them to hate each other. God seems to have a particular fondness for contradicting the cliched notion that increased "understanding" between groups or societies will breed peace. Israelis and Palestinians, Greeks and Turks, Indians and Pakistanis understand each other very well, and yet they would probably take exception to this liberal rule of thumb. Academics who share nearly identical worldviews, incomes, and interests are notoriously capable of despising each other-- even as they write learned papers about how increased understanding brings comity. So it was with Communists and Nazis between the two world wars.

Because a small population of Jews had lived in Palestine continuously, Zionists framed their movement as one of national liberation: like other oppressed people, Jews were getting a state of their own. Of course, from the perspective of the much larger population of Palestinians, who were being evicted from their homes, lands, and communities to make way for a brand-new country, Israel was very far from an anti-colonial project. It was the opposite: a settler colony being established at a time when the rest of the world was going in the opposite direction.

By B’Tselem, he meant the veteran Israeli human rights organization that monitored violations of Palestinian rights in the occupied territories and was widely vilified on the right as the embodiment of Western liberalism and naivete.

The feminist mission has drifted, and women’s rights have been trumped by issues of racism, religion, and intersectionality. Liberal feminists today care more about the question of Palestinian statehood than the mistreatment of Palestinian women at the hands of their fathers and husbands. In the battle of the vices, sexism has been trumped by racism.

Gaza may force us to glimpse into the heart of darkness, but it equally reveals the heart of humanity that never gives up. Gaza is not a footnote, it is the later than life shadow of the colonizer's fear: captivating, awesome, mythical, mesmerizing, extraordinary, impressive, monumental, unreal, burdensome, miraculous, and most of all, durable. Gaza is our obligation.

After the Oslo peace process dissolved into violence and hopelessness, the Israeli left and center-left had increasingly moved their focus from the quest for a land-for-peace settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a more social, civic agenda, promoting issues such as gender equality, civil marriage, LGBTQ rights, public transport on the Sabbath, and accommodation toward the more liberal, progressive streams of Judaism with which the vast majority of affiliated Jews in North America were identified, and which were repudiated by Israel’s Orthodox religious authorities.

The political perspective of Bishara and the NDA has been adopted in principle by the majority of the Palestinian intellectual and political leadership in Israel, as reflected in the four Position Papers, released in 2007 by leading Palestinian organizations. One of the papers, “The Future Vision of the Palestinians in Israel,” was issued by the Palestinians’ highest and most authoritative representative vis-à-vis the state—the Higher Follow-Up Committee for Arabs in Israel.27 All four papers demand, first and foremost, that Israel become a state of all its citizens. The Haifa Declaration, for example, calls for canceling the Law of Return, recognizing Palestinian national identity, and implementing collective national rights for Palestinians through representatives in government. These rights include, among others, the ability to veto all matters pertaining to their interests and the right for cultural autonomy.28

The Right in Israel has no difficulty justifying the existence of a non-democratic regime in which Palestinians are second-class citizens, because they have never pretended to uphold universalist-socialist values like the Left.

Left intellectuals’ discourse on the existential importance of retaining a Jewish majority raises a question that most of them refrain from answering: What is to be done in order to preserve the Jewish majority? How can Israel prevent the higher natural growth rate of Palestinians, which may change the demographic balance inside Israel and which has already tipped the balance when one considers the entire Israeli empire? Zionist Left intellectuals are well aware of the way Zionists dealt with this issue in 1948. Their failure to warn their readers against ethnic cleansing makes them complicit to the growing discourse of “transfer” in Israeli society.

Israeli law does not recognize an Israeli nationality. Thus, while Jewish citizens are classified as having “Jewish nationality,” Israeli law methodically strips Palestinian citizens of their national identity and reduces them to mere ethnicity or religious affiliation (like Muslims, Christians, Druze, etc.).6 As a result, Israel is not just another nation-state in which minority communities lack some secondary rights owned by the majority. Instead, it is a settler-colonial state established by the Zionist movement for advancing and expanding its colonialist project for the benefit of the Jews alone.

The very fact that this interview was published in the liberal daily Haaretz, according to Adi Ophir, professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University, reflects the growing trend of supporting the transfer and elimination of Palestinians far beyond the traditional base of the extreme Right.

Palestinians demand more than just civil rights. They are the indigenous people of the land, and they have no aspiration to integrate into the Zionist/Jewish state.

The state of Israel has incorporated the philosophy of the Jewish state—“a state of the Jews for the Jews”—into its identity, official ideology, and policies toward the Palestinian people within Israel and in the ’67 occupied territories, and in the Diaspora. This ideology claims the Jewish people have the historic right to “return” to their homeland, from which they were expelled two thousand years ago, so as to regain their national sovereignty in an exclusive Jewish state.

Hence, the consistent expectation of the Zionist Left, that the Palestinian citizens will legitimize the Zionist colonial project embodied in the Jewish state, is doomed to fail. This was exemplified in a series of dialogue meetings between Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals from January 1999 to January 2001. The meetings were hosted by the Israel Democracy Institute and aimed “to formulate an agreement that would define the relationship between the majority and minority in the state and their mutual concerns.” However, the intellectuals failed to reach this goal because the Palestinian participants refused to declare their recognition of the Jewish state, a condition demanded by the Israelis.

But, as emphasized before, this comparison between the Law of Return and other immigration laws is misleading. Underlying it is the fallacious position that Palestinian citizens are immigrants. This is wholly incorrect, as Palestinians are the indigenous residents of the land. Furthermore, in democratic states immigration laws do not condition the right to immigrate and qualify for citizenship on religious/ethnic criteria, as does the Law of Return.

Peled’s inclination to refrain from depicting Labor Zionism as the creator of both the state and its hegemonic, semi-fascist ideology is repeated here as well as in his later works. He avoids attributing responsibility for Israel’s ethnocracy under Labor governments who ruled until 1977. Also, he claims it was the right-wing government, headed by Sharon in 2001, that introduced a new approach of marginalizing Palestinian citizens and limited the democratic defenses the preceding Labor regime had provided for them.

Begin’s approach to the Palestinians, while not essentially different from those adopted by Labor, could now be criticized more freely.

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

As Matzpen’s founder Moshé Machover notes, “Israel is not only a product of the Zionist colonization but also an instrument for its further extension and expansion. . . . Colonization continued between 1948 and 1967 in the territory ruled then by Israel, within the Green Line. Lands belonging to Palestinian Arabs—including those who remained within the Green Line—were expropriated and given over to Zionist colonization.

The expulsion of the Palestinians was Zionism’s main goal from the outset. All settler colonial projects, writes Machover, involve the dispossession of indigenous people and brutal measures to suppress resistance. But the projects differ, broadly speaking, in terms of whether the colonizers exploit the indigenous population as a labor force, or whether the indigenous population is to be excluded from the settlers’ economy, exterminated, or expelled.

What the Palestinians demand and what the Zionist Left wants for Palestinians are two entirely different things.

The Marxist Mapam leader Simha Flapan,7 not an academic scholar, was the first historian to challenge the myths surrounding the 1948 war.8 Most of his theses were confirmed and elaborated upon by the other three historians. The New Historians disclosed how the Zionist leadership nominally accepted the UN Partition Plan but covertly agreed with King Abdullah to divide the area designed for a Palestinian state between Transjordan and Israel. Motivated to prevent the founding of a Palestinian state, Britain and the US supported the extension of the state of Israel into areas that were granted to the Palestinians; furthermore, they encouraged the rule of the Hashemites over the rest of the West Bank.

The official position on the 1948 Nakba was that Palestinians willingly left the country following orders broadcast over the radio by Arab and Palestinian leaders, calling for people to move to safer places in anticipation of the triumphant Arab armies. Supposedly others fled due to their baseless fears of the Jewish army. The misleading official Israeli position led to the widely accepted conclusion that refugees should be settled in the Arab states, given that they (the Arabs) started the war and created the problem in the first place; thus, they should pay for the consequences. Since the late 1950s, the Israeli narrative has been refuted by historians like Walid Khalidi and Erskine Childers.18 These historians disproved the Israeli contention that official and unofficial bodies in the Arab world, including Palestinian groups, called upon Palestinians to stay in their homes, and even threatened to punish those who left.19

Zionist Left discourse on equal rights for Palestinians takes place within the boundaries of the hegemonic Zionist ideology and state policies. The Zionist Left collectively strives to perpetuate an exclusive Jewish state with a substantive Jewish majority, and in effect negates the indigenous Palestinian population. As emphasized in previous chapters, recognizing Palestinian citizens as a national minority with national rights would undermine the ideological justification of Jewish domination. Structured

As in the past, Oz refrains from criticizing his expressed “brotherhood” with the most ideological fanatics of Ofra, who have continued to steal Palestinian lands for further settler expansions.48

Another former staffer told me under the condition of anonymity that it was a “constant discussion,” and that the company was under pressure from the Israeli government. As Maria tried to point out to her superiors, Zionism is an ideology or a political doctrine, akin to “communism” or “liberalism”—not an immutable characteristic. Treating it as such is not merely a mockery of actual characteristics that make a person or group vulnerable, but elevating it—and not Palestinians—to such a level also fails to take into account the power imbalance that exists between occupied and occupier. But, Maria told me, “Palestine and Israel has always been the toughest topic at Facebook. In the beginning, it was a bit discreet,” with the Arabic-language team mainly in charge of tough calls, but after the 2014 conflict between Israel and Gaza, the company moved closer to the Israeli government. Somewhat notably, one of the first twenty members of Facebook’s new External Oversight Board is Emi Palmor, under whose direction the Israeli Ministry of Justice petitioned Facebook to censor legitimate speech of human rights defenders, according to 7amleh.

This language matters because it displays a contempt for non-Jews that is carried into its relations with outsiders. It was common for Jews to be taught at school or in religious education, as I was told at home by my liberal Jewish parents, that Jews are the chosen people and have a unique relationship with God and society. We could and should help others (though there were set limits to this sympathy, namely excluding Palestinians). It is a belief system that allows racial supremacy against non-Jews to thrive and justifies disregard for their lives. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2010, referencing the phrase from verses in the Book of Isaiah, that Israel is “a proud people with a magnificent country and one which always aspires to serve as ‘light unto the nations.

Islamists’ criticism [of the PLO leadership for signing the Oslo Accords] was completely in line with other non-Islamist critics (except for the reproach of having been paid to sign). Edward Said suggested that according to sources from the PLO Executive Committee, Arafat only took an interest in the sections of the agreement being negotiated in Oslo which concerned him and his future role. All Arafat wanted, according to Said, was "acceptance" by the Israeli and American side: "They weren’t interested in fighting, or being equal, they just wanted the white man to say they were okay." All Arafat got in Said’s eyes from the Israelis was a mandate "to enforce what they call their security". His resumé was that the PLO succeeded in "being the first national liberation movement in history to sign an agreement to keep an occupying power in place." He called for a boycott of and non-cooperation with the Palestine National Authority (PNA). "So I think the preeminent responsibility of every Palestinian is not to cooperate with the authority that is a surrogate to the Israeli occupation and an incompetent one at that." Said and Ḥamās called for the return to the Intifāḍa: Said in the sense that local needs be taken care of by the community in parallel institutions as during the Intifāḍa, Ḥamās furthermore in terms of military struggle.

The father of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, wrote in his seminal 1896 pamphlet, The Jewish State, “There [in Palestine] we shall be a sector of the wall of Europe against Asia, we shall serve as the outpost of civilization against barbarism.”24 Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who led the country between 1999 and 2001, used a metaphor with a similar meaning: Israel is a “villa in the middle of a jungle,” arguing that Israel was a civilized nation among Muslim savages in the Middle East. This language matters because it displays a contempt for non-Jews that is carried into its relations with outsiders. It was common for Jews to be taught at school or in religious education, as I was told at home by my liberal Jewish parents, that Jews are the chosen people and have a unique relationship with God and society. We could and should help others (though there were set limits to this sympathy, namely excluding Palestinians). It is a belief system that allows racial supremacy against non-Jews to thrive and justifies disregard for their lives. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2010, referencing the phrase from verses in the Book of Isaiah, that Israel is “a proud people with a magnificent country and one which always aspires to serve as ‘light unto the nations.

While the blockade on Gaza is a physical one, ideas and visions for liberation cannot be limited by Israel’s fences and barriers. The dismissal and exclusion of Palestinian voices from debates and conversations about the past, present, and future are as destructive as the physical blockade itself.

If Jaysh o ‘Arab reflected our trauma and goals to liberate Palestine, playing house expressed our dreams of a normal life.

An entire era ended when Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin presided over the signing of the Declaration of Principles on 13 September 1993. Their exchange of letters of recognition ended decades of mutual denial between the national communities they represented, even if the accord did not fundamentally resolve all aspects of the conflict. Many thousands had died, both combatants and civilians, since the war that led to the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine and to the mass exodus of its Arab population in 1947–9. The Palestinian national movement was to raise the twin banners of 'total liberation' and 'armed struggle' in following years, but ultimately proved unable to liberate any part of its claimed homeland by force. The civilian uprising that erupted in 1987 initially appeared more effective in shaking Israeli control, but still the PLO finally accepted a negotiated compromise, the terms of which ran counter to virtually all the principles and aims it had espoused for so long.

Western liberals like or pretend to view Palestinian Arabs, indeed all Arabs, as Scandinavians, and refuse to recognize that peoples, for good historical, cultural, and social reasons, are different and behave differently in similar or identical sets of circumstances.

The existence of Israel is called by the Qur'ånic term of batil, the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of an Islamic Palestinian state is viewed as haqq. The dichotomous character of the worldview advanced by the Qur'än is thus applied to the conflict with Israel. But — paradoxically or as a consequence — the fact that Israel is perceived to be based on religious laws, and the efficiency of world Jewry in achieving its religious interests at the same time, inspires profound admiration and serves as a model for a coming Islamic Palestinian state.

One of the more surprising things I learned is that as a population living under occupation, we are granted by international law the legal right to resist through armed struggle. It’s protected under the Geneva Conventions, reaffirmed in a 1982 UN General Assembly resolution. The resolution reaffirmed “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.

In 1963, I was sitting with a number of my students on the campus of Columbia University in New York. The morning was beautiful, the sun was shining, and we were talking to each other about the Buddhist practice of removing concepts. Suddenly someone passing by stopped and looking at me for a few seconds, and then he asked, "Are you a Buddhist?" I looked up and said, "No." Did I tell a lie? I hope that my students understood me at that moment. If I had said, "Yes, I am a Buddhist," then he would still be caught in his idea of what a Buddhist is, and that would not help him. So "No" was more helpful than "Yes." That is the language of Zen. When you do say or do something, it is to help undo the knots in people's minds, and not to bind them anymore. That is why the language we use should aim at liberation.

Injustice is suffered by both sides. The Palestinians have suffered much. And when the Israelis come and describe to us their suffering, we are able to see that they too have suffered. That kind of understanding is crucial. Once understanding and compassion are born in our heart, the poisons of anger, discrimination, hate, and despair will be transformed. That is why the only answer is to remove the poison and to allow the insight and compassion in. Then we will discover each other as human beings and we will not be deceived by outer layers like "Buddhism," "Islam," "Judaism," "pro-American," "pro-Arab," and so on. This is a process of liberation from our ignorance, ideas, notions, and our tendency to discriminate. When I see you as a human being who suffers so much, I will not have the courage to shoot you. I will ask you to come and work with me so that we have a chance to live peacefully together. It is a pity—the Earth is so beautiful and there is enough room for all of us, yet we are killing each other.

The only "achievement" for Palestine in their armed struggle has been in making Israelis feel the pain. At best, the armed struggle for Palestinian liberation creates a "lose-lose" scenario, which has essentially been what we have been facing for too long.

The idea of an American “honest broker” in the Middle East has been a joke for decades. Only a real debate over U.S. policy can change that. That debate cannot happen if liberals refuse to critically examine every aspect of U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine to determine whether it is in step with their core political values. No longer can any position be “taken for granted,” nor can any solution be viewed as a non-starter. Rather, we must be willing to critically interrogate our entire approach to the current crisis. We must be willing to embrace, or at least consider, any solution that will yield freedom, justice, safety, and self-determination for everyone. This has been a demand placed on Palestinians and their supporters for a very long time, requiring them to justify the fight for their rights against accusations of bias against Israel and even against Jews in general. In a conflict as fraught with passion and zealotry as this one is, this sort of critical approach must be demanded equally of all sides and key players involved.

HOW DOES THIS RADICAL conceptual divide over whether Judaism is a religion or an ethnicity play out in relations between the two communities? One manifestation is the lack of political cooperation between Israeli and American Jewish progressives. Though right-of-center American Jews are often active in supporting Israel’s right-leaning parties and offer financial support through American Friends of Likud and other organizations, there has been surprisingly little alignment between liberal American Jews and the Israeli political left.* There is, of course, some American organizational support for Israel’s left-leaning parties, but the relationship on the left is not nearly as vigorous as it is on the right. Why is that? Once again, the answer lies largely in the Judaism-as-religion issue, which makes it difficult for the two communities to understand each other. Einat Wilf—a secular and unabashedly nationalist former Knesset member and outspoken voice for liberal causes—is a compelling example of how Judaism-as-religion versus Judaism-as-nation creates a disconnect between the two communities. In 2018, she published a book titled The War over the Right of Return, in which she argues that the fundamental reason the Israeli-Arab conflict has never been settled has been Israel’s refusal to reject outright the Palestinian demand for a “right of return” of 1948 refugees and their descendants.* The fact that millions of Palestinians still harbor a hope of returning to “Palestine,” argues Wilf, leaves open in their minds the possibility that Israel as a Jewish nation-state can still be ended. End that charade, she argues, and one major obstacle on the road to settling the conflict will have been removed. What matters for us is not whether Wilf’s analysis is right or wrong. What we need to note is that there is scarcely an American Jewish liberal who would dare speak aloud about denying the Palestinian right of return once and for all. How does Wilf straddle the fence, some might ask? How can she be both a liberal and such a committed nationalist? To Wilf, as to many Israelis, there is simply no fence to straddle. For many Israeli progressives like her, there is no tension at all between liberal values and Judaism-as-nation. But for American Jews who see themselves primarily as a religion and not a nation, Wilf’s value set is a much more difficult position to adopt. The disconnect is between Judaism-as-justice and Judaism-as-survival. Those are obviously not always incompatible, but they are profoundly different instincts.

We should practice so that we can see Muslims as Hindus and Hindus as Muslims. We should practice so that we can see Israelis as Palestinians and Palistinians as Israelis. We should practice until we can see that each person is us, that we are not separate from others. This will greatly reduce our suffering. We are like the cookies, thinking we are separate and opposing each other, when actually we are all of the same reality. We are what we perceive. This is the teaching of nonself, of interbeing.

There is an important thing about this reading site that the reader of this commentary must keep in mind. The “center-periphery” model is in many respects germane also to the world, and hence the site, of Mark himself. The ancient Mediterranean world was dominated by the rule of imperial Rome. However, whereas I read from the center, Mark wrote from the Palestinian periphery (see below, 2, A, i). His primary audience were those whose daily lives bore the exploitative weight of colonialism, whereas mine are those who are in a position to enjoy the privileges of the colonizer. In this sense, Third World liberation theologians, who today also write from the perspective of the colonized periphery have the advantage of a certain “affinity of site” in their reading of the Gospels.

Rabin was assassinated by a far-right Israeli extremist in 1995. His liberal successor, Shimon Peres, served for seven months before losing a snap election to Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud party, whose platform had once included total annexation of the Palestinian territories. Unhappy about the Oslo Accords, harder-line organizations like Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad set about undermining the credibility of Arafat and his Fatah party with Palestinians, calling for armed struggle to take back Arab lands and push Israel into the sea.

After Netanyahu was defeated in the 1999 election, his more liberal successor, Ehud Barak, made efforts to establish a broader peace in the Middle East, including outlining a two-state solution that went further than any previous Israeli proposal. Arafat demanded more concessions, however, and talks collapsed in recrimination. Meanwhile, one day in September 2000, Likud party leader Ariel Sharon led a group of Israeli legislators on a deliberately provocative and highly publicized visit to one of Islam’s holiest sites, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. It was a stunt designed to assert Israel’s claim over the wider territory, one that challenged the leadership of Ehud Barak and enraged Arabs near and far. Four months later, Sharon became Israel’s next prime minister, governing throughout what became known as the Second Intifada: four years of violence between the two sides, marked by tear gas and rubber bullets directed at stone-throwing protesters; Palestinian suicide bombs detonated outside an Israeli nightclub and in buses carrying senior citizens and schoolchildren; deadly IDF retaliatory raids and the indiscriminate arrest of thousands of Palestinians; and Hamas rockets launched from Gaza into Israeli border towns, answered by U.S.-supplied Israeli Apache helicopters leveling entire neighborhoods. Approximately a thousand Israelis and three thousand Palestinians died during this period—including scores of children—and by the time the violence subsided, in 2005, the prospects for resolving the underlying conflict had fundamentally changed. The Bush administration’s focus on Iraq, Afghanistan, and the War on Terror left it little bandwidth to worry about Middle East peace, and while Bush remained officially supportive of a two-state solution, he was reluctant to press Sharon on the issue. Publicly, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states continued to offer support to the Palestinian cause, but they were increasingly more concerned with limiting Iranian influence and rooting out extremist threats to their own regimes.

Anumber of young Palestinian-Nicaraguans joined the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front), or FSLN, in the 1970s, and some died fighting for the cause, including Selim Shible, Omar Hassan, Amín Halum, Mauricio Abdalah, and Soraya Hassan

The ‘Palestinian’ myth is the ‘Palestinian’ nationality itself. On March 31, 1977, the Dutch newspaper Trouw interviewed Zahir Muhsein of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Muhsein said: The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. These Jewish educators are promoting this century’s annihilationists before they, too, get their heads lopped off.

The leading post-Zionists’ lack of solidarity with Palestinian citizens results from their reticence to confront the core nature of Israel as a settler colonial state and society.

Their positions are part of a wider worldview that legitimizes any effort to abolish Palestinian national resistance nor that of Arabs against their dictatorial regimes. The lack of a radical anti-imperialist perspective, let alone an approach of anti-capitalist globalization, is in line with their support of US imperial interests in the region and Israel’s role as their enforcer. The Zionist Left wholeheartedly backs the US war against “Islamic terror,” which enables Israel to escalate its military involvement against “refusing” states and resistance movements in the Middle East. The current warmongering by the Israeli security and political establishments against Iran (and Syria and Lebanon) has gained the support of a wide strata of Israeli society. The Zionist Left shares this perspective of a continuous threat to the “security” of the state and has largely internalized it. Hence, no Left movement will be there to resist the disastrous war when it comes.

Most Zionist Left intellectuals share the conviction that Palestinians in Israel should be denied the rights that embody and sustain the national identity and existence of Jews.

The fait accompli attitude of the Jewish state and the prerogatives conferred upon its Jewish citizens prevent any reversal of dispossession policies against Palestinians. Leaders of the peace camp, and Zionist Left intellectuals who have called for dismantling Jewish settlements in the ’67 occupied territories, have never asked the same of the Mitzpim or yishuvim kehilatyim built on confiscated Palestinian land in the Galilee or Wadi Ara, nor even to freeze their expansion. The very existence of “state lands,” most of which was Palestinian land, is uncritically accepted by the Zionist Left intellectuals as a “fact.

What a pathetic victory for the historic Zionist Labor movement! Its ideological triumph has been so complete that its distinct political framework was made obsolete.59 The majority of Israeli society has by now adopted the duplicitous discourse of the Left: calling for peace while supporting a devastating war against the Palestinians that blocks said peace. Since the Zionist Left had, by the end of the 2000s, disappeared as a distinctive force, did the post-Zionists fare any better? In a word: no.

What we have in hand is sheer opportunism. Shenhav defends his retreat from his earlier challenge to Zionism by referring to his Jewish identity, and even to his personal condition and needs. In turn, the fight for democratization of the state is left to the Palestinians. Indeed, Azmi Bishara “can better defend his own positions [emphasis added]” because they are absolutely contradictory to those of Shenhav. The Israeli establishment persecuted Bishara precisely because he refused to be “an Israeli patriot

All peace initiatives reject the notion of the unity of the Palestinian people and thus reduce the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to a territorial dispute with the residents of the 1967 occupied territories alone.

Only the Israeli Black Panther movement raised the slogans of both anti-Zionism and class-consciousness. Crucially, the Black Panthers linked the Mizrahi struggle for social equality with the struggles of Palestinian citizens. The Black Panther movement recognized the Palestinian people’s national rights.

Already in 1972—years before figures in the Zionist Left took similar steps—the Black Panthers met PLO leaders and recognized the organization as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people.

The accumulated rage of the Mizrahim against Mapai governments eventually found its expression in “the rebellion at the polls” during the 1977 elections, when Mizrahim shifted their allegiance en masse to the right-wing Likud Party. Later, much of this political energy was co-opted into religious Mizrahi parties, which gradually diverted any potential radicalism into anti-Palestinian sentiment. By 2009, the Mizrahi orthodox Shas Party, which at its onset was politically moderate, had become an extremely right-wing, racist party.

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.

What makes identity politics so crippling as an alternative to Zionism is the claim that Mizrahi and Palestinian citizens are equal “victims of Zionism.

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.

the very concept of citizenship in Israel is built upon the exclusion of Palestinians from the national Jewish collective. Threats of emptying Palestinian second-rate citizenship of any real political meaning and stripping them of basic human rights are constant. As the absolute “other,” Palestinians are always in danger of ethnic cleansing, as the state waits for an opportunity to arise. In contrast, Mizrahim are included in the Jewish national collective and receive full citizenship, even though they are positioned in the socioeconomic hierarchical structure as inferior to that of Ashkenazim. The difference between Mizrahim and Palestinians is essential.

Ein-Gil and Machover’s analysis concludes that framing Palestinians in Israel as another identity group fighting marginalization empties the Palestinian national struggle of its true essence: the democratization of the Zionist state and the dismantlement of its colonial-Zionist nature

The tendency of multiculturalism and identity politics to ignore the strengthened nationalist consciousness of Palestinian citizens of Israel and their challenge to the Jewish Zionist state is consistent with avoiding the fact that Israel is the vehicle implementing the Zionist colonial project, and not just another Western nation.

However, while the discourse of postcolonial studies may describe the situation of third world immigrant groups in Europe in some respects, its application to the case of Palestinians in Israel is totally misleading. One cannot label Palestinians as an “ethnic identity group” (as is the case with immigrants), because it is they who are the original inhabitants of the land and whose national homeland was occupied by a colonial force.