Palestinian Suffering Quotes

If the Palestinian people really suffered a nakba, it was largely of their own making — and that of their grand mufti.

I have spent a great deal of my life during the past thirty-five years advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by the way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, coexistence, and not further suppression and denial. Not accidentally, I indicate that Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism have common roots. Therefore, it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the reductively simplifying and confining ones, based on mutual hostility, that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long.

Sonnet of Palestine I don't want to wage a war, All I want is to raise a family. I don’t want your empty pity, All I seek is a little humanity. To call genocide as self-defense, May be textbook diplomacy. Killing innocents to keep control, Is an act of terrorist hypocrisy. Brokers may bring ceasefire, But they can never give us liberty. All they do is arrange assemblies, While we suffer through the century. So I say to you o people in luxury, Look at us and you'll know your fallacy.

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

But she was so happy in her gilded cage, wasn’t she? She ate well, slept well, enjoyed herself She lacked nothing. And then, look, a bunch of mental cases turn her away from her happiness and send her to -- how did you put it? -- to ‘blow herself away’?. The good doctor lives next door to a war but he doesn’t want to hear a word about it. And he thinks his wife shouldn’t worry about it, either. … We’re at war. Some people take up arms; others twiddle their thumbs. And still others make a killing in the name of the Cause. That’s life. … Your wife chose her side. The happiness you offered her smelled of decay. It repulsed her, you get it? She didn’t want your happiness. She couldn’t work on her suntan while her people were bent under the Zionist yoke. Do I have to draw you a picture to make you understand, or do you refuse to look reality in the face?

While we enjoy sunrise and all touch of sunlight, the other side of the world suffers from dark times, fireballs, and mourning, like a sunset that ends the day.

We are all capable of recognizing that we are not the only one who suffers, that the other person also suffers very deeply, and that we are partly responsible for his or her suffering.

But Arafat's devotion was to the Palestinian cause and not to the Palestinian people. [...] As a result, Arafat delayed the conflict's solution, leaving a legacy of avoidable disaster and unnecessary suffering.

On behalf of those you killed, imprisoned, tortured, you are not welcome, Erdogan! No, Erdogan, you’re not welcome in Algeria. We are a country which has already paid its price of blood and tears to those who wanted to impose their caliphate on us, those who put their ideas before our bodies, those who took our children hostage and who attempted to kill our hopes for a better future. The notorious family that claims to act in the name of the God and religion—you’re a member of it—you fund it, you support it, you desire to become its international leader. Islamism is your livelihood Islamism, which is your livelihood, is our misfortune. We will not forget about it, and you are a reminder of it today. You offer your shadow and your wings to those who work to make our country kneel down before your “Sublime Door.” You embody and represent what we loathe. You hate freedom, the free spirit. But you love parades. You use religion for business. You dream of a caliphate and hope to return to our lands. But you do it behind the closed doors, by supporting Islamist parties, by offering gifts through your companies, by infiltrating the life of the community, by controlling the mosques. These are the old methods of your “Muslim Brothers” in this country, who used to show us God’s Heaven with one hand while digging our graves with the other. No, Mr. Erdogan, you are not a man of help; you do not fight for freedom or principles; you do not defend the right of peoples to self-determination. You know only how to subject the Kurds to the fires of death; you know only how to subject your opponents to your dictatorship. You cry with the victims in the Middle East, yet sign contracts with their executioners. You do not dream of a dignified future for us, but of a caliphate for yourself. We are aware of your institutionalized persecution, your list of Turks to track down, your sinister prisons filled with the innocent, your dictatorial justice palaces, your insolence and boastful nature. You do not dream of a humanity that shares common values and principles, but are interested only in the remaking of the Ottoman Empire and its bloodthirsty warlords. Islam, for you, is a footstool; God is a business sign; modernity is an enemy; Palestine is a showcase; and local Islamists are your stunned courtesans. Humanity will not remember you with good deeds Humanity will remember you for your machinations, your secret coups d’état, and your manhunts. History will remember you for your bombings, your vengeful wars, and your inability to engage in constructive dialogue with others. The UN vote for Al-Quds is only an instrument in your service. Let us laugh at this with the Palestinians. We know that the Palestinian issue is your political capital, as it is for many others. You know well how to make a political fortune by exploiting others’ emotions. In Algeria, we suffered, and still suffer, from those who pretend to be God and act as takers and givers of life. They applaud your coming, but not us. You are the idol of Algerian Islamists and Populists, those who are unable to imagine a political structure beyond a caliphate for Muslim-majority societies. We aspire to become a country of freedom and dignity. This is not your ambition, nor your virtue. You are an illusion You have made beautiful Turkey an open prison and a bazaar for your business and loved ones. I hope that this beautiful nation rises above your ambitions. I hope that justice will be restored and flourish there once again, at least for those who have been imprisoned, tortured, bombed, and killed. You are an illusion, Erdogan—you know it and we know it. You play on the history of our humiliation, on our emotions, on our beliefs, and introduce yourself as a savior. However, you are a gravedigger, both for your own country and for your neighbors. Turkey is a political miracle, but it owes you nothing. The best thing you can do

Today, though, each faith community suffers from a decline of one or the other aspect of religious vitality. Modernity has not been kind to Jewish spirituality: Large parts of the Jewish people have become severed from basic faith and devotion. The Muslim world has the opposite problem: an erosion of open inquiry and self-critique.

For the “new democracies” in Eastern Europe, meeting this standard “would be commensurate with their passage from totalitarianism to democratic states.” Eizenstat is a senior US government official and a prominent supporter of Israel. Yet, judging by the respective claims of Native Americans and Palestinians, neither the US nor Israel has yet made the transition.85

Though it is obligatory to hail our leaders for their sincere dedication to bringing democracy to a suffering world, perhaps in an excess of idealism, the more serious scholar/advocates of the mission of “democracy promotion” recognize that there is a “strong line of continuity” running through all administrations: the United States supports democracy if and only if it conforms to U.S. strategic and economic interests.

If you cared about the thousands of children suffering today in Gaza, as much you care about the birth of one middle eastern child two thousand years ago, perhaps then, you could've understood the true meaning of Christmas. As of now, Christmas is just a festival of hypocrisy - and that too, in the name of a man who gave his life to lift up the fallen. My question is, if you cannot be Christlike in your deeds, what's the point of all these festivities, which are supposed to be rooted in goodwill towards all, not mindless self-obsession!

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

I am reluctant to say that I am on your side, that I support you wholeheartedly, and will do everything you want me to do. I am not ready to take sides like that. I would ask, "Yes, I am ready to take your side, but are you ready to take my side? I am a human being like you. Do you know what my side is? It is that suffering must stop. I agree with you that there must be something that can and should be done to stop the suffering. But I may not agree on other things relating to your position. I want to act, I want to have compassion, but I don't want to act out of anger, violence, and discrimination. If you take my side, I will be with you one hundred percent.

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.

Israel was able to exploit the deep division among Palestinians and Gaza’s isolation to launch three savage air and ground assaults on the strip that began in 2008 and continued in 2012 and 2014, leaving large swaths of its cities and refugee camps in rubble and struggling with rolling blackouts and contaminated water.26 Some neighborhoods, such as Shuja‘iyya and parts of Rafah, suffered extraordinary levels of destruction. The casualty figures tell only part of the story, although they are revealing. In these three major attacks, 3,804 Palestinians were killed, of them almost one thousand minors. A total of 87 Israelis were killed, the majority of them military personnel engaged in these offensive operations. The lopsided 43:1 scale of these casualties is telling, as is the fact that the bulk of the Israelis killed were soldiers while most of the Palestinians were civilians.

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

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

Palestinians make up 20 percent of Israel’s population, and despite the fact that they live in their own homeland, Israel relegates them to second- or even third-class status. One of my classmates had discovered that more than fifty laws discriminated against the Palestinian citizens of Israel based solely on their ethnicity. Another discussed how government resources were disproportionately directed to Jews, leaving the Palestinians to suffer the worst living standards in Israeli society, with Palestinian children’s schools receiving only a fraction of the government spending given to Jewish schools. They also talked about how difficult it was for Palestinians to obtain land for a home, business, or agriculture because over 90 percent of the land in Israel was owned either by the state or by quasigovernmental agencies (like the Jewish National Fund) that discriminated against Palestinians. And they lamented the fact that if they or any of their relatives chose to marry a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza, they couldn’t pass on their Israeli citizenship to their spouse, thanks to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law. Their spouse wouldn’t even be able to gain residency status to live with them inside Israel. This meant they’d be forced to leave Israel and separate from their family in order to live with their spouse.

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.

Prisons are racism incarnate. As Michelle Alexander points out, they constitute the new Jim Crow. But also much more, as the lynchpins of the prison-industrial complex, they represent the increasing profitability of punishment. They represent the increasingly global strategy of dealing with populations of people of color and immigrant populations from the countries of the Global South as surplus populations, as disposable populations. Put them all in a vast garbage bin, add some sophisticated electronic technology to control them, and let them languish there. And in the meantime, create the ideological illusion that the surrounding society is safer and more free because the dangerous Black people and Latinos, and the Native Americans, and the dangerous Asians and the dangerous White people, and of course the dangerous Muslims, are locked up! And in the meantime, corporations profit and poor communities suffer! Public education suffers! Public education suffers because it is not profitable according to corporate measures. Public health care suffers. If punishment can be profitable, then certainly health care should be profitable, too. This is absolutely outrageous! It is outrageous. It is also outrageous that the state of Israel uses the carceral technologies developed in relation to US prisons not only to control the more than eight thousand Palestinian political prisoners in Israel but also to control the broader Palestinian population. These carceral technologies, for example, the separation wall, which reminds us of the US-Mexico border wall, and other carceral technologies are the material constructs of Israeli apartheid. G4S, the organization, the corporation G4S, which profits from the incarceration and the torturing of Palestinian prisoners, has a subsidiary called G4S Secure Solutions, which was formerly known as Wackenhut. And just recently a subsidiary of that just have one more page of notes corporation, GEO Group, which is a private prison company, attempted to claim naming rights at Florida Atlantic University by donating something like $6 million, right? And, the students rose up. They said that our football stadium will not bear the name of a private prison corporation! And the students won. The students won; the name came down from the marquee.

allegedly receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in USAID contracts.”[193] The deep-seated corruption of the Palestinian Authority is the principal reason that Palestinians continue to suffer economically. The so-called refugees are largely pawns in a chess match used by Israel’s Arab neighbors who will not accept them into their own lands.

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

Six months before Israel’s birth, the United Nations had decided by a two-thirds majority that the only just solution to the British departure from Palestine would be the establishment of a Jewish state and an Arab state side by side. The undeniable fact remains: The Jews accepted that compromise; the Arabs rejected it. With a vengeance. On the day the British pulled down their flag, Israel was invaded by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Iraq—650,000 Jews against 40 million Arabs. Israel prevailed, another miracle. But at a very high cost—not just to the Palestinians displaced as a result of a war designed to extinguish Israel at birth, but also to the Israelis, whose war losses were staggering: 6,373 dead. One percent of the population. In American terms, it would take 35 Vietnam memorials to encompass such a monumental loss of life. You rarely hear about Israel’s terrible suffering in that 1948–49 war. You hear only the Palestinian side. Today, in the same vein, you hear that Israeli settlements and checkpoints and occupation are the continuing root causes of terrorism and instability in the region.

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.

By contrast, notes Oz, Labor Zionism had from its inception moral supremacy over Palestinian nationalism. All it asked for was recognition that those who suffered from persecution and wanted to survive in the divided land had just cause.

Oh For God Almighty Let’s scrape away those Palestinian Muslim Arab scums To rightly make room for the Jews, God’s chosen ones. In the name of God, King and Country, always to trust To slaughter the innocent children, too die if we must You sword wielding followers of the prophet Mohamed With hatred forever the creed of your Shia Sunni divide To bring destruction one to the other, so millions have died In the name of God, King and Country, always to trust To slaughter the innocent children, too die if we must Be gone you Popeless protestant English bastards For us Fenians will always carry the true cross of Jesus In the name of God, King and Country, always to trust To slaughter the innocent children, too die if we must If oil be the quest let war drums begin and bombs be the rain So onward Christian soldiers, to Iraq and away with Hussain In the name of God, King and Country, always to trust To slaughter the innocent children, too die if we must Millions made homeless, endless suffering without pause Civil war be the call, with Syrians fighting their hopeless cause In the name of God, King and Country, always to trust To slaughter the innocent children, too die if we must And so to the future, a blond king is born, his war ships to sea Yet concern there must be as he doesn’t even know his ABC In the name of God, King and Country, always to trust To slaughter the innocent children, too die if we must There are lessons to learn, yet as history so often does show None will take heed, not even with nukes that are ready to throw. In the name of God, King and Country, always to trust To slaughter the innocent children, too die if we must What’s to lose, as black frocked men offer promise of life ever after Whilst appointed men of another faith the promise of 72 waiting virgins In the name of God, King and Country, always to trust To slaughter the innocent children, too die if we must

the Jordanians and the Palestinians will suffer the curse-for-curse-in-kind consequence contained in the Genesis 12:3 clause of the Abrahamic Covenant for their homesteading of the Holy Land.

Our team walked through the women’s empowerment center, which was operating in a multistory building, one of the stops we were contemplating for the First Lady. The young man and woman escorting us took us to the roof as part of the tour. I looked out over the city, and other than the bright blue sea, most everything I saw was dusty, arid, and brown except, off in the distance, where I noticed a patch of vibrant green. There were nice buildings and what appeared to be trees and grass. It looked like a desert oasis, or a mirage. “What’s that?” I asked. “That,” our consul general said, “is an Israeli settlement.” “But it’s so green. I thought you said there was very little running water here.” “That’s right,” he said. “There’s limited running water here. The Israelis control the water so twenty times more goes there than comes here.” It was the first time I saw up close what it was like to live under the daily humiliation Palestinians had suffered for years. There it was, a better, easier life, starting right at them.

I argued that armed struggle was supremely unsuited to the Palestinian condition, that it was a mistake to put so much emphasis on it. I argued that armed struggle is less about arms and more about organization, that a successful armed struggle proceeds to out-administer the adversary and not out-fight him. And that the task of out-administration was a task of out-legitimizing the enemy. Finally, I argued that this out-administration occurs when you identify the primary contradiction of your adversary and expose that contradiction not only to yourselves, which you don’t need to do so much, but to the world at large, and more important, to the people of the adversarial country itself. I argued that Israel’s fundamental contradiction was that it was founded as a symbol of the suffering of humanity . . . at the expense of another people who were innocent of guilt. It’s this contradiction that you have to bring out. And you don’t bring it out by armed struggle. In fact, you suppress this contradiction by armed struggle. The Israeli Zionist organizations continue to portray the Jews as victims of Arab violence.

Dear Mr. President of the USA, Donald Trump Your Excellency, Equality, justice, harmony, and love, within the concept and context of security, and respect, are for the entire humanity, not only for the USA and its people. Global peace lies in a step that; pull out your troops from the Muslim States and stop interfering with its systems and way of life; all terrorists will disappear, and peace shall prevail. One should realize the atrocities of the Isreal, against Palestinians’ determination and India, against Kashmiris that the United Nations and its Security Council fail to resolve and solve those disputes under the umbrella of the USA. Consequently, each one of us faces the consequences. You, as a leader of the great nation, ought to be great and noble; it is possible if you change your distinctive thoughts and policies; you may change human history, becoming the historical leader of the entire humanity that suffers from injustice and hunger and death. As I know that Pakistan Armed forces have devotedly and significantly sacrificed along with the Armed Forces of the USA for global peace, so never degrade your national pride, ignoring, denying, and forgetting that the sacrifice of our men and women, which we are still paying. You should cooperate, instead of becoming influenced by the opposing third party, to accuse Pakistan. We are a peaceful nation and determined to stand along with the USA forces, to eliminate all sorts of terrorists, for world peace. God bless you. - Ehsan Sehgal

The contemptuous person is likely to experience feelings of low self-esteem, inadequacy, and shame. In a March 2019 New York Times opinion piece entitled Our Culture of Contempt, Arthur C. Brooks writes: “political scientists have found that our nation is more polarized than it has been at any time since the civil war. One in six Americans has stopped talking to a family member or close friend because of the 2016 election. Millions of people organized their social lives and their news exposure along with ideological lines to avoid people with opposing viewpoints.” What's our problem? A 2014 article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on motive attribution asymmetry, the assumption that your ideology is based in love while your opponent’s is based in hate suggests an answer. The researchers found that the average republican and the average democrat today suffer from a level of motive attribution asymmetry that is comparable with that of Palestinians and Israelis. Each side thinks it's driven by a benevolence while the other side is evil and motivated by hatred, and is therefore an enemy with whom one cannot negotiate or compromise. People often say that our problem in America today is incivility or intolerance. This is incorrect. Motive attribution asymmetry leads to something far worse – contempt, which is a noxious brew of anger and disgust, and not just contempt for other people's ideas but also for other people. In the words of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, contempt is “the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.” Brooks goes on to say contempt makes political compromise and progress impossible. It also makes us unhappy as people. According to the American Psychological Association, “the feelings of rejection so often experienced after being treated with contempt increases anxiety, depression, and sadness. It also damages the contemptuous person by stimulating two stress hormones -- cortisol and adrenaline -- in ways both public and personal. Contempt causes us deep harm.

You already suffer a lot, and if you get angry with your anger, you will suffer more.

If they come and burn your hut and chase you away, of course you suffer, but if you know how to go back to your true home, you will not lose your faith.

There is a tendency to speak about your suffering and difficulties so that you can draw more people to support you in order to fight the other side. That is a big temptation. You think if you are strong and you will have more support, the other side will have to withdraw. That is the hope of many people. But we know that activities based on that kind of thinking have gone on for many years without bearing any fruit at all.

Sometimes it is easier to be angry than to express your own suffering.

We are separated by names like "Buddhist," "Christian," "Jew," "Muslim." When we hear one of these words, we see an image and we feel alienated, we don't feel connected. We have set up many structures in order to be separated from each other and make each other suffer. That is why it is very important to discover the human being in us. As human beings we are exactly the same.

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 “right of return” is a demand for the return of a population more than six times larger than the one that fled, seventy years ago. It is a population that has been indoctrinated for three generations to blame Israel for their suffering, rather than the actual culprits. It is a population replete with individuals deeply hostile to Israel’s continued existence. That cannot end well.

Palestinians have a legal right to armed resistance/ struggle against Israel colonialism according International Law, just as South Africans did against APARTHEID. Gaza suffers under an illegal Israeli blockade that even a former British prime minister recognized to be a “prison camp”- Journalist Ben Norton

We know that Jews suffered terrible, unimaginable crimes at the hands of the Nazis, and all of humanity should stand against such murderous hatred and make sure it’s never repeated. But how does that give Zionists the right to push us off our own land to make a country for Jews alone? Why should Palestinians compensate—lose our homeland, our property, our rights, even our lives—for the Holocaust committed by Europeans? We shouldn’t have to pay for the crimes of the Europeans against Jews. That’s just wrong.

If you cared about the thousands of children suffering today in Gaza, as much you care about the birth of one middle eastern child two thousand years ago, perhaps then, you could've understood the true meaning of Christmas.

I think everyone is a victim. If you are not a victim of this, you are a victim of that. For example, when you have anger and despair in you, you are a victim of your anger and despair, and you suffer very deeply. Building a wall or dropping a bomb can make you suffer, that is true, but having anger and despair makes you suffer also—maybe more. We may be the victim of others, and we may be the victims of ourselves.

If I can say anything to you, it is to invite you to look deeply and recognize the real enemy. That enemy is not a person. That enemy is a way of thinking that has brought a lot of suffering for everyone.

As Hamas’s rocket stockpiles dwindled, it reduced the number of rockets launched nightly but increased the range to Tel Aviv and beyond. Several of my conversations with Obama were interrupted by sirens. “Sorry, Barack,” I’d say. “I’m afraid we’ll have to resume our conversation in a few minutes.” With the rest of the staff I had forty-five seconds to go into underground shelters, returning after getting the all-clear sign. These live interruptions strengthened my argument for taking increasingly powerful actions against Hamas. And so we did. The IAF destroyed more and more enemy targets. Hamas panicked and became careless. Our intelligence identified the locations of their commanders. We targeted them and delivered painful blows to their hierarchy. Hamas then shifted their command posts to high-rises, believing they would be immune to our strikes. Using a technique called “knock on roof,” the air force fired nonlethal warning shots on the roofs of the buildings. Along with phone calls to the building occupants, these warnings enabled them to leave the premises unharmed. The IDF flattened several high-rise buildings with no civilian casualties. The sight of these collapsing towers sent Hamas a powerful message of demoralization and fear. This was literally “you can climb but you can’t hide.” Desperation was seeping through Hamas ranks. Arguments began to flare between Mashal in Qatar and the ground command in Gaza, which was suffering the brunt of our attacks. Eventually they caved. In the talks with Egypt they rescinded all their demands and agreed to an unconditional cease-fire that went into effect on August 26, 2014. After fifty days, Protective Edge was over. Sixty-seven IDF soldiers, five Israeli civilians, including one child, and a Thai civilian working in Israel lost their lives in the war. There were 4,564 rockets and mortars fired at Israel from Gaza, nearly all from civilian neighborhoods. The Iron Dome system intercepted 86 percent of them.4 The IDF killed 2,125 Gazans,5 roughly two-thirds of whom were members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian terrorist groups. A third were civilians who were often used by the terrorists as human shields. Colonel Richard Kemp, the commander of British forces in Afghanistan, said that “the IDF took measures to limit civilian casualties never taken by any Western army in similar situations.” At least twenty-three Palestinian civilians were executed by Hamas over false accusations of colluding with Israel. In reality many had simply criticized the devastation of Gaza brought about by Hamas’s aggression against Israel.6 Hamas leaders emerged from their bunkers. Surveying the rubble, they predictably declared victory. This is what all dictatorships do. They are not accountable to the facts or to their people. Less predictably, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas admitted that Hamas was severely weakened and achieved none of its demands.7 With the

After the Hebron Agreement there was the briefest of honeymoons with the Clinton administration. Clinton sent me a letter commending me for my “courage” for making a tough decision. He sent Arafat a similar letter. I thought that was peculiar since the only courage Arafat displayed was the courage to receive the Palestinian neighborhoods we had transferred to his control. But this was clearly as good as it was going to get. “Netanyahu and Arafat are both allies of the United States,” the White House briefed Israeli reporters.3 This was incredible. The democratically elected leader of the staunchest ally of the US and the leader of a terrorist organization that had murdered hundreds of Americans were put on equal footing. But such was the diplomatic mind-set of Washington in those days. The administration suffered from double-barreled myopia. First, it refused to see that the core of our conflict with the Palestinians was the persistent Palestinian refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any boundary. Second, it refused to really internalize that Israel’s government was dependent on a parliamentary system in which the prime minister could be toppled at any moment by the slimmest of majorities.

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.

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.

Children in war zones play out the violence they see around them; they’re impulsive and cannot access critical thinking skills because they’re in the “fight or flight” mode, too busy fending off their fears and anxieties. These results made me wonder if my work at the RFS was futile. Perhaps what these children needed more than anything else was to receive psychotherapy treatments to help them recover from these traumas, and the end of the Occupation, two things I obviously had no control over. In my readings I came across only one hopeful aspect—the most important resiliency factor predicting psychological adjustment in traumatized children is a loving and present mother or father. I could tell how much the children at the Ramallah Friends School were loved by their parents. The children were held and kissed with obvious affection; they went on vacations with their parents; they were well fed, dressed nicely, and had toys. I was not surprised to read about the importance of a constant loving figure in a child’s life, since responsive mothering is at the core of attachment theory. When you know you can count on your mother or father’s presence and unconditional love, you grow up able to function in the world with a sense of confidence and security. Despite the Israeli Occupation, Palestinian children will grow up to become confident adults because their parents love them. I think of my own mother, of how much she had suffered and lost but how much she has infused me with her love, courage, self-reliance, and trust. I am who I am today because she was capable of transcending her own trauma to create a stable, loving, and responsive home for me. My father, too, gave me his unconditional love and modeled a poised and assured demeanor in the world.

Sometimes it is easier to be angry than to express your own suffering. The Israelis think that they are not Arabs, but they are very similar to the Arabs. They are human beings. They don’t want to die, and they want to live in safety. They want brotherhood, sisterhood, and peace. We are separated by names like “Buddhist,” “Christian,” “Jew,” “Muslim.” When we hear one of these words, we see an image and we feel alienated, we don’t feel connected. We have set up many structures in order to be separated from each other and make each other suffer. That is why it is very important to discover the human being in the other person, and to help the other person discover the human being in us. As human beings we are exactly the same. If you have many layers of garments, you prevent other people from seeing you as a human being.

The Jews have suffered, and we have suffered. And we need to find a way to live here in one country, with everyone as equals, not in this apartheid state where Palestinians are forced to live on shrinking pieces of our homeland while the best land is reserved for one group. The world did not accept this in South Africa. Why would they accept it in Palestine?

Over seven months, 531 villages were destroyed and 15,000 people were killed. The remaining Palestinians suffered beatings, rape, and internment.

Many of my friends around the world express surprise at the Palestinian attachment to place of origin and concerns for family ties. Some even scoff at it and contrast it with their own open-armed acceptance of adventure, discovery, a nomadic lifestyle and residence in places that they choose and change according to their fancy, without the slightest regret at leaving family or even homeland behind. They remind me that the world is wider and more beautiful than 'our villages' and 'our families'. I understand this beautiful sense of the vastness of the world. Like them, I love movement, journeys, and living in new places. What these friends forget is that it is they who choose to distance themselves. They are the ones who take the decision and make the plans and then present their passports (recognized everywhere) and get on planes and trains and cars and motorcycles and go to places where three conditions that the Palestinian cannot meet are fulfilled: first, that it is their preference and choice to go to specifically these places; second, that these places always welcome them; and third and most important, that it is in their power to return to their home country whenever they desire and decide. The Palestinian forced to become a refugee, to migrate, and to go into exile from his homeland in the sixty years since the Nakba of 1948, or the forty since the June 1967 War, suffers miseries trying to obtain a document by which he will be recognized at borders. He suffers miseries trying to obtain a passport from another state because he is stateless and has to go through Kafkaesque interrogations before being granted entry visa to any place in the world, even the Arab states. The Palestinian is forbidden to enter his own country by land, sea, or air, even in a coffin. It is not a matter of romantic attachment to a place but of eternal exclusion from it. The Palestinian stripped of an original identity is a palm tree broken in the middle. My foreign friends have control over the details of their lives but a single Israeli solder can control the details of the life of any Palestinian. This is the difference. This is the story.

Well, then can you tell me something?” she continued. “Why is it that when the Germans were killing the Jews everyone screamed, but when we are being killed by Israelis, the world calls us killers?” The nurse’s question was clearly spoken out of a deep psychic wound, a grievance that she herself had been nursing for a long time. Who could blame her? As I stood there, one hand on the new mother’s bed railing and the other gripping my clipboard, I wanted to explain to her that the difference in treatment had nothing to do with the Israeli cause being somehow morally superior to that of the Palestinians and that it also had nothing to do with any conspiracy in the media. It had to do with the fact that the Palestinians simply are not part of the biblical super story through which the West looks at the world, and it is the super story that determines whose experiences get interpreted and whose don’t, whose pain is felt and whose is ignored. That is why when it comes to winning the sympathies of the West the Palestinians can never quite compete with the Jews, no matter how hard they try and no matter how much they suffer.

Notoriously, there are disputed territories – for example, border areas and regions occupied by groups which are not independent nations, but many of whose members wish that they were. Again, there are territories like that which used to be called Palestine; here the principles which in the case of Norway point univocally to one national group as that to which the area belongs diverge, some supporting the claims of the Israelis and others the claims of the Palestinian Arabs. Cyprus and Northern Ireland are two other obvious examples of conflicting prima facie rights of distinguishable national groups. In such cases the appeal, by both parties to a dispute, to supposedly absolute rights is disastrous. It reduces the readiness to negotiate and compromise, and it seems to justify any atrocities against the enemy, and any resulting losses and suffering for one's own side, that are needed to vindicate those rights.

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.

We learned that its full name was the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and that it was ratified by Israel in 1991. Article 1 of the convention defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information, or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity…

It happened in the middle of the night, while the young family of four was fast asleep in their home in the West Bank village of Duma. Two Israeli settlers threw a firebomb into their house, setting it ablaze. Flames engulfed the home and baby Ali, just eighteen months old, was killed. His father, Sa’ad, was so badly burned that he died a week later. That left the mother, Reham Dawabsheh, and her four-year-old son, Ahmed, as the only surviving members of the family. Reham, who was a teacher in an elementary school, suffered third-degree burns on 90 percent of her body—and after nearly five weeks on life support, she also died. And so, four-year-old Ahmed became the sole surviving member of his immediate household. Second- and third-degree burns covered 60 percent of his body. And this little boy was now motherless, fatherless, and brotherless.

If Europeans criticize Israeli policies, people remind them of the Holocaust. If people oppose Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, then people accuse them of anti-Semitism. According to Aloni, Jews habitually remind others of their suffering to justify what they are doing to the Palestinians.

At a point in history when two thirds of Europe’s Jewry had been exterminated, with their murderers uncharged, it seems reasonable to me that the world needed a Jewish state. None of this is to condone the tragedy of Palestinian displacement nor the illegality and, to my mind, immorality of the settlements, nor to minimise or excuse any of the subsequent tragedies visited upon the Palestinian people who have suffered worst from a cycle of violence that does as much to advance the careers of right-wing ideologues as it does to legitimise Hamas, but it’s important to remember that Israel exists, primarily, because it needed to. Know that every Jew you meet has a member of their family who was forced to leave their homeland because it was hostile to Jews. Anti-Semitism created Israel, and not, as some would have it, the other way around.

You know what amazes me, Zev? It’s that so many Jews and Palestinians don’t give a damn about one another’s stories. Too many Palestinians don’t grasp why three thousand years of death and persecution make Jews want their own homeland, or how suicide bombings alienate Jews and extend the occupation. Too many Jews refuse to acknowledge their role in the misery of Palestinians since 1948, or that the daily toll of occupation helps fuel more hatred and violence. So both become clichés: Jews are victims and oppressors; Palestinians are victims and terrorists. And the cycle of death rolls on. The two things the extremists have in common is how much they hated Amos Ben-Aron, and a gift for keeping old hatreds fresh.” David stopped, then continued more evenly: “In three short weeks I’ve seen all kinds of suffering, from the families in Haifa to the misery of Hana’s parents. But they live in different worlds. Hana has become a bit player in a tragedy that shows no sign of ending. Not for her, or her daughter, or anyone who lives here.” Ernheit studied him coolly. “In the end, David, which side would you choose?” David’s own gaze did not waiver. “I’m a Jew. I feel more at home here; on the West Bank, I heard enough anti-Semitism to remind me of how often Jews have had no choice but to fight or run. So if I had to choose, I’d have no choice. “The problem is that every day more choices are foreclosed for those who live here. Each day that Jews fight to build more settlements or Palestinians stoke the fantasy of return, they guarantee that someone else will die. And the hatred embedded in the DNA of this region continues to metastasize.

Palestinians cannot get permits to build necessary extensions on existing homes in areas under Israeli military control, forcing them to build without them in order to meet basic demographic needs. This results in a steady stream of demolitions of so-called “illegal” structures. Unemployment in the West Bank is generally around 18 percent, and Palestinian workers frequently suffer a loss of income because Israeli military closures make it impossible for them to get to their jobs.

Israeli soldiers bulldozed every Jewish settlement structure, except for synagogues, which were then promptly blown up by the Palestinians, upon taking over the land. Rabbi Yosef Dayan imposed an ancient curse on Sharon for giving up the land, known as a Pulsa di Nura, which included a request that the Angel of Death take Sharon’s life. About 100 days later, Sharon suffered what was thought to be a minor stroke, which was soon followed by a second stroke, other complications and ultimately, over several months, he was declared to be in a persistent vegetative state.

The august international organizations charged with preserving peace and human dignity in the world—the UN, the EU, among others—would have preferred that terrorist atrocities be limited to Israel. However, once the intentional mass murder of innocent civilians was legitimized against Israel, it was legitimized everywhere, constrained by nothing more than the strongly held beliefs of those who would become the mass murderers. Because the Palestinians were encouraged by most of the world to believe that the murder of innocent Israeli civilians is a legitimate tactic to advance the Palestinian nationalist cause, the Islamists believe that they may commit mass murder anywhere in the world to advance their holy cause. As a result, we suffer from a plague of Islamic terrorism, from Moscow to Madrid, from Bali to Beslan, from Nairobi to New York, authored and perfected by the Palestinians. Israel and the United States are not separate targets of Islamic terrorism. The whole world is its target. Israel and the United States share the bull’s-eye.

Palestinians in this country, as in others, are clearly conscious of the sufferings of their Palestinian ancestors and relatives who have faced persecutions, discrimination, expulsions, and property and goods confiscation133

Peace is not only the absence of war, but it is the absence of dire poverty and hunger. Peace is freedom from sickness and disease. It is employment and health. Peace is based on a deep sense of human equality and basic justice. Peace is when we have no fear to assemble, to worship, to work, to speak and publish the truth, even to the powerful. Peace is hope for our future and the future of all God's children and all God's world. Peace is salaam, well-being for all, equality and respect for human rights. Peace is when everybody feels at home and is accepted, without barriers based on age, class, sex, race, religion, or nationality. Peace is that fragile harmony that carries with it the experience of struggle, the endurance of suffering, and the strength of love. There is so much that is gathered into the word peace. Peace is costly and must not be misunderstood to mean a patchwork solution to the conflicts of the world. Peace is not submission, nor is it silent acceptance of what goes on around us. Peace is not only the peace of governments, their plans and initiatives, which we have been hearing about for so long.

on July 25, 2000…Barak had offered Arafat about 90 percent of the West Bank, the entire Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem as the capital of a new Palestinian state. In addition, a new international fund would be established to compensate Palestinians for the property that had been taken from them. This “land for peace” offer represented a historic opportunity for the long-suffering Palestinian people, something few Palestinians would have dared imagine possible. But even so, it was not enough for Arafat. Yasser Arafat had grown extraordinarily wealthy as the international symbol of victimhood. He wasn’t about to surrender that status and take on the responsibility of actually building a functioning society.

The Israeli social media strategy aimed to involve both domestic and global supporters of its military missions. By doing so, and asking backers to post their own supporting tweets, Face-book posts, or Instagram images, the IDF created a collective mission that other nations could easily mimic by stirring up nationalist fervor online. During Operation Pillar of Defense, the IDF encouraged supporters of Israel to both proudly share when “terrorists” were killed while at the same time reminding a global audience that the Jewish state was a victim. It was a form of mass conscription to the cause through the weaponization of social media.12 This was war as spectacle, and the IDF was spending big to make it happen. The IDF media budget allowed at least 70 officers and 2,000 soldiers to design, process, and disseminate official Israeli propaganda, and almost every social media platform was flooded with IDF content. Today, the IDF Instagram page regularly features pro-gay and pro-feminist messaging alongside its hard-line militaristic iconography.13 On October 1, 2021, the IDF posted across its social media platforms a photo of its headquarters swathed in pink light with this message: “For those who are fighting, for those who have passed, and for those who have survived, the IDF HQ is lit up pink this #BreastCancerAwarenessMonth.” Palestinian American activist Yousef Munayyer responded on Twitter: “An untold number of women in Gaza suffer from breast cancer and are routinely denied adequate treatment and timely lifesaving care because this military operates a brutal siege against over 2 million souls.” On Instagram, however, most of the comments below the post praised the IDF.

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. I’m now both an Australian and German citizen due to my family’s escape from Europe before World War II. I’m an atheist Jew.

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.

Today, the IDF Instagram page regularly features pro-gay and pro-feminist messaging alongside its hard-line militaristic iconography.13 On October 1, 2021, the IDF posted across its social media platforms a photo of its headquarters swathed in pink light with this message: “For those who are fighting, for those who have passed, and for those who have survived, the IDF HQ is lit up pink this #BreastCancerAwarenessMonth.” Palestinian American activist Yousef Munayyer responded on Twitter: “An untold number of women in Gaza suffer from breast cancer and are routinely denied adequate treatment and timely lifesaving care because this military operates a brutal siege against over 2 million souls.” On Instagram, however, most of the comments below the post praised the IDF.

The challenges facing Palestinians are harder than anything we could have imagined; the moment the challenge isn’t just ‘how to survive today’, a whole world of future suffering will open up to us. I remembered my early thought, when I was in the north, that the real war starts when the military operations end. It’s true, both politically and at the level of human drama. When the guns are shut down, the pain and despair of ordinary people will come to the surface. It will be that moment of realisation: both of the loss they’ve suffered and the new conditions they have to live with. In this sense, thinking of tomorrow is more difficult than thinking of today.