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+	"text": "Welcome to our Palestine FAQ. In this section you will find answers to the most commonly asked questions regarding the Palestinian question. For your convenience, we have divided the answers into categories:\n\nThe Question of Palestine\n\nWhat is the Palestinian question?\nThe Palestinian question refers to the Palestinian people’s struggle against Zionist and Israeli settler-colonialism, which has been intent on erasing Palestinians and claiming their lands for over a century.\n\nIsn’t this an ancient struggle, going back thousands of years?\nNot at all. The beginning of the question of Palestine is rooted in the Zionist movement, and its goal of colonizing Palestine to establish a Zionist settler state there. The first Zionist conference took place at the very end of the 19th century (1897).\n\nWhy is it so incredibly complicated?\nWhen traced back to its roots, the Palestinian question is a remarkably simple story of settler-colonialism and resistance to it. Naturally, it is just as complex and worthy of study as any other anti-colonial struggle, however, the claims of exceptional complexity are often employed in an effort to obfuscate the reality on the ground and limit discussion. The question of Palestine is not exceptional in its complexity, we can trace its origins, chronicle its events and trajectories and analyze its politics all quite well. There are decades of scholarship on the matter for reference. The appeals to complexity often arise when attempting to justify actions or policies that would be deemed unjustifiable in another context, for example, arguing against the right of refugees to return home.\n\nIsn't it just a holy war?\nCertainly not. This is a case of a native population resisting settler colonialism. Throughout history peoples all over the world rose up to fight colonialism regardless of the religion of their colonizer. For example, it would be ridiculous to suggest that Vietnamese rebellion against the French was out of religious motivation. However, as with any struggle, religion can be cynically instrumentalized to legitimize and mask political goals.\n\nWhy do you avoid calling it a conflict?\nThe term “conflict” is inadequate to describe the Palestinian question. It holds within it connotations of symmetry, of two conflicting and equal parties, rather than a case of an indigenous population resisting colonial dispossession and ethnocide. It obfuscates that this is not some local squabble between two already existing populations, but a case of foreign settlers seizing land to construct an exclusivist ethnocracy at the expense of the natives. Settler colonialism, by its very definition, is unequal.\n\nDid the United Nations establish Israel?\nThis is a popular misconception. The United Nations suggested a non-binding partition plan that was never implemented. Furthermore, the United Nations, both its General Assembly as well as its Security Council do not have the jurisdiction to impose political solutions, especially without the consent of those it affects.\nIsrael was established not through the UN, but through warfare and the creation of facts on the ground. Facts it created through the destruction and ethnic cleansing of hundreds of Palestinian villages and communities.\n\nWhat is the Nakba?\nThe Nakba is Arabic for “catastrophe” or “calamity”, and it refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine at the hand of Zionist militias between 1947-1948 and the subsequent establishment of the state of Israel. This campaign of ethnic cleansing took place before, during and after the war of 1948, and saw approximately 800,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes, and over 530 Palestinian communities demolished. Today, Israel can only maintain itself as an ethnocracy by perpetuating the displacement of these refugees and their descendants.\n\nWhat is the occupation?\nThe mainstream usage of the term occupation refers to the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem in the 1967 war. These areas remain occupied to this day and are ruled de facto by Israel, who controls most aspects of Palestinian life, down to determining who a Palestinian citizen is. It should be noted that we do not differentiate morally between the take-over of parts of Palestine in 1948 or 1967, as all of it is stolen, colonized land.\n\nDid Israel withdraw from the Gaza Strip?\nGaza is still in fact militarily occupied. For an area to be considered occupied the occupying state must exercise “effective control” over it. Unlike in the past, the Israeli siege, surveillance and monitoring technology allow for effective control of Gaza through controlling select key positions without the necessity of a full occupation force inside the area.\nThis position is echoed by the United Nations, Amnesty International, the International Red Cross and countless other international organizations specialized in human rights and international humanitarian law.\n\nDo Palestinians have the right to resist Israeli colonialism?\nAccording to international law, it is legitimate for an occupied people to resist occupation by any means available to them. United Nations resolution 37/43 “Reaffirms 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”.\nIt further specifically mentions the Palestinian people as possessing this right:\n“Reaffirms the inalienable right of the Namibian people, the Palestinian people and all peoples under foreign and colonial domination to self-determination, national independence, territorial integrity, national unity and sovereignty without outside interference”.\nBut even if such a right was not enshrined in international law, it is natural for humans to want to rid themselves from the domination of others.\n\nWhat is the Intifada?\nAn Intifada is an uprising or rebellion against oppression and tyranny. Coming from the Arabic root word nafada, its literal meaning is “shaking off”. The word has come to be strongly associated with the Palestinian cause and resistance to tyranny, especially after the wide-scale protests, civil disobedience, boycotts and other forms of resistance against Israel during the Intifada of 1987 and Aqsa Intifada of 2000.\nWhile the word is heavily associated with Palestine, its usage predates the Palestinian Intifadas. For example, the Bread Intifada of 1977 in Egypt.\n\nDoes the Palestinian authority actually represent the will of the Palestinian people?\nLike any other society, Palestinians are not a monolith. The Palestinian intellectual and political tradition has had a long history of dissent and debate. However, Palestinians in general hold a negative view of the Palestinian Authority and the Oslo accords. Many have come to view the Palestinian Authority as subcontractors for Israeli control of Palestine, especially through its security coordination.\n\nIs the Palestinian question still relevant today?\nYes, the Palestinian people still suffer under Israeli colonialism in every part of Palestine. The liberation of all oppressed peoples should always be “relevant” to people of conscience. Despite the dubious claims that the Palestinian question is irrelevant today, it is still a cause that can marshal support and solidarity all across the globe, and has become a symbol for resistance against oppression and imperialism.\nIf the Palestinian question was truly something in the past, there would not be so much effort on part of Israel to censor and penalize solidarity actions, such as the BDS campaign all over the world.\n\nWhy should you care about Palestine?\nIf internationalist solidarity between oppressed peoples is not a compelling enough reason, it’s important to understand that the same imperialism oppressing Palestinians in Palestine is also oppressing you at home. The same forces of colonialism, supremacy, patriarchy and capitalistic exploitation that committed genocide against the natives, and repressed social justice and liberation movements all over the world are still alive and well, and are always looking for ways to maintain the status quo.\nIsrael is an outpost of world imperialism in the Middle East, it is not supported by the West out of any altruistic intention to “make up” for its genocidal past, it is supported because it aligns with and furthers its interests.\nFor instance, Israel and the United States share violent policing tactics with each other to help suppress any kind of resistance. The same teargas grenades used on protestors in Ferguson are used on protestors in Palestine. The same surveillance and spying technologies tested on Palestinians find their way into the arsenal of other repressive regimes the world over.\n\nWhat are some examples of solidarity between Palestine and other liberation movements?\nHistorically speaking, there have been strong ties between the Palestinian revolution and movements for liberation all over the world. Leaders such as Thomas Sankara and Kwame Ture supported the Palestinian struggle against Israeli colonialism. Huey Newton visited Palestinian refugee camps in an act of solidarity. George Jackson was heavily influenced by Palestinian poetry and thinkers while in jail. The Black Panther party, as well as the Young Lords Party all took firm pro-Palestinian and anti-imperialist stances.\nToday, these expressions of solidarity can be seen between Palestinian activists and the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the Movement for Black Lives, the NODAPL protests, and other resistance movements all over the world. For example, the Deadly Exchange campaign aims to end collaboration and training between Israeli and American police departments, where both learn violent tactics from each other to suppress marginalized people and crush dissent.\n\nDoes the label Apartheid apply to the Palestinian context?\nWhile South Africa was a prominent example of an Apartheid state, it is not the only form it can take. According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the crime of Apartheid is defined as “inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime;”\nThere are many inhumane acts listed under paragraph 1, but the most relevant to the Palestinian context are:\nMurder, deportation or forcible transfer of population, imprisonment and severe deprivation of liberty, torture, Persecution based on ethnic, religious or national origins, other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.\nIt is indisputable that Israel practices these acts against Palestinians, inside and outside of the green line. It is also indisputable that as a state built on a colonial ideology that privileges one ethnic group over the rest, its actions are ultimately committed to maintain this system of supremacy. B’Tselem, Israel’s largest human rights organization, has officially designated Israel as an Apartheid state.\n\nBut Israel has Arab lawmakers; how could it be Apartheid?\nApartheid has a specific definition, and nowhere does it state that it must be a carbon copy of the South African model. There is a precedent of an Apartheid state having parliament members of the oppressed indigenous group, that being Southern Rhodesia. Despite allowing a certain number of black parliamentarians, it was still a racist entity ruled by a white government, with the very honest declared goal of maintaining itself as a white state. Israel, being an ethnocracy, has the similar goal of maintaining itself as a self-professed “Jewish state” at the expense of everybody else in Palestine, necessitating the oppression of millions of Palestinians and the perpetual banishment of their refugees.\n\nWhy are there Palestinian refugees?\nThe main bulk of Palestinian refugees were created through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine at the hand of Zionist militias between 1947-1948 and the subsequent establishment of the state of Israel. This campaign of ethnic cleansing took place before and during the war of 1948, and saw approximately 800,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes, and over 530 villages being demolished. Another large wave of displacement and expulsions followed the war of 1967. Israel depends upon the displacement of these refugees and their descendants to maintain itself as an ethnocracy.\n\nWhy did the Palestinians leave during the Nakba?\nThe Palestinians did not “leave” their villages as much as they were forced out of them through various means. According to Salman Abu Sitta, and based on a wide array of sources, the majority of Palestinian villages (54%) were abandoned due to military assaults by Zionist militias. The second largest reason was direct expulsion by Zionist forces (24%). Panic caused by the atrocities committed in other fallen villages inspired mass panic that resulted in the abandonment of (10%) of the villages. Fear of Zionist attack resulted in a further (7%) of the villages being abandoned, while (2%) were abandoned due to psychological terror campaigns, dubbed “whispering” campaigns.\nIt should be stressed, however, that the technicalities or reasons why the refugees left are irrelevant, as they have a right to return to their homes regardless.\n\nWeren't there Arab orders to evacuate the Palestinian villages?\nDespite the popularity -and convenience- of this claim there is no evidence to corroborate the existence of any blanket calls for mass Palestinian evacuation. As a matter of fact, there were calls to the opposite, and borders were often closed to Palestinian refugees, especially men of fighting age. The only villages that were partially evacuated by the Arab armies for various reasons amount to less than 1% of the ethnically cleansed communities. In any case, even if there had been such a blanket order, the refugees still have a right to return irrespective of such details.\n\nHow many Palestinian refugees are there today?\nAs of 2021, it is estimated that there are over 7 million Palestinian refugees worldwide, most of which are registered through UNRWA.\n\nWhere are Palestinian refugees concentrated?\nMost Palestinian refugees live in refugee camps in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The rest are scattered all across the globe.\n\nWhy are Palestinian refugees prevented from returning?\nIsrael prevents Palestinian refugees from returning because it claims they are a security threat. However, seeing as Israel is a settler colony built on stolen land, it did not have the population numbers to sustain itself. It could only be established by creating new demographic realities on the ground, these new realities necessitated that approximately 80% of the Palestinians in what is today considered Israel be ethnically cleansed to maintain a demographically stable Zionist ethnocracy. In short, Israel can only exist because millions of Palestinians are scattered refugees all over the world, simply because they are not Jewish.\n\nDo Palestinian refugees have a right of return?\nYes, as with any other refugee population they are entitled to return to their homes. There are also United Nations resolutions specifically affirming the Palestinian right of return. Israel, however, contends that no such right exists.\n\nAre Palestinian refugees special?\nPalestinian refugees are special in the sense that they are overseen by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) rather than the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). This is because (UNHCR) did not exist as an organization when the ethnic cleansing of Palestine occurred. This, however, confers no special privileges to Palestinians, and can in fact be detrimental to Palestinian refugees compared to refugees from other contexts.\n\nAre Palestinians the only refugees that can pass on their status to their descendants?\nAbsolutely not. According to the official United Nations website:\n“Under international law and the principle of family unity, the children of refugees and their descendants are also considered refugees until a durable solution is found.  Both UNRWA and UNHCR recognize descendants as refugees on this basis, a practice that has been widely accepted by the international community, including both donors and refugee hosting countries. Palestine refugees are not distinct from other protracted refugee situations such as those from Afghanistan or Somalia, where there are multiple generations of refugees, considered by UNHCR as refugees and supported as such. Protracted refugee situations are the result of the failure to find political solutions to their underlying political crises.“\n\nWhy is the right of return so special?\nThe expulsion of the Palestinians forms a cornerstone of the question of Palestine and the Palestinian revolution. The refugees expelled by Israel still languish in refugee camps simply for not being Jewish. For any lasting solution to materialize justice must be taken into account. There can be no justice without the right of return.\n\nWhy can’t Palestinians just assimilate into some other Arab country?\nWhy should they? According to international law, refugees have a right to return to their homes and they should not be used as sacrificial lambs so that Israel can pursue its racist, artificial demographic aims.\n\nWhy are there Palestinian citizens of Israel?\nFor various reasons, such as a commander’s decision during war, or the location of a village, or just by pure chance, some Palestinians were not ethnically cleansed during and after the establishment of Israel. It is estimated that around 20% of the original Palestinian population remained while the rest were forcefully expelled through various means.\nThis does not mean that the spared population had sided with the Zionist forces. For example, the city of Nazareth was spared because the Zionist commander thought that ethnically cleansing such a large amount of Palestinian Christians at the same time would look bad for Israel. However, ethnically cleansing smaller Christian and mixed villages around Nazareth and elsewhere was fine.\nIt should be noted that the destruction of Palestinian villages had nothing to do with whether they participated in the war of 1948 or not. Neutral villages with non-aggression pacts with the Yishuv were also ethnically cleansed.\n\nWhat is pinkwashing?\nPinkwashing refers to the efforts of Zionist organizations, as well as the Israeli government to invoke LGBTQ+ rights to distract from its human rights violations. This appeal is an attempt to establish a moral superiority for the settler state, and frame the Israeli settler as enlightened, as opposed to the backwards Palestinian Arab. This is all used to legitimize the existence of the Zionist settler-colonial project. It erases queer Palestinians and resistance to ongoing Israeli violence and is itself a form of colonial violence that attempts to further fracture Palestinian society.\n\nWhat is greenwashing?\nGreenwashing refers to the Israeli projection of an environmentally friendly and responsible image to divert attention away from its dismal record on human rights, international law and various well-documented war crimes against the Palestinians. It also covers for environmental racism, whereas Zionists pay lip service to ecological preservation and ahistorically depict Israel as “making the desert bloom”. All the while, Israel continues polluting Palestinian land, planting invasive species, building “ecological preserves” to cover  up ethnically cleansed villages, and presenting its theft of Palestinian water as a miraculous answer to the water scarcity.\n\nWhat is bluewashing?\nThe term “bluewashing” is a portmanteau of the words “blue” and “whitewash,” which is generally a metaphor for the cover up of crimes committed; the color blue is used because of its association with the United Nation and has thus become associated with humanitarianism and human rights. Bluewashing was first used to criticize the corporate partnerships formed under the United Nations Global Compact initiative following credible accusations that this association with the United Nations was undeservedly improving the corporations’ reputations. In short, these partnerships were being used as a fig leaf rather than an honest commitment to any kind of ideal.\nIsrael too is quite flagrantly attempting to improve its ugly reputation through a cover of humanitarianism regarding the Palestinians it has been massacring, ethnically cleansing, bombing, imprisoning, and keeping under occupation for over 70 years. Such “humanitarian” work is also intended to ideologically align Israel with the West despite its physical location in the East.\n\nWhat is redwashing?\nWhile many Palestinian activists and allies have used redwashing to refer to Israel’s cynical weaponization of indigeneity discourse, and its attempted recruitment of the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island to cover up its settler-colonial nature, we have chosen here instead to use redwashing to refer to depictions of early Zionist institutions in Palestine as socialist, as well as current claims of Zionism being compatible with leftism or even progressivism.\nStill, the separate phenomenon of Israel’s audacious indigeneity claims is a significant one also worth critiquing, and so an article addressing this is forthcoming under the title of “Brownwashing”.\n\nWhat is purplewashing?\nPurplewashing refers to when organizations or states project a feminist or gender inclusive facade on their politics, in order to make them seem more palatable and promote the image of social responsibility. This is part of an ideological framework referred to by scholars as colonial feminism, whereby women’s rights are appropriated in the service of empire; in the context of Palestine, this rhetoric is also known as gendered Orientalism. The Palestinian Arab/Muslim is framed as an “other”, who is culturally or even genetically predisposed to misogyny. Naturally, this is juxtaposed with the framing of a liberal, enlightened, Israeli Westerner. Ultimately to Israel, this facade of feminism is a way to improve its image, and incorporate women into its violent, colonial, racist systems and institutions, as well as a way to paint Palestinians as unworthy of statehood or even humanity.  The fact that these systems subjugate other -usually Palestinian- women is hardly mentioned.\n\nWhat is faithwashing?\nFaithwashing refers to the efforts to frame the question of Palestine as a religious conflict, rather than a case of settler colonialism. This framing suggests that the solution lies through interfaith dialogue, completely sidelining the colonized native population in favor of coopted religious leaders with no connection to Palestine to normalize Israeli settler colonialism.\n\nHasn’t Israel always sought peace with the Arabs?\nThis is a popular talking point, but has little evidence behind it. There are many examples of Israel deliberately seeking war to maximize territorial expansion. There have also been many Arab peace offers that Israel chose to neglect or reject. As a matter of fact, Palestinians have compromised tremendously during negotiations, and Israel has never -not even under Rabin- committed to a sovereign Palestinian state.\n\nWhy did the Palestinians reject every peace offer from Israel?\nHas it never once sounded suspicious to you how Israelis focus on the “peace offers” that were refused by the Palestinians, but never once discussed the actual parameters or substance in detail?\nBecause when these parameters are discussed, it becomes clear that these are terms nobody could accept. For example, even when Palestinians accepted the 1967 borders, a very limited return of refugees, and other compromises, this was still not good enough for Israel, which sought to shrink the Palestinian Bantustan even further and deny any real sovereignty to the supposed Palestinian state. These arrangements seek to formalize the status quo with cosmetic changes. Netanyahu promised that no Palestinian state will emerge, and in the case of any limited self-rule arrangement for the Palestinians, he spoke about a permanent IDF presence in the West Bank, as well as Israeli control of the borders and airspace. These are the amazing “opportunities” that Palestinians have been declining, and as a result are being painted as warmongering rejectionists for doing so. As it stands, Palestinian aspirations cannot exceed the ceiling of Israeli table scraps. Furthermore, this talking point purposefully ignores Palestinian counter-offers and proposals that Israel has rejected over the years, solely to paint Palestinians in a bad light.\n\nDid Barak offer the Palestinians everything at Camp David?\nNot at all. The idea that Barak offered Arafat “everything” which he rejected is a media spin to blame the Palestinians for the failure of the negotiations. Once actually inspected, you will come to see that Barak’s “generous offer” lacked many aspects that would enable the emergence of a sovereign Palestinian state:\nThe claim that Palestinians were offered 96% of land in the West Bank sounds “generous”, only then to find out that this 96% excluded areas already under Israeli control, such as the Dead Sea, the Jordan Valley, and East Jerusalem, effectively shrinking down the West Bank to around 80% at the most generous of estimates. In return, Israel was prepared to give an equivalent of 1% of land in the Naqab desert to the Palestinian state.\nThe West Bank would be crisscrossed by a network of settlements and Israeli areas, neatly dividing it into cantons with very little contiguity or connections. Even the noble sanctuary and the Aqsa mosque, as well as around a third of East Jerusalem would remain under permanent Israeli sovereignty in the supposed Palestinian capital. This is not even to mention that the Palestinian right of return was completely brushed under the carpet, with the Israelis not even allowing some refugees to return to the future Palestinian state.\nNone of this was conducive for the establishment of a real, sovereign and viable Palestinian state. Shlomo Ben Ami, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, and one of the main negotiators at Camp David, candidly admitted later that “Camp David was not the missed opportunity for the Palestinians, and if I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well.”\n\nIs the two-state solution the only viable solution?\nViable for whom and for what?\nThe two-state solution is inadequate to right historical wrongs, as it focuses on the pre-1967 borders as a starting point, which are in themselves a product of the colonization of Palestine, and not the root cause of it. It is thus preoccupied with finding solutions to symptoms, rather than dare address the root cause, which is Zionist settler colonialism and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.\nThis automatically means that Palestinians must relinquish any rights or hopes for their millions of refugees, and it also means that Palestinians must relinquish their rights to live in over 80% of the land they were ethnically cleansed from. Consequently, resource distribution, from water to fertile land, will be heavily stacked in Israel’s favor.\nShortly put, the two-state solution is more interested in maintaining Israel’s colonial gains and artificial demographic aspirations, and lending them legitimacy, rather than seeking justice for the Palestinians in any form.\n\nDon’t most Palestinians support a two-state solution?\nSupport for the two-state solution has been steadily dwindling over the years, today most Palestinians do not support it. It should be noted that even among those who support it, a considerable number of Palestinians support it due to a lack of perceived alternatives, or as a stepping stone towards a more just solution.\nFor example, the vast majority of Palestinian university students do not see that the two-state solution is capable of answering the Palestinian question.\n\nWhat is the one-state solution?\nThe one-state solution calls for the establishment of a decolonized, unitary, secular, democratic state for all of those between the river and the sea. It does not merely advocate for greater Palestinian civil rights within the framework of the Israeli state.  However, this would necessitate that Israel relinquish its state ideology of ethnic supremacy. The idea of a unitary state where everyone is equal is hardly new, and was proposed back before the original partition plans. Of course, the Zionist movement being hell-bent on the exclusive domination of the land, rejected this.\n\nDoes the one-state solution mean Jewish Israelis need to leave?\nNot at all, and none of the literature discussing this come close to suggesting that. In its most simple form, the one state solution calls for dismantling the Zionist colonial state and replacing it with an egalitarian democratic state which would not grant rights based on ethnicity, where every citizen is equal. It says nothing of displacement.\n\nDoes the one-state solution have any support among Palestinians and Israelis?\nSupport for the one-state solution fluctuates between 25-33% in both societies. This is a remarkably high number considering such a solution is often used by Palestinian and Israeli leaderships as an example of a nightmare scenario to be avoided at all costs. Furthermore, it is worth situating these numbers within their proper historical context. In mid-1988 for example, support for the two-state solution among Palestinians was barely 17%. At the end of the same year, the PLO adopted it as their basis for resolution and its support rate rose greatly, reaching a record high of 81% support for the peace process by 1996. It is not farfetched to imagine a similar transformation once the idea of two-states is buried for good.\n\nWhat is Zionism?\nZionism is a colonial ideology and political movement that calls for establishing a Jewish nation state in Palestine with a Jewish majority. Seeing as Palestine was already inhabited, and that there were barely any Zionists there before the 20th century, this necessitated the oppression and expulsion of the Palestinians to create the necessary conditions for this state.\n\nWhen was the Zionist movement established?\nOfficially, the first Zionist congress was in 1897, however, there were some precursor events and earlier settlers in Palestine tracing back to the mid-19th century.\n\nIs Zionism just Jewish self-determination?\nThe claim that Zionism is just Jewish self-determination has become popular as of late, but it is rife with critical omissions. It is akin to describing manifest destiny as “pilgrims seeking a better life for themselves”.  While this definition is convenient to its proponents, it leaves out the horrific acts of barbarity committed towards those ends. Israel as a colonial project was not created in a vacuum, its establishment necessitated the active  oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians.\nPalestine has always been home to countless refugee populations, the idea that the Jewish people fleeing persecution could find a safe home in Palestine was never the issue. The issue is that these sentiments were never reciprocated by the Zionist movement, who showed disdain towards Palestinians from the very beginning and sought to take over the land with the aim of establishing an exclusive ethnic state.\n\nDidn't the Zionists just want to live in peace?\nNo, since their arrival the Zionist settlers exploited Palestinian hospitality and worked towards the aim of establishing an ethnocratic settler state at their expense. They banned Arab workers, established a Jewish only trade union, and censured those buying Arab produce or cooperating in any manner. As Menachem Usishkin, chairman of the Jewish National Fund said, they wanted to be the “landlords of this land”. Even before any physical Zionist settlement, Herzl wrote about ways to get rid of the population already living there.\n\nDidn't the Zionists accept the partition plan while the Arabs rejected it?\nWhile publicly the Zionist Yishuv accepted the partition plan, it did so as a temporary tactic only. In private, they rejected any idea of partition and quite candidly admitted that partition would be a means to establish a strong army to take over the rest of Palestine.\nWhile addressing the Zionist Executive, Ben Gurion emphasized that any acceptance of partition would be tactical and temporary:\n“After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”\n\nIs anti-Zionism antisemitism?\nNo, criticism of Israel and its founding ideology cannot be conflated with the hatred of the Jewish people. When Palestinians resist Israeli colonialism, it is not due to the religion or ethnicity of Israelis. Resistance to foreign domination has been a staple of oppressed and colonized people all across the globe. From the very beginning, the Zionist movement had the goal of establishing an exclusivist ethnic state at the expense of the natives already living there, Palestinians objecting to and resisting this endeavor cannot be compared to the odious, murderous antisemitism that plagued Europe throughout history.\nThis is not even to mention that most Zionists today aren’t even Jewish, and many anti-Zionists are.\n\nIf Israel is a colony, who is it a colony of?\nIsrael is a settler colony. Settler colonialism differs from classic colonialism, in that settler colonialism only initially and temporarily relies on an empire for their existence. In many situations, the colonists aren’t even from the empire supporting them, and end up fighting the very sponsor that ensured their survival in the first place. Another difference is that settlers are not merely interested in the resources of these new lands, but also in the lands themselves, and to carve out a new homeland for themselves in the area.\nThe obvious issue here is that these lands were already inhabited by other people before their arrival.\n\nDid Israel make the desert bloom?\nTo begin with, Palestine is situated in the fertile crescent, and is one of the birth places of agriculture. It was never as much a desert as the Zionist narrative claims. The vast majority of cultivated agricultural land in Israel today was already being cultivated by Palestinians before their ethnic cleansing. Schechtman estimates that on the eve of the 1948 war, around 2,990,000 dunams of land (or 739,750 acres) were being cultivated by Palestinians. These cultivated lands were so vast, that they were “greater than the physical area which was under cultivation in Israel almost thirty years later.” It took Israel 30 years to even equal the amount of land being cultivated before its establishment. Alan George continues: “The impressive expansion of Israel’s cultivated area since 1948 has been more apparent than real since it involved mainly the ‘reclamation’ of farmland belonging to the refugees.”\nAnother aspect we should be wary of is reading desert as to mean uncultivated. Palestinian Bedouins have long cultivated lands in the Naqab desert using traditional farming and water preserving techniques. Records show that despite the loud proclamations of Zionists making the desert bloom, in 1944 land cultivated by Palestinians in the Naqab desert alone was three times of that cultivated by the entire Zionist settler presence in Palestine. As a matter of fact, the amount of cultivated land in the Naqab desert has dropped significantly since the Nakba in 1947-48. This is yet another case of a popular Zionist slogan being the complete opposite of reality.\n\nIs Israel a democracy?\nNo, Israel is an ethnocracy, which is a political system dominated by a specific ethnic group, and its policies revolve around furthering the interests of said group to the detriment of the rest. Usually ethnocracies have a thin democratic facade, but while it has the nominative and formal criteria of democracy, the way it functions is counter to the core spirit and ideas of democracy, such as equality among the populace.\n\nIs every Israeli citizen equal?\nIsrael distinguishes between citizenship and nationality. For example, you can be a citizen of Israel but be a Druze national, or a Jewish national. Your nationality is determined by your ethnicity and it cannot be changed or challenged. Many of the rights you are accorded in Israel stem from your nationality not your citizenship. Meaning an “Arab” Israeli citizen and a Jewish Israeli citizen, while both citizens, enjoy different rights and privileges determined by their “nationality”. Seeing how Israel is an ethnocracy it is not a mystery who this system privileges and who it discriminates against. This discrimination is enshrined both in law and in practice.\n\nDoes Israel have a right to exist?\nPeople have a right to self-determination, but no state in the world has a right to exist. This ‘right’ simply has no foundation, and Israel is not special in this regard.\n\nWhat is Hasbara?\nHasbara, meaning “explaining” is Israeli public diplomacy, especially that aimed at international audiences. It seeks to spread a positive image of Israel and legitimize its actions, often through outright false talking points and demonization of Palestinians. It is a state-backed endeavor, with fellowships, organizations and other funded activities to spread it. In short, Israeli propaganda.\n\nWhat is BDS?\nThe Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is a non-violent human rights campaign formed in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian non-governmental organizations, unions and civil society groups. The campaign aims to apply international pressure (economic and otherwise) on Israel until it complies with international law, in order to protect the rights of Palestinians. The BDS movement does not take a position on political solutions, as it is strictly a human rights movement.\n\nWhat are the goals of BDS?\nThe BDS movement has three goals:\n\nEnding Israeli occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall.\nRecognizing the fundamental rights of the Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality.\nRespecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.\n\nSimply put, the consistent application of international law.\n\nDo Palestinians support BDS?\nYes, support for BDS is ubiquitous in Palestinian civil society as well as among the general Palestinian populace. However, we must keep in mind that Palestinians under occupation often have no choice but to purchase Israeli products. For example, if you wish to have water, electricity or fuel, you’re forced to deal with Israel either directly or indirectly.\n\nWon't BDS harm Palestinian workers?\nBDS, being a call from Palestinian civil society includes Palestinian workers and major trade unions. Any short-term harm is far outweighed by the benefits of a successful BDS campaign, considering that UNCTAD estimates that the Israeli occupation and de-development of the Palestinian economy has cost Palestinians over two million jobs since 2000. It is incredibly condescending to tell Palestinian workers what their own interests are. This criticism is seldom made in good faith, however, if the goal is truly to support Palestinian workers, then helping stop the methodical Israeli destruction of the Palestinian economy would be a much more effective method.\n\nDoes BDS call for the destruction of Israel?\nNo, it does not. It does, however, call for the return of Palestinian refugees in accordance with international law, which would endanger Israel’s ruling ideology of reactionary ethnic-nationalism and artificial demographic aspirations.\n\nWhy does BDS single out Israel?\nThe BDS movement is not some universal scale of justice meting out punishment to all those who deserve. It’s specifically a call to action from Palestinians about the Palestinian context, nothing more.\n\nDoesn't BDS harm Israelis who are sympathetic to Palestinians?\nBDS does not target individual Israelis, but institutions complicit in the oppression of Palestinians.\n\nDoesn't BDS lay all of the blame on Israel?\nThis criticism could be justified if both the Palestinians and Israelis were symmetrical in capabilities and context. In reality, it is the Israelis who are occupying the Palestinians, and it is the Israelis who are colonizing Palestine. Israelis hold the power and Palestinians have no real means of imposing their wishes. This is not a case of two neighboring countries having a dispute, but a context of settler colonialism, which is unequal by definition.\n\nDoesn't BDS harm academic freedom?\nIsraeli universities are not neutral bystanders in the oppression of Palestinians, but play a key role in upholding this oppression. Either through developing discriminatory policies for the government or designing more efficient weapons of war, Israeli academia is complicit.\nFurthermore, the claim of the sanctity of academic freedom only seems to arise when we mention boycotting Israeli academic institutions. Palestinian universities have been bombed, and their students arrested without a single complaint from those posing as champions of academic freedom.\n\nWhy call for a cultural boycott of Israel?\nBDS does not target individual Israeli artists, but institutions or those complicit in the oppression of Palestinians and the whitewashing of Israeli crimes.\nIsrael has always been very public about using cultural means to improve its image abroad, and divert attention away from its oppression of the Palestinians. A recent example is Israel hosting Eurovision in Tel Aviv in an attempt to put a pluralistic and “pretty face” on the state, and whitewash its human rights violations. It should be noted that Israel is not unique in this regard, as Apartheid South Africa also hosted music festivals and cultural events in an effort to change perceptions of the racist state.\n\nWhy did you make this website?\nWe wanted to create a website which could serve as a quick reference for those interested in Palestine. We would provide some quick, basic answers to some commonly discussed topics and then recommend further readings to deepen knowledge on said topic. Basically, we wanted to create a website we wished existed when we were younger and wanted to expand our knowledge on Palestine.\n\nIs your website objective and neutral?\nObjective, yes. Neutral, not at all.\nThere is a common misconception, that in order to be objective you need to be neutral. These concepts can be connected but they do not necessarily follow from each other. Having two points of view does not automatically mean that both points of view are equally legitimate or based in reality, or that the truth has to be located somewhere in the middle. For example, you can of course bring two opposing sides to discuss if climate change is real or not, but treating them both as equally valid and of equal worth when one is backed by scientific consensus and the other isn’t is not a fair and balanced representation of reality. It is a false equation of two sides simply for being two different sides. This actually gives legitimacy to reactionary and anti-scientific positions.\nSimilarly, Israeli colonialism and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is an objective fact. Maintaining a neutral position on this war crime is not only immoral, but enables Israel to commit further heinous acts in the future. Therefore, we take a very clear position: For the liberation of Palestine. However, all of our information and sources are objective and based on rigorous academic scholarship and testimonies.\n\nWho is this website run by?\nThis website is run by two Palestinians living in Ramallah. We are not affiliated with any organization, party or government. This is a strictly personal and independent endeavor.\n\nWho funds this website?\nThe creation of the website was completely self-funded by two Palestinians living in Ramallah. The maintenance and further expansion of the website is made possible by our generous patrons and backers.\n\nCan I use your writing? What is your copyright policy?\nOf course! Nothing would make us happier. This website operates under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike policy. Meaning that you are free to share, adapt and use this material under these conditions:\n1) You must credit us.\n2) You may not use the material for commercial purposes.\n3) If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same two conditions.\n\nHow can I support you?\nIf you feel like you have learned something new and useful, you could always spread the word around about the website.\nYou could also become a Patron through Patreon to help support the continuing growth of the website, as well as the further education of its authors. [Click link here to go to Patreon]\n\nI love your graphics! Who are your artists?\nOur beautiful art is the result of the fantastic artistic talents of three Palestinian artists, comissioned specifically for the site.\nThey are, in no particular order:\nimaginary0friend\npaliart.by.hiba\nmsh.fannana\n\nDidn’t find what you were looking for?\nCheck out our myths section for a more comprehensive list of myths and talking-points.\nYou can also explore our introductory articles for a general overview of the history of the Palestinian question."
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+	"text": "When partition is brought up it is not surprising that most tend to think of the 1947 United Nations General Assembly resolution. This resolution recommended the partition of Palestine into an Arab-Palestinian state and a Zionist-Jewish state at the end of the British mandate. This was seen by some as a solution to the escalating tensions and violence during the mandate years.\nHowever, this was not the first partition scheme to be presented. In 1919, for example, the World Zionist Organization put forward a ‘partition’ plan, which included all the territory which would become mandatory Palestine, as well as parts of Lebanon, Syria and Transjordan. At the time, the Jewish population of this proposed state would not have even reached 2-3% of the total population. Naturally, such a colonial proposal would be unjust regardless of the population disparity, but it is an indication of the entitlement of the Zionist movement in wanting to establish an ethnic state in an area they had no claim to, and where they were so utterly outnumbered.\n\nThe bulk of the Zionist population arrived in Palestine during the 4th and 5th Zionist immigration waves -Aliyot- (Between 1924-1939). That means that the majority of those demanding partition of the land had barely been living there for 20 years at the most. To make matters worse, the UN partition plan allotted approximately 56% of the land of mandatory Palestine to the Zionist state, including most of the fertile coastal region.\nThe Palestinians, of course, rejected this. They were being asked to give away most of their land to a minority of recently arrived settlers. The rejection of this ridiculous premise is still cited today as the Palestinians being intransigent and refusing peace. This is often negatively contrasted with the claim that the Yishuv agreed to the 1947 partition plan, which is portrayed as a showing of good will and a readiness to coexist with their Palestinian neighbors. While this may seem true on the surface, a cursory glance at internal Yishuv meetings paints an entirely different picture. Partition as a concept was entirely rejected by the Yishuv, and any acceptance in public was tactical in order for the newly created Jewish state to gather its strength before expanding.\nWhile addressing the Zionist Executive, Ben Gurion, leader of the Yishuv and Israel’s first Prime Minister, reemphasized that any acceptance of partition would be temporary:\n\n“After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”\n\nThis was not a one-time occurrence, and neither was it only espoused by Ben Gurion. Internal debates and letters illustrate this time and time again. Even in letters to his family, Ben Gurion wrote that “A Jewish state is not the end but the beginning” detailing that settling the rest of Palestine depended on creating an “elite army”. As a matter of fact, he was quite explicit:\n\n“I don’t regard a state in part of Palestine as the final aim of Zionism, but as a mean toward that aim.”\n\nChaim Weizmann, prominent Zionist leader and first President of Israel, expected that “partition might be only a temporary arrangement for the next twenty to twenty-five years”.\nSo even ignoring the moral question of requiring the natives to formally green-light their own colonization, had the Palestinians agreed to partition, they most likely still would not have had an independent state today. Despite what was announced in public, internal Zionist discussions make it abundantly clear that this would have never been allowed.\nHowever, the problems with the United Nations partition plan go even deeper than this. To be clear, the resolution did not partition Palestine. It was in fact a partition plan, which was to be seen as a recommendation, and that the issue should be transferred to the Security Council. The resolution does not obligate the people of Palestine to accept it, especially considering the non-binding nature of UNGA resolutions.\nFor its part, the Security Council attempted to find a resolution based on the UNGA recommendation, but could not arrive at a consensus. Many concluded that the plan could not be enforced. Israel was unilaterally declared a state by Zionist leadership while the Security Council was still trying to arrive at a conclusion. The plan was never implemented.\nHowever, there is an argument that although the plan never came to fruition, the UNGA recommendation to partition Palestine to establish a Jewish state conferred the legal authority to create such a state. As a matter of fact, this can be seen in the declaration of the establishment of the state of Israel.\nThis argument falls flat on its face when we take into account that the United Nations, both its General Assembly as well as its Security Council, do not have the jurisdiction to impose political solutions, especially without the consent of those it affects. There is nothing in the UN charter that confers such authority to the United Nations. Indeed, this was brought up during the discussions on the matter. Furthermore, not only would this be outside the scope of the United Nations’ power, it would as a matter of fact run counter to its mandate. This issue was raised by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine itself:\n\n“With regard to the principle of self-determination, although international recognition was extended to this principle at the end of the First World War and it was adhered to with regard to the other Arab territories, at the time of the creation of the ‘A’ Mandates, it was not applied to Palestine, obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there. Actually, it may well be said that the Jewish National Home and the sui generis Mandate for Palestine run counter to that principle.”\n\nThis is a direct admission that the creation of a Zionist national home in Palestine runs counter to the principle of self-determination for Palestinians already living there. The United Nations needed to twist itself into a knot and make an exception to their own charter to recommend the partition of Palestine. However, even if it had been within their power to do so, and had it not ran counter to their charter, the UN still had no right to force the Palestinians to tear their homeland in half.The demographic realities in Palestine had always troubled the Zionist movement. Despite their consistent sloganeering of “A land without a people for a people without a land”, they were acutely aware of the reality on the ground. Even from its earliest days, Zionist leaders spoke about removing the native population to make room for the colonists who would utilize the land in much more “civilized” and “advanced” ways . Towards the end of the mandate, it would become clear that there would be no voluntary exodus of the native Palestinians.\nIt is within this context that Plan D (Tochnit Dalet) was developed by the Haganah high command. Although it was adopted in May 1948, the origins of this plan go back a few years earlier.  Yigael Yadin reportedly started working on it in 1944. This plan entailed the expansion of the borders of the Zionist state, well beyond partition, and any Palestinian village within these borders that resisted would be destroyed and have its inhabitants expelled. This included cities that were supposed to be part of the Arab Palestinian state after partition, such as Nazareth, Acre and Lydda.\nBen Zohar, the biographer of Ben Gurion wrote that:\n\n“In internal discussions, in instructions to his men, the Old Man [Ben-Gurion] demonstrated a clear position: it would be better that as few a number as possible of Arabs would remain in the territory of the [Jewish] state.”.\n\nAlthough it could be argued that Plan D did not outline the exact villages and cities to be ethnically cleansed in an explicit way, it was clear that the various Yishuv forces were operating with its instructions in mind.\nIt is important to stress that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began before the 1948 war, and before even a single regular Arab soldier set foot in Palestine. This is important to understand because many still erroneously argue that the Nakba -Arabic for catastrophe- was a byproduct of the Arab war on the fledgling Israeli state. Approximately 300,000 Palestinians had been expelled through ethnic cleansing campaigns before the onset of war or the end of the mandate. These campaigns were accompanied by massacres and war crimes, even against villages that were neutral and had non-aggression pacts with the Zionist Yishuv. The ethnic cleansing of the village of Deir Yassin demonstrates this perfectly .\nFor many reasons, the Arab states, mainly Transjordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, were not interested in a war. However, after the monstrous ethnic cleansing campaigns against the Palestinians, they finally reluctantly intervened. However, an aspect that is often ignored is the inter-Arab rivalries and disunity that were among the chief causes for the intervention in 1948. Barely coming out from under colonialism themselves, their actions during the war showed that they never really joined the war with eliminationist intent, as the popular narrative goes. The Jordanians were more interested in acquiring the West Bank as a stepping stone to their real ambition, which was greater Syria. As a matter of fact, there is ample evidence of collusion between the Israelis and Jordanians during the 1948 war, with deals under the table pretty much gifting parts of the West Bank to Transjordan in return for not interfering in other areas.\nThe Egyptians joined in an attempt to counter the Hashemite power-play that could change the balance of power in the region. For these reasons, the Arab armies generally intervened in the territories of the mandate destined to be part of the Palestinian Arab state according to the 1947 partition plan, and with very few exceptions, stayed away from the area designated to be part of the Zionist-Jewish state. Yes, support for Palestine and Palestinians played a large role in the legitimization of such interventions, but they were never the real reason behind them. As per usual when it comes to international relations, interests are always at the center of any maneuver regardless of the espoused noble and altruistic motivations.\n\nDespite their propaganda and rhetoric, the Arab states sought different secret opportunities to avoid and end the war with Israel. Some offers went as far as to agree to absorb all Palestinian refugees. These were all rejected by Israel with the goal of maximizing its land-grabs . For example, when it became clear that Israel would ignore all negotiations regarding partition and unilaterally declare its independence, there were enormous efforts behind the scenes aimed at avoiding war, not to mention ending it early when it did eventually break out. These efforts were heavily sponsored by the United States, who asked in March 1948 that all military activities be ceased, and asked the Yishuv to postpone any declaration of statehood and to give time for negotiations. Outside of Abdallah of Transjordan, the Arab states accepted this initiative by the United States. However, it was rejected by Ben Gurion, who knew that any peaceful implementation of the partition plan meant that the refugees he had expelled earlier would have a chance to return, not to mention that war would offer him a chance to conquer the lands he coveted outside the partition plan.\nThis followed a long series of Zionist rejection of overtures by the native Palestinians. In 1928, for example, the Palestinian leadership voted to allow Zionist settlers equal representation in the future bodies of the state, despite them being a minority who had barely just arrived. This was faced with Zionist rejection. Even after this, in 1947 the Palestinians suggested the formation of a unitary state for all those living between the river and the sea to replace the mandate to no avail. There were many attempts at co-existence, but this simply would not have benefited the Zionist leadership who never intended to come to Palestine to live as equals.\nBy the end of the war, 800,000 Palestinians would be ethnically cleansed from approximately 530 villages and communities. Israel would be established on the rubble of these villages, and their settlers would come to call the emptied abodes that once housed Palestinian families home. To this day, these 800,000 and their descendants are still scattered all over the world in refugee camps, and Israel refuses their right to return home. The ethnic cleansing operations continued well into the 1950s, years after the end of the war.\nThe post-war armistice line would come to be known as the green line, and it marked the de facto borders of the Israeli state, though official borders have never been declared. The areas that Israel did not conquer, i.e. the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would come to be ruled by Jordan and Egypt respectively. It is estimated that around 80% of the Palestinian population within the green line were expelled. The remaining 20% would live under martial law for decades to come, and have their communities turned into segregated, heavily controlled enclaves surrounded by barbed wire.\nThese early years would prove formative to the discriminatory regime of laws that govern Israel to this very day. This period will be discussed in the next part of our introduction series.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "This slogan persists to this day because it was never meant to be literal, but colonial and ideological. This phrase is yet another formulation of the concept of Terra Nullius meaning “nobody’s land”. In one form or the other, this concept played a significant role in legitimizing the erasure of the native population in virtually every settler colony, and laying down the ‘legal’ and ‘moral’ basis for seizing native land. According to this principle, any lands not managed in a ‘modern’ fashion were considered empty by the colonists, and therefore up for grabs. Essentially, yes there are people there but no people that mattered or were worth considering.\nThere is no doubt that Zionism is a settler colonial movement intent on replacing the natives. As a matter of fact, this was a point of pride for the early Zionists, as they saw the inhabitants of the land as backwards and barbaric, and that a positive aspect of Zionism would be the establishment of a modern nation state there to act as a bulwark against these ‘regressive’ forces in the east .\nA characteristic feature of early Zionist political discourse is pretending that Palestinians exist only as individuals or sometimes communities, but never as constituting a people or a nation. This was accompanied by the typical arrogance and condescension towards the natives seen in virtually every settler colonial movement.\nThat the early settlers interacted with the natives while simultaneously claiming the land was empty was not seen as contradictory to them. According to these colonists, even if some scattered, disorganized people did exist, they were not worthy of the land they inhabited. They were unable to transform the land into a modern functioning nation state, extract resources efficiently and contribute to ‘civilization’ through the free market, unlike the settlers. Patrick Wolfe’s scholarship on Australia illustrates this dynamic and how it was exploited to establish the settler colony.\nThis becomes exceedingly clear when reading the discussions of early Zionists, such as Chaim Weizmann, who when asked about the inhabitants of Palestine responded with:\n\n“The British told us that there are there some hundred thousands negroes [Kushim] and for those there is no value.”.\n\nYou can clearly see the influence and internalization of racist European colonial rhetoric. This attitude would become a cornerstone of Zionism as a political and colonial movement. This is why there is an emphasis in the Zionist narrative on how supposedly desolate and backwards Palestine was before their arrival. This same logic animates the ‘making the desert bloom’ myth that remains central to Israeli Hasbara efforts . The underlying message being: We deserve the land more than its natives, they have done nothing with it, and we can bring it into modernity.Perhaps one of the most widely quoted texts used to support this argument is Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869) in which he chronicled his travels through Europe and the Middle East. Naturally, his unflattering descriptions of the ‘Holy land’, both people and land, are what draw attention, as he found Palestine to be a “..hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land“. He then concludes that ‘Palestine is desolate and unlovely.’\nTwain’s account is taken as definitive proof that Palestine was a lifeless, empty husk before the arrival of the Zionist colonists. But as usual, in order to present and sustain this talking point, context must be completely ignored and any evidence to the opposite omitted. Even if we are to take Twain’s commentary at face value, one would be remiss not to investigate the circumstances of his visit.\nIndeed, once some very basic research is done it becomes clear that Twain visited Palestine in September, which meant that it was at the end of the summer season and the land had not seen any rain for months. In addition to this, his visit happened to coincide with a drought, meaning that this was an exceptional case of dryness even for September. And finally, his visit also coincided with the American civil war, which disrupted the cotton trade the region depended upon. That meant that the whole area, not only Palestine, was undergoing a significant economic downturn and increase in poverty, which pushed many a peasant to abandon their farms.\nBut let us say you are unconvinced by this, what have others who visited Palestine had to say?\nTwain is far from the only traveler to visit Palestine in the 19th century. Another such traveler is David Roberts, a Scottish painter who visited Palestine in 1839. He wrote describing his travels that the way from Jaffa to Jerusalem lay..\n\n“..across the plain of Sharon, through a richly-cultivated country. The ground is carpeted with flowers—the plain is studded with small villages and groups of palm-trees, and, independent of its interesting associations, the country is the loveliest I ever beheld.“\n\nSiegfried Sassoon also visited Palestine during the first world war and chronicled his journey:\n\n“March 11, reached Railhead (Ludd) at 2.30 pm. Olive trees and almond orchards. Fine hills inland, not unlike Scotland. Last night we went through flat sandy places. About daybreak the country began to be green. Tents among crops and trees all the way up from Gaza. Weather warm and pleasant, with clouds. A few Old Testament pictures of people and villages. Inhabitants seem to live by selling enormous oranges to the troops on the train.”\n\nOn page 94 of his digitized journal, which you can access fully (here), he wrote describing the flowers growing in Palestine:\n\n“Came back through a tangle of huge golden daisies -knee deep solid gold, as if Midas had been walking here among the almond trees and cantaloupes.”\n\nSo, what is the truth? Was Palestine a desolate, backwater wasteland, or a paradise with golden daisies and green hills akin to those in Scotland?\nBoth Roberts and Sassoon visited Palestine in the spring, at the end of the rainy season in years with no droughts. It makes sense, then, that the land would be green and the trees and flowers would be blooming.\nSo why only focus on the Twain paragraph to the exclusion of others? Is it not intellectually dishonest to present The Innocents Abroad as the definitive description of Palestine when other accounts contradict it? Is this not an irresponsible and deceptive selection of information?\nSadly, this is par for the course, as more often than not these arguments are made in bad faith. Because once again, conveying historical or factual accuracy is not the intended goal of these claims. These claims serve mainly as propaganda to legitimize the colonization of Palestine and to prove that the Zionist movement was more entitled to the land than its natives. This speaks to the insecurity of the settler, as such efforts to justify themselves would not be needed if they did not believe -even if on a subconscious level- that they do not belong.\nThis is hardly the only example of such discourse, Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial is one of the more shameless propaganda publications masquerading as a history book, full of cherry-picked data and absurd claims regarding the origins of Palestinians . Even though this book has been utterly debunked by a large number of scholars, it remains incredibly popular among Zionists as the definitive version of history. The endurance of this book as a source of information shows that much discourse on the question of Palestine is anything but fact based.\nThese cases illustrate a central point about Israeli and Zionist propaganda: It is full of selectively chosen data, dubious framing and omissions of inconvenient information. To succeed, it primarily relies on the ignorance of the listener. These talking points do not stand up to scrutiny, and wither away once countered with actual historic literacy. We should strive to challenge these claims wherever they arise, and do our best to set the record straight.\nBut for argument’s sake, even if Palestine had been truly “desolate” or “unlovely”, does this provide a moral cover for settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing and erecting a reactionary ethnocracy at the expense of the people living there? Of course not. It’s a fruitless argument which only aims to discredit the natives.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "When we speak of Israel as a settler colony, we refer to a very specific phenomenon. Settler colonialism differs from classic colonialism, in that settler colonialism only initially and temporarily relies on an empire for their existence. In many situations, the colonists aren’t even from the empire supporting them, and end up fighting the very sponsor that ensured their survival in the first place. Another difference is that settlers are not merely interested in the resources of these new lands, but also in the lands themselves, and to carve out a new homeland for themselves in the area.\nThe obvious issue here is that these lands were already inhabited by other people before their arrival.\nThis is when the settler “logic of elimination” comes into play. Coined by scholar Patrick Wolfe, this means that the settlers needed to develop not only moral justifications for the removal of the natives, but also the practical means to ensure its success. This could take the form of ethnic cleansing, genocide or other gruesome tools of ethnocide.\nIf you’re at all familiar with Zionist talking points, you can see this logic of elimination in motion. “A land without a people for a people without a land“, “there is no such thing as a Palestinian“, “Israel made the desert bloom” and many other talking points illustrate this perfectly. For example, you can immediately see how denying the existence of Palestinians resembles the Terra Nullius argument used by colonists all over the world . All of these talking points are aimed at justifying the dispossession of the Palestinians and legitimizing Zionist claims to the land they wished to colonize. As for the practical means to remove the natives, the Nakba remains a testimony to such crimes.\nThe claim that Zionism is merely Jewish self-determination also conflates the Jewish people with Zionism, an ideology finding its origins in Europe in the late 1800s. At the time, the Jewish people were largely uninterested in Zionism. As a matter of fact many Jewish groups were fiercely anti-Zionist. The attempt to conflate the two is an attempt to give legitimacy to self-professed settlers from Europe, and portray any criticism of the Zionist project as inherently antisemitic.\nYet in the early days, the Zionist movement was astonishingly honest about its existence as a form of colonialism. For example, Herzl, one of the founders of political Zionism wrote in 1902 to infamous colonizer Cecil Rhodes, arguing that Britain recognized the importance of “colonial expansion”:\n\n“You are being invited to help make history,” he wrote, “It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor ; not Englishmen, but Jews . How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.”\n\nNordau, Herzl’s right hand man, even rightfully called Zionist settlements in Palestine “colonies”:\n\n“Zionism rejects on principle all colonization on a small scale, and the idea of “sneaking” into Palestine. The Zionists have therefore devoted themselves preeminently to a zealous and tireless advocacy of the uniting of the already existing Jewish colonies in Palestine with those who until now have given them their aid and who of late have inclined towards the withdrawal of their support from them.”\n\nMenachem Usishkin, chairman of the Jewish National Fund, was known for his calls to rid Palestine of its natives:\n\n“What we can demand today is that all Transjordan be included in the Land of Israel. . . on condition that Transjordan would be either be made available for Jewish colonization or for the resettlement of those [Palestinian] Arabs, whose lands [in Palestine] we would purchase. Against this, the most conscientious person could not argue . . . For the [Palestinian] Arabs of the Galilee, Transjordan is a province . . . this will be for the resettlement of Palestine’s Arabs. This the land problem. . . . Now the [Palestinian] Arabs do not want us because we want to be the rulers. I will fight for this. I will make sure that we will be the landlords of this land . . . . because this country belongs to us not to them . . . “\n\nRevisionist Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, in an essay titled The Iron Law (1925) wrote that:\n\n“A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the future. If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find some rich man or benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else-or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempt to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is impossible, not difficult, not dangerous, but IMPOSSIBLE!… Zionism is a colonization adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important… to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonizing.”\n\nThese quotations are merely the tip of the iceberg, but lest you think I am cherry-picking and choosing out of context passages, I invite you to read their original writings. There are only so many mental gymnastics you can perform to try and find a different meaning to “Zionism is a colonization adventure.” One of them is the claim that the Zionists adopted this kind of language only to convince the great imperial powers. It must have been a pretty convincing act, then, as its practice is still ongoing after over 100 years.\nThis, of course, is nonsense. It was not a question of rhetoric, but also execution. The first Zionist bank established was named the ‘Jewish Colonial Trust’ and the whole endeavor was supported by the ‘Palestine Jewish Colonization Association’ and the ‘Jewish Agency Colonization Department’. Such an association was yet to become unpopular or taboo as it is today.A further problem with the claim that Zionism is merely Jewish self-determination is that it is an intellectually dishonest claim. It is a claim so rife with critical omissions that it cannot but be classified as a lie when the full context is explored.\nLet’s try and apply this argument to another prominent settler colonial context: The colonization of Turtle Island.\nWhen somebody today describes American “Manifest destiny” as settlers seeking a better life for themselves, or claims that the United States was founded on liberty, equality and justice for all, you instantly know that something is amiss. How could they leave out details such as the genocide of the indigenous nations or slavery from the story?\nWhen they say liberty, equality and justice for all, you ask, liberty for whom? Equality for whom? Justice for whom?\nIn the American case, the answer was white, male land-owners. Everybody else’s oppression -to different degrees- was necessary to build the privileges and power of this class. But you absolutely cannot glean an accurate understanding of American history without mentioning this foundational and continuing oppression.\nSo, when Zionists claim that Zionism is just Jewish self-determination, what are they leaving out of their story?\nAt what cost was Israel established?\nWhat happened to the society that already existed when the first Zionist settlers arrived?\nIs the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the colonization of their lands not worth mentioning in this context?\nFurthermore, is it intellectually honest to frame objection to these atrocities as objection to Jewish self-determination as a concept?\nOnce again, we return to the logic of elimination where this destruction is justified.\nWhen it came to Palestinians, the issue was never with an abstract Jewish self-determination. Everybody should be able to determine their own destiny, but not at the expense of the oppression of others. As a matter of fact, there is ample evidence -recorded by the Zionist pioneers themselves- that the native Palestinian population was welcoming of the first Zionist settlers. They worked side by side, they taught them how to work the land, even when they showed arrogance and saw the natives as inferior. Only after it became clear that these settlers did not come merely to live in Palestine, but to become its landlords as Usishkin said, did resistance to Zionism begin.\nPalestine has always been home to countless refugee populations, the idea that the Jewish people fleeing persecution could find a safe home in Palestine was never the issue. The issue is that these ideals of coexistence were never reciprocated by the Zionist movement, who showed disdain towards Palestinians from the very beginning and sought to take over the land. For example, it sanctioned settlers working with Palestinians, even calling Arab labor an “illness” and formed a segregated trade union that banned non-Jewish members.\nIn 1928, the Palestinian leadership even voted to allow Zionist settlers equal representation in the future bodies of the state, despite them being a minority who had barely just arrived. The Zionist leadership rejected this, of course. Even after this, in 1947 the Palestinians suggested the formation of a unitary state for all those living between the river and the sea to replace the mandate to no avail. There were many attempts at co-existence, but this simply would not have benefited the Zionist leadership who never intended to come to Palestine to live as equals.\nIt is due to this long history that Zionism is facing a legitimacy crisis. It has nothing to do with denying Jewish self-determination, and everything to do with attempting to right historical wrongs. You cannot hope to find solutions if you refuse to even entertain thinking about the root causes.\nAfter all, could it ever be righteous to end a diaspora by causing another one?\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
+}
+{
+	"text": "The Oslo accords were a result of the secret negotiations between the PLO and Israel. Negotiating directly, and sitting face to face for the first time, they agreed upon a declaration of principles that would lead to creating the Palestinian Authority as an interim government that would pave the way for a final settlement. Although these talks would kickstart what came to be known as the “peace” process and the two-state solution, they were mostly a declaration of principles which did not contain any concrete specificities for a resolution. As a matter of fact, the word “state” with regards to Palestinians was never mentioned once.\nIt was two years later, in what is referred to as Oslo II, taking place in the Egyptian city of Taba, that negotiations earnestly began. In these negotiations more concrete parameters were discussed, and the logistics as well as method for instating the Palestinian Authority on the ground were determined. It is also worth mentioning that during this period, Jordan would go on to sign the Wadi Araba peace treaty with Israel and officially normalize its ties, making it the second Arab country after Egypt to do so.\n\nOriginally, the interim Oslo agreement and the Palestinian Authority were meant to be of a transitional nature, only lasting 5 years leading up to the final settlement. Interestingly enough, the form of this final settlement was never concretely defined as resulting in a state for Palestinians. Oslo II resulted in dividing the West Bank into three areas, labeled A, B and C.\nAreas A: These areas were to be under complete civil and security Palestinian (Palestinian Authority) control. This includes the major Palestinian cities and population centers. There should have been no Israeli presence in this area. This area makes up approximately 18% of the West Bank while containing 55% of the Palestinian population.\nAreas B: These areas were to be under Palestinian civil control, but Israeli security control. Many Palestinian villages and smaller population centers fall within this area. Areas B constitute approximately 21% of the West Bank while containing 41% of the Palestinian population.\nAreas C: These areas were to be under full Israeli civil and security control. Areas C constitute the majority of the West Bank making up approximately 61% of the land. It is in these areas where the majority of settlement activity takes place, as they are abundant in land and resources while containing a relatively small portion of the Palestinian population.\nThe labeling and designation of these areas continues to be an issue of importance to this day, as increasing numbers of Israeli officials call for the complete annexation of areas C to Israel. This means that Israel makes life as difficult as possible for Palestinians in areas C to encourage their exodus. Other issues of importance such as the use of water resources are heavily affected by which area you live in. Naturally if you are an illegal Israeli settler, such distinctions do not matter.\nToday Israel barely distinguishes between these areas, as it is seen operating freely in Areas A, as well as retroactively recognizing new settlement outposts in Areas B. This will be discussed in depth in the next article.\nIn theory, then, the two-state solution calls for establishing two states, as the name implies. The Palestinian state would be erected in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. On the question of refugees, this topic was always postponed for future negotiations. The Palestinian Authority insists that there will be a “just solution” to the refugee question, but internal documents reveal that they have basically given up on the matter. Not even a token amount of refugees would be permitted to return to their homes. Another issue is borders, where Israel has attempted to keep control of its illegal settlement blocs in the West Bank.\nThe Oslo accords came bundled with the Paris protocol, which dictated the economic policies the Palestinians were allowed to make, and directly tied the Palestinian economy to the Israeli one. In essence, what the Paris protocol achieved was a structured subordination of the Palestinian economy to the Israeli one, giving the Israeli market immense control and power over it. As a matter of fact, many aspects of the Oslo accord were just a reformulation of occupation policies with a civil face; domination and exploitation were simply rebranded as cooperation.\nSetting aside the practical issues and stalemates in the negotiation, the two-state solution has many conceptual problems that make it unfitting as a mechanism through which a resolution can be found. To put it bluntly, Israel is not a normal state. It is a settler colony. We are not talking about two naturally occurring populations which have a land dispute. Israelis are descended from settlers that arrived from abroad with the goal of erecting an ethnocratic settler state in an area that was already home to the Palestinians.\nAdditionally, this approach is inadequate to right historical wrongs, as it focuses on the pre-1967 borders as a starting point, which are in themselves a product of this colonization, and not the root cause of it. It is thus preoccupied with finding solutions to symptoms, rather than dare address the root cause, which is Zionist settler colonialism and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.\nThis automatically means that Palestinians must relinquish any rights or hopes for their millions of refugees, and it also means that Palestinians must relinquish their rights to live in over 80% of the land they were ethnically cleansed from. Naturally, this promises that resource distribution, from water to fertile land, will be heavily stacked in Israel’s favor.\nAll of these shortcomings are often countered with the assertion that Palestinians must compromise to reach peace. Israeli control is treated as a fait accompli and that Palestinians must deal with it, rather than demand justice. This is the whole premise of the two-state solution, that Palestinians must compromise on their rights to be granted a small, powerless sham of a state in part of their homeland. Israel, of course was not asked to compromise on anything substantial. The only “compromise” asked of Israelis is to stop its illegal occupation of foreign lands, as well as stop its illegal settlement enterprise, which it should cease regardless of any negotiation with the Palestinians. This attitude basically boils down to “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is negotiable.”.\nYet despite all of this, Palestinians were willing to agree to these terms. The PLO was willing to give up on the Palestinian people’s historical rights in order to find peace and have a state. But none of this was sufficient for Israel. Even Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who signed the Oslo accords, who is considered a holy martyr for peace among the Israeli peace camp was not prepared to give the Palestinians a real state. He spoke of a sham “state-minus” with no sovereignty, and the offers did not get better than that throughout the history of negotiations.\nSo even when Palestinians accepted the 1967 borders, an incredibly limited return of refugees, and other compromises, this was still not good enough for Israel that sought to shrink the Palestinian Bantustan even further. These arrangements seek to formalize the status quo with cosmetic changes. Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, promised that no sovereign Palestinian state will emerge, and in the case of any limited self-rule arrangement for the Palestinians, there will be a permanent IDF presence in the West Bank, as well as Israeli control of the borders and airspace. As it stands, Palestinian aspirations cannot exceed the ceiling of Israeli table scraps, and any rejection of this ridiculous premise is framed as irrational intransigence.\nNeedless to say, the Palestinian Authority, which was supposed to last only 5 years still exists to this day. No Palestinian state has materialized, and the Israeli matrix of control is more far-reaching than ever. Israeli intransigence and the stalemate in negotiations following the failed Camp David negotiations would erupt a second Intifada. This time, however, it would differ in character and organization from the first, and would become much more militarized over its course.The stalemate in the negotiations, and the escalating settlement activities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip combined together to create a climate of heightened tension. This tension would erupt into a conflagration at the end of September 2000. Triggered by the visit of Ariel Sharon to the Aqsa mosque and the Noble Sanctuary, the second Intifada, also known as the Aqsa Intifada, would demolish much of what the Palestinian Authority had built over the last few years.\nAriel Sharon, known as the butcher of Sabra and Shatilla to Palestinians, visited al-Aqsa mosque escorted by hundreds of armed troops to make a statement that no matter what agreement would emerge, the Noble Sanctuary would forever remain under Israeli sovereignty and control. Being the third holiest site in Islam, and holding a very special importance for all Palestinians, this visit was deliberately designed to provoke a response from the Palestinians. It was thought that decisively crushing this response would give the Israelis a better position in the negotiations, and lower the political demands of the Palestinian Authority.\nSimilar to the first Intifada, Palestinians mobilized massive protests, civil disobedience actions, boycotts and other forms of resistance. However, unlike the first Intifada which took Israel by surprise, the repression was much more harsh and violent. Israel ruthlessly shot to kill, using live ammunition and savagely cracked down on Palestinians. What had initially erupted as a popular, mostly peaceful movement, was soon pushed by the harsh response to gradually become militarized. While popular resistance would continue, this time it would be accompanied by guerilla warfare, suicide bombings and other tactics.\n\nSoon the same Ariel Sharon who provoked the Intifada would become Prime Minister, and with his extensive history of repressing Palestinians, he greatly escalated the violence. He would invade and reoccupy all Palestinian areas that were under the control of the Palestinian Authority, including the large population centers such as Nablus and Ramallah. This was also used as a pretext to begin constructing Israel’s infamous segregation wall, which has been widely condemned as illegal.\nThis would shake up the status quo considerably; the West Bank and Gaza Strip would be completely cut off from each other and the rest of Palestine. Much of the Palestinian Authority’s security forces were decimated, and Israel retrenched its position to have a tighter grip on the occupied areas. Naturally, during this period there were many attempts at resuscitating the peace process or shifting the status quo, but they all ended in failure.\nOne of the major events that took place during the second Intifada was the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. While it is true that Israeli forces and settlers withdrew from within Gaza in 2005 due to heavy Palestinian resistance, this does not mean that all manifestations of the occupation were ended, as Israel continued to exert effective control over Gaza. This is confirmed by the United Nations, Amnesty International, the International Red Cross and countless other international organizations specialized in human rights and international humanitarian law  .\nBut this claim that Gaza is unoccupied has been very useful for Israel, as it plays into the propaganda that Israel has sacrificed immensely for peace, a talking point unsubstantiated by actual history. As noble as Israelis make it sound, there were less altruistic intentions behind the retreat from Gaza, articulated by Dov Weisglas, top aide to Ariel Sharon who was Prime Minister at the time:\n\n“The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”\n\nHe continued:\n\n“The disengagement is actually formaldehyde, It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”\n\nAnd he was right. For example, whenever the Palestinian Authority criticized Israel for its intransigence or its new settlement and colonization projects in the West bank, Israel would retort that they gave up Gaza and sacrificed immensely for peace. This was an effective way for Israel to circumvent criticism of its violations of international law and shift the onus of compromise onto Palestinians. In this context, “compromise” came to mean acquiescence to the brazen colonization of the vast majority of the West Bank. Weisglas bragged that:\n\n“That is exactly what happened, you know, the term `peace process’ is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it’s the return of refugees, it’s the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen…. what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did.”\n\nFurthermore, Israel knew it was not really relinquishing control of the Gaza strip, but rather reconfiguring how the occupation looked and functioned. They knew that the occupation, despite being in a new form, would still illicit resistance from those inside the strip. Israel could then use this resistance as proof that “relinquishing” land in return for peace with the Palestinians was an impossible task, because Palestinians would continue to attack it no matter what. This has served as a major argument for why Israel should not withdraw from any inch of the West Bank to this very day.\nBy the end of the second Intifada and due to its militarized nature, nearly 5000 Palestinians and 1000 Israelis would be killed. It shifted the status quo in Palestine, and undid much of the work accomplished by the Palestinian Authority in the years prior. This along with the death of Palestinian Authority and PLO leader Yasser Arafat would trigger changes in the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian leadership in general. The Palestinian Authority would be restructured into an even more docile and obedient entity, Israeli colonization efforts would accelerate, and a new phase in the Palestinian question would begin. This phase continues to this very day, and will be discussed in the next article.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
+}
+{
+	"text": "But this claim that Gaza is unoccupied has been very useful for Israel, as it plays into the propaganda that Israel has sacrificed immensely for peace, a talking point unsubstantiated by actual history, and also erases the valiant efforts of Palestinian resistance fighters in the Gaza Strip who played a critical role in making the maintenance of a physical military presence inside the strip very costly to Israel to the point it had to retreat.\nAs noble as Israelis make it sound, there were other less altruistic intentions regarding the retreat from Gaza, articulated by Dov Weisglas, top aide to Ariel Sharon who was Prime Minister at the time:\n\n“The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”\n\nHe continued:\n\n“The disengagement is actually formaldehyde, it supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”\n\nAnd he was right. For example, whenever the Palestinian Authority criticized Israel for its intransigence or its new settlement and colonization projects in the West bank, Israel would retort that they gave up Gaza and sacrificed immensely for peace. This was an effective way for Israel to circumvent criticism of its violations of international law and shift the onus of compromise onto Palestinians. In this context, “compromise” came to mean acquiescence to the brazen colonization of the vast majority of the West Bank. Weisglas bragged that:\n\n“That is exactly what happened, you know, the term `peace process’ is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it’s the return of refugees, it’s the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen…. what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did.”\n\nFurthermore, Israel knew it was not really relinquishing control of the Gaza strip, but rather reconfiguring how the occupation looked and functioned. They knew that the occupation, despite being in a new form, would still illicit resistance from those inside the strip. Israel could then use this resistance as proof that “relinquishing” land in return for peace with the Palestinians was an impossible task, because Palestinians would continue to attack it no matter what. This has served as a major argument for why Israel should not withdraw from any inch of the West Bank to this very day.\nSo, as you can see, the withdrawal from Gaza did not really end the occupation, and it certainly was not a compromise out of a desire for peace with the Palestinians. This is not speculation, this is not a conspiratorial reading or analysis of the policy; we have a complete candid confession from the architect of this plan, it is all documented and easily accessible and we encourage you to read the full interview for context.\nGaza today remains as a staunch reminder of Israel’s birth: A small strip of land filled to the brim with refugees whose houses have been seized by foreign colonists. Israel can occupy, besiege and bomb the strip, but it will never beak the spirit of those yearning for freedom and a return to their stolen homes. It is our duty to help them in any way we can, even if by simply not allowing Israel to create its own false narrative and pass it off as the indisputable truth.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
+}
+{
+	"text": "Even before the establishment of Israel, Palestinian leadership tried to come to an understanding with the Zionist settlers. For example, in 1928, the Palestinian leadership voted to allow them equal representation in the future bodies of the state, despite them being a minority who had barely arrived. The Zionist leadership rejected this, of course. Even after this, in 1947 the Palestinians suggested the formation of a unitary state for all those living between the river and the sea to replace the mandate to no avail. There were many attempts at co-existence, but this simply would not have benefited the Zionist leadership who never intended to come to Palestine to live as equals.\nThis point is further reinforced by the Yishuv’s position on partition. While accepting the partition in public, in private Ben Gurion reemphasized that any acceptance of partition would be tactical and temporary:\n\n“After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”\n\nThis was not a one-time occurrence, and neither was it only espoused by Ben Gurion. Internal debates and letters illustrate this time and time again. Even in letters to his family, Ben Gurion wrote that “A Jewish state is not the end but the beginning” detailing that settling the rest of Palestine depended on creating an “elite army”. As a matter of fact, he was quite explicit:\n\n“I don’t regard a state in part of Palestine as the final aim of Zionism, but as a mean toward that aim.”\n\nChaim Weizmann expected that “partition might be only a temporary arrangement for the next twenty to twenty-five years”. From the offset, any claims that the Zionist settlers simply wanted to live in peace with the Palestinians are highly suspect. As chairman of the Jewish National Fund and Zionist leader Usishkin emphasized:\n\n“..the [Palestinian] Arabs do not want us because we want to be the rulers. I will fight for this. I will make sure that we will be the landlords of this land . . . . because this country belongs to us not to them ..”\nEven during the war of 1948, there were many opportunities to cease hostilities which Israel rejected. There were negotiations between Israel and Egypt in October 1948, where based on previous correspondences, Egypt was prepared to offer many concessions in exchange for peace, even offering to resettle the Palestinian refugees in the UN decreed “Arab” areas of Palestine. Four days after Israeli politician Eliyahu Sasson went to meet with Heikal, chairman of the Egyptian senate, Ben Gurion launched a new military operation. Naturally, this put an end to any attempt at avoiding bloodshed.\nFrom their side, the Syrians also attempted to end the war at the beginning of 1949, where prime minister al-Azm informed the US ambassador of their desire to stop the fighting. The only conditions they put forward was that Palestinians be afforded the right to self-determination, and the recognition of traditional and historic Syrian fishing rights in certain areas of lake Tiberius. In the same month, a Syrian mediator attempted to meet with Eliyahu Sasson’s assistant in Paris to directly discuss a peace treaty. He was instantly turned down because the Israelis believed that any negotiation with Syria meant discussing the division of water sources, which Israel wanted to control in their entirety.\nFollowing a coup in Damascus, Husni al-Zaim seized power and offered Israel even more concessions. As a matter of fact, he suggested meeting Ben Gurion face to face to negotiate a full-fledged peace. Not only that, he offered absorbing and resettling 300,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria. The US was enthusiastic about this development, the Israelis however, were indifferent and refused the offer. Ben Gurion wanted to force an agreement through military might only. Israeli historian Avi Shlaim wrote that:\n\n“During his brief tenure of power [Zaim] gave Israel every opportunity to bury the hatchet and lay the foundations for peaceful coexistence in the long term. If his overtures were spurned, if his constructive proposals were not put to the test, and if a historic opportunity was frittered away . . . the fault must be sought not with Zaim but on the Israeli side.”\n\nThis refusal is only perplexing if you have internalized the idea that Israel actually sought peace, and not that it used it as a charade to justify its brazen expansionism. This would not be the only time Israelis could have avoided war but chose to pursue territorial gains instead.Hoping to repeat the success of 1948, Israel purposefully marched into the 1967 war despite all the claims of it being a defensive war of no-choice. This becomes exceedingly clear once we examine the diplomatic record, and the numerous times Israel sabotaged any attempt at mediation or diplomacy to avert the outbreak of war.\nFor example, throughout much of the crisis of 1967 Egypt expressed its willingness to resurrect and expand the Egyptian-Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission (EIMAC), which was officially rejected by Israel in May. In the same month, the UN secretary-General U Thant, personally attempted to avert an escalation by travelling to Cairo to mediate between the Egyptians and Israelis. He came with a proposal which called for a two week moratorium in the straits of Tiran . Egypt agreed to the proposal in an attempt to lower tensions. Israel rejected the proposal. Brian Urquhart, who was a senior UN official at the time, wrote in his memoir that “Israel, no doubt having decided on military action, turned down U Thant’s ideas“.\nThis is hardly the only attempt at averting an escalation, the United States also tried its hand at mediation. High ranking American diplomats and politicians met with Nasser in late May in a meeting that was deemed a “breakthrough in the crisis”. In this meeting Nasser showed flexibility and a willingness to include the World Court to arbitrate in some of the issues. However, what was most promising was that Nasser agreed to send his vice-president to Washington within a week in an attempt to reach a diplomatic settlement for the crisis.\nYou may be wondering why you’ve never heard of such a meeting, or what its results were. That is because two days before the meeting, Israel decided to launch its surprise attack, torpedoing all efforts to reach a non-violent diplomatic solution to the crisis.\nThis shocked even the Americans, Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State wrote that:\n\n“They attacked on a Monday, knowing that on Wednesday the Egyptian vice-president would arrive in Washington to talk about re-opening the Strait of Tiran. We might not have succeeded in getting Egypt to reopen the strait, but it was a real possibility.”\n\nFollowing the diplomatic developments of the time leaves no shadow of a doubt that Israel was purposely seeking war. It rebuffed all attempts at mediation and even deceived and humiliated its ally, the United States, by allowing it to continue with the charade of diplomacy when Israel knew it was going to attack anyway. On the other hand, this shows Nasser to have been far more flexible, and amenable to diplomatic solutions than many suggest. Yet until this day, Israel is portrayed as being forced into a defensive war, while Nasser is portrayed as a warmonger.\nIn his memoir, U Thant, the UN Secretary General at the time wrote that:\n\n“if only Israel had agreed to permit UNEF to be stationed on its side of the border, even for a short duration, the course of history could have been different. Diplomatic efforts to avert the pending catastrophe might have prevailed; war might have been averted.“\n\nThis was further confirmed by Odd Bull, chief of staff of  the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) at the time, who stated that:\n\n“it is quite possible that the 1967 war could have been avoided’ had Israel acceded to the Secretary-General’s request.“\n\nThere are many other examples where Israel chose war or the status-quo over peace to maintain its interests. During the Oslo Accords, the amount of Israeli settlement construction skyrocketed. This was embodied by Ariel Sharon’s quote over Israeli radio in 1998: “Everybody has to move, run and grab as many [Palestinian] hilltops as they can to enlarge the [Jewish] settlements because everything we take now will stay ours… Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”\nEven the “dove” Rabin never agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian state, but a “state-minus” with no real sovereignty [you can read more about this here]. Like virtually all Israeli talking points, reality and history paint an entirely different picture than the one offered. However, with the proliferation of the internet and easier access to information, they are coming under considerable attack. A sign that Israel is losing the battle for hearts and minds is that it has now resorted to lawfare to make its case, such as its attempts to outlaw BDS. This is not the behavior of somebody secure in their narrative or their history.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+{
+	"text": "It was a war of “no choice”.\nIt was a war which would fatefully decide whether Israel would “live or perish”.\nIt was a war for survival, where an Israeli David defended itself from the Arab Goliath hell-bent on its elimination.\nThis is how the 1967 war is often described by Israelis. Unfortunately, this view is often uncritically regurgitated in the mainstream narrative of the war. Needless to say, this is pure revisionism with no basis in reality. Israel has managed to score a major propaganda victory when it convinced many that its wars are all defensive, even the one which it initiated through a sneak attack. It is a testament to the triumph of sophistry and confirmation bias over facts in the context of the Palestinian question.\nLet us look at the historical record and dismantle this myth piece by piece.\nAlthough it has become part of the conventional “wisdom” for many, the idea that Israel was pushed into a war it wanted nothing to do with collapses upon itself when the historical record of events is examined.\nThe 1967 war did not materialize out of a vacuum, nor should it be understood as such. The 1967 war was merely a continuation of Israel’s wars against the region to achieve maximum territorial expansion. Particularly, this war would finish what was begun in 1956, when Israel invaded Egypt with the help of Britain and France.\nThe United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) was created in the aftermath of the 1956 war on Egypt to secure peace, and patrol both sides of the border between Egypt and Israel. Despite being the aggressor, Israel refused to cooperate with the UN force, and rejected the idea of any peace-keeping force on their side of the border, meanwhile Egypt accepted the UN force and cooperated with them. Not only did Israel refuse to cooperate, but over its decade-long existence, Israeli troops “regularly patrolled alongside the line and now and again created provocations by violating it“.\nThis, however, was only the tip of the iceberg of Israeli provocations towards its neighbors. Much of Israel’s military actions were designed to goad Nasser into war, an example of this can be seen in the disproportionate Israeli assault on Gaza in 1955, or the assault on Samu in 1966, or the frequent unprovoked bombings of Syrian border positions. This is hardly our unique interpretation of events; at the time this was widely understood. For example the British ambassador in Israel explained that this tactic aimed to spawn a “deliberately contrived preventive war“.\nBut even if this is unconvincing to you, and you remain adamant that Israel was acting purely in self-defense, there is ample evidence to show that Israel was not intent on avoiding war. As mentioned, war was an opportunity to achieve many of its objectives, one of which is the expansion into territories not conquered in 1948, as Ben Gurion lamented. This becomes exceedingly clear once we examine the diplomatic record, and the numerous times Israel sabotaged any attempt at mediation or diplomacy to avert the outbreak of war.\nFor example, throughout much of the crisis of 1967 Egypt expressed its willingness to resurrect and expand the Egyptian-Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission (EIMAC), which was officially rejected by Israel in May. In the same month, the UN secretary-General personally attempted to avert an escalation by travelling to Cairo to mediate between the Egyptians and Israelis. He came with a proposal which called for a two-week moratorium in the straits of Tiran (Which we will be discussing shortly). Once again, Egypt agreed to the proposal in an attempt to lower tensions. Israel rejected the proposal. Brian Urquhart, who was a senior UN official at the time, wrote in his memoir that “Israel, no doubt having decided on military action, turned down U Thant’s ideas“.\nThis is hardly the only attempt at averting an escalation, the United States also tried its hand at mediation. High ranking American diplomats and politicians met with Nasser in late May in a meeting that was deemed a “breakthrough in the crisis”. In this meeting Nasser showed flexibility and a willingness to include the World Court to arbitrate in some of the issues. However, what was most promising was that Nasser agreed to send his vice-president to Washington within a week in an attempt to reach a diplomatic settlement for the crisis.\nYou may be wondering why you’ve never heard of such a meeting, or what its results were. That is because two days before the meeting, Israel decided to launch its surprise attack, torpedoing all efforts to reach a non-violent diplomatic solution to the crisis.\nThis shocked even the Americans, Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State wrote that:\n\n“They attacked on a Monday, knowing that on Wednesday the Egyptian vice-president would arrive in Washington to talk about re-opening the Strait of Tiran. We might not have succeeded in getting Egypt to reopen the strait, but it was a real possibility.”\n\nFollowing the diplomatic developments of the time leaves no shadow of a doubt that Israel was purposely seeking war. It rebuffed all attempts at mediation and even deceived and humiliated its ally, the United States, by allowing it to continue with the charade of diplomacy which Israel knew it was going to attack anyway. On the other hand, this shows Nasser to have been far more flexible, and amenable to diplomatic solutions than many suggest. Yet until this day, Israel is portrayed as being forced into a defensive war, while Nasser is portrayed as a warmonger.\nIn his memoir, U Thant, the UN Secretary General at the time, wrote that “if only Israel had agreed to permit UNEF to be stationed on its side of the border, even for a short duration, the course of history could have been different. Diplomatic efforts to avert the pending catastrophe might have prevailed; war might have been averted.” This was further confirmed by Odd Bull, chief of staff of  the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) at the time, who stated that “it is quite possible that the 1967 war could have been avoided’ had Israel acceded to the Secretary-General’s request.“\nIsrael had no interest in avoiding war, this much is clear. But let us delve a little bit deeper and inspect the pretexts it used for the justification of its sneak attack on Egypt, which it labeled as a “preemptive strike”.\n\nThe culmination of all the pretexts mentioned previously constituted -according to the Israeli narrative- a clear and present danger to the very existence of the Israeli state. This is why they had to attack Egypt, otherwise Israel would have been utterly destroyed. However, after reviewing these pretexts, the following becomes clear:\nIsrael was under no military threat from the Egyptian or Syrian militaries.\nAn ineffective, partial blockade on a minor port did not actually threaten it with strangulation.\nIsrael constantly and aggressively provoked its neighbors with raids, bombings and violations of UN resolutions.\nIsrael avoided every attempt at mediation or de-escalation, and chose to attack right before a meeting that could have eased tensions.\nVirtually every talking point Israel uses to justify this war is based on strategic omission and the manipulation of history.\nUnder no circumstance was Israel under an imminent threat of destruction, not even the Israelis believed that at the time. Israeli Minister Mordecai Bentov frankly admitted a few years later that:\n\n“This entire story about the danger of extermination was invented and exaggerated after the fact to justify the annexation of new Arab territories“.\n\nFor Israel, the 1967 war had nothing to do with “self-defense” and everything to do with finishing what it started in 1948 and 1956. It had to do with acquiring new territories and expanding, and it had to do with striking Nasser’s project before it could become too big of a threat.\nBen Gurion’s apprehension regarding Nasser was never a secret, he admitted that he:\n\n“..always feared that a personality might arise such as arose among the Arab rulers in the seventh century or like [Kemal Ataturk] who arose in Turkey after its defeat in the First World War. He raised their spirits, changed their character, and turned them into a fighting nation. There was and still is a danger that Nasser is this man.”\n\nWe should keep these lessons in mind whenever tackling any Israeli claim. We must never take these arguments at face value. We should always question and investigate. Truth is the best disinfectant, and Israel would not need to lie so brazenly if it truly believed its position to be a just or moral one. All will be revealed in time, and as we say “You can’t cover the sun with a sieve“.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "On the morning of June the 5th 1967, Israel launched a sneak attack on Egypt decimating its air force. Thus, began the 1967 war, which would last less than a week and enable Israel to finally conquer the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Egyptian Sinai desert and the Syrian Golan heights. Israel claims to this day that these strikes were preemptive self-defense, citing a number of concerns, such as Nasser’s forces in Sinai, the closing of the straits of Tiran and the situation in the Syrian Golan heights. As per usual, these claims should not be taken at face value, as even the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages which had signed non-aggression pacts with the Yishuv was framed as self-defense. If you are interested in a detailed debunking of these pretexts, you can [read more about this here].\nThe 1967 war did not materialize out of a vacuum, nor should it be understood as such. It constituted a continuation of Israel’s wars against the region to achieve maximum territorial expansion. Particularly, this war would finish what began in 1956. Following the political defeat in the previous war, much of Israel’s military actions were designed to goad Nasser and other Arab leaders into an attack, an example of this can be seen in the disproportionate Israeli assault on Samu in 1966, or the frequent unprovoked bombings of Syrian border positions. This is hardly our unique interpretation of events; at the time this was widely understood. For example the British ambassador in Israel explained that this tactic aimed to spawn a “deliberately contrived preventive war“.\nThere is ample evidence to show that Israel was intent on provoking a war. This war would finally give them an opportunity to expand into territories not conquered in 1948, as Ben Gurion lamented. This becomes exceedingly clear once we examine the diplomatic record, and the numerous times Israel sabotaged any attempt at mediation or diplomacy to avert the outbreak of war.\nFor example, throughout much of the crisis of 1967 Egypt expressed its willingness to resurrect and expand the Egyptian-Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission (EIMAC), which was officially rejected by Israel in May. In the same month, the UN secretary-General personally attempted to avert an escalation by traveling to Cairo to mediate between the Egyptians and Israelis. Once again, Egypt agreed to the proposal in an attempt to lower tensions. Israel rejected the proposal. Brian Urquhart, who was a senior UN official at the time, wrote in his memoir that “Israel, no doubt having decided on military action, turned down [UN General Secretary] U Thant’s ideas“.\nThere were many other attempts at averting an escalation, for instance, the United States also tried its hand at mediation. High ranking American diplomats and politicians met with Nasser in late May in a meeting that was deemed a “breakthrough in the crisis”. In this meeting Nasser showed flexibility and a willingness to include the World Court to arbitrate in some of the issues. However, what was most promising was that Nasser agreed to send his vice-president to Washington within a week in an attempt to reach a diplomatic settlement for the crisis.\nYou may be wondering why you’ve never heard of such a meeting, or what its results were. That is because two days before the meeting, Israel decided to launch its surprise attack, torpedoing all efforts to reach a non-violent diplomatic solution to the crisis.\nThis shocked even the Americans, Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State at the time wrote that:\n\n“They attacked on a Monday, knowing that on Wednesday the Egyptian vice-president would arrive in Washington to talk about re-opening the Strait of Tiran. We might not have succeeded in getting Egypt to reopen the strait, but it was a real possibility.”\n\nFollowing the diplomatic chain of events at the time leaves no shadow of a doubt that Israel was purposely seeking war. It rebuffed all attempts at mediation and even deceived and humiliated its ally, the United States, by allowing it to continue with the charade of diplomacy when Israel knew it was going to attack anyway. On the other hand, this shows Nasser to have been far more flexible, and amenable to diplomatic solutions than many suggest. Yet until this day, Israel is portrayed as being forced into a defensive war, while Nasser is portrayed as a warmonger.\nIn his memoir, U Thant, the UN Secretary General at the time wrote that “if only Israel had agreed to permit UNEF to be stationed on its side of the border, even for a short duration, the course of history could have been different. Diplomatic efforts to avert the pending catastrophe might have prevailed; war might have been averted.” This was further confirmed by Odd Bull, chief of staff of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) at the time, who stated that:\n\n“it is quite possible that the 1967 war could have been avoided’ had Israel acceded to the Secretary-General’s request.“\n\nThe revisionism surrounding the 1967 war is one of Israel’s most significant propaganda achievements. Suddenly, reality is flipped on its head, and the powerful aggressor becomes an underdog fighting to stave off extermination, though no such threat really existed. Israeli Minister Mordecai Bentov frankly admitted a few years after the war that:\n\n“This entire story about the danger of extermination was invented and exaggerated after the fact to justify the annexation of new Arab territories”.\n\nFollowing this war, Israel would come to control the entirety of what was once mandatory Palestine. The Jordanians and Egyptians were pushed out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip respectively, and these areas were now subjected to Israeli military occupation. In addition to this, the Syrian Golan Heights as well as the Sinai Peninsula were seized by Israel. Similar to the 1948 war, the 1967 war provided cover for more ethnic cleansing campaigns. By the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would be ethnically cleansed from various areas of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Over 100,000 Syrians would also be ethnically cleansed from the Golan Heights, and their villages and communities demolished and erased.\nThis defeat would come to be known as the Naksa, Arabic for setback. It would also crush the spirits of the Palestinians and the wider Arab population in general.After decades of perfecting colonial control mechanisms for Palestinians inside the green line, Israel was more than equipped to impose an effective military governing system on the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 1966, Israel would end its martial law regulations for Palestinian villages inside the green line only to impose them once again in the West Bank and Gaza Strip after its victory in 1967.\n\nThe military occupation of the West Bank -including East Jerusalem- and the Gaza Strip persist to this day. This new status quo allowed Israel to pursue its goals of colonizing the rest of the territory that made up mandatory Palestine. It is in this context that the Allon plan emerged. Named after its creator, Yigal Allon, this plan would see Israel permanently seizing control of vast territories of the West Bank through multiple methods, such as through military installations as well as settlements. The large Palestinian population centers would then either be given some form of nominal autonomy, or have their control transferred to the Jordanian monarchy.\nIt was according to this plan that the colonial settlement enterprise in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was birthed. Settlements are colonies built on land under Israeli occupation outside the green line, and are open only to Jewish Israelis. Initially, Israel constructed settlements in all the territories it seized in the 1967 war, including the Sinai and Golan heights. For reasons which we will discuss in the next articles, the settlements in the Gaza Strip and Sinai were dismantled over time. However, in the West Bank and Golan heights, this has only worsened. There are over 200 settlements and outposts dotting the entirety of these areas. These settlements are home to over 600,000 settlers, living on stolen and occupied territory. According to international law, these settlements are absolutely illegal, and their existence is a stark violation of the Geneva conventions and other international norms.\nIf you were to look at the distribution of these settlements all across the West Bank, you will notice that there is a striking resemblance between their positions and the territory outlined in the Allon plan to be permanently seized by Israel. This is by design, and Israeli policy since the 60s has been to change the facts on the ground as much as possible so as to enable the theft of these lands. This colonization drive persists to this very day through various annexations and land confiscations, and did not even stop during times of peace negotiations. As a matter of fact, it accelerated during times of negotiations because the Israelis knew that the Palestinians would not want to jeopardize the negotiations they so desperately needed to establish a state. In addition to the settlements, the West Bank is dissected by military firing ranges, nature reserves and many other legalistic schemes to deny Palestinians access. This dissection is so severe, that the West Bank has jokingly come to be known as the West Bank archipelago, where small pockets of Palestinians are surrounded by Israeli controlled zones. This will be further elaborated upon in the next introductory article.Despite the death of Nasser, Egypt remained determined to take back the territories it lost in the 1967 war. With the help of Syria, who had also lost its Golan Heights, they put together a plan to retake control of their occupied areas. This came in the form of the 1973 war, which was a gamechanger in the region.\nIn the first hours of the war, Egypt under the leadership of Anwar Sadat, was able to cross the Suez Canal and overwhelm the Bar Lev line, which was constructed by Israel to fend off any Egyptian attack. On the northern front, the Syrians were able to advance well into the occupied Golan heights. These early military victories were ultimately reversed as Israel strengthened its position with the aid of the United States. While the Arab forces would be repulsed, the war served as a warning sign to Israel that it cannot forever guarantee that it would always be a victor in war.\nThis laid the groundwork for the 1978 Camp David accords with Egypt, where the Sinai would be returned to Egypt (with certain stipulations), in exchange for peace, normalization and the Egyptian recognition of Israel. Furthermore, the fledgling Israeli colonies in the Sinai would be dismantled. Egypt would be the first Arab state to officially recognize Israel, and would begin to reorient itself towards the United States and the West Bloc.\nAmong the various clauses and provisions of the Camp David accords was the condition that the rights of the Palestinian people were to be recognized, and that some form of autonomy would be granted to the Palestinians. While vague and noncommittal, this would eventually pave the way for the secret negotiations between the PLO and Israel.\nThe Syrians, however, would not fare as well. The Syrian Golan heights remain occupied to this day, and the state of war between Syria and Israel has technically never ended. Israel has used this as a pretext to illegally annex the Golan heights, and colonize it in a manner similar to the West Bank and East Jerusalem.\nThis new status quo, and the perceived shift in the balance of power would ultimately culminate in the Palestinian Intifada and the Oslo accords, which would for the first time allow the PLO leadership to return to Palestine in an endeavor to establish a Palestinian state. This will be discussed in depth in the next article.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "Today the Two State Solution refers to the diplomatic process finding its roots in the 1970s which called for establishing a sovereign Palestinian state next to Israel. The first bilateral breakthrough in this process materialized in the -at the time- secret Oslo Accords where Palestinians, represented by the PLO, and Israelis agreed upon a declaration of principles that would lead to creating the Palestinian Authority as an interim government that would supposedly pave the way for a final settlement. These accords were mostly a declaration of principles which did not contain any parameters for how such a state would even look. As a matter of fact, the word “state” with regards to Palestinians was never mentioned once. It was two years later, in what is referred to as Oslo II, taking place in the Egyptian city of Taba, that negotiations earnestly began. In these negotiations more concrete parameters were discussed, and the logistics as well as method for instating the Palestinian Authority on the ground.\nNeedless to say, that state has failed to materialize, and the so-called peace process has been used as a cover to accelerate Israeli colonization in the West Bank, as well as to subsidize the occupation of Palestinians through the international community under the guise of state-building.\nWhat this approach to a solution neglects, is that Israel is not a normal state. It is a settler colony . We are not talking about two naturally occurring populations which have a land dispute. Israelis are descended from settlers that arrived from abroad with the goal of erecting an ethnocratic settler state in an area that was already home to the Palestinians.This approach is also inadequate to right historical wrongs, as it focuses on the pre-1967 borders as a starting point, which are in themselves a product of this colonization, and not the root cause of it. It is thus preoccupied with finding solutions to symptoms, rather than dare address the root cause, which is Zionist settler colonialism and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.\nThis automatically means that Palestinians must relinquish any rights or hopes for their millions of refugees, and it also means that Palestinians must relinquish their rights to live in over 80% of the land they were ethnically cleansed from. It also means that resource distribution, from water to fertile land, will be heavily stacked in Israel’s favor.\nAll of these shortcomings are often countered with the assertion that Palestinians must compromise to reach peace. Israeli control is treated as a fait accompli and that Palestinians must deal with it, rather than ask for justice. This is the whole premise of the two-state solution, that Palestinians must compromise on their rights to be granted a small, powerless sham of a state in part of their homeland. Israel, of course was not asked to compromise on anything substantial. The only compromise asked of Israelis is to stop its violation of international law, which it should cease regardless of any negotiation with the Palestinians. This attitude basically boils down to “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is negotiable.”.\nYet despite all of this, Palestinians were willing to agree to these terms. The PLO was willing to give up on the Palestinian people’s historical rights in order to find peace and have a state. But even that was not sufficient for Israelis. Even Rabin, who is considered a holy martyr for peace among the Israeli peace camp, was not prepared to give the Palestinians a state. He spoke of a sham “state-minus” with no sovereignty, and the offers did not get better than that throughout the history of negotiation.\nHas it never once sounded suspicious to you how Israelis focus on the number of “peace offers” that were refused by the Palestinians, but never once discussed the actual parameters or substance in detail?\nBecause when these parameters are discussed, it becomes clear that these are terms nobody could accept. So even when Palestinians accepted the 1967 borders, a very limited return of refugees, and other compromises, this was still not good enough for Israel that sought to shrink the Palestinian Bantustan even further. These arrangements seek to formalize the status quo with cosmetic changes. Netanyahu promised that no Palestinian state will emerge, and in the case of any limited self-rule arrangement for the Palestinians, he spoke about a permanent IDF presence in the West Bank, as well as Israeli control of the borders and airspace. These are the amazing “opportunities” that Palestinians have been declining, and as a result are being painted as warmongering rejectionists for doing so.\nAs it stands, Palestinian aspirations cannot exceed the ceiling of Israeli table scraps.\nIt should be mentioned that such arrangements were also concocted for the various Bantustans in Apartheid South Africa. What all of these arrangements have in common, is that they are designed specifically to dance around settler colonialism, and to try and find a “solution” comfortable for the settlers which do not harm any expansionist ambitions. In this way Palestinians are pushed to compromise until there is nothing left to compromise on, they are now even being pushed to compromise on having actual borders.Naturally, there are other ways to answer the question of Palestine outside the dominant paradigm of the two state solution. Some scholars and activists are calling for a decolonized state for all of those between the river and the sea.  However, this would necessitate that Zionists relinquish their ideology of ethnic supremacy.\nThis is hardly a new or radical position, such an entity was suggested by the Arab states as a counter-proposal to the 1947 partition plan. Naturally, this was rejected by the Zionists. That we barely ever hear about the offers that the Yishuv/Israel rejected should be an indicator of the nature of mainstream discussions on Palestine and the silencing of Palestinian voices. The Palestinian Liberation Organization also called for establishing a secular, democratic unitary state for all its citizens. Naturally, none of these proposals included genocide, ethnic cleansing or mass murder.\nThese anxieties are not unique to Jewish Israelis, settlers in many different colonies throughout history have echoed these same sentiments. If we were to take a look at the narrative surrounding anti-Apartheid South Africa activism and boycotts, we would find eerily similar projections and arguments.\nFor example, In an article for the Globe and Mail under the title “The good side of white South Africa” Kenneth Walker argued that ending the Apartheid system and giving everyone an equal vote would be a “a recipe for slaughter in South Africa”. Others, such as Shingler, echoed similar claims, saying that anti-racist activists were actually not interested in ending Apartheid as a policy, but in South Africa as a society. Others came out to claim these activists were actually motivated by “anti-white racism”, fueled by “Black imperialism”. Political comics displayed a giant soviet bear, bearing down on South Africa declaring “We shall drive South Africa into the Sea!”\nSound familiar?\nYet even when it is rarely acknowledged that Palestinian refugees were wronged, and deserve to return home, the refrain is that while it is tragic, it is the only way to keep the Jewish people safe. Once again, this pretense is hardly unique to Jewish Israelis, as a matter of fact, similar arguments were used against the abolition of slavery in the United States. For example, Thomas Jefferson likened slavery to a wolf:\n\n“we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”\n\nHow utterly ridiculous this all sounds now.\nWhile the first approach is crude and vile propaganda, designed to instigate fear and panic, it is par for the course for settler societies. Perhaps the second approach stands out a little bit more for its brazen attempt at manipulation. In a final endeavor to center their experiences and erase their victims, settlers frame themselves as the stars of their own tragedy, in the end they were the tragic victims of fate, forced to wield injustice for the sake of self-preservation.\nUnderlying the logic of both of these approaches are racist assumptions that the colonized are barbaric, bloodthirsty and ruthless. It is a deeply dehumanizing logic, steeped in every colonial and Orientalist trope. The idea that a decolonized, free Palestine would inevitably lead to genocide comes from this same logic. As a matter of fact, for all the claims of the Palestinians wanting to push Israelis into the sea, only the opposite has occurred in reality.\n\nRegardless of your ideological leanings, the reality is that we are already living under a de facto one-state reality. Israeli politicians proudly boast about never allowing a Palestinian state to materialize. Israeli school books already erase the green line. Israel already rules the lives of everyone there. Palestinians calling for the dissolution of this naked colonialism is legitimate and just. The fact that Palestinians are even asked to guarantee the well-being and welfare of their oppressors as they are killed, imprisoned and brutally repressed daily is a testament to their utter dehumanization.\n\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "Sustaining this argument requires some glaring lies of omission and manipulation of facts. I believe it is important to scrutinize this claim, and this can only be done by conveying a historically accurate depiction of the debates and context surrounding partition.\nBefore we can talk about partition, however, we need to talk about those demanding partition. Based on the Israeli narrative, this would be “the Jewish people”. This is a dishonest assertion and is often uncritically accepted by many.\nThis line of thought conflates the Jewish people with Zionism, an ideology finding its origins in Europe in the late 1800s. At the time, the Jewish people were largely uninterested in Zionism. As a matter of fact many groups were fiercely anti-Zionist. The attempt to conflate the two is an attempt to give legitimacy to self-professed settlers from Europe, and portray any criticism of the Zionist project as inherently antisemitic.\nYet in the early days, the Zionist movement was astonishingly honest about its existence as a form of colonialism. The founding fathers of Zionism, such as Herzl, Nordau, Ussishkin and Jabotinsky –among others- employed the same colonial tropes and tactics used by Europeans to legitimize their imperialism. Not only was Zionism colonialism in practice, but Zionists openly referred to it as such; for example, Herzl sought counsel from Cecil Rhodes on how best to proceed with the process of colonization, describing Zionism as ‘something colonial’. To drive this point even further, the first Zionist bank established was named the ‘Jewish Colonial Trust’ and the whole endeavor was supported by the ‘Palestine Jewish Colonization Association’ and the ‘Jewish Agency Colonization Department’.\nAt the end of the day it was a group of European settlers claiming an already inhabited land for an exclusivist ethnic state, while planning to ‘spirit the penniless population across the border’ through various means. Modern attempts to retroactively whitewash Zionism, and portray it merely as a movement for self-determination, cannot escape these facts .When partition is brought up in the historical sense, it is not surprising that most tend to think of the 1947 UNGA resolution. However, this was not the first partition scheme to be presented. In 1919, for example, the World Zionist Organization put forward a ‘partition’ plan, which included all of historical Palestine, parts of Lebanon, Syria and Transjordan. At the time, the Jewish population of this proposed state would not have even reached 2-3% of the total population.\nNaturally, such a proposal did not see the light of day, but it is an indication of the entitlement of the Zionist movement in wanting to establish an ethnic state in an area where they were so utterly outnumbered. To put this into context, even after waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, and a much smaller area allocated to the Jewish state in the 1947 partition plan, the proposed Jewish state would not have had a Jewish majority without additional immigration and settlement. As even on the eve of the Nakba, the Jewish population in mandatory Palestine was less than a third.\nIf we consider that most of this population arrived during the 4th and 5th Aliyot (Between 1924-1939), then the majority of those demanding partition of the land had barely been living there for 20 years at the most. To make matters worse, the UN partition plan allotted approximately 56% of the land of mandatory Palestine to the Jewish state.\nWhy, then, were Palestinians expected to agree to give away most of their land to a minority of recently arrived settlers? Why is the rejection of such a ridiculously unjust proposal framed as irrational or hateful?\nJabotinsky understood clearly what establishing Israel meant for the natives; he did not mince words, in his 1923 essay The Iron Wall he wrote that:\n\n‘Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised’.\n\nWhat was being asked of Palestinians was nothing short of rubber-stamping their own colonization with approval. Nobody should be expected to agree to that.Yet for some, this is not seen as convincing reasoning for the rejection of partition. They acknowledge the obscene injustice of what was being asked of Palestinians, yet they argue that due to the historical persecution of the Jewish people, and fresh off the heels of the Holocaust, creating a Jewish state at the expense of Palestinians was a historic necessity.\nWhile such justifications serve mainly to assuage guilt, I argue that there is also a practical reason for why accepting or rejecting partition was irrelevant to the grand scheme of Zionist colonization of Palestine.\nIt is often brought up how the Yishuv agreed to the 1947 partition plan, showing good will and a readiness to coexist and live with their Palestinian neighbors. While this may seem true on the surface, a cursory glance at internal Yishuv meetings paints an entirely different picture. Partition as a concept was entirely rejected, and any acceptance in public was tactical in order for the newly created Jewish state to gather its strength before expanding .\nWhile addressing the Zionist Executive, Ben Gurion reemphasized that any acceptance of partition would be tactical and temporary:\n\n“After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”\n\nThis was not a one-time occurrence, and neither was it only espoused by Ben Gurion. Internal debates and letters illustrate this time and time again. Even in letters to his family, Ben Gurion wrote that “A Jewish state is not the end but the beginning” detailing that settling the rest of Palestine depended on creating an “elite army”. As a matter of fact, he was quite explicit:\n\n“I don’t regard a state in part of Palestine as the final aim of Zionism, but as a mean toward that aim.”\n\nChaim Weizmann expected that:\n\n“partition might be only a temporary arrangement for the next twenty to twenty-five years”.\n\nSo even ignoring the moral question of requiring the natives to formally green-light their own colonization, had the Palestinians agreed to partition they most likely still would not have had an independent state today. Despite what was announced in public, internal Zionist discussions make it abundantly clear that this would have never been allowed.\nPartition today remains as immoral as it was when first presented, a band-aid solution and a cure for a symptom which overlooks the root cause. Any settlement that is achieved without justice or accountability merely buries the issues in exchange for short-lived quiet; but no matter how long it takes, silenced and ignored grievances will resurface. This becomes exceedingly clear when observing the situation of our comrades in South Africa today.\nThe demise of the Oslo accords can serve as a catalyst to challenge the fixation on the pre-1967 war borders. Reducing the question of Palestine to partition and occupation overlooks crucial components of the struggle. Many may prefer to ignore said components; however, if true justice is our goal, then they must be discussed and confronted. We must start from the beginning and reject any urges to whitewash history.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "For instance, Deir Yassin was a small, pastoral village west of Jerusalem. The village was determined to remain neutral, and as such refused to have Arab soldiers stationed there. Not only were they neutral, they also had a non-aggression pact signed with the Haganah. This, however, did not save it from its fate, as it was in the territory of the Jewish state lined out in Plan D.\nThis meant that not only was it to be destroyed and have its population ethnically cleansed, an example needed to be made of it as to inspire terror in the surrounding villages. As a result, this massacre was particularly monstrous.\nOn April 9th 1948, Zionist forces attacked the village of Deir Yassin under the cover of darkness. The Zionist forces shot indiscriminately and killed dozens of Palestinian civilians in their own homes. The number of those murdered ranges from roughly 100 to over 150, depending on estimation.\nPerhaps one of the most graphic witness testimonials comes from Othman Akel:\n[Warning:  Explicit descriptions of torture and violence. Click to skip]\n\n“I saw the Zionist terrorist soldiers ordering the bakery man of the village to throw his son in the oven and burn him alive. The son is holding the clothes of his father tightly and crying from fear and pleading to his father not to do it. the father refuses and then the soldiers hit him in his gut so hard it caused him to fall on the floor. Other soldiers held his son, Abdel Rauf, and threw him in the oven and told his father to toast him well-done meat. Other soldiers took the baker himself , Hussain al-Shareef, and threw him, too, in the oven, telling him, “follow your son, he needs you there”.\n\nOther stories include tying a villager to a tree before burning him, rape and disembowelment. Dead villagers were thrown into pits by the dozen. Many were decapitated or mutilated. Houses were looted and destroyed. A number of prisoners were taken, put in cuffs, and paraded around West Jerusalem as war trophies, before being executed and dumped in the village quarry.\n\n[End of explicit descriptions of torture and violence]\nThe village posed no threat and was not part of any military action. It is also noteworthy that because the village had a non-aggression pact with the Haganah, it was the Stern and Lehi that carried out this massacre. The Yishuv offered a few words of condemnation, but later the name of Deir Yassin would be seen listed next to successful operations. In the future, there would not even be the charade of caring about non-aggression pacts or the neutrality of villages that were designated for ethnic cleansing.\nThere was absolutely nothing defensive about these actions. They were designed to change demographic realities that the Zionists found inconvenient, as even the proposed Jewish state would not have had a Jewish majority without additional settlers.\nEven internally, the Yishuv acknowledged that it had the power to impose a new status quo regardless of what the Palestinians thought, Cabinet Minister Ezra Danin believed that:\n\n“..the majority of the Palestinian masses accept the partition as a fait accompli and do not believe it possible to overcome or reject it.”\nThis talking point also neglects to mention the enormous efforts behind the scenes aimed at avoiding war, not to mention ending it early when it did eventually break out. These efforts were heavily sponsored by the United States, who asked in March 1948 that all military activities be ceased, and asked the Yishuv to postpone any declaration of statehood and to give time for negotiations. Outside of Abdallah, the Arabs accepted this initiative by the United States. However, it was rejected by Ben Gurion, who knew that any peaceful implementation of the partition plan meant that the refugees he had expelled earlier would have a chance to return, not to mention that war would offer him a chance to conquer the lands outside the partition plan that he coveted.\nThis was the Zionist aim from the outset, as even in the earliest discussions of partition, Zionists emphasized that any acceptance of partition was merely tactical and temporary. Ben Gurion argued that:\n\n“[I am] satisfied with part of the country, but on the basis of the assumption that after we build up a strong force following the establishment of the state–we will abolish the partition of the country and we will expand to the whole Land of Israel.”\n\nThis was not a one-time occurrence, and neither was it only espoused by Ben Gurion. Internal debates and letters illustrate this time and time again. Even in letters to his family, Ben Gurion wrote that “A Jewish state is not the end but the beginning” detailing that settling the rest of Palestine depended on creating an “elite army”. As a matter of fact, he was quite explicit:\n\n“I don’t regard a state in part of Palestine as the final aim of Zionism, but as a mean toward that aim.”\n\nChaim Weizmann expected that:\n\n“partition might be only a temporary arrangement for the next twenty to twenty-five years”.\n\nWhen the Arab states finally reluctantly intervened, they arrived for the most part in the areas designated for the Arab Palestinian state per the 1947 partition plan. They were not interested in war and despite their propaganda and rhetoric, sought different secret opportunities to end the war with Israel, which were rejected by the latter with the goal of maximizing its land-grabs. .\nFor example, there were negotiations between Israel and Egypt in October 1948, where based on previous correspondences, Egypt was prepared to offer many concessions in exchange for peace, even offering to resettle the Palestinian refugees in the UN decreed “Arab” areas of Palestine. Four days after Israeli politician Eliyahu Sasson went to meet with Heikal, chairman of the Egyptian senate, Ben Gurion launched a new military operation. Naturally, this put an end to any negotiation and with it, any attempt at avoiding bloodshed.\nFrom their side, the Syrians also attempted to end the war at the beginning of 1949, where prime minister al-Azm informed the US ambassador of their desire to stop the fighting. The only conditions they put forward was that Palestinians be afforded the right to self-determination, and the recognition of traditional and historic Syrian fishing rights in certain areas of lake Tiberius. In the same month, a Syrian mediator attempted to meet with Eliyahu Sasson’s assistant in Paris to directly discuss a peace treaty. He was instantly turned down because the Israelis believed that any negotiation with Syria meant discussing the division of water sources, which Israel wanted to control in their entirety.\nFollowing a coup in Damascus, Husni al-Zaim seized power and offered Israel even more concessions. As a matter of fact, he suggested meeting Ben Gurion face to face to negotiate a full-fledged peace. Not only that, he offered absorbing and resettling 300,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria. The US was enthusiastic about this development, the Israelis however, were indifferent and refused the offer. Ben Gurion wanted to force an agreement through military might only. Israeli historian Avi Shlaim wrote that:\n\n“During his brief tenure of power [Zaim] gave Israel every opportunity to bury the hatchet and lay the foundations for peaceful coexistence in the long term. If his overtures were spurned, if his constructive proposals were not put to the test, and if a historic opportunity was frittered away . . . the fault must be sought not with Zaim but on the Israeli side.”\n\nThis followed a long series of Zionist rejections to overtures by the native Palestinians. In 1928, for example, the Palestinian leadership voted to allow Zionist settlers equal representation in the future bodies of the state, despite them being a minority who had barely just arrived. The Zionist leadership rejected this, of course. Even after this, in 1947 the Palestinians suggested the formation of a unitary state for all those living between the river and the sea to replace the mandate to no avail. There were many attempts at co-existence, but this simply would not have benefited the Zionist leadership who never intended to come to Palestine to live as equals.\n\nSo, in a sense, the 1948 war was only inevitable because Zionist expansionism and aims made it such. From their first arrival in Palestine, the settlers were intent on conquering the entirety of Palestine and erecting an exclusivist ethnocratic regime, and never had the intention of living peacefully with anyone else. As Chairman of the Jewish National Fund, Menachem Usishkin, so bluntly put it:\n\n“..the Arabs do not want us because we want to be the rulers. I will fight for this. I will make sure that we will be the landlords of this land . . . . because this country belongs to us not to them..”\n\nThe narrative of Israel emerging from an inevitable war of self-defense has little basis in reality, and is rather a reflection of ideological bias. It serves to justify what was done to the Palestinians and disguise the victimizers as the victims. It is therefore unsurprising that many other myths revolve around this talking point, such as the myth of Israel being a small and outnumbered David facing a mighty Arab Goliath . As with most Israeli talking points, when properly inspected and situated in their historical context, a different image emerges. It falls on us to make this sure that this image is accurately conveyed.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+{
+	"text": "Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:\nThe miraculous genesis of Israel was achieved through a heroic and desperate battle for survival. Outnumbered and outgunned, the fledgling Jewish state held its own against overwhelming military odds and persevered.\nI’m certain that such a narrative makes for some great story-telling, not to mention indoctrination; tales of plucky underdogs overcoming their powerful bullies have always resonated with people and elicited their sympathies. However, as far as foundational tales in the context of nation building tend to be, they are more mythology than reality. Such tall stories cannot withstand even elementary research or scrutiny.\nIt is not difficult to understand the allure of such a narrative for Israelis and their supporters, as it functions on multiple levels. It evokes a modern-day David and Goliath, which bestows moral superiority to the Zionist colonists, further reinforcing notions that they were favored by God, karma, justice, the universe or whatever metaphysical force you believe in (or don’t). This interplays wonderfully with the claimed Israeli purity of arms (Tohar HaNeshek) where Israeli weapons are framed as “pure” because they are used only in self-defence and never against innocents . It also serves to augment Zionist claims of technical superiority over the natives, as a small number of the enlightened and civilized colonists managed to hold out against seven whole nations! If this isn’t further proof that they are more deserving of the land by virtue of their ingenuity and strength then nothing is.\nUnfortunately, as many myths regarding Israel tend to be, this is an enduring one that is still widespread today, especially within Israel itself. Up until relatively recently it was virtually unchallenged in the world outside the Arab states and those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. It began to be challenged seriously with the advent of the so-called Israeli New Historians, who with access to declassified Israeli war archives offered a “new”, more critical look at Israel’s foundational myths. As far as Orientalism goes, this is nothing new, Palestinian and Arab claims are often dismissed as biased and unscientific, while Israeli claims are accepted with hardly any scrutiny at all. For example, the Palestinian narrative of the Nakba, including acknowledging the ethnic cleansing and war crimes committed by Zionist militias did not even earn a glance from Western audiences until it was confirmed by Israeli scholars, but this is a different topic for a different article.\nAvi Shlaim argues that the disconnect between the Israeli narrative and reality is further aided by the fact that:\n\n“Most of the voluminous literature on the war was written not by professional historians but by participants, by politicians, soldiers, official historians and by a large host of sympathetic chroniclers, journalists, biographers and hagiographers.”\n\nTherefore, most “historical” writings on the war are relegated to the realm of political claim-making rather than honestly reflecting the history and events of the war.\nWith this in mind, what does the historical data say on the question of Israelis being outnumbered in the 1948 war?\n\nUnsurprisingly, the data says that it was in fact the Arab armies which were outnumbered. The actual debate here is about the degree to which the Arab armies were outnumbered. Let us look at a few sources:\nLet us begin with the numbers of John Glubb, commander of the Arab Legion during the war, who estimated that on May 15th -the outbreak of the war- the numbers of troops were roughly as follows:\n\nCountry\nNumber of soldiers\n\nEgypt\n10000\n\nTransjordan\n4500\n\nIraq\n3000\n\nSyria\n3000\n\nLebanon\n1000\n\nArab total\n21500\n\nIsrael total\n65000\n\nHow could this be? How could such a numerical advantage be swept under the rug and be so grossly misrepresented? Perhaps as commander of the Arab Legion, he purposefully exaggerated the number of Israeli troops, and downplayed the number of Arab troops.\nLet us look at another source, this time the estimates of the brothers Kimche, who have been very vocal about their Zionism. They estimated the balance of power on May the 15th as such:\n\nCountry\nNumber of soldiers\n\nALA\n2000\n\nEgypt\n10000\n\nTransjordan\n4500\n\nIraq\n3000\n\nSyria\n3000\n\nLebanon\n1000\n\nArab total\n23500\n\nIsrael total\n25000\n\nThe main differences in these estimates, is that Kimche added the Arab Liberation Army to their estimates for the Arab side, and trimmed the Israeli total down to 25000. Even in this very conservative estimate, the Israeli army outnumbered every single Arab army combined. But what is the reason for such a large discrepancy? How did 65000 become 25000?\nWalid Khalidi sheds some light on this, as he differentiates between first-line mobilized Zionist soldiers and second-line troops in the settlements. Glubb partially accounted for these in his numbers, Kimche elected to omit them completely. Here are Khalidi’s numbers:\n\nCountry\nNumber of soldiers\n\nALA\n3830\n\nPalestinian Arabs\n2563\n\nEgypt\n2800\n\nTransjordan\n4500\n\nIraq\n4000\n\nSyria\n1876\n\nLebanon\n700\n\nArab total\n20269\n\nIsrael first-line\n27000\n\nIsrael second-line\n90000+\n\nIsrael total\n117000+\n\nShlaim goes even further and estimates that the number of first-line Israeli troops was at 35000 on May 15th. So even if we were to omit these second-line forces -for some reason- there is a solid scholarly consensus that it was actually the Arab armies that were outnumbered. Remember that these numbers are for May 15th, the first day of the war. The numbers did not remain static. As a matter of fact, the longer the war went on for, the more the numerical gap between the sides widened in Israel’s favor. Between March and July, almost 13,000 trained men arrived from abroad to join the war on the Israeli side, by mid-June Ben Gurion noted that the IDF stood at 41,000, in addition to the 90,000 second line units as a complement to the IDF. There were efforts to increase these 90000 to 112000. The Arab states also reinforced their armies, but they were never able to keep up with the numbers of the Israeli side. At the end stages of the war, the Israeli army actually outnumbered the Arab armies by 2 to 1. This is not even delving into the qualitative difference in troops, as many troops on the Israeli side had combat experience from the world wars as well as superior equipment and tools after the first truce.\n\nHowever, another aspect that is often ignored in this narrative is the inter-Arab rivalries and disunity that were the main cause for the intervention in 1948. Contrary to popular framings of the 1948 war, and despite their fiery rhetoric, the Arab countries and leaders were not interested in a war with Israel. Barely coming out from under colonialism, their actions during the war showed that they never really joined the war with eliminationist intent, as the popular narrative goes. The Jordanians were more interested in acquiring the West Bank as a stepping stone to their real ambition, which was Greater Syria. As a matter of fact, there is ample evidence of collusion between the Israelis and Jordanians during the 1948 war, with deals under the table pretty much gifting parts of the West Bank to Jordan in return for not interfering in other areas. This is why Glubb Pasha, commander of the Arab Legion, described the 1948 war as a “phoney war“.\nThe Egyptians intervened in an attempt to counter the Hashemite power-play that could change the balance of power in the region. This is why the Arab armies generally intervened in the territories of the mandate destined to be part of the Palestinian Arab state according to the 1947 partition plan, and with very few exceptions, stayed away from the area destined to be part of the Jewish state. Yes, support for Palestine and Palestinians played a large role in the legitimization of such interventions, but they were never the real reason behind them. As per usual when it comes to international relations, interests are always at the center of any maneuver despite the espoused noble and altruistic motivations.\nUltimately, Israel enjoyed a number of advantages which are often downplayed if not completely omitted from this “underdog” mythical version of history:\nSignificant superiority in numbers, technical and military training courtesy of veterans of the world wars, sympathetic allies in Europe who smuggled advanced weaponry and equipment and troops into the country, as well as a centralized command which ensured unity in goals, organization and tactics.\nIn short, there was nothing “miraculous” about the Israeli victory in 1948. The better organized, better armed and most numerous side won. This is why when spreading this narrative the only numbers mentioned are the number of Arab states that wanted to team up on Israel but still couldn’t win. This is an attempt to imply numerical superiority on the side of the Arab states without explicitly claiming it, as it is complete nonsense when even briefly researched.\nThe endurance of this myth stems from the desperate need of the Zionist settlers for the illusion of moral superiority in the foundation of their colony. After all, it is hard to sell the scrappy, righteous underdog survivor story if the numbers show you to be the top dog in this situation. This is not a uniquely Israeli quality, however, as in most foundational narratives, it is mostly myth legitimizing horrible acts of cruelty. One need look no further than foundational myths in other settler colonies like the United States or Canada to see how twisting and omitting history is used to legitimize the powers that be.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!\n\nSaid, Edward W. The war for Palestine: rewriting the history of 1948. Vol. 15. Cambridge University Press, 2001.\nInstitut des études palestiniennes (Beyrouth). From haven to conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine problem until 1948. Ed. Walid Khalidi. No. 2. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971.\nShlaim, Avi. Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist movement, and the partition of Palestine. Clarendon Press, 1988.\nShlaim, Avi. “The debate about 1948.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27.3, 1995: 287-304.\nPappe, Ilan. Britain and the Arab-Israeli conflict, 1948-51. Springer, 1988.\nFlapan, Simha. The birth of Israel: Myths and realities. London: Croom Helm, 1987.\nHughes, Matthew. “The Conduct of Operations: Glubb Pasha, the Arab Legion, and the First Arab–Israeli War, 1948–49.” War in History 26.4, 2019: 539-562."
+}
+{
+	"text": "Even before the establishment of Israel, the Zionist Yishuv worked tirelessly to cultivate a certain image for itself. Civilized, democratic, inventive, and above all, moral. This is why the claim of the moral superiority of the Zionist militias, and later the IDF, is central in the narrative of the Israeli state’s foundation.\nSimilar to other elements of this narrative, such as depicting the Zionist settlers as outnumbered underdogs facing an Arab goliath, this talking point becomes impossible to argue when presented with a factual historical record. As Shlaim notes, especially when it comes to the history of the 1948 war that:\n\n“Most of the voluminous literature on the war was written not by professional historians but by participants, by politicians, soldiers, official historians and by a large host of sympathetic chroniclers, journalists, biographers and hagiographers.”\n\nTherefore, much of the written “history” of the 1948 war is bare-faced propaganda with little basis in reality. This becomes exceedingly clear when it turns out that, for example, Israeli military forces outnumbered and outgunned the entirety of the Arab armies in the 1948 war, which is the complete opposite of the popular narrative of the scrappy Zionist underdog, persisting against the odds.\nA central aspect of the claims to the IDF’s morality is the concept of the “purity of arms”. Shlaim continues:\n\n“Of particular relevance here is the precept of tohar haneshek, or the “purity of arms,” which posits that weapons remain pure as long as they are used only for defensive purposes. This popular-heroic-moralistic version of the 1948 war is the one that is taught in Israeli schools and used extensively in the quest for legitimacy abroad. It is a prime example of the use of a nationalist version of history in the process of nation building.”\n\nNeedless to say, these claims about the IDF use of weapons only for self-defense have no bearing on reality.\nLet us take a brief look at the conduct of the IDF and its predecessors over the years, to show just how baseless this talking point. Naturally, this is by no means an exhaustive list, otherwise this article would be hundreds of pages long.\n\nIf the purity of arms dictates that weapons can only be used in defense, I find this difficult to reconcile with the Zionist assault and depopulation of approximately 600 Palestinian villages during the Nakba. I know what you are thinking, perhaps these villages were simply the battlefield and their destruction was a byproduct of the war?\nWhile this claim is put forward by many advocates of Israel, it has no evidence to support it. The evidence actually points to the purposeful ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to create a demographically viable Jewish ethnocracy, which went far outside the proposed borders of the UN partition plan .\nDeir Yassin is probably one of the better-known examples of Zionist war crimes during the Nakba.\nDeir Yassin was a small, pastoral village west of Jerusalem. The village was determined to remain neutral, and as such refused to have Arab soldiers stationed there. Not only were they neutral, they also had a non-aggression pact signed with the Haganah. This, however, did not save it from its fate, as it was in the territory of the Jewish state lined out in Plan D .\nThis meant that not only was it to be destroyed and have its population ethnically cleansed, an example needed to be made of it as to inspire terror in the surrounding villages. As a result this massacre was particularly monstrous.\nOn April 9th 1948, Zionist forces attacked the village of Deir Yassin under the cover of darkness. The Zionist forces shot indiscriminately and killed dozens of Palestinian civilians in their own homes. The number of those murdered ranges from roughly 100 to over 150, depending on estimation.\nPerhaps one of the most graphic witness testimonials comes from Othman Akel:\n[Warning:  Explicit descriptions of torture and violence. Click here to skip]\n\n“I saw the Zionist terrorist soldiers ordering the bakery man of the village to throw his son in the oven and burn him alive. The son is holding the clothes of his father tightly and crying from fear and pleading to his father not to do it. the father refuses and then the soldiers hit him in his gut so hard it caused him to fall on the floor. Other soldiers held his son, Abdel Rauf, and threw him in the oven and told his father to toast him well-done meat. Other soldiers took the baker himself , Hussain al-Shareef, and threw him, too, in the oven, telling him, “follow your son, he needs you there”.\n\nOther stories include tying a villager to a tree before burning him, rape and disembowelment. Dead villagers were thrown into pits by the dozen. Many were decapitated or mutilated. Houses were looted and destroyed. A number of prisoners were taken, put in cuffs, and paraded around West Jerusalem as war trophies, before being executed and dumped in the village quarry.\n[End of explicit descriptions of torture and violence]\nIt is important to note that this massacre was carried out before the 1948 war. It posed no threat and was not part of any military action. More recently, Zionist revisionists have tried to frame the massacre as a battle because the village guards put up resistance to the invading militias. In typical Zionist fashion, I’m certain that even had the villagers lain on the ground and died without resistance, they would have found a way to blame them for their deaths anyway.\nIt is also noteworthy that because the village had a non-aggression pact with the Haganah, it was the Stern and Lehi that carried out this massacre. The Yishuv offered a few words of condemnation, but later the name of Deir Yassin would be seen listed next to successful operations. In the future, there would not even be the charade of caring about non-aggression pacts or the neutrality of villages that were designated for ethnic cleansing.\nBut Deir Yassin is far from the only example. Al Dawayma was a Palestinian village that lay west of Al-Khalil (Hebron). According to Haganah records, the village was considered “Very friendly”. Meaning it had not host or participated in any attacks against the Yishuv. This, like Deir Yassin, did not spare them the brutality of the Zionist militias.\nOn October 8th 1948, the village was occupied by Battalion 89 of Brigade Eight, who committed some depraved acts upon the villagers. 20 armored cars invaded the village while soldiers attacked from another flank. The village guards couldn’t even respond, and the village fell with very little resistance.\nThe soldiers got out of their vehicles and started indiscriminately shooting villagers to force a panic and hurried depopulation of the village. Hundreds were killed, many of which were women and children. Villagers attempted to seek refuge in mosques and a close by shrine were shot by the dozens. Acts of barbarity were also reported by Zionist troops:\n[Warning:  Explicit descriptions of torture and violence. Click here to skip]\n\nBabies skulls cracked open, women raped and burned alive in houses, villagers stabbed to death.\n\n[End of explicit descriptions of torture and violence]\nThe village posed no threat, and was merely in the way of the expanding Jewish state that necessitated a Jewish demographic majority. So, it had to be eradicated.\n\nDespite how often this accusation is hurled at Palestinians, there is actually scant evidence to support it. However, perhaps the most overlooked aspect of this accusation is that it is a case of pure projection on part of Israel. Israel has been notorious in its use of Palestinians as human shields. As a matter of fact, many of investigations into alleged Palestinian use of human shields found that it was actually Israel that was using Palestinians as human shields. For example, they would force Palestinian civilians to check houses for traps, or handle suspicious objects, or tie them to military vehicles to discourage stone throwing.\nEven a simple search reveals hundreds of cases of Palestinians being used as human shields. In fact, using Palestinians as human shields was so popular that when the Israeli high court attempted to outlaw the practice the IDF actually appealed to have the decision reversed. I find it difficult to imagine any weapon or soldier remaining “pure” after using a child as a human shield .\n\nArbitrary arrest and standing trial in a military court is a staple of daily life for Palestinians. This also applies to Palestinian children who are not spared this blatantly illegal practice. Not only were children abducted from their homes in the middle of the night, most were tortured or abused in one way or another.\nAccording to Defense of Children and based on 739 testimonies of arrested children, approximately 74% of them experienced physical violence following their arrest. 95% had their hands tied, 86% were blindfolded, 49% were taken from their homes in the middle of the night. 64% faced verbal abuse, humiliation or intimidation. 74% were not informed of their rights. 96% were interrogated without the presence of a family member. 20% were subjected to stress positions, and 49% were forced under duress to sign documents in Hebrew, a language most Palestinian children do not speak or understand.\n\nThe destruction of non-military infrastructure and incurring massive losses in civilians is a deliberate policy which has come to be known as the Dahiya doctrine, where it was first practiced in the Dahiya area of Beirut.\nGadi Eizenkot was quoted as saying that:\n\n“We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage i destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.”\n\nThis is a direct admission that Israel sees civilian areas as military targets, and preemptively justifies their bombardment with accusations that Palestinians are using these civilians as human shields, which there is no evidence of.\n\nThe execution of captured prisoners of war by the IDF has been documented, Prior writes that:\n\n“The Israeli daily Ma’ariv (2 August 1995) exposed the killing of some 140 Egyptian prisoners of war, including forty-nine Egyptian workers in 1956 by the elite paratroop unit 890, on the orders of Rafael Eitan, who later became the IDF Chief-of-Staff, subsequently founded the Tzomet party and now serves as Minister of Agriculture and Environment Quality in the Netanyahu government. Israel’s ‘purity of arms’ culture was further rocked by the revelation of former Labour MK, Michael Ben-Zohar, that he had witnessed the fatal stabbing of three Egyptian PoWs by two Israeli chefs during the 1967 June War. Military historian and also former MK, Meir Pa’il knew of many instances in which soldiers had killed PoWs or Arab civilians. In response to these revelations Prime Minister Rabin regretted that ‘things have been said so far. I won’t add anything to this’“\n\nI don’t know about you, but I personally find that torturing children, taking civilians as human shields, massacring hundreds of defenseless villagers and executing prisoners of war does not sound very “pure” to me. And if you consider all of these atrocities to be committed under the guise of “defense” then we have very different definitions of the word.\nAt the end of the day, the IDF is an army, and like other armies it is there to commit violence. The difference is that other armies are acknowledged as such, while the IDF baselessly claims an elevated moral position for itself. But how does the IDF act when such atrocities come to light? Surely if it is such a moral army, then it would punish the perpetrators of these acts.\nPredictably, this is also an area where the IDF fails miserably to live up to its desired image.\nThe first instinct of the IDF in such circumstances is to deny the existence of the event, or even try and blame it on the Palestinians. They frame the event as “faked” or part of Pallywood . Only after the overwhelming evidence of these atrocities becomes viral and widespread, do the IDF admit that it was caused by them, and promise to investigate. As usual, these investigations are shams that are designed to shield the IDF from ICC prosecution, rather than seeking actual justice for its victims.\nThe case of Razan al Najjar is emblematic of this operational mode. She was a volunteer nurse who was shot tending to the wounded during the Gaza protests of 2018, even though she posed no danger.  The IDF began its usual mantra, blamed Hamas for her death, and even released an edited video to try and defame Al-Najjar and make it seem that she was being used as a human shield. This backfired when the full video was released that made no such claim. The whole issue was buried under the IDF’s “internal investigation” routine.\nBut even in the extremely rare cases where the investigations lead to a trial, and in the infinitesimally rarer cases it actually finds a soldier to be guilty, the “punishments” are rather laughable. For example, the commander found to be responsible for the Kufr Qassim massacre where 49 Palestinians were murdered in cold blood was fined 10 measly pennies for giving the order to open fire on civilians. His accomplices were sentenced to very light jail time, but were all pardoned and set free within a year. So even when these insulting sentences are given, it’s rare for an Israeli soldier to actually serve their full sentence.\nUltimately, the goal of propaganda is not to paint an accurate image of reality. The most effective variants of it is short, easy to remember, and corresponds to your worldview and biases. This is the case for all Israeli propaganda, much of which was considered the conventional wisdom when it came to the question of Palestine. However, thanks to the efforts of scholars and historians from all over the world, these myths and talking points no longer hold the sway they used to. This is not lost on advocates of Israel, which is why they have moved to try and censor and stifle Palestinian voices through legislation. It is up to us to make sure that Palestinian voices are heard and centered and let no Israeli myth pass unchallenged.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!\n\nKhalidi, Walid, Sharif S. Elmusa, and Muhammad Ali Khalidi. All that remains: The Palestinian villages occupied and depopulated by Israel in 1948. Institution for Palestine Studies, 1992.\nShlaim, Avi. “The debate about 1948.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27.3, 1995: 287-304.\nPappe, Ilan. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Simon and Schuster, 2007."
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+{
+	"text": "From its earliest days, the Zionist movement was well-aware of the existence of the Palestinian natives. Even though the claim was “A land without a people for a people without a land” what they truly meant is that the land had no people worth talking about. This becomes exceedingly clear when reading the discussions of early Zionists, such as Chaim Weizmann, who when asked about the inhabitants of Palestine responded with:\n\n“The British told us that there are there some hundred thousands negroes [Kushim] and for those there is no value.”.\n\nYou can clearly see the influence and internalization of racist European colonial rhetoric. This attitude would become a cornerstone of Zionism as a political and colonial movement .\nDenying the existence of the natives, or their validity or right to exist, is par for the course for many a colonizing movement. This is merely another formulation of the Terra Nullius argument which was used to legitimize settler-colonialism all over the globe .\nWith the arrival of the first Zionist colonists it became apparent that there was no hope of establishing an ethnocracy without first getting rid of the Palestinians already living there. This was encapsulated by an overheard conversation documented by Moshe Smilansky in 1891:\n\n“We should go east, into Transjordan. That would be a test for our movement.”\n“Nonsense… isn’t there enough land in Judea and Galilee?”\n“The land in Judea and Galilee is occupied by the Arabs.”\n“Well, we’ll take it from them.”\n“How?” (Silence.)\n“A revolutionary doesn’t ask naive questions.”\n“Well then, ‘revolutionary,’ tell us how.”\n“It is very simple, we’ll harass them until they get out… Let them go to Transjordan.”\n“And are we going to abandon all of Transjordan?” asks an anxious voice.\n“As soon as we have a big settlement here we’ll seize the land, we’ll become strong, and then we’ll take care of the Left Bank [of the Jordan River], we’ll expel them from there, too. Let them go back to the Arab countries.”\n\nThis is hardly the only example of such candid conversations about the colonist’s intentions towards the Palestinians. There was never an intention to settle Palestine and live in peace with the natives.\nWhen asked about the deprivation of Palestinians from their rights as a result of the Zionist project, Moshe Beilinson, close associate of Ben Gurion stated in 1929 that:\n\n“There is no answer to this question nor can there be, and we are not obliged to provide it because we are not responsible for the fact that a particular individual man was born in a certain place, and not several kilometres away from there.”\n\nIn 1930, Menahem Ussishkin, Chairman of the Jewish National Fund and a member of the Jewish Agency executive, declared that:\n\n“We must continually raise the demand that our land be returned to our possession….lf there are other inhabitants there, they must be transferred to some other place. We must take over the land. We have a greater and nobler ideal than preserving several hundred thousands of Arab fellahin.”\n\nThere are dozens of other examples of such public statements, this is of course not even taking into account what was being said behind closed doors. But it is obvious that for the Zionist movement to succeed, the Palestinians needed to be removed from Palestine. Anything else would not allow for the erection of an exclusivist Zionist ethnocracy.\nThe idea of removing the Palestinians was rather popular among Zionist leaders decades before any kind of war or conflict, and was even seen as a necessity by many. Naturally, this set the stage for the ethnic cleansing that occurred between 1947-1950 (and beyond).It is within this context that Plan D (Tochnit Dalet) was developed by the Haganah high command. Although it was adopted in May 1948, the origins of this plan goes back a few years further.  Yigael Yadin reportedly started working on it in 1944. This plan entailed the expansion of the borders of the Jewish state, well beyond partition, and any Palestinian village within these borders that resisted would be destroyed and have its inhabitants expelled. This included cities that were supposed to be part of the Arab Palestinian state after partition, such as Nazareth, Acre and Lydda.\nBen Zohar, the biographer of Ben Gurion wrote that:\n\n“In internal discussions, in instructions to his men, the Old Man [Ben-Gurion] demonstrated a clear position: it would be better that as few a number as possible of Arabs would remain in the territory of the [Jewish] state.”\n\nAlthough it could be argued that Plan D did not outline the exact villages and cities to be ethnically cleansed in an explicit way, it was clear that the various Yishuv forces were operating with its instructions in mind.\nTo further reinforce my argument that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was not some byproduct of warfare, but rather deliberate policy -regardless of degree of central organization- I would like to share some rather explicit and deliberate examples of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.Deir Yassin was a small, pastoral village west of Jerusalem. The village was determined to remain neutral, and as such refused to have Arab soldiers stationed there. Not only were they neutral, they also had a non-aggression pact signed with the Haganah. This, however, did not save it from its fate, as it was in the territory of the Jewish state lined out in Plan D.\nThis meant that not only was it to be destroyed and have its population ethnically cleansed, an example needed to be made of it as to inspire terror in the surrounding villages. As a result this massacre was particularly monstrous.\nOn April 9th 1948, Zionist forces attacked the village of Deir Yassin under the cover of darkness. The Zionist forces shot indiscriminately and killed dozens of Palestinian civilians in their own homes. The number of those murdered ranges from roughly 100 to over 150, depending on estimation.\nPerhaps one of the most graphic witness testimonials comes from Othman Akel:\n[Warning:  Explicit descriptions of torture and violence. Click to skip]\n\n“I saw the Zionist terrorist soldiers ordering the bakery man of the village to throw his son in the oven and burn him alive. The son is holding the clothes of his father tightly and crying from fear and pleading to his father not to do it. the father refuses and then the soldiers hit him in his gut so hard it caused him to fall on the floor. Other soldiers held his son, Abdel Rauf, and threw him in the oven and told his father to toast him well-done meat. Other soldiers took the baker himself , Hussain al-Shareef, and threw him, too, in the oven, telling him, “follow your son, he needs you there”.\n\nOther stories include tying a villager to a tree before burning him, rape and disembowelment. Dead villagers were thrown into pits by the dozen. Many were decapitated or mutilated. Houses were looted and destroyed. A number of prisoners were taken, put in cuffs, and paraded around West Jerusalem as war trophies, before being executed and dumped in the village quarry.\n\n[End of explicit descriptions of torture and violence]\nIt is important to note that this massacre was carried out before the 1948 war. It posed no threat and was not part of any military action. More recently, Zionist revisionists have tried to frame the massacre as a battle because the village guards put up resistance to the invading militias. In typical Zionist fashion, I’m certain that even had the villagers lain on the ground and died without resistance, they would have found a way to blame them for their deaths anyway.\nIt is also noteworthy that because the village had a non-aggression pact with the Haganah, it was the Stern and Lehi that carried out this massacre. The Yishuv offered a few words of condemnation, but later the name of Deir Yassin would be seen listed next to successful operations. In the future, there would not even be the charade of caring about non-aggression pacts or the neutrality of villages that were designated for ethnic cleansing.Al Faluja and Iraq al Manshiyya were Palestinian villages east of Gaza. They were both home to a pocket of Egyptian troops who were assigned to defend the villages, and were besieged since October 1948. On February 1949, an armistice agreement was reached between Egypt and Israel, where the Egyptian troops and all military personnel would evacuate the pocket and hand it over to Israel.\nOne of the conditions of this armistice agreement was that the civilians of these villages were to remain safe and unharmed. Israel agreed to this. However, as soon as the villages were under Israeli control they were subjected to a merciless campaign of intimidation to push the villagers to leave, which included beatings, looting, attempted rapes, threats, and the employment of the so called “whispering campaigns”. It is speculated by Benny Morris that the decision was most likely approved by high ranking Israeli officials, but of course, as with Deir Yassin they feigned outrage without doing anything about it.Al Dawayma was a Palestinian village that lay west of Al-Khalil (Hebron). According to Haganah records, the village was considered “Very friendly”. Meaning it had not hosted or participated in any attacks against the Yishuv. This, like Deir Yassin, did not spare them the brutality of the Zionist militias.\nOn October 8th 1948, the village was occupied by Battalion 89 of Brigade Eight, who committed some depraved acts upon the villagers. 20 armored cars invaded the village while soldiers attacked from another flank. The village guards couldn’t even respond, and the village fell with very little resistance.\nThe soldiers got out of their vehicles and started indiscriminately shooting villagers to force a panic and hurried depopulation of the village. Hundreds were killed, many of which were women and children. Villagers attempted to seek refuge in mosques and a close by shrine were shot by the dozens. Acts of barbarity were also reported by Zionist troops:\n[Warning:  Explicit descriptions of torture and violence. Click to skip]\n\nBabies skulls cracked open, women raped and burned alive in houses, villagers stabbed to death.\n\n[End of explicit descriptions of torture and violence]\nThe village posed no threat, and was merely in the way of the expanding Jewish state that necessitated a Jewish demographic majority. So it had to be eradicated.\nThese are just only a few of the examples of Palestinian villages that were destroyed and depopulated outside the context of combat or war. As a matter of fact, ethnic cleansing operations continued well into the 1950s, a long time after the war was over.\nThe ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was deliberate and necessary for the creation of Israel. The evidence that it was planned and not simply a byproduct of the fighting is overwhelming. Israel was not born in a vacuum, its birth was preconditioned on making the native Palestinians disappear.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "One enduring talking point often employed when discussing the depopulation of Palestinian villages is that the Palestinians voluntarily evacuated their communities at the request of the invading Arab armies. It is not difficult to see the allure of such a claim for Israel. In one stroke it clears itself completely of any blame for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and transfers that responsibility onto the Palestinians themselves, not to mention the neighboring Arab countries.\nAlluring as it may be, unfortunately for Israel, it is a myth with little basis in reality. Let us review the evidence:\nFirst, we must consider the magnitude of the Arab League or the Arab Higher Command evacuating an entire people. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people living in hundreds of communities from the Jalil to the Naqab. This is by no means a simple or brief task. It is very difficult to imagine an order of such scale not leaving behind a trace of some sort. There must have been some mention -even if in passing- of the orders telling the Palestinians to leave. Furthermore, orders such as these do not materialize suddenly, there must have been a preceding process where the decision was taken. These meetings or debates would surely be reflected in some minutes somewhere, right?\nThe answer is a resounding “no”, because no decision of the sort ever came from these sources. Historian Walid Al-Khalidi reviewed every press release of the Arab league, where every critical announcement was made without a trace of such orders. Not content with official pronouncements, he then examined the minutes of the meetings of the Arab League General Assembly from the relevant periods, there was still no trace of an evacuation order. Determined to be as thorough as possible, he then went through the minutes of the Iraqi Parliamentary Committee which was formed after the 1948 war to report to King Faisal on the causes of the Arab defeat. Once again, zero evidence was found to suggest such orders existed.However, Khalidi’s research revealed that on the 8th of March 1948, a memo circulated by the Arab Higher Command urged the heads of all Arab governments not to grant entry permits to Palestinians, except for a few exceptions. It also requested that residence permits not be renewed for Palestinians already living in the Arab countries. This was animated by the logic of having as many Palestinians as possible in Palestine to help defend their homeland. This seems to directly contradict Zionist claims on the matter. How could the Arab states order Palestinians to leave their country but at the same time not allow them to?\nFurther investigation is warranted.\nIf these orders exist, then I’m confident that the various newspapers across the Arab world would surely mention them in some form. Perhaps in a passing comment, or even an opinion piece somewhere?\nNot even once.\nBut do you know what this foray into these newspaper archives revealed instead? That there were frequent mentions of not allowing Palestinians of military age to enter various Arab countries. There were also some calls for sending back Palestinian refugees fleeing the violence which sometimes bordered on demonization.\nFor something that supposedly exists -according to Israel- these orders have been incredibly hard to pin down. If anything, the deeper we investigate the matter, the more obvious it becomes that the Arab states did not want Palestinian refugees within their borders, let alone the entirety of the Palestinian people.\nPerhaps radio broadcasts could shed some light on this matter, for if such an order existed the radio would be the fastest and most efficient way to broadcast it. Luckily for us, there are ways to investigate this, and British researcher Erskine Childers has already done the investigation for us:\n\n“The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts throughout 1948. The records, and companion ones by a United States monitoring unit, can be seen at the British Museum. There was not a single order or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine, from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is a repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put.”\n\nIndeed, there are multiple occasions where not only were Palestinians told to stay put and not leave their lands, but that they would suffer punishment should they abandon their houses and flee.\nFurthermore, had the Palestinians chose to voluntarily leave their villages, then the brief first or second truces in the fighting would have been ideal opportunities to do so. It is worthy of attention that during those periods, not only did Palestinians stay put in their villages, those who had been expelled earlier attempted to return to their original communities, and were greeted by Israeli gunfire.\nAll the empirical evidence lies in stark contradiction to the Israeli talking point. There is absolutely no proof to even begin entertaining this as a main cause for the exodus of the Palestinians. To this day, there has not been a single citation, or a shred of paper pointing to such blanket orders. Not one radio station has been named, or even a date given for when these alleged orders were broadcasted. They are a complete fabrication with little basis in reality. It is not a coincidence that no specificities are given when this talking point is employed."
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+	"text": "Despite how ubiquitous this accusation is, there is actually scant evidence to corroborate it.\nIf the use of human shields was so wide as to cause hundreds upon hundreds of dead Palestinian civilians, then surely there would be a reporter or an observer on the ground that could have caught a whiff of it. But reporters on the ground could find no trace of such a supposedly widespread action, Jeremy Bowen of the BBC wrote that he found no evidence of the use of human shields while he was covering the assault on Gaza. Similarly, Kim Sengupta writing for the Belfast Telegraph interviewed Palestinians in Gaza and unsurprisingly came to a similar conclusion: Hamas was not forcing anybody to be a human shield, counter to Netanyahu’s claims.\nBut perhaps these reporters were missing something, let us consult an organization which specializes in these matters. Fortunately for us, Amnesty international released a detailed report of its investigation into the matter. In their report they indicate that:\n\n“The Israeli authorities have claimed that in a few incidents, the Hamas authorities or Palestinian fighters directed or physically coerced individual civilians in specific locations to shield combatants or military objectives. Amnesty International has not been able to corroborate the facts in any of these cases.”\n\nSo, it seems that the Israeli claims have no basis in reality, and are just a way to demonize Palestinians and legitimize their indiscriminate bombardment of civilians. This is hardly the first time Israel has used this accusation to delegitimize their enemies. For example, in the 2006 war against Lebanon Israel accused Hizballah of using human shields. Unsurprisingly, investigations by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch similarly found no evidence.\nThe same accusations were also hurled at Palestinians during the great march of return when Israeli snipers killed Palestinian nurse Razan Al-Najjar while she was tending to the injured. Naturally, no evidence was provided other than a clearly doctored video in an attempt to defame her.\nFortunately, these investigations into the supposed Palestinian use of human shields tend to backfire on Israel, and have historically produced a wealth of literature showing how often Israel targets civilians far removed from any combat context. Amnesty International reported that\n\n“In the cases of precision missiles or tank shells which killed civilians in their homes, no fighters were present in the houses that were struck and Amnesty International delegates found no indication that there had been any armed confrontations or other military activity in the immediate vicinity at the time of the attack.”\n\nThis is not in error, and is in fact by design. The destruction of non-military infrastructure and incurring massive losses in civilians is a deliberate policy followed by the IDF. This policy has come to be known as the Dahiya doctrine, where it was first practiced in the Dahiya area of Beirut.\nGadi Eizenkot was quoted as saying that:\n\n“We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.”\n\nThis is a direct admission that Israel sees civilian areas as military targets, now the only thing that remained was finding a way to justify it. This is where the human shields accusation comes in. And in the end when the war is over, the fact that no evidence is ever presented, or that various organizations exonerate the accused is forgotten, and the smears remain, and contribute to justify the same inhumane actions in any future conflagration.\nPerhaps the most overlooked aspect of this accusation is that it is a case of pure projection on part of Israel. Israel has been notorious in its use of Palestinians as human shields. As a matter of fact, many of these same reports investigating the Palestinian use of human shields found that it was actually Israel that was using Palestinians as human shields. For example, they would force Palestinian civilians to check houses for traps, or handle suspicious objects, or tie them to military vehicles to discourage stone throwing.\nEven a simple search reveals hundreds of cases of Palestinians being used as human shields. This is not a case of a few bad apples, but of rampant and widespread behavior. In fact, using Palestinians as human shields was so popular that when the Israeli high court attempted to outlaw the practice the IDF actually appealed to have the decision reversed.\nI would further argue that not only does Israel use Palestinians as human shields, but also its own population when it uses them to settle and colonize areas beyond the green line. They are directly put in danger as a sacrifice to Israel’s expansionist colonial designs, which they can then blame on Palestinians to further accelerate this same project.\nSo not only is the Palestinian use of human shields a myth lacking any evidence, it is in fact Israel who is infamous for using human shields in its oppression of the Palestinians. Examples of this are incredibly easy to find even with the most rudimentary of research. Like much Israeli propaganda, it seeks to turn reality upside down and accuse the Palestinians of the crimes that Israel so often commits. This is a prime example of baseless dehumanization that many eagerly embrace because they have come to internalize a demonized image of Palestinians based on Israeli propaganda.\nThe fact that this slander is so prevalent while not having any basis in reality is a testament to the power of propaganda, and how readily people accept the projections of barbarity onto the peoples of the global south. In the narrative war against Palestine there is hardly a method Israel has not resorted to in order to dehumanize Palestinians. It is on us to resist that, and set the record straight.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "Purplewashing refers to when a state or organization appeal to women’s rights and feminism in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices.\nMuch to the dismay of colonizers everywhere, it was once much easier to justify colonialism. The language surrounding it used to be rather straightforward; we deserve these lands and resources because we are more advanced; because God wanted it this way; because you are savages. Israel, as a settler-colony, was no exception to this line of reasoning; the sentiments of the founders of Zionism, and later of the State of Israel, are well documented regarding the native Palestinians, who they deemed as being “backwards” and not as deserving of the land as they were .\nIt is now a faux pas to say any of this quite so bluntly, even as (neo)colonialism prevails. Today, it is more fashionable to justify the theft of lands and resources under the guise of being protectors of human rights, unlike the enemies they seek to dominate.\nIt is within this context that Israel is rebranding itself. One facet of this propaganda is now centered on its supposed deep concern for the rights and freedoms of women, even Palestinian ones. This has come to be known as purplewashing, which consists of:\n“political and marketing strategies that [indicate] a supposed commitment to gender equality. It often refers to the image-cleaning of western countries, which have not achieved genuine equality between men and women but criticise inequalities in other countries or cultures, often where there is a Muslim majority.”\nThese strategies constitute representing Muslim women -which Palestinian women are largely coded as despite the existence of non-Muslim Palestinians- as uniquely abused in order to create the narrative that feminism only exists on the side of the West. This is part of an ideological framework referred to by scholars as colonial feminism, whereby women’s rights are appropriated in the service of empire; in the context of Palestine, this rhetoric is also known as gendered Orientalism. The Palestinian Arab/Muslim is framed as an “other”, who is culturally or even genetically predisposed to misogyny. Naturally, this is juxtaposed with the framing of a liberal, enlightened, Israeli Westerner. Ultimately to Israel, this facade of feminism is a way to improve its image, and incorporate women into its violent, colonial, racist systems and institutions, as well as a way to paint Palestinians as unworthy of statehood or even humanity.  The fact that these systems subjugate other -usually Palestinian- women is hardly mentioned.\n\nMuch of Zionists’ attempts to market Israel as feminist revolves around the Israeli army. The Israeli army’s official social media accounts and those at pro-Israel groups such as the Lawfare Project, hail the Israeli army as “one of the only armies in the Western world in which women are drafted to military service by law”. They praise women’s participation in the ethnic cleansing campaigns and massacres of the 1948 Nakba, and cheer on the increasing role of women in combat positions.\nHannah MacLeod, women’s officer for Australian Young Labor praised women’s participation in the Israeli army as “empowering” and pushed for Australia to encourage this participation. There is a “Hot Israeli Army Girls” Instagram account and Maxim magazine’s infamous “Women of Israel Defence Forces”, was deemed so crucial to Israel’s international reputation that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs threw a party celebrating its publication. One of the more recent and successful additions to the purplewashing of Israel has been Gal Gadot starring as Wonder Woman. Gadot, being a former IDF soldier herself, posted support for the Israeli military as it murdered thousands of Palestinians in its 2014 assault on Gaza, and helped spread the racist and baseless idea that Palestinians use their children and women as human shields. Nonetheless, none of this has stood in the way of trying to frame her as an icon of empowerment for women everywhere.\nAll of these efforts are meant to sell the idea of Israel being a liberal haven. That sexual assault is rampant in the Israeli army does not make the glossy brochures and social media posts; instead, they are all designed to convey the idea that this objectification in service of a settler-colonial fantasy is the height of female empowerment, an empowerment that Palestinian and other Arab and Muslim women can only aspire to.\nThis purplewashing of a colonial military, which in addition to subjugating the native population, is also one of the largest exporters of drones globally and has supplied weapons to some of the most repressive, racist regimes in modern history, including Apartheid South Africa. Such a military is anathema to the framework of intersectionality which undergirds a feminism that seeks to dismantle patriarchy and end violence against all women.\n\nThe body of theory on intersectionality in feminist movements, created by and largely expanded on by Black feminist writers, compellingly posits that challenging one aspect of structural power alone such as patriarchy, while leaving white supremacy unscathed, only empowers white, upper-class and otherwise privileged women at the expense of all other women. This understanding that feminism must be about ending not only patriarchy but racism and other oppressive systems has led to acts of global solidarity with Palestine, such as from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, notably regarding the partnership between the Israeli military and American police departments.\nZionists’ reaction to this solidarity has frankly been nothing short of unhinged, often attacking the concept of intersectionality as a whole. Monica Osborne from the Jewish Journal declared intersectionality “an even more sinister threat than the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish state”, and Sharon Nazarian, a senior vice president for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in her article for the Forward used a series of myths and half-baked talking points to declare that of course Zionism and feminism are compatible, and expressed her dismay at how “anti-Zionism is becoming increasingly visible in intersectional discourse”.\n\nSmearing intersectionality and solidarity efforts is becoming increasingly unpopular, and so instead there has been a push to purplewash Israel’s history instead. These efforts start with its history, especially in regards to its 4th Prime Minister Golda Meir. Zionists gush over Meir as “an icon—feminist and otherwise—of the 20th century.” The titles of one of her more well-known biographies simultaneously declared her as the “iron lady of the Middle East” and the “first woman prime minister in the West”. This is indicative of Zionist attempts to reap the benefits of Israel being considered a Western country even as they work to portray Israel as indigenous to the Middle East.\nTo Palestinian women, however, she was no more empowering than the male Zionist figures who sought and seek to erase our very existence; she once infamously declared that because Palestinians did not have a state or ascribe to modern-day conceptions of nationalism, they were not really ethnically cleansed:\n“It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” .\nThese efforts to purplewash Meir are made even more ridiculous by the fact that she did not even consider herself a feminist, as biographer Elinor Burkett stated, “American feminists loved to adopt Golda, but she was not interested…she ignored gender prejudices…she didn’t think of her [premiership] as an achievement for women. She thought of it as an achievement for Golda.”\nIn the present day, Zionist groups like Hadassah and the Zioness coalition are increasingly attempting to present themselves as feminist, indicative of a concern amongst Israeli hasbarists that Zionism needs to be rebranded in a more social justice inclined era. This is reflected in Hadassah’s online speaker series, “Defining Zionism in the 21st Century” including a “Zionism for Millennials” segment led by speaker Chloe Valdery, an evangelical Zionist and secretary of the Zioness coalition. Recently, Zioness has been revealed to be an astroturfing group co-founded by Amanda Berman, a Lawfare project executive. Zioness also stirred controversy for attempting to insert itself and its purplewashing agenda into Chicago’s Dyke March and Slutwalk Chicago’s annual protest. Understandably, these efforts were rejected by the radical organizers behind the protest, with Slutwalk Chicago’s statement explaining that they were adamantly opposed to Zioness centering its politic “over the fight for equality and against patriarchy”; they continued:\n“We find it disgusting that any group would appropriate a day dedicated to survivors fighting rape culture in order to promote their own nationalist agenda.” They later added that “we fight for equality for everyone which means we stand with Jewish AND Palestinian people, while taking a firmly anti-state, anti-imperialist position that necessarily includes Israel.”\n\nZionists’ purplewashing their nationalist agenda also often takes the form of a contrived concern for Palestinian women, even while erasing the identities of the Palestinian women living within the green line as “Israeli Arabs”, in an effort to depict Israeli society as ‘multi-cultural’ and tolerant . Native informant Yoseph Haddad, whose entire career revolves around being a bankrolled “Israeli Arab” mouthpiece for the Israeli government, posted a graphic titled “Israeli-Arab Women: Breaking the Glass Ceiling”. Per the accompanying caption on Facebook, Haddad presented individual Palestinian women having roles as professors, police officers, or even winning a singing competition as proof refuting the existence of Israeli Apartheid. Haddad also wrote that “While women face systemic discrimination and oppression all over the Middle East, in Israel Arab women can be anything they want to be”. Besides the insulting notion that individual members of an oppressed group having certain jobs or positions precludes the existence of systemic racism, the implied message is clear: Palestinian women living under Israeli rule are “better off” than they would be under Palestinian rule.\nThus, Palestinian women are depicted as in need of saving from Palestinian men. NGO Monitor, an anti-Palestinian group with close ties to the Israeli government and settler movement, specializing in smearing Palestinian human rights organizations as ‘terrorist’ groups, published a special report titled “The Exploitation of Palestinian Women’s Rights NGOs” which scolded Palestinian feminist activists and organizations for “focusing on Israel as the cause of gender inequality, while not paying adequate attention to internal, systemic practices within Palestinian society that are discriminatory against women”.\nIn a 2017 Daily Beast article, liberal Zionist wonderboy Peter Beinart accused leftists of overlooking Hamas’s misogyny and paternalistically fretted over what it would look like “when Palestinians more fully govern themselves”.  Even Beinart’s more conservative Zionist counterpart Bret Stephens, whose racism against Palestinians is so unbridled that he has openly described Palestinians as “psychotic” and “seized by bloodlust”, nevertheless also positions himself as deeply concerned for Palestinian women, and similarly declared that the “so-called progressives now find themselves in sympathy with the misogynists of Hamas”. In that same article Stephens takes it a step further and declares, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the prominence of women at the Gaza Strip’s Great March of Return was orchestrated by Hamas because “Israeli soldiers might be less likely to fire on women”, conveying his worldview where Israeli soldiers value Palestinian women’s lives, unlike Palestinian men, with all the subtlety of a nuclear warhead. That the Palestinian women in question could have attended the protests of their own accord or that Palestinian men also do not deserve to be murdered at the hands of their occupiers were not even considered points worth entertaining.\nEven the Israeli government’s official website has a page dedicated to “the status of women in Gaza” which cynically lists the issues Palestinian women face regarding gender-based violence and limited employment, as if issues of sexism can all neatly be reduced to Hamas’ creation a little over 30 years ago, or as if the Gaza Strip, which has become the world’s largest open-air prison, is not increasingly becoming unlivable in every meaning of the word thanks to Israel’s blockade and bombardment.\n\nThe aforementioned fixation on Palestinian women obfuscates how dehumanized Palestinian women and Palestinian mothers in particular actually are by Zionists and throughout Israeli society. This is evident in how Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked openly called for the murder of Palestinian women because they give birth to “little snakes.” Bret Stephens similarly targeted Palestinian mothers in a particularly atrocious article, saying that unlike Western mothers who worry their child will get a bad tattoo, Palestinian mothers want their children to die fighting the occupation; he then went on to say that he has yet to meet an Israeli mother who wants to raise a murderer, because in his view state-sanctioned murder vis-a-vis military conscription or having children write messages of racist hate on missiles about to be launched into Lebanon do not count.\nStephens finally openly states that Palestinian culture is “a culture that openly celebrates murder and is not fit for statehood”, consequently, if Palestinians want a state, they should, like postwar Germany, put themselves “…through a process of moral rehabilitation” and that for Palestine, “this should start with the mothers.”\nMordechai Kedar, an Israeli military intelligence officer turned academic made public statements regarding ‘raping the wives and mothers of Palestinian combatants’ to deter ‘terrorist attacks’. These comments were defended by his university as “the bitter reality of the Middle East”. This sentiment is widespread throughout Israeli society, as the eminent scholar Rabab Abdulhadi noted in her incredibly valuable article for Feminist Studies; Israel’s bloody 2014 assault on Gaza was gleefully supported with Israeli social media posts that included a sexualized image of a hijabi women with calls on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to rape her. Furthermore, public banners sponsored by an Israeli city’s city council told Israeli soldiers to ‘pound their mothers and come home to your own mothers!’, and a popular t-shirt design amongst Israeli men who served in the army depicted a bullseye pointing at a pregnant Palestinian niqab-wearing woman with the caption “one shot, two kills.”\nPalestinian women are targeted for these kinds of racist and misogynistic attacks because Israel is an ethnocracy, which aims to cement the domination of a certain ethnic group on all spheres of society, a crucial aspect of which is demography. Within this framework, Palestinians are viewed as “demographic threats” . This obsession with demographics necessarily manifests itself, as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has written,  in racist and gendered policies to “contain and reduce the Palestinian population” through assaults on Palestinian daily and domestic life, extending to the often fatal denial of essential treatment to pregnant women, as evidenced by two UNHCR reports of checkpoints delaying pregnant Palestinian women’s access to healthcare. These reports state that 68 women had forced roadside births resulting in 34 miscarriages and that inadequate medical care during pregnancy was found to be the third cause of mortality among Palestinian women of reproductive age.\nThe aim is to “target the literal biological reproduction of Palestinian life”; these policies have shaped, Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues, a “death zone” for Palestinians and Palestinian women especially, as part of a larger, ongoing process of dispossession congruent with settler colonial practices elsewhere. This death zone is “the space where the biological, material and cultural reproduction of Palestinian social life is put at daily and intimate risk.” According to Shalhoub-Kevorkian, this “sexual violence is central to the larger structure of colonial power, its racialized machinery of domination, and its logic of elimination. Colonialism is itself structured by the logic of sexual violence.” Attacks on Palestinian women’s lives include  rape and other forms of gender-based torture in Israeli prisons, consistent with the UN’s findings that sexual violence as part of overarching violent conflict is “used as a means of inflicting terror upon the population at large” and “can also be part of a genocidal strategy”.\nFurthermore, as reported by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women Dubravka Šimonović, Israeli settlers also frequently attack little girls going to school, to such an extent that some families have become too afraid to send them. While this is a case of gendered human rights abuses committed by non-State actors, it is ultimately de facto endorsed by the Israeli State through their consistent ‘failure’ to investigate or prosecute perpetrators. Šimonović also reported on the traumatizing effect of Israeli home raids and demolitions, with a woman testifying that she took to sleeping fully covered in anticipation of soldiers’ entering her bedroom during a night raid, as has become all too customary.\n\nThat misogyny exists within Palestinian society is undeniable. However, the idea that Israel represents salvation from this misogyny, rather than embodying the racist and colonial structures that perpetuate it, is far more questionable. In fact, there is much evidence that weakening community structures, disruptions in law and order, economic hardship, forced migration and over-crowded living conditions in refugee/displacement camps, all of which Palestinians have experienced as a result of Israeli violence, are all factors that increase the risk of sexual and gender-based violence, especially against women and girls. Furthermore, the bureaucratic colonial fragmentation of Palestine into different areas of control, especially the division of the West Bank into areas A, B, and C and the divide between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is actually an obstacle to preventing this violence or holding its perpetrators accountable .\nPalestinian feminist scholars and organizers have been studying and resisting Israel’s violent practices against all Palestinians, and its gendered practices against Palestinian women in particular. As a result, we recognize that true liberation for Palestinian women is impossible with anything short of the liberation of all Palestinians from Israeli settler colonialism. As Palestinian feminists, human rights activists and representatives of women organizations declared in a statement of support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement:\n“The struggle of Palestinian feminists [is] as marginalized women who are deprived of equal rights and as part of an indigenous people suffering under a regime of occupation and apartheid. We cannot accept the backseat reserved for an obedient minority that must be filled in conferences or statements issued by Israeli groups. We are struggling for our rights, all of our rights, national, social and otherwise, and against all oppression.”\nPalestinian women reject all purplewashing attempts to minimize Israeli violence against us and all Palestinians, which only seeks to bolster Israel’s image at the expense of Palestinians’ rights. Palestinian women in the struggle are aware that they are fighting for the rights and human dignity of all, and that “feminism that doesn’t have an understanding of how it intersects with racial and ethnic oppression is simply a diversification of white supremacy.” We hope you will join us in working for the liberation of all Palestinians; and that the next time you see an pro-Israel organization brazenly attempt to use the feminist movement to cover for colonialism, you can see that purple really isn’t Israel’s color.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!\n\nShalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera. Militarization and violence against women in conflict zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian case-study. Cambridge University Press, 2009.\n\nShalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera et al. Sexual Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism. Jadaliyya. November 17th, 2014. [Link]\n\nFarris, Sara R. In the name of women’s rights: The rise of femonationalism. Duke University Press, 2017.\nJad, Islah. Palestinian Women’s Activism: Nationalism, Secularism, Islamism. Syracuse University Press, 2018.\nAbdulhadi, Rabab. “Israeli Settler Colonialism in Context: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence.” Feminist Studies 45.2-3, 2019: 541-573.\nElia, Nada. “Justice is indivisible: Palestine as a feminist issue.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 6.1, 2017.\nSharoni, Simona, et al. “Transnational Feminist Solidarity in Times of Crisis: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement and Justice in/for Palestine.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 17.4, 2015: 654-670.\nAbdulhadi, Rabab, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber, eds. Arab and Arab American feminisms: gender, violence, and belonging. Syracuse University Press, 2011.\nAbu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim women need saving?. Vol. 15. No. 5. Sage UK: London, England: SAGE Publications, 2015."
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+	"text": "The roots of contemporary Palestinian identity have been outlined in many works, but we believe that Rashid Khalidi’s wonderful book, Palestinian Identity, has one of the more exhaustive and detailed explorations of the subject.  According to Khalidi, Palestinian national identity can be traced back to Ottoman times, but it arguably started crystallizing in its modern form during the WW1 period. It is important to keep in mind that nationalism as a whole first touched the region around that period. While the mandatory period did see a rise of Palestinians identifying with the idea of a greater Arab nation, this did not preclude regional Palestinian identity and sense of belonging. It is not a contradiction to identify both as an Arab and a Palestinian, as was the case for many.\nThere are multiple elements that coalesced to create this proto-Palestinian identity, the first of which was the significant religious attachment to Palestine as a holy land by the people living there. Of course, Palestine has been an important religious nexus throughout history, but this feeling of attachment was particularly strong among those living there. Another element is the distribution of Ottoman administrative boundaries and the special status afforded to Palestine. According to Khalidi:\n\n“from 1874 onwards, the sanjaq of Jerusalem, including the districts of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Beersheeba, Gaza, and Jaffa, was a separate unit administered independently from any other Ottoman province.“\n\nPreviously, Jerusalem was the capital of the larger province (Vilayet) of Palestine (Filastin) which includes the vast majority of what is now considered Palestine.\nA third element is the fierce local loyalties and attachments, especially in the larger cities. Khalidi dubbed this “Urban Patriotism”.  Nabulsis, Gazans, Jerusalemites, etc. all took pride in their cities and their local histories. Evidence of this can be seen in Palestinian family names, such as “Al-Nabulsi” (of Nablus) or “Al-Khalili” (of Hebron) and many other cities, towns and villages. With modernization and the spread of transport, communication, education, and notions of nationalism throughout the region, this local attachment evolved to include areas outside of the direct city or town and came to resemble what we understand today as nationalism more closely.\nIt is important to emphasize that all of this preceded any encounter with Zionism. This is important to understand, because there is a common assertion that Palestinian identity grew as a consequence of Zionist colonialism of Palestine, even though no such claim is made for the neighboring countries which all developed identities and nationalisms of their own. It is worth noting, however, that for Palestinians, the Zionists were yet another imperial or colonial force in a history full of such forces, be it the Ottomans who the Palestinians rebelled against, the British, or any other.\nHowever, this does not mean that Palestinian identity was not influenced at all by its encounters with European or Zionist colonialism. For example, Najib ‘Azuri, in response to Zionist goals in Palestine, wrote in 1908 that the progress of “the land of Palestine” depends on expanding and raising the status of Jerusalem.\nEvidence of early Palestinian identification and attachment to the land is abundant. One need not look only at some of the larger indicators, such as the founding of the Filastin (Palestine) newspaper in Jaffa in 1911, but also at the smaller ones, such as a group of Palestinian immigrants to Chile founding a football club and naming it Deportivo Palestino in 1920. That’s pretty impressive for an identity that allegedly did not exist!\nThis talking point becomes even more egregious when you consider how hard Israel has worked to co-opt and appropriate Palestinian identity and cultural markers, such as the Kuffiyeh, Dabkeh and even Palestinian cuisine . It simultaneously seeks to sever the ties of the indigenous people to the land while stealing indigenous identity markers in an attempt to self-indigenize its settler population. Ultimately, all these claims aim to whitewash the crimes committed against Palestinians by implying that they shouldn’t have been there in the first place, that they do not belong, and that the settlers are more worthy of the land.\nBut even if you swallow this premise wholly, and come to internalize it. What then? Does the national identification (or lack thereof) of the Palestinians mean that they were legitimate targets for ethnic cleansing? Even if we accept the ridiculous and false premise that the Palestinians were “just Arabs” without a distinct national identity, how does this justify the destruction of hundreds of villages and the subjugation of millions?\nIt doesn’t, and it can’t.\nFrom the onset, this talking point is not only racist, but highly ineffectual if followed to its logical conclusion. Palestinians exist, and would have existed regardless of Zionism or any other colonial power. No amount of revisionist and ideological twisting of history can erase that.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!\n\nKhalidi, Rashid. Palestinian identity: The construction of modern national consciousness. Columbia University Press, 2010.\nKhalidi, Rashid, ed. The origins of Arab nationalism. Columbia University Press, 1991.\n\nKamel, Lorenzo. Imperial perceptions of Palestine: British influence and power in late Ottoman times. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.\n\nMuslih, Muhammad. “Arab politics and the rise of Palestinian nationalism.” Journal of Palestine Studies 16.4 (1987): 77-94.\nAnderson, Benedict. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso books, 2006.\nHobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The invention of tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2012.\nWeber, Eugen. Peasants into Frenchmen: the modernization of rural France, 1870-1914. Stanford University Press, 1976."
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+	"text": "In the grand scheme of Israeli colonialism, this might seem like a relatively small issue. What is stealing a dish when there are millions of Palestinians in refugee camps?\nBut this theft of culture is typical for settler movements, which seek to coopt and commodify the culture of the natives in an attempt to self-indigenize. Although they would never admit this, it stems from an unconscious nagging that they do not belong and that aspects of the native culture are seen as more legitimate than their imported ones.\nSettlers do not only lay claim to these indigenous practices, but they also attempt to ban the natives from practicing them altogether. Examples of such cases are abundant, such as Canadian attempts to ban or restrict indigenous peoples from their millennia-old sustainable fishing practices. Similar efforts were pursued by the Israeli authorities regarding Za’tar, Akub and many other traditional Palestinian wild herbs and plants. Palestinians had been harvesting these plants for centuries, however,  Israel quickly moved in to ban picking these herbs, conveniently and selectively citing environmental concerns, while it continued to dump sewage and toxic waste on Palestinian villages in the West Bank .\nMeanwhile, Israeli businessmen started cultivating Za’tar. The Ben Herut family was the dominant force in this market, where for the first time they sought to create an Israeli Za’tar mix. Their first attempt resulted in a product that is, according to Ben Herut the son: “Totally disgusting, it came out all black.”\nIt was only after his father consulted some Palestinians that they learnt how to make the mix that in any way resembles the traditional Za’tar we all know and love. When asked what drove their business, the son responded with: “National pride … I want people to say za’atar is Israel.”\nSettler societies have a penchant for selective history, Israel is no different. Consequently, this new cooptation stuck and Israelis started claiming Za’tar as their own. Additionally, it was retroactively legitimized and incorporated into the national mythology, Israelis declared that Za’tar is actually “traditionally Israeli” because the plant is mentioned in the Bible as Ezov. It is quite ‘convenient’ how this supposedly ancient traditional food was only discovered in the 1970s, and only after copying the Palestinian recipe. It is also quite a ridiculous argument, as the Bible does not describe the plant being eaten in the same way as Za’tar, which is a specific blend of spices, herbs and sesame, eaten with olive oil and bread.\nIf we were to follow this same line of biblical logic consistently, can it also not be argued that any food item mentioned in the Bible is traditionally Israeli? After all, milk was mentioned in the bible, so following this same reasoning can’t we argue that ice cream is also “traditionally” Israeli?\nWhen confronted with these issues, Israelis often claim that since many Israelis are Mizrahim (Jewish people of Middle Eastern or North African ancestry) then these foods are part of their culture and history as well. However, this argument buckles under its own contradictions when examined in a wider context.\nIt seems that even while attempting to self-indigenize, Zionists can’t help but have an essentialist view of the region. This essentialism treats all Arab or Muslim majority countries across the Middle East and North Africa as one monolithic entity. For example, a large portion of Mizrahi Israelis originated in Iraq and Morocco where dishes such as Hummus, Falafel and herbs such as Za’tar are not part of the local cuisine, and if they are, they are vastly different to the Levantine style that the Palestinians prepare. It is not a coincidence that this exact same Levantine Palestinian style is the one that the Israelis sought to coopt and claim as their own.\nFurthermore, as Ali Abunimah observed, this argument is rather selective and only seems to apply in the case of Middle Eastern cuisines. For instance, over a million Israelis today have Polish ancestry, yet we never hear the claim that Pierogi is a traditional Israeli dish. This selective application reinforces the argument put forward by many Palestinians that this claim is not made in good faith, and aims to justify the cooptation of these cultural markers. Indeed, if we were to apply this argument consistently based on the geographic origin of Israeli dishes, it would produce the opposite effect to the intended one, which is to better claim indigeneity.\nThe increasingly common identification of Zionism with settler colonialism and reactionary far-right movements all over the world has left Israel in a crisis of image. It is more desperate than ever to project an organic, indigenous depiction of itself, but all these efforts are destined to fail as long as Israel remains steadfast in its Zionism. As many propagandists have found out over the years, marketing can only help you so much when you have a rotten product.\n\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "Theodor Herzl, one of the founding fathers of Zionism, wrote a utopian novel by the name of Altneuland, or “Old New Land.” In the book, a Viennese Jew and a Prussian nobleman return from a twenty-year isolation on a tropical island, stop in Palestine and discover Herzl’s utopian vision for the future Jewish state. In Herzl’s wildest dreams -and due to Jewish ingenuity- Palestine is no longer a “neglected and desertified land” but suddenly a technologically savvy nation replete with fast trains to Europe, where in Herzl’s mind everything culturally and politically worthwhile is. Much of the novel drones on about what he perceives to be an “unforgiving arid climate” thanks to human-driven desertification as well as the idea that the biblical land of plenty has devolved into a feudal and largely subsistence economy.\nHerzl wasn’t alone in this charged characterization of Palestinian land. In 1928, the Economic Board for Palestine of London recorded a Zionist bulletin declaring that:\n\n“Palestine was a poor and backward agricultural country. This is of course still the case to a large extent, but a remarkable development has taken place which is gradually modifying the traditional life”.\n\nBen-Gurion, another Zionist founding father and Israel’s first prime minister, described in a 1942 pamplet the Jordan Valley, largely known as the breadbasket of Palestine due to its fertile land, as a wasteland “..which knew not at all the pioneer passion that would come to fertilize it”.\nPaired with Zionist rhetoric on the supposed desolation of Palestinian land is the manner in which Palestinian fellahin (farmers) and Bedouins are spoken of as having ruined the land with their incompetence. The Jewish Agency exemplified this rhetoric in its call for  replacing the “traditional” Arab farmers with better cultivators, matched by Ben-Gurion stating that “we do not recognize their [the Arabs] right to rule the country to the extent that it has not been built by them and is still awaiting its cultivators”.\nThey were in fine imperialist company with types like Winston Churchill, then British Colonial Secretary and overall genocide-engineering extraordinaire, who stated that “left to themselves the Arabs would never in 1,000 years take effective steps towards the irrigation of Palestine”, as well as with Laurence Oliphant, a British MP and intelligence officer and occasional collaborator with the Palestine Exploration Fund, who declared that:\n\n“The Arabs have very little claim to our sympathy. They have laid waste this country, ruined its villages, and plundered its inhabitants, until it has been reduced to its present condition…the same system might be pursued which we have adopted with success in Canada with our North American Indian tribes, who are confined to their ‘reserves’, and live peaceably upon them in the midst of the settled agricultural population.”\n\nThese statements and attitudes on Palestinian farmers’ inadequacy and the conditions of the land was service to the rather dubious claim, as recorded in Moshe Smilansky’s Jewish Colonisation and the Fellah , that the Palestinian farmer can only be saved from his misery and turned into a ‘real’ farmer through the aid of Jewish settlers. These absurd and racist claims were intended to legitimize the Zionist project, and put forward the idea that Zionist colonialism would not displace or otherwise harm the native Palestinians and would even benefit Palestinians. In reality, the settlers banned re-sale or lease of land to Palestinians and prevented their employment in their Jewish-only endeavors. A significant example of this is the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organization founded in 1901 to acquire land in Palestine explicitly for Jewish-only use, and whose dispossession of Palestinians continues to the present day.\nDespite the political usefulness of the claims that Zionists were improving conditions for all the inhabitants of Palestine, there is ample evidence that the British and Zionists alike frequently ignored the aspects of Palestinian agricultural practices which contradicted their ideologically-driven predispositions. Yitzhak Elazari-Volkani, one of the founders of the agricultural faculty at the Hebrew University, made a compelling argument in a piece written on Zionist agricultural practices, where he asserted that it was actually the Zionist agricultural practices which could be deemed “defective”, with money blown on expensive machinery only to gain comparable, if not lower income than Palestinian farmers. Furthermore, the British Hope-Simpson report on immigration, land settlement and development in Mandatory Palestine found that said expensive machinery actually risked damaging the soil, while Jewish farmers “had to be protected by subsidies from the JNF or other Jewish agencies in order to sustain their European standard of living.” Nevertheless, the Zionist and British stance was still that Palestinian agriculture was in need of “capital-driven improvement”, because neither could think in terms other than that.\nTo be clear, besides the agricultural expertise Palestinians had accumulated for generations, they already had a lot to work with naturally; in contrast to claims of barren Palestinian land that was “mostly desert”, most of  Palestine had been cultivated, and had supported agricultural populations for centuries. The lands of Palestine have long been written about as one of the most fertile lands in the decidedly aptly named Fertile Crescent. Renowned Roman historian Tacitus described Palestine in flowery terms, saying “the inhabitants are healthy and robust; the rains moderate; the soil fertile.”\nIn fact, Palestine, as later shown in a pioneering study by Alexander Schölch, produced large agricultural surpluses and was integrated into the world capitalist economy as an exporter of goods such as barley, sesame, olive oil, and soap during the 1856–1882 period. Consular reports on imports and exports such as through the ports of Acre and Haifa showed that exports not only closely shadowed shifting European demand but also exceeded imports of European machine-manufactured goods, which meant that Palestine helped the rest of Greater Syria minimize its overall negative balance of trade with Europe. Already, then, wide areas such as the coastal plain to the north and south of Gaza were cultivated, producing wheat crops, with the city of Gaza once having been a prosperous market town functioning as a collecting and forwarding center for the citrus, wheat, and barley crops of the Gaza District before being cut off from its trade relations following the 1948 Nakba. Examples of this cultivation were not limited to Gaza, with watermelons and above all citrus being cultivated in the Jaffa area, olives and cotton in the Jabal Nablus region, grapes in Al Khalil region, and tobacco and watermelon in the Galilee among others.\nTo add insult to the injury of these arrogant claims, much of Zionists’ first agricultural attempts went as well as you would expect, seeing as large swathes of the first settlers had no agricultural experience whatsoever. A prominent example of this is the Bilu group, comprised of primarily Russian Jewish settlers who viewed their mission in Palestine as a pioneering one towards “the physical upbuilding of the land as contributing toward both a revitalization of the Jewish nation and the reemergence of Jewish masculinity and virility”. One of these early settlers, Chaim Chissin, himself admitted that this group was composed of students who had little to no experience in agriculture, though he appeared to view this as a minor detail. However, this lack of experience and familiarity with the land definitely impeded their progress; in describing the failure of their first harvest, Chissin acknowledged the condescending attitude of the Jewish pioneers towards the Arab peasants:\n\n“Whenever the Arabs told us that it was already too late to sow barley, or that the land was unsuited for it, we never hesitated to tell the ‘barbarians,’ with considerable self assurance, ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter. We’ll plow deep, we’ll turn the soil inside out, we’ll harrow it clean, and then you’ll see what a crop we’ll have!’ We provided ourselves with big plows, sunk them deep into the soil, and cruelly whipped our horses which were cruelly exhausted. Our self-confidence had no limits. We looked down on the Arabs, assuming that it was not they who should teach us, but we who would show these barbarians’ what a European could accomplish on this neglected land with the use of perfect tools and rational methods of cultivation. The only trouble was that we ourselves knew about European methods of cultivation only from hearsay, and our agriculturalist, too, knew very little [about conditions in Palestine].”\n\nAdditionally, George Mansour, an active Palestinian trade unionist of the time compares Palestinian agricultural practices to the new Zionist settlers, writing that with regard to fruit trees other than citrus and bananas, government data actually showed that “the Arabs have, in recent years, very greatly increased their area of olives, figs and vines; while the Jews, in a disastrous rush to make quid profits by planting citrus, have decreased theirs…the present crisis of over-production is entirely due to the Zionists’ desire to develop everything unnaturally quickly, in order to facilitate Jewish immigration.”\nIt is no wonder then, that large portions of these settlers eventually moved back to Russia or migrated to the West. Even so, it does not appear that Chissin learned from this failure, going on to rationalize that the Jewish settlers could not rely on the advice of the Arabs, as they were untrustworthy and treacherous. These sentiments were echoed by Mark Twain, who also had abhorrent things to say about the indigenous Palestinians, Chissin described Arab peasants as “very ignorant despite all their experience”.\nUltimately, while  the dichotomy of Zionist environmental prowess vs. Palestinian carelessness towards the land has been shown to be nonsense, it is worthwhile for us here to emphasize the following: Even in an alternate reality where all the Zionist settlers had been the most talented farmers with the most efficient tools the world, and had all the Palestinians never heard of or seen a tree in their lives, it is an outrageous notion that a people’s, home, sovereignty, self-determination and dignity were all up for grabs through some contest akin to a reality TV show.\nOr, as American Jewish philosopher Michael Neumann phrased it:\n\n“It does not matter if the Zionists achieved wonderful things or ‘turned the desert green.’ That I do wonderful things while acquiring the power of life and death over you hardly legitimizes my venture. It does not matter if Palestine was or wasn’t a poor, neglected area; this could not possibly give anyone supreme power over its inhabitants.”\nUnfortunately, today the situation is not so different. This justification for colonialism per civilizational metrics continues to rear its ugly head in new ways, and with increased environmentalist concerns over resources with the advent of climate change. These concerns are driving the Israeli state’s green campaigns which reach a fever pitch every Earth Day.\nIsrael’s Ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, described Israel as a hub for renewable energy research and development in the global initiative Sustainable Energy for All (SEforAll) forum. He quoted one of Israel’s “sustainable energy pioneers” who waxed poetic about “the same sun that shines equally on all of us, is owned by none of us, and can supply energy in abundance, inherently promotes peace.”\nAs touching as this sentiment is, the reality is a bit less sunshine and rainbows. While Israeli and multinational corporations have been reaping enormous profits from the initiation and operation of commercial and residential projects in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinians living there are deprived from tapping into the potential of solar energy production. Instead the Palestinian economy has been de-developed and pushed into an expensive reliance on Israeli energy companies. The Jordan Valley alone, with its 3,000 hours of annual sunshine and high radiation levels, would be perfect for solar energy production to meet Palestinian energy needs. Instead, fields for Israeli commercial use are built, which provide uninterrupted electricity to illegal settlements while the neighboring Palestinian towns suffer under blackouts.\nTo circle back to Prosor’s statement, the sun should belong to everyone. Instead, for years, Israel has destroyed with impunity even the solar panels that have been donated to Palestinians, deeming them “illegal” as permits for Palestinian infrastructure building are difficult to come by, while illegal settlements continue to expand. Solar panel donations from Spain, the Netherlands, and Ireland have all been destroyed, with seven EU countries calling for the end of these cruel demolitions.\nSimilarly, oft-touted are Israel’s assertions of ingenuity regarding wastewater recycling. For example, Israel and Israeli advocacy groups regularly boast about Israel’s recycling of wastewater, as proof of its environmental stewardship, with Israel reportedly being the first country in the world to make effluent recycling a central component of its water management strategy. However, this obscures how the wastewater Israel reuses for irrigation is an environmental and health hazard, given its poor pre-treatment, inadequate oversight, and leniency of standards. Sludge is also generated as a byproduct of wastewater treatment, which contains high concentrations of pathogens, heavy metals, and organic pollutants. Israel dumps about half (46%) of this byproduct directly into the sea, according to the Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection. Israeli sludge is now highlighted as the major source of pollution in the Mediterranean Sea, significantly larger than all other sources combined.\nIsrael supporters also regularly claim that Israel is a “water expert”, with a big song and dance on drip-irrigation and desalination measures. Common tropes again include the idea that water was scarce in Palestine before the Zionist project and would be scarce now if it was not for their ingenuity, and that neighboring Middle Eastern countries have a lot to learn on water technology. Of course, it is not hard to gain a water advantage when you have undertaken all measures possible to extract, steal and hoard the water in the first place. Palestinian environmental scholar Sharif S. Elmusa describes Israel’s water policy, as being a water sponge. A greedy sponge at that, with Israel using 73% of the West Bank’s water, diverting an additional 10% of it to illegal settlements, and selling to Palestinians the remaining 17%. It is also currently utilizing about 80% of the Palestinian groundwater resources in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.\nOf note here as well is Israel denying Palestinian access to the vast majority of the water from the Jordan River despite only 3% of the river falling within the supposed pre-1967 borders. Israel has also diverted most of the water from the Jordan River and from Lake Tiberias (located in the North) to the central and southern parts of the country. This diversion massively reduced the Jordan River’s flow; the amount of water that historically flew into the lower Jordan River reaching the Dead Sea was nearly 1.1 billion cubic meters per year in 1900. Now, barely 50 million cubic meters reach the river, mostly consisting of sewage water from Israeli settlements in the upper Jordan Valley. The water levels are now so low that the Jordan River can no longer replenish the Dead Sea. This drop has led to the development of sinkholes and an increased groundwater flow from surrounding Palestinian aquifers towards the sea. Thus, surrounding aquifers have also become depleted. Meanwhile, the relatively saline waters of Lake Tiberias contaminated groundwater used for irrigation of the Naqab, salinating the soil.\nThe Israeli army also has the liberty to declare however many dunams of land a “closed military area” at will, as it did in the area of Susya, denying the villagers access to the 13 rainwater harvesting cisterns located there and making their water shortage worse still. Meanwhile, in the nearby illegal Israeli settlement, the Israeli settlers have ample water supplies. They have a swimming pool and their lush irrigated vineyards, herb farms and lawns – verdant even at the height of the dry season – stand in stark contrast to the parched and arid Palestinian villages on their doorstep. This is not an isolated incident: it has been found that overall, water consumption by Israelis is at least four times that of Palestinians living in the OPT. Palestinians consume on average 73 litres of water a day per person, which is well below the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommended daily minimum of 100 litres per capita. In many herding communities in the West Bank, the water consumption for thousands of Palestinians is as low as 20 litres per person a day, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). By contrast, the average Israeli consumes approximately 300 litres of water a day.\nAnother point of pride for Israel, a familiar policy of greenwashing across all settler-colonies, is the designation of certain areas as national parks, boasting of over 70 across the occupied West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. National parks put a green face on Israel’s colonial expansion; the declaration of land belonging to local Palestinian residents as a nature reserve, such as has happened in Wadi Qana, has meant an absolute ban on Palestinian farming, meaning the loss of an important source of income and way of life. Some Palestinian residents have resisted the ban by planting olive trees, but the Israeli government regularly uproots and confiscates these trees. Meanwhile, Israel turns a blind eye to illegal activities by settlers in the same nature reserve, such as massive construction, building roads, and discharging wastewater into the wadi (valley). Some 100 homes in the settlements of Yaqir, Nofim, and Karnei Shomron were constructed within the area of the reserve and, in 2014, master plans were submitted for them which include rezoning areas from a nature reserve to residential.\nIn east Jerusalem, some of these national parks completely lack any landscape, nature or national treasures or significance, making clear that their true motive is to prevent Palestinian construction, not protect the environment. This has led NGO Bimkon to dub these national parks “green settlements”.\nAs South African geographer Maano Ramutsindela wrote, even on its face, such national parks appeal to a widespread Western view of nature that people must be excluded from it in order to protect it. Furthermore, as has been the case in the U.S and in Apartheid South Africa, national parks remove and dispossess the Indigenous population and interrupt traditional foodways, ultimately causing more environmental harm than good; such preservation tactics to maintain a landscape in its existing state, is interfering with natural processes and can actually reduce biodiversity, degrading the health of the environment.\nZionism, like all settler-colonialism, does not take into account these natural processes, biodiversity and the overall health of the ecosystem. The delicate interdependence between humans and nature is secondary to atrocities being perpetrated against indigenous populations. This brings us back to the JNF, whose environmental “genius” led to them draining the Hula Lake and the surrounding swamplands, precipitating an environmental disaster that, among other consequences, wiped out dozens of fauna and flora unique to the region. In 1994, once the full impact of the Hula drainage project became apparent and after years of failed attempts to turn the valley into productive agricultural land, the JNF took the unprecedented step of partially reflooding the lake in an attempt to undo the destruction they had wrought. Naturally, this did this not stop the Zionist talking-point of how the settlers supposedly saved Palestine from its swamps.\nMost central to JNF’s masquerade as a charitable organization is its insidious tree-planting campaigns, which are cynically exploited for colonial ends. Trees are quite widely perceived as an incontrovertible good, the organization plays on this impression to garner political and financial support for its activities and to conceal their deeply ideological and political work. The trees themselves are used as proof that Zionism is “bettering” the land in ways Palestinians could not and as a symbol of an imagined Israeli past.\nThe reality of the JNF, in addition to its barely covert mission to dispossess Palestinians, is that its work has also been environmentally destructive. Its manner of planting, its use of hazardous chemicals and its repeated planting of non-native trees, has been disastrous. For example, extensive planting of pine trees has killed off much of the native habitat and is implicated in massive forest fires, including one that killed 42 people:\n\n“The JNF planted hundreds of thousands of trees…helping to establish the Carmel National Park. An area on the south slope of Mount Carmel so closely resembled the landscape of the Swiss Alps that it was nicknamed ‘Little Switzerland. Of course, the nonindigenous trees of the JNF were poorly suited to the environment in Palestine. Most of the saplings the JNF plants at a site near Jerusalem simply do not survive, and require frequent replanting. Elsewhere, needles from the pine trees have killed native plant species and wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. And as we have seen with the Carmel wildfire, the JNF’s trees go up like tinder in the dry heat.”\n\nMost sinisterly, the JNF’s trees are frequently planted over the remains of Palestinian villages ethnically cleansed and destroyed during the 1948 Nakba; the aforementioned pine trees, for example, were planted over the remains of the Palestinian village of Al-Trina. The purpose of this is to construct the physical invisibility of the Palestinians by literally obscuring evidence of their previous existence on the same land.In discussing Zionists’ latest greenwashing claims, we have touched upon the reality of Israel’s environmental destruction. This section will go into further depth on what this environmental destruction looks like and how it amounts to environmental racism against Palestinians.\nOne prominent example is Al Mokatta River near the city of Haifa, which Israel renamed the Kishon. The river has been polluted for decades with acidic waste from Haifa’s petrochemical industry. This river which was “once the lifeblood of the region has turned to a stinking trench of poison”; it’s said if you put your hand into the river for long enough, the acid will begin to burn it. Not even bacteria can reportedly survive in the water anymore, and tests show that fish die in less than three minutes of being submerged. This river is now reportedly the most polluted river in Israel. However, as Shoshana Gabbay, editor of the Israel Environment Bulletin reports, it is certainly not the only polluted river. With the exception of the upper Jordan River and its tributaries, the prognosis for Israel’s rivers has long been gloomy: a slow and painful death. Whether as a result of industrial discharge, municipal sewage, overpumping or general abuse – rivers have either dried up or become sewage conduits.\nNot satisfied with polluting the Palestinian lands stolen in 1948, Israel also treats the West Bank as sewage and pollution dumping grounds. Taking advantage of old Jordanian law provides the West Bank significantly fewer labor and environmental protections than those offered by Israeli law, to the benefit of the Israeli economy. For example, as of 2014, roughly half of Israel’s environmental laws did not apply in the West Bank, encouraging Israeli polluting factories to set up in the West Bank.\nFor instance, Geshuri industries, a manufacturer of pesticides and fertilizers was ordered in 1982 by an Israeli court to move from Kfar Saba, inside the green line, to an area adjacent to Tulkarem, inside the West Bank because of the company’s negative environmental effects on Israeli land, public health, and agriculture. The health of Israelis was clearly deemed more important than that of the Palestinian residents of Tulkarem, a blatant act of environmental racism. An empirical study showed that this polluting industry may have devastated the environment and health of the Palestinian residents of Tulkarem; Tulkarem residents were found to have some of the highest rates of cancer, asthma, and eye and respiratory health anomalies compared to residents in other districts in the West Bank. Chemical waste from the factory also harmed the farming land that surrounds Tulkarem, causing trees to lose their leaves and destroying the fertile nature of the soil. Vegetables to be sold in Palestinian markets, grew not far from the factory.\nThe Gaza Strip has not been spared from Israel’s environmental destruction. Israel, as an arms exporter, has tested much of its weaponry on the besieged and blockaded area. Such warfare, besides the horrendous human toll it has taken, is also inherently ecologically damaging, with weapons manufacturing and testing generating tremendous pollution and hazardous waste.\nPalestinian environmental NGO, PENGON, published an environmental impact assessment of Israel’s 2014 War on Gaza. Gaza’s environment, the assessment recognized, was already devastated by Israel’s siege, with the war exacerbating these damages. Almost 95 percent of the water pumped in Gaza in 2010 was deemed unfit for drinking due to severe pollution, the water was polluted by both the over pumping of the underground water of the Coast Aquifer and Operation Cast Lead, which caused more than 600,000 tons of waste, including asbestos, oils, and fuels, to contaminate Gaza’s water. Unfortunately, there are no means to rehabilitate the water or treat wastewater, thanks to Israel’s 2007 decision forbidding the entry of the necessary equipment and materials.\nThus, Israel’s 2014 war almost completely halted wastewater treatment. Millions of cubic meters of wastewater were consequently dumped completely untreated into the sea. This dumping deteriorated the marine environment, turning 70% of Gaza’s seashore unfit for recreational activities. The war also produced more than 2.5 million tons of demolition waste, causing particulate matter pollution throughout Gaza. The heavy bombing also sparked fires, which caused air pollution composed of soot, chemicals, and particulate matter.\nMoreover, Israel attacked the fuel stores of the Gaza power plant, openly igniting two million liters of diesel, which further contaminated the air. Meanwhile, water and soil infrastructure were damaged and farms, trees, crops, poultry, and livestock were destroyed. 3,450 hectares including more than 250,000 trees, mostly olive, citrus, and grape trees, and more than a thousand greenhouses and tens of thousands of open lands cultivated for the production of vegetables were directly damaged during Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza.\nWhile the information presented here barely scratched the surface of Israel’s environmental destruction and racist colonial practices vis-a-vis Palestinians which it hopes to conduct under a green-tinted shroud, it must be taken into account that Palestinians, especially in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, are particularly vulnerable to the catastrophic effects of climate change. So much so, that the UNDP has deemed the Israeli occupation itself as an environmental risk in its own right due to its fragmentation of the Palestinian political landscape, the Apartheid wall, land grabs, settlement expansion and settler violence. We hope then that this has given you much to think and research about and will push you to not only be able to recognize greenwashing campaigns and talking points, but to take action to protect and defend Palestinian sovereignty over our land and resources."
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+	"text": "A cursory glance at Palestine’s geography would reveal that most of it is part of what is known as the Fertile Crescent (you have three guesses as to why). The region has historically been known for its crops and agriculture.  As a matter of fact, if we are to look at the average annual rainfall in the area over the last 100 years, then Ramallah has a higher average annual rainfall than Paris, and Jerusalem has a higher average annual rainfall than Berlin. Now unless you’re going to refer to north-east Germany as an uncultivated desert, then you might want to reevaluate why Jerusalem was framed as such with comparable levels of rainfall. Although Palestine does not have many sources of surface water -relatively speaking- it has an abundance of ground and mineral water stored in its aquifers.\nTruth be told, over its history Palestine has had ample problems with an overabundance of water, leading to the creation of swamplands in the north. Naturally, the drying of these swamplands is also used by Zionists as an example of their ingenuity bringing prosperity to the land, while also claiming that Palestine was a dry desert. National foundation mythologies are seldom consistent, and the Zionist one is no exception.\nHistorically speaking, there is strong evidence that the fertile crescent is where agriculture was first invented and practiced; for example the Natufians who lived in the area are often credited with being the pioneers of agriculture. This, of course, would not be possible if the land lacked the necessary prerequisites, such as abundant water and fertile soil.\nThis is not to say that Palestine is entirely free of deserts, as the Naqab desert actually extends over vast territories in the south. But under no stretch of the imagination did this mean that Palestine as a whole is or was a desert. For example, vast swathes of land in California are also considered desert, yet it also contains fertile and cultivated lands that make it a major bread basket in the world.\nAnother aspect we should be wary of is reading desert as to mean uncultivated. Palestinian Bedouins have long cultivated lands in the Naqab desert using traditional farming and water preserving techniques. Records show that despite the loud proclamations of Zionists making the desert bloom, in 1944 land cultivated by Palestinians in the Naqab desert alone was three times of that cultivated by the entire Zionist settler presence in Palestine. As a matter of fact, the amount of cultivated land in the Naqab desert has dropped significantly since the Nakba in 1947-48. This is yet another case of a popular Zionist slogan being the complete opposite of reality.If we look at the data even more closely, it paints an even clearer picture: The vast majority of cultivated agricultural land in Israel today was already being cultivated by Palestinians before their ethnic cleansing. Schechtman estimates that on the eve of the 1948 war, around 2,990,000 dunams of land (or 739,750 acres) were being cultivated by Palestinians. These cultivated lands were so vast, that they were “greater than the physical area which was under cultivation in Israel almost thirty years later.” It took Israel 30 years to even equal the amount of land being cultivated before its establishment. Alan George continues:\n\n“The impressive expansion of Israel’s cultivated area since 1948 has been more apparent than real since it involved mainly the ‘reclamation’ of farmland belonging to the refugees.”\n\nIt would be dishonest to claim that there have been no new cultivated lands since, but the fact remains that the agricultural core of the Israeli state consists of cultivated farmland that was stolen from Palestinian refugees after their ethnic cleansing . Zionist settlers did not make the desert bloom, as the land was never as much as a desert as they claimed, and even those areas which were classified as such were still cultivated and tended to by Palestinians. The severe drop in the amount of cultivated land in the Naqab after 1948 attests to this fact.\nBut as usual, these talking points are never about the actual history, or the data, or reality. They are usually about a message to be conveyed, or an image to be maintained. This is especially clear when we look at some of the modern Naqab farms that Israel loves to market. Never mind the fact that, as mentioned, the amount of cultivated land in the Naqab actually dropped; the portrayal of these farms as oases in the desert, and as an ode to Israeli and Zionist resilience and ingenuity is rooted in Zionist propaganda. These desert farms do not make sense economically, and they are unsustainable in almost any way you look at it. However, their purpose lies in their discursive value. As Messserschmid argues:\n\n“Israel allows itself to waste vast amounts of water and water resources, especially for agriculture. Israel, it’s known, uses over 60 percent of its water for agriculture, which amounts to about 2 percent of GDP… Agriculture in Israel is important in terms of preserving the national ethos, and is not calculated in terms of the actual conditions of the water economy.”\n\nIndeed, making a minor green spot in the desert is no magical feat, as Baskin says “All you need is to waste huge quantities of water“. And despite their “water miracle” propaganda stating the opposite, waste water they do.\nIn the end, this whole talking point is beyond the issue, and amounts to nothing more than Greenwashing settler colonialism . It simply exists to try and show why the Zionist settlers are more deserving of the land than Palestinians, who had supposedly neglected it. Despite the data showing that the land was far from an uncultivated desert, and that Israel stole millions of dunams of cultivated land to kick-start its agricultural sector, it’s a moot point to begin with. For argument’s sake, even if this talking point was accurate, and that the land was mostly uncultivated desert, does this provide a moral cover for settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing and erecting a reactionary ethnocracy at the expense of the people living there?\nOf course not. Nothing can justify that. But this raises another point: Why the need to resort to such arguments in the first place? Why did these settlers feel the need to legitimize themselves if they didn’t feel like they were doing anything wrong, or if nobody was there in the first place, as they often claimed?\nIt’s because they knew they were wronging someone. They knew they were taking over someone’s land, and they knew that they were spouting nonsensical propaganda. This is why these talking points often clash so terribly against each other, because they are not based on fact, but on political utility. It is unfortunate that such baseless claims survive to this day, but as with all propaganda, it loses its effectiveness when you start asking the right questions.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "Theodor Herzl, one of the founding fathers of Zionism, wrote a utopian novel by the name of Altneuland, or “Old New Land.” In the book, a Viennese Jew and a Prussian nobleman return from a twenty-year isolation on a tropical island, stop in Palestine and discover Herzl’s utopian vision for the future Jewish state. In Herzl’s wildest dreams -and due to Jewish ingenuity- Palestine is no longer a “neglected and desertified land” but suddenly a technologically savvy nation replete with fast trains to Europe, where in Herzl’s mind everything culturally and politically worthwhile is. Much of the novel drones on about what he perceives to be an “unforgiving arid climate” thanks to human-driven desertification as well as the idea that the biblical land of plenty has devolved into a feudal and largely subsistence economy.\nHerzl wasn’t alone in this charged characterization of Palestinian land. In 1928, the Economic Board for Palestine of London recorded a Zionist bulletin declaring that:\n\n“Palestine was a poor and backward agricultural country. This is of course still the case to a large extent, but a remarkable development has taken place which is gradually modifying the traditional life”.\n\nBen-Gurion, another Zionist founding father and Israel’s first prime minister, described in a 1942 pamplet the Jordan Valley, largely known as the breadbasket of Palestine due to its fertile land, as a wasteland “..which knew not at all the pioneer passion that would come to fertilize it”.\nPaired with Zionist rhetoric on the supposed desolation of Palestinian land is the manner in which Palestinian fellahin (farmers) and Bedouins are spoken of as having ruined the land with their incompetence. The Jewish Agency exemplified this rhetoric in its call for  replacing the “traditional” Arab farmers with better cultivators, matched by Ben-Gurion stating that “we do not recognize their [the Arabs] right to rule the country to the extent that it has not been built by them and is still awaiting its cultivators”.\nThey were in fine imperialist company with types like Winston Churchill, then British Colonial Secretary and overall genocide-engineering extraordinaire, who stated that “left to themselves the Arabs would never in 1,000 years take effective steps towards the irrigation of Palestine”, as well as with Laurence Oliphant, a British MP and intelligence officer and occasional collaborator with the Palestine Exploration Fund, who declared that:\n\n“The Arabs have very little claim to our sympathy. They have laid waste this country, ruined its villages, and plundered its inhabitants, until it has been reduced to its present condition…the same system might be pursued which we have adopted with success in Canada with our North American Indian tribes, who are confined to their ‘reserves’, and live peaceably upon them in the midst of the settled agricultural population.”\n\nThese statements and attitudes on Palestinian farmers’ inadequacy and the conditions of the land was service to the rather dubious claim, as recorded in Moshe Smilansky’s Jewish Colonisation and the Fellah , that the Palestinian farmer can only be saved from his misery and turned into a ‘real’ farmer through the aid of Jewish settlers. These absurd and racist claims were intended to legitimize the Zionist project, and put forward the idea that Zionist colonialism would not displace or otherwise harm the native Palestinians and would even benefit Palestinians. In reality, the settlers banned re-sale or lease of land to Palestinians and prevented their employment in their Jewish-only endeavors. A significant example of this is the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organization founded in 1901 to acquire land in Palestine explicitly for Jewish-only use, and whose dispossession of Palestinians continues to the present day.\nDespite the political usefulness of the claims that Zionists were improving conditions for all the inhabitants of Palestine, there is ample evidence that the British and Zionists alike frequently ignored the aspects of Palestinian agricultural practices which contradicted their ideologically-driven predispositions. Yitzhak Elazari-Volkani, one of the founders of the agricultural faculty at the Hebrew University, made a compelling argument in a piece written on Zionist agricultural practices, where he asserted that it was actually the Zionist agricultural practices which could be deemed “defective”, with money blown on expensive machinery only to gain comparable, if not lower income than Palestinian farmers. Furthermore, the British Hope-Simpson report on immigration, land settlement and development in Mandatory Palestine found that said expensive machinery actually risked damaging the soil, while Jewish farmers “had to be protected by subsidies from the JNF or other Jewish agencies in order to sustain their European standard of living.” Nevertheless, the Zionist and British stance was still that Palestinian agriculture was in need of “capital-driven improvement”, because neither could think in terms other than that.\nTo be clear, besides the agricultural expertise Palestinians had accumulated for generations, they already had a lot to work with naturally; in contrast to claims of barren Palestinian land that was “mostly desert”, most of  Palestine had been cultivated, and had supported agricultural populations for centuries. The lands of Palestine have long been written about as one of the most fertile lands in the decidedly aptly named Fertile Crescent. Renowned Roman historian Tacitus described Palestine in flowery terms, saying “the inhabitants are healthy and robust; the rains moderate; the soil fertile.”\nIn fact, Palestine, as later shown in a pioneering study by Alexander Schölch, produced large agricultural surpluses and was integrated into the world capitalist economy as an exporter of goods such as barley, sesame, olive oil, and soap during the 1856–1882 period. Consular reports on imports and exports such as through the ports of Acre and Haifa showed that exports not only closely shadowed shifting European demand but also exceeded imports of European machine-manufactured goods, which meant that Palestine helped the rest of Greater Syria minimize its overall negative balance of trade with Europe. Already, then, wide areas such as the coastal plain to the north and south of Gaza were cultivated, producing wheat crops, with the city of Gaza once having been a prosperous market town functioning as a collecting and forwarding center for the citrus, wheat, and barley crops of the Gaza District before being cut off from its trade relations following the 1948 Nakba. Examples of this cultivation were not limited to Gaza, with watermelons and above all citrus being cultivated in the Jaffa area, olives and cotton in the Jabal Nablus region, grapes in Al Khalil region, and tobacco and watermelon in the Galilee among others.\nTo add insult to the injury of these arrogant claims, much of Zionists’ first agricultural attempts went as well as you would expect, seeing as large swathes of the first settlers had no agricultural experience whatsoever. A prominent example of this is the Bilu group, comprised of primarily Russian Jewish settlers who viewed their mission in Palestine as a pioneering one towards “the physical upbuilding of the land as contributing toward both a revitalization of the Jewish nation and the reemergence of Jewish masculinity and virility”. One of these early settlers, Chaim Chissin, himself admitted that this group was composed of students who had little to no experience in agriculture, though he appeared to view this as a minor detail. However, this lack of experience and familiarity with the land definitely impeded their progress; in describing the failure of their first harvest, Chissin acknowledged the condescending attitude of the Jewish pioneers towards the Arab peasants:\n\n“Whenever the Arabs told us that it was already too late to sow barley, or that the land was unsuited for it, we never hesitated to tell the ‘barbarians,’ with considerable self assurance, ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter. We’ll plow deep, we’ll turn the soil inside out, we’ll harrow it clean, and then you’ll see what a crop we’ll have!’ We provided ourselves with big plows, sunk them deep into the soil, and cruelly whipped our horses which were cruelly exhausted. Our self-confidence had no limits. We looked down on the Arabs, assuming that it was not they who should teach us, but we who would show these barbarians’ what a European could accomplish on this neglected land with the use of perfect tools and rational methods of cultivation. The only trouble was that we ourselves knew about European methods of cultivation only from hearsay, and our agriculturalist, too, knew very little [about conditions in Palestine].”\n\nAdditionally, George Mansour, an active Palestinian trade unionist of the time compares Palestinian agricultural practices to the new Zionist settlers, writing that with regard to fruit trees other than citrus and bananas, government data actually showed that “the Arabs have, in recent years, very greatly increased their area of olives, figs and vines; while the Jews, in a disastrous rush to make quid profits by planting citrus, have decreased theirs…the present crisis of over-production is entirely due to the Zionists’ desire to develop everything unnaturally quickly, in order to facilitate Jewish immigration.”\nIt is no wonder then, that large portions of these settlers eventually moved back to Russia or migrated to the West. Even so, it does not appear that Chissin learned from this failure, going on to rationalize that the Jewish settlers could not rely on the advice of the Arabs, as they were untrustworthy and treacherous. These sentiments were echoed by Mark Twain, who also had abhorrent things to say about the indigenous Palestinians, Chissin described Arab peasants as “very ignorant despite all their experience”.\nUltimately, while  the dichotomy of Zionist environmental prowess vs. Palestinian carelessness towards the land has been shown to be nonsense, it is worthwhile for us here to emphasize the following: Even in an alternate reality where all the Zionist settlers had been the most talented farmers with the most efficient tools the world, and had all the Palestinians never heard of or seen a tree in their lives, it is an outrageous notion that a people’s, home, sovereignty, self-determination and dignity were all up for grabs through some contest akin to a reality TV show.\nOr, as American Jewish philosopher Michael Neumann phrased it:\n\n“It does not matter if the Zionists achieved wonderful things or ‘turned the desert green.’ That I do wonderful things while acquiring the power of life and death over you hardly legitimizes my venture. It does not matter if Palestine was or wasn’t a poor, neglected area; this could not possibly give anyone supreme power over its inhabitants.”\nUnfortunately, today the situation is not so different. This justification for colonialism per civilizational metrics continues to rear its ugly head in new ways, and with increased environmentalist concerns over resources with the advent of climate change. These concerns are driving the Israeli state’s green campaigns which reach a fever pitch every Earth Day.\nIsrael’s Ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, described Israel as a hub for renewable energy research and development in the global initiative Sustainable Energy for All (SEforAll) forum. He quoted one of Israel’s “sustainable energy pioneers” who waxed poetic about “the same sun that shines equally on all of us, is owned by none of us, and can supply energy in abundance, inherently promotes peace.”\nAs touching as this sentiment is, the reality is a bit less sunshine and rainbows. While Israeli and multinational corporations have been reaping enormous profits from the initiation and operation of commercial and residential projects in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinians living there are deprived from tapping into the potential of solar energy production. Instead the Palestinian economy has been de-developed and pushed into an expensive reliance on Israeli energy companies. The Jordan Valley alone, with its 3,000 hours of annual sunshine and high radiation levels, would be perfect for solar energy production to meet Palestinian energy needs. Instead, fields for Israeli commercial use are built, which provide uninterrupted electricity to illegal settlements while the neighboring Palestinian towns suffer under blackouts.\nTo circle back to Prosor’s statement, the sun should belong to everyone. Instead, for years, Israel has destroyed with impunity even the solar panels that have been donated to Palestinians, deeming them “illegal” as permits for Palestinian infrastructure building are difficult to come by, while illegal settlements continue to expand. Solar panel donations from Spain, the Netherlands, and Ireland have all been destroyed, with seven EU countries calling for the end of these cruel demolitions.\nSimilarly, oft-touted are Israel’s assertions of ingenuity regarding wastewater recycling. For example, Israel and Israeli advocacy groups regularly boast about Israel’s recycling of wastewater, as proof of its environmental stewardship, with Israel reportedly being the first country in the world to make effluent recycling a central component of its water management strategy. However, this obscures how the wastewater Israel reuses for irrigation is an environmental and health hazard, given its poor pre-treatment, inadequate oversight, and leniency of standards. Sludge is also generated as a byproduct of wastewater treatment, which contains high concentrations of pathogens, heavy metals, and organic pollutants. Israel dumps about half (46%) of this byproduct directly into the sea, according to the Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection. Israeli sludge is now highlighted as the major source of pollution in the Mediterranean Sea, significantly larger than all other sources combined.\nIsrael supporters also regularly claim that Israel is a “water expert”, with a big song and dance on drip-irrigation and desalination measures. Common tropes again include the idea that water was scarce in Palestine before the Zionist project and would be scarce now if it was not for their ingenuity, and that neighboring Middle Eastern countries have a lot to learn on water technology. Of course, it is not hard to gain a water advantage when you have undertaken all measures possible to extract, steal and hoard the water in the first place. Palestinian environmental scholar Sharif S. Elmusa describes Israel’s water policy, as being a water sponge. A greedy sponge at that, with Israel using 73% of the West Bank’s water, diverting an additional 10% of it to illegal settlements, and selling to Palestinians the remaining 17%. It is also currently utilizing about 80% of the Palestinian groundwater resources in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.\nOf note here as well is Israel denying Palestinian access to the vast majority of the water from the Jordan River despite only 3% of the river falling within the supposed pre-1967 borders. Israel has also diverted most of the water from the Jordan River and from Lake Tiberias (located in the North) to the central and southern parts of the country. This diversion massively reduced the Jordan River’s flow; the amount of water that historically flew into the lower Jordan River reaching the Dead Sea was nearly 1.1 billion cubic meters per year in 1900. Now, barely 50 million cubic meters reach the river, mostly consisting of sewage water from Israeli settlements in the upper Jordan Valley. The water levels are now so low that the Jordan River can no longer replenish the Dead Sea. This drop has led to the development of sinkholes and an increased groundwater flow from surrounding Palestinian aquifers towards the sea. Thus, surrounding aquifers have also become depleted. Meanwhile, the relatively saline waters of Lake Tiberias contaminated groundwater used for irrigation of the Naqab, salinating the soil.\nThe Israeli army also has the liberty to declare however many dunams of land a “closed military area” at will, as it did in the area of Susya, denying the villagers access to the 13 rainwater harvesting cisterns located there and making their water shortage worse still. Meanwhile, in the nearby illegal Israeli settlement, the Israeli settlers have ample water supplies. They have a swimming pool and their lush irrigated vineyards, herb farms and lawns – verdant even at the height of the dry season – stand in stark contrast to the parched and arid Palestinian villages on their doorstep. This is not an isolated incident: it has been found that overall, water consumption by Israelis is at least four times that of Palestinians living in the OPT. Palestinians consume on average 73 litres of water a day per person, which is well below the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommended daily minimum of 100 litres per capita. In many herding communities in the West Bank, the water consumption for thousands of Palestinians is as low as 20 litres per person a day, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). By contrast, the average Israeli consumes approximately 300 litres of water a day.\nAnother point of pride for Israel, a familiar policy of greenwashing across all settler-colonies, is the designation of certain areas as national parks, boasting of over 70 across the occupied West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. National parks put a green face on Israel’s colonial expansion; the declaration of land belonging to local Palestinian residents as a nature reserve, such as has happened in Wadi Qana, has meant an absolute ban on Palestinian farming, meaning the loss of an important source of income and way of life. Some Palestinian residents have resisted the ban by planting olive trees, but the Israeli government regularly uproots and confiscates these trees. Meanwhile, Israel turns a blind eye to illegal activities by settlers in the same nature reserve, such as massive construction, building roads, and discharging wastewater into the wadi (valley). Some 100 homes in the settlements of Yaqir, Nofim, and Karnei Shomron were constructed within the area of the reserve and, in 2014, master plans were submitted for them which include rezoning areas from a nature reserve to residential.\nIn east Jerusalem, some of these national parks completely lack any landscape, nature or national treasures or significance, making clear that their true motive is to prevent Palestinian construction, not protect the environment. This has led NGO Bimkon to dub these national parks “green settlements”.\nAs South African geographer Maano Ramutsindela wrote, even on its face, such national parks appeal to a widespread Western view of nature that people must be excluded from it in order to protect it. Furthermore, as has been the case in the U.S and in Apartheid South Africa, national parks remove and dispossess the Indigenous population and interrupt traditional foodways, ultimately causing more environmental harm than good; such preservation tactics to maintain a landscape in its existing state, is interfering with natural processes and can actually reduce biodiversity, degrading the health of the environment.\nZionism, like all settler-colonialism, does not take into account these natural processes, biodiversity and the overall health of the ecosystem. The delicate interdependence between humans and nature is secondary to atrocities being perpetrated against indigenous populations. This brings us back to the JNF, whose environmental “genius” led to them draining the Hula Lake and the surrounding swamplands, precipitating an environmental disaster that, among other consequences, wiped out dozens of fauna and flora unique to the region. In 1994, once the full impact of the Hula drainage project became apparent and after years of failed attempts to turn the valley into productive agricultural land, the JNF took the unprecedented step of partially reflooding the lake in an attempt to undo the destruction they had wrought. Naturally, this did this not stop the Zionist talking-point of how the settlers supposedly saved Palestine from its swamps.\nMost central to JNF’s masquerade as a charitable organization is its insidious tree-planting campaigns, which are cynically exploited for colonial ends. Trees are quite widely perceived as an incontrovertible good, the organization plays on this impression to garner political and financial support for its activities and to conceal their deeply ideological and political work. The trees themselves are used as proof that Zionism is “bettering” the land in ways Palestinians could not and as a symbol of an imagined Israeli past.\nThe reality of the JNF, in addition to its barely covert mission to dispossess Palestinians, is that its work has also been environmentally destructive. Its manner of planting, its use of hazardous chemicals and its repeated planting of non-native trees, has been disastrous. For example, extensive planting of pine trees has killed off much of the native habitat and is implicated in massive forest fires, including one that killed 42 people:\n\n“The JNF planted hundreds of thousands of trees…helping to establish the Carmel National Park. An area on the south slope of Mount Carmel so closely resembled the landscape of the Swiss Alps that it was nicknamed ‘Little Switzerland. Of course, the nonindigenous trees of the JNF were poorly suited to the environment in Palestine. Most of the saplings the JNF plants at a site near Jerusalem simply do not survive, and require frequent replanting. Elsewhere, needles from the pine trees have killed native plant species and wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. And as we have seen with the Carmel wildfire, the JNF’s trees go up like tinder in the dry heat.”\n\nMost sinisterly, the JNF’s trees are frequently planted over the remains of Palestinian villages ethnically cleansed and destroyed during the 1948 Nakba; the aforementioned pine trees, for example, were planted over the remains of the Palestinian village of Al-Trina. The purpose of this is to construct the physical invisibility of the Palestinians by literally obscuring evidence of their previous existence on the same land.In discussing Zionists’ latest greenwashing claims, we have touched upon the reality of Israel’s environmental destruction. This section will go into further depth on what this environmental destruction looks like and how it amounts to environmental racism against Palestinians.\nOne prominent example is Al Mokatta River near the city of Haifa, which Israel renamed the Kishon. The river has been polluted for decades with acidic waste from Haifa’s petrochemical industry. This river which was “once the lifeblood of the region has turned to a stinking trench of poison”; it’s said if you put your hand into the river for long enough, the acid will begin to burn it. Not even bacteria can reportedly survive in the water anymore, and tests show that fish die in less than three minutes of being submerged. This river is now reportedly the most polluted river in Israel. However, as Shoshana Gabbay, editor of the Israel Environment Bulletin reports, it is certainly not the only polluted river. With the exception of the upper Jordan River and its tributaries, the prognosis for Israel’s rivers has long been gloomy: a slow and painful death. Whether as a result of industrial discharge, municipal sewage, overpumping or general abuse – rivers have either dried up or become sewage conduits.\nNot satisfied with polluting the Palestinian lands stolen in 1948, Israel also treats the West Bank as sewage and pollution dumping grounds. Taking advantage of old Jordanian law provides the West Bank significantly fewer labor and environmental protections than those offered by Israeli law, to the benefit of the Israeli economy. For example, as of 2014, roughly half of Israel’s environmental laws did not apply in the West Bank, encouraging Israeli polluting factories to set up in the West Bank.\nFor instance, Geshuri industries, a manufacturer of pesticides and fertilizers was ordered in 1982 by an Israeli court to move from Kfar Saba, inside the green line, to an area adjacent to Tulkarem, inside the West Bank because of the company’s negative environmental effects on Israeli land, public health, and agriculture. The health of Israelis was clearly deemed more important than that of the Palestinian residents of Tulkarem, a blatant act of environmental racism. An empirical study showed that this polluting industry may have devastated the environment and health of the Palestinian residents of Tulkarem; Tulkarem residents were found to have some of the highest rates of cancer, asthma, and eye and respiratory health anomalies compared to residents in other districts in the West Bank. Chemical waste from the factory also harmed the farming land that surrounds Tulkarem, causing trees to lose their leaves and destroying the fertile nature of the soil. Vegetables to be sold in Palestinian markets, grew not far from the factory.\nThe Gaza Strip has not been spared from Israel’s environmental destruction. Israel, as an arms exporter, has tested much of its weaponry on the besieged and blockaded area. Such warfare, besides the horrendous human toll it has taken, is also inherently ecologically damaging, with weapons manufacturing and testing generating tremendous pollution and hazardous waste.\nPalestinian environmental NGO, PENGON, published an environmental impact assessment of Israel’s 2014 War on Gaza. Gaza’s environment, the assessment recognized, was already devastated by Israel’s siege, with the war exacerbating these damages. Almost 95 percent of the water pumped in Gaza in 2010 was deemed unfit for drinking due to severe pollution, the water was polluted by both the over pumping of the underground water of the Coast Aquifer and Operation Cast Lead, which caused more than 600,000 tons of waste, including asbestos, oils, and fuels, to contaminate Gaza’s water. Unfortunately, there are no means to rehabilitate the water or treat wastewater, thanks to Israel’s 2007 decision forbidding the entry of the necessary equipment and materials.\nThus, Israel’s 2014 war almost completely halted wastewater treatment. Millions of cubic meters of wastewater were consequently dumped completely untreated into the sea. This dumping deteriorated the marine environment, turning 70% of Gaza’s seashore unfit for recreational activities. The war also produced more than 2.5 million tons of demolition waste, causing particulate matter pollution throughout Gaza. The heavy bombing also sparked fires, which caused air pollution composed of soot, chemicals, and particulate matter.\nMoreover, Israel attacked the fuel stores of the Gaza power plant, openly igniting two million liters of diesel, which further contaminated the air. Meanwhile, water and soil infrastructure were damaged and farms, trees, crops, poultry, and livestock were destroyed. 3,450 hectares including more than 250,000 trees, mostly olive, citrus, and grape trees, and more than a thousand greenhouses and tens of thousands of open lands cultivated for the production of vegetables were directly damaged during Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza.\nWhile the information presented here barely scratched the surface of Israel’s environmental destruction and racist colonial practices vis-a-vis Palestinians which it hopes to conduct under a green-tinted shroud, it must be taken into account that Palestinians, especially in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, are particularly vulnerable to the catastrophic effects of climate change. So much so, that the UNDP has deemed the Israeli occupation itself as an environmental risk in its own right due to its fragmentation of the Palestinian political landscape, the Apartheid wall, land grabs, settlement expansion and settler violence. We hope then that this has given you much to think and research about and will push you to not only be able to recognize greenwashing campaigns and talking points, but to take action to protect and defend Palestinian sovereignty over our land and resources."
+}
+{
+	"text": "I can already hear you protest, but Israel has elections! There is separation of powers! How could you say such nonsense?\nWhen discussing democracy many often fall into the trap of focusing on the formal trappings of democracy while ignoring its actual spirit. For instance, you can have regular elections, but if your system is designed so that it purposefully de facto excludes certain people then it is functionally no different than legally excluding them for whatever reason, be that race, gender or class.\nOne of the core aspects of democracy is equality. We cannot speak of a democratic system unless all of those participating in it are on equal legal and moral footing. There can be no second-class citizens in a democracy. In the case of Israel, however, it clearly distinguishes between citizenship and nationality.\nWhat does this mean?\nFor example, you can be a citizen of Israel but be a Druze national, or a Jewish national. Your nationality is determined by your ethnicity and it cannot be changed or challenged. Many of the rights you are accorded in Israel stem from your nationality not your citizenship. Meaning an “Arab” Israeli citizen and a Jewish Israeli citizen, while both citizens, enjoy different rights and privileges determined by their “nationality” .\nThis is not merely discrimination in practice, but discrimination by law. Adalah have composed a database of discriminatory laws in Israel that disfavor non-Jewish Israelis. For example, the Law of Return and Absentees’ Property Law are but two examples of flagrant racism and discrimination in the Israeli legal system.\nThis is not some old, odd oversight, but a very deliberate part of the design of Israeli society. This is periodically reinforced whenever some Israelis petition the Supreme Court to recognize an Israeli nationality that does not discriminate based on ethnicity. A recent example of these petitions was in 2013, where the Supreme Court rejected such an idea on the grounds that it would “undermine Israel’s Jewishness“.\nIt says quite a lot about Israel that a unifying egalitarian identity not based around ethnicity would “pose a danger to Israel’s founding principle: to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people” as the court ruled.  The fact that such discrimination is seen as a cornerstone of Israeli society only reinforces its colonial ethnocratic nature, and undermines any claims to equality among citizens.\nBut this kind of discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg, as it only covers some aspects of de jure inequality among Israelis. Inspecting the de facto discrimination against non-Jewish Israelis shines an even brighter light on Israel’s ethnocratic hierarchy.\nAlmost half of all Palestinian citizens of Israel live under the poverty line, with a considerable percentage close to the poverty line. They also have a considerably lower life expectancy, a higher infant mortality rate, less access to education and resources as well as less municipality and government funding. Should you be interested in delving into some of the more detailed aspects of this discrimination, you can read Adalah’s The Inequality Report. It is an excellent overview of many issues. Another report shining the light on Israel’s discrimination is “Discrimination against Palestinian Citizens in the Budget of Jerusalem Municipality and Government Planning: Objectives, Forms, Consequences” by the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, which you can find at this.\nAdditionally, you could read this report from the Adva center which illustrates quite clearly how this discrimination touches almost every aspect of life.\nFurthermore, most land inside the green line is off limits to Palestinian citizens of Israel. A large percentage of land in Israel is under the control of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which has a:\n\n“specific mandate to develop land for and lease land only to Jews. Thus the 13 percent of land in Israel owned by the JNF is by definition off-limits to Palestinian Arab citizens, and when the ILA tenders leases for land owned by the JNF, it does so only to Jews—either Israeli citizens or Jews from the Diaspora. This arrangement makes the state directly complicit in overt discrimination against Arab citizens in land allocation and use..”.\n\nThe JNF is not the only entity blocking Palestinian citizens of Israel from purchasing, leasing or renting land and property, but also by so-called regional and local councils, which account for the vast majority of land. These councils have the authority to block anyone from settling in these areas that do not seem like a “good fit”, for example a religious community would not want to allow secular residents from moving in on the grounds that it would be against the spirit of their communities. In practice, this has translated into a virtual ban on non-Jewish Israelis moving into Jewish areas. In a Statement submitted by Habitat International Coalition and Adalah to the United Nations, it was estimated that almost 80% of the entire country is off limits to lease for Palestinian citizens of Israel. You can click here to read their full statement.These features of Israeli “democracy” have not gone unnoticed. In its defense, Smooha suggests referring to Israel as an ethnic democracy, where he admits that the state institutions are built to privilege the majority group, but yet it maintains its democratic label.\nHere we have entered the realm of qualified democracy: “Other than this one missing feature, the system would be a liberal democracy, therefore it’s just a different kind of democracy.” But what if this feature is a core aspect of democracy? How could one argue for the presence of democracy where the citizens are unequal in front of the law and the state?\nThis argument could also apply to other states, not just Israel, but while these states claim that the de facto inequality among citizens fostered by their systems are an unintended byproduct, doubtful as that is, Israel openly flaunts these features and doesn’t even attempt to hide them. It is an ethno-state, it will always privilege and support the dominance of one ethnicity.\nOren Yiftachel defines Israel as an ethnocracy rather than a democracy. According to Yiftachel ethnocratic regimes:\n\n“…promote the expansion of the dominant group in contested territory and its domination of power structures while maintaining a democratic facade.”\n\nEthnocracies have several distinguishing characteristics:\n\nDespite declaring the regime as democratic, ethnicity (and not territorial citizenship) is the main determinant of the allocation of rights, powers, and resources, and politics is characterized by constant democratic-ethnocratic tension.\nState borders and political boundaries are fuzzy: there is no clear demos, mainly owing to the active role of ethnic diasporas and the bounded, unequal citizenship of ethnic minorities.\nA dominant, “charter” ethnoclass appropriates the state apparatus and determines the outcome of most public policies.\nSegregation and stratification occur on two main levels: ethnonations and ethnoclasses.\nThe socioeconomic sphere is marked by long-term ethnoclass stratification.\nThe logic of ethnic segregation is diffused into the social’ and political system, enhancing multidirectional processes of essentializing political ethnicization.\nSignificant (though partied) civil and political rights are extended, to members of the minority ethnonation, distinguishing -ethnocracies from Herrenvolk (apartheid) or authoritarian regimes.\n\nHrmm, sounds familiar.\nBut unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. All of the above applies only to so called “Israel proper”, meaning we are completely neglecting the areas beyond the green line that Israel is expanding into and controlling. If we look at the entirety of the territory controlled by Israel, ethnocracy would be too toothless of a term to describe the complex system of IDs and tiered ethnicity-based rights employed by Israel. This system finally pushed B’Tselem, Israel’s largest human rights group to officially designate Israel as an Apartheid state .\nIsrael cannot be called a democracy without omitting major features that most think of when they hear the term. The hyper-focus on the formalistic aspects of democracy obfuscates the preconditions and modifications needed to sustain the appearance of this label while completely twisting its spirit. However, if you remain unconvinced and still believe Israel to be democratic, then by now you should know that it has no bearing on the behavior of any state. Indeed, throughout history democracies have been capable of monstrous cruelty, genocide and repression at home and abroad, something Israel is undoubtedly guilty of regardless of how democratic you think it is.\n\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
+}
+{
+	"text": "But this kind of discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg, as it only covers some aspects of de jure inequality among Israelis. Inspecting the de facto discrimination against non-Jewish Israelis shines an even brighter light on Israel’s ethnocratic hierarchy.\nAlmost half of all Palestinian citizens of Israel live under the poverty line, with a considerable percentage close to the poverty line. They also have a considerably lower life expectancy, a higher infant mortality rate, less access to education and resources as well as less municipality and government funding. Should you be interested in delving into some of the more detailed aspects of this discrimination, you can read Adalah’s The Inequality Report. It is an excellent overview of many issues facing Palestinians within the green line. Another report shining the light on Israel’s discrimination is “Discrimination against Palestinian Citizens in the Budget of Jerusalem Municipality and Government Planning: Objectives, Forms, Consequences” by the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute.\nAdditionally, you could read this report from the Adva center which illustrates quite clearly how this discrimination touches almost every aspect of life.\nFurthermore, most land inside the green line is off limits to Palestinian citizens of Israel. A large percentage of land in Israel is under the control of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which has a:\n\n“specific mandate to develop land for and lease land only to Jews. Thus the 13 percent of land in Israel owned by the JNF is by definition off-limits to Palestinian Arab citizens, and when the ILA tenders leases for land owned by the JNF, it does so only to Jews—either Israeli citizens or Jews from the Diaspora. This arrangement makes the state directly complicit in overt discrimination against Arab citizens in land allocation and use…”.\n\nThe JNF is not the only entity blocking Palestinian citizens of Israel from purchasing, leasing or renting land and property, but also the so-called regional and local councils, which account for the vast majority of land. These councils have the authority to block anyone from settling in these areas that do not seem like a “good fit” for the community there. For example, a religious community would not want to allow secular residents from moving in on the grounds that it would be against the spirit of their communities. In practice, this has translated into a virtual ban on non-Jewish Israelis moving into Jewish areas. In a Statement submitted by Habitat International Coalition and Adalah to the United Nations, it was estimated that almost 80% of the entire country is off limits to lease for Palestinian citizens of Israel. You can click here to read their full statement.\nNo matter how you look at it, Israeli society is a heavily segregated and hierarchical one. Whether through the legal system or just the attitudes of average Jewish Israelis, the ethnocratic nature of Israel and its obsession with ethnic gerrymandering always rises to the surface. Some would deny it, citing standards of living or some random “Arab” judge as a refutation of this point, but as discussed in [this article], none of these claims dispute the extreme inequality -by design- of Israeli society. This denial is not unique to Israelis, we saw similar sentiments among white Americans who denied the existence of white supremacy, even though they reaped its benefits either directly or indirectly.\nUltimately, the goal of this article is not to advocate for a “more just” or equal settler-colonial state. As Audre Lorde observed, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. A just society is the complete antithesis to an ethnocracy, which elevates one group of people over the rest by virtue of their blood. It falls on us, however, to advocate for decolonization, where justice is its cornerstone rather than ethnic supremacy.\nSound utopian?\nPerhaps, but to quote Pliny the elder, how many things, too, are looked upon as quite impossible, until they have been actually effected?\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
+}
+{
+	"text": "Associating Israel with the label of Apartheid has become ubiquitous as of late; annual events all over the globe such as Israeli Apartheid Week have done much to normalize this coupling. Naturally, advocates for Israel insist that it is all nonsense, indeed how could Israel practice Apartheid when there are “Arab” judges, or members of Knesset? How could anyone accuse Israel of such practices when every citizen is allowed to vote?\nLet us delve a little bit deeper into this question and try to come up with an answer.\nFirstly, it is important to establish what we mean with Apartheid. There is a widespread misconception that Apartheid refers solely to the case of South Africa. While it’s understandable that people think of South Africa when Apartheid is mentioned, it is critical to recognize that it was merely one manifestation of it, and that there were different regimes with different configurations which upheld the same system.\nAccording to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the crime of Apartheid is defined as follows:\n\n“The crime of apartheid” means inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime;”\n\nThere are many inhumane acts listed under paragraph 1, but the most relevant to our case are:\n\nDeportation or forcible transfer of population.\nImprisonment and severe deprivation of liberty.\nPersecution based on ethnic, religious or national origins.\nOther inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.\n\nIt is indisputable that Israel practices these acts against Palestinians, inside and outside of the green line. It is also indisputable that as a state built on a colonial ideology that privileges one ethnic group over the rest, its actions are ultimately committed to maintain this system of supremacy.\nYou will notice that nowhere in this description does it say that if you have a judge from the oppressed minority then it ceases being an Apartheid system. As a matter of fact, Nelson Mandela was a successful lawyer. The counter-argument that there are “Arab” judges or policemen ceases to be convincing when you realize that the system doesn’t need to be a complete carbon copy of South Africa to be counted as Apartheid.\nMentioning that there are “Arab” members of Knesset is also not as powerful a gotcha moment as Israeli advocates believe it to be, simply because there is a precedent of an Apartheid state having parliament members of the oppressed indigenous group. That precedent is Southern Rhodesia. Despite allowing a certain number of black parliamentarians, it was still a racist entity ruled by a white minority, with the very honest declared goal of maintaining itself as a white state.\nAs you have surely noticed I have been referring to “Arabs” in parenthesis, this is because most Palestinians living within the green line prefer to call themselves Palestinians, not merely Arab. Naturally, this is a threat to the Israeli narrative of the non-existence of Palestinians as a people , so even as they tokenize them in an attempt to prove their egalitarianism, they seek to simultaneously erase their actual identity.\nSo now that we have established the meaning of Apartheid, and that having a few members of the oppressed group in high profile positions is irrelevant to the definition, we can move onto the next part of our answer.The argument that Israel does not practice apartheid hinges on one very crucial caveat: that we are distinguishing between Israel and the areas Israel rules. In practice, however, this distinction is functionally meaningless. (Even following this caveat, Israel itself is definitely not a democracy, at best it could be described as an ethnocracy ).\nIn practice, Israel rules everything from the river to the sea, it is the only sovereign power that runs the lives of all who inhabit this area. I know some of you will point to the Palestinian Authority, but in reality, the Palestinian Authority is relegated to the realm of administering occupied territories, without any real power, sovereignty or influence.\nFor example, the Palestinian Authority can’t even determine who a Palestinian citizen is. The citizen registry for Palestinians is under de facto Israeli control. Meaning that if a Palestinian marries a non-Palestinian, their spouse will never be able to gain Palestinian citizenship as Israel’s demographic obsessions would not allow for any preventable increase in the Palestinian population. Even Abbas needs to coordinate with the Israeli military to be able to visit other Palestinian cities, cities of a “country” he is supposedly president of.\nIn a watershed moment, B’Tselem, Israel’s largest human rights group recently released a report officially calling Israeli practices Apartheid, it argues that:\n\n“Although there is demographic parity between the two peoples living here, life is managed so that only one half enjoy the vast majority of political power, land resources, rights, freedoms and protections. It is quite a feat to maintain such disfranchisement. Even more so, to successfully market it as a democracy (inside the “green line” – the 1949 armistice line), one to which a temporary occupation is attached. In fact, one government rules everyone and everything between the river and the sea, following the same organising principle everywhere under its control, working to advance and perpetuate the supremacy of one group of people – Jews – over another – Palestinians. This is apartheid.”\n\nThey continued:\n\n“There is not a single square inch in the territory Israel controls where a Palestinian and a Jew are equal. The only first-class people here are Jewish citizens such as myself, and we enjoy this status both inside the 1967 lines and beyond them, in the West Bank. Separated by the different personal statuses allotted to them, and by the many variations of inferiority Israel subjects them to, Palestinians living under Israel’s rule are united by all being unequal.”\n\nIndeed, the green line has long been invisible to Israelis, and Israel treats the settlements as parts of its own state. Why should we pretend otherwise? Why pretend that we’re talking about two governing bodies when the Palestinian Authority is a glorified bantustan administrator with no say about anything?\nThis is by design, not by chance. Israel has been very conscious with how it approached its colonization project in the West Bank, in 1972 Ariel Sharon proclaimed that:\n\n“We’ll make a pastrami sandwich out of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in twenty five years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”\n\nEven more recently, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also officially designated Israeli behavior as constituting Apartheid. We promise they won’t be the last human rights organization to do so.\nIt is about time we stopped pretending that there ever was a hope for two states, or that we aren’t already living under a de facto one state from the river to the sea, with varying tiers of rights and privileges bestowed upon you based on where you come from and your ethnicity.\nWhen a Jewish settler attacks a Palestinian and is tried in a civil court, while those protesting the attack are tried in a military court, that practice is Apartheid, and no appeals to the contrary can change that. Pretending that this occupation is temporary has long been delusional, but has now crossed the line into intellectual dishonesty. If we are to have any hope for a way forward then we must call things as they are. We do not have the privilege of wasting another 25 years pretending to live in an alternate reality.\nFinally, it should be stressed that calling Israeli policy Apartheid does not mean that the Palestinian question is not a settler-colonial context, nor does it imply that the solution lies in a civil rights movement for equality or the mere incorporation of the West Bank or Gaza Strip into the Israeli state. The Palestinian cause is a cause for decolonization and freedom, not for acquiring privileges in a colonial state. Consequently, we argue that the term Apartheid is not a sufficient descriptor for the status quo, but merely one of the many crimes committed by Israel. After all, even if Israel stopped practicing Apartheid, without true decolonization and the right of return, the Palestinian struggle for liberation would be incomplete.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+{
+	"text": "Purplewashing refers to when a state or organization appeal to women’s rights and feminism in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices.\nMuch to the dismay of colonizers everywhere, it was once much easier to justify colonialism. The language surrounding it used to be rather straightforward; we deserve these lands and resources because we are more advanced; because God wanted it this way; because you are savages. Israel, as a settler-colony, was no exception to this line of reasoning; the sentiments of the founders of Zionism, and later of the State of Israel, are well documented regarding the native Palestinians, who they deemed as being “backwards” and not as deserving of the land as they were .\nIt is now a faux pas to say any of this quite so bluntly, even as (neo)colonialism prevails. Today, it is more fashionable to justify the theft of lands and resources under the guise of being protectors of human rights, unlike the enemies they seek to dominate.\nIt is within this context that Israel is rebranding itself. One facet of this propaganda is now centered on its supposed deep concern for the rights and freedoms of women, even Palestinian ones. This has come to be known as purplewashing, which consists of:\n“political and marketing strategies that [indicate] a supposed commitment to gender equality. It often refers to the image-cleaning of western countries, which have not achieved genuine equality between men and women but criticise inequalities in other countries or cultures, often where there is a Muslim majority.”\nThese strategies constitute representing Muslim women -which Palestinian women are largely coded as despite the existence of non-Muslim Palestinians- as uniquely abused in order to create the narrative that feminism only exists on the side of the West. This is part of an ideological framework referred to by scholars as colonial feminism, whereby women’s rights are appropriated in the service of empire; in the context of Palestine, this rhetoric is also known as gendered Orientalism. The Palestinian Arab/Muslim is framed as an “other”, who is culturally or even genetically predisposed to misogyny. Naturally, this is juxtaposed with the framing of a liberal, enlightened, Israeli Westerner. Ultimately to Israel, this facade of feminism is a way to improve its image, and incorporate women into its violent, colonial, racist systems and institutions, as well as a way to paint Palestinians as unworthy of statehood or even humanity.  The fact that these systems subjugate other -usually Palestinian- women is hardly mentioned.\n\nMuch of Zionists’ attempts to market Israel as feminist revolves around the Israeli army. The Israeli army’s official social media accounts and those at pro-Israel groups such as the Lawfare Project, hail the Israeli army as “one of the only armies in the Western world in which women are drafted to military service by law”. They praise women’s participation in the ethnic cleansing campaigns and massacres of the 1948 Nakba, and cheer on the increasing role of women in combat positions.\nHannah MacLeod, women’s officer for Australian Young Labor praised women’s participation in the Israeli army as “empowering” and pushed for Australia to encourage this participation. There is a “Hot Israeli Army Girls” Instagram account and Maxim magazine’s infamous “Women of Israel Defence Forces”, was deemed so crucial to Israel’s international reputation that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs threw a party celebrating its publication. One of the more recent and successful additions to the purplewashing of Israel has been Gal Gadot starring as Wonder Woman. Gadot, being a former IDF soldier herself, posted support for the Israeli military as it murdered thousands of Palestinians in its 2014 assault on Gaza, and helped spread the racist and baseless idea that Palestinians use their children and women as human shields. Nonetheless, none of this has stood in the way of trying to frame her as an icon of empowerment for women everywhere.\nAll of these efforts are meant to sell the idea of Israel being a liberal haven. That sexual assault is rampant in the Israeli army does not make the glossy brochures and social media posts; instead, they are all designed to convey the idea that this objectification in service of a settler-colonial fantasy is the height of female empowerment, an empowerment that Palestinian and other Arab and Muslim women can only aspire to.\nThis purplewashing of a colonial military, which in addition to subjugating the native population, is also one of the largest exporters of drones globally and has supplied weapons to some of the most repressive, racist regimes in modern history, including Apartheid South Africa. Such a military is anathema to the framework of intersectionality which undergirds a feminism that seeks to dismantle patriarchy and end violence against all women.\n\nThe body of theory on intersectionality in feminist movements, created by and largely expanded on by Black feminist writers, compellingly posits that challenging one aspect of structural power alone such as patriarchy, while leaving white supremacy unscathed, only empowers white, upper-class and otherwise privileged women at the expense of all other women. This understanding that feminism must be about ending not only patriarchy but racism and other oppressive systems has led to acts of global solidarity with Palestine, such as from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, notably regarding the partnership between the Israeli military and American police departments.\nZionists’ reaction to this solidarity has frankly been nothing short of unhinged, often attacking the concept of intersectionality as a whole. Monica Osborne from the Jewish Journal declared intersectionality “an even more sinister threat than the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish state”, and Sharon Nazarian, a senior vice president for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in her article for the Forward used a series of myths and half-baked talking points to declare that of course Zionism and feminism are compatible, and expressed her dismay at how “anti-Zionism is becoming increasingly visible in intersectional discourse”.\n\nSmearing intersectionality and solidarity efforts is becoming increasingly unpopular, and so instead there has been a push to purplewash Israel’s history instead. These efforts start with its history, especially in regards to its 4th Prime Minister Golda Meir. Zionists gush over Meir as “an icon—feminist and otherwise—of the 20th century.” The titles of one of her more well-known biographies simultaneously declared her as the “iron lady of the Middle East” and the “first woman prime minister in the West”. This is indicative of Zionist attempts to reap the benefits of Israel being considered a Western country even as they work to portray Israel as indigenous to the Middle East.\nTo Palestinian women, however, she was no more empowering than the male Zionist figures who sought and seek to erase our very existence; she once infamously declared that because Palestinians did not have a state or ascribe to modern-day conceptions of nationalism, they were not really ethnically cleansed:\n“It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” .\nThese efforts to purplewash Meir are made even more ridiculous by the fact that she did not even consider herself a feminist, as biographer Elinor Burkett stated, “American feminists loved to adopt Golda, but she was not interested…she ignored gender prejudices…she didn’t think of her [premiership] as an achievement for women. She thought of it as an achievement for Golda.”\nIn the present day, Zionist groups like Hadassah and the Zioness coalition are increasingly attempting to present themselves as feminist, indicative of a concern amongst Israeli hasbarists that Zionism needs to be rebranded in a more social justice inclined era. This is reflected in Hadassah’s online speaker series, “Defining Zionism in the 21st Century” including a “Zionism for Millennials” segment led by speaker Chloe Valdery, an evangelical Zionist and secretary of the Zioness coalition. Recently, Zioness has been revealed to be an astroturfing group co-founded by Amanda Berman, a Lawfare project executive. Zioness also stirred controversy for attempting to insert itself and its purplewashing agenda into Chicago’s Dyke March and Slutwalk Chicago’s annual protest. Understandably, these efforts were rejected by the radical organizers behind the protest, with Slutwalk Chicago’s statement explaining that they were adamantly opposed to Zioness centering its politic “over the fight for equality and against patriarchy”; they continued:\n“We find it disgusting that any group would appropriate a day dedicated to survivors fighting rape culture in order to promote their own nationalist agenda.” They later added that “we fight for equality for everyone which means we stand with Jewish AND Palestinian people, while taking a firmly anti-state, anti-imperialist position that necessarily includes Israel.”\n\nZionists’ purplewashing their nationalist agenda also often takes the form of a contrived concern for Palestinian women, even while erasing the identities of the Palestinian women living within the green line as “Israeli Arabs”, in an effort to depict Israeli society as ‘multi-cultural’ and tolerant . Native informant Yoseph Haddad, whose entire career revolves around being a bankrolled “Israeli Arab” mouthpiece for the Israeli government, posted a graphic titled “Israeli-Arab Women: Breaking the Glass Ceiling”. Per the accompanying caption on Facebook, Haddad presented individual Palestinian women having roles as professors, police officers, or even winning a singing competition as proof refuting the existence of Israeli Apartheid. Haddad also wrote that “While women face systemic discrimination and oppression all over the Middle East, in Israel Arab women can be anything they want to be”. Besides the insulting notion that individual members of an oppressed group having certain jobs or positions precludes the existence of systemic racism, the implied message is clear: Palestinian women living under Israeli rule are “better off” than they would be under Palestinian rule.\nThus, Palestinian women are depicted as in need of saving from Palestinian men. NGO Monitor, an anti-Palestinian group with close ties to the Israeli government and settler movement, specializing in smearing Palestinian human rights organizations as ‘terrorist’ groups, published a special report titled “The Exploitation of Palestinian Women’s Rights NGOs” which scolded Palestinian feminist activists and organizations for “focusing on Israel as the cause of gender inequality, while not paying adequate attention to internal, systemic practices within Palestinian society that are discriminatory against women”.\nIn a 2017 Daily Beast article, liberal Zionist wonderboy Peter Beinart accused leftists of overlooking Hamas’s misogyny and paternalistically fretted over what it would look like “when Palestinians more fully govern themselves”.  Even Beinart’s more conservative Zionist counterpart Bret Stephens, whose racism against Palestinians is so unbridled that he has openly described Palestinians as “psychotic” and “seized by bloodlust”, nevertheless also positions himself as deeply concerned for Palestinian women, and similarly declared that the “so-called progressives now find themselves in sympathy with the misogynists of Hamas”. In that same article Stephens takes it a step further and declares, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the prominence of women at the Gaza Strip’s Great March of Return was orchestrated by Hamas because “Israeli soldiers might be less likely to fire on women”, conveying his worldview where Israeli soldiers value Palestinian women’s lives, unlike Palestinian men, with all the subtlety of a nuclear warhead. That the Palestinian women in question could have attended the protests of their own accord or that Palestinian men also do not deserve to be murdered at the hands of their occupiers were not even considered points worth entertaining.\nEven the Israeli government’s official website has a page dedicated to “the status of women in Gaza” which cynically lists the issues Palestinian women face regarding gender-based violence and limited employment, as if issues of sexism can all neatly be reduced to Hamas’ creation a little over 30 years ago, or as if the Gaza Strip, which has become the world’s largest open-air prison, is not increasingly becoming unlivable in every meaning of the word thanks to Israel’s blockade and bombardment.\n\nThe aforementioned fixation on Palestinian women obfuscates how dehumanized Palestinian women and Palestinian mothers in particular actually are by Zionists and throughout Israeli society. This is evident in how Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked openly called for the murder of Palestinian women because they give birth to “little snakes.” Bret Stephens similarly targeted Palestinian mothers in a particularly atrocious article, saying that unlike Western mothers who worry their child will get a bad tattoo, Palestinian mothers want their children to die fighting the occupation; he then went on to say that he has yet to meet an Israeli mother who wants to raise a murderer, because in his view state-sanctioned murder vis-a-vis military conscription or having children write messages of racist hate on missiles about to be launched into Lebanon do not count.\nStephens finally openly states that Palestinian culture is “a culture that openly celebrates murder and is not fit for statehood”, consequently, if Palestinians want a state, they should, like postwar Germany, put themselves “…through a process of moral rehabilitation” and that for Palestine, “this should start with the mothers.”\nMordechai Kedar, an Israeli military intelligence officer turned academic made public statements regarding ‘raping the wives and mothers of Palestinian combatants’ to deter ‘terrorist attacks’. These comments were defended by his university as “the bitter reality of the Middle East”. This sentiment is widespread throughout Israeli society, as the eminent scholar Rabab Abdulhadi noted in her incredibly valuable article for Feminist Studies; Israel’s bloody 2014 assault on Gaza was gleefully supported with Israeli social media posts that included a sexualized image of a hijabi women with calls on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to rape her. Furthermore, public banners sponsored by an Israeli city’s city council told Israeli soldiers to ‘pound their mothers and come home to your own mothers!’, and a popular t-shirt design amongst Israeli men who served in the army depicted a bullseye pointing at a pregnant Palestinian niqab-wearing woman with the caption “one shot, two kills.”\nPalestinian women are targeted for these kinds of racist and misogynistic attacks because Israel is an ethnocracy, which aims to cement the domination of a certain ethnic group on all spheres of society, a crucial aspect of which is demography. Within this framework, Palestinians are viewed as “demographic threats” . This obsession with demographics necessarily manifests itself, as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has written,  in racist and gendered policies to “contain and reduce the Palestinian population” through assaults on Palestinian daily and domestic life, extending to the often fatal denial of essential treatment to pregnant women, as evidenced by two UNHCR reports of checkpoints delaying pregnant Palestinian women’s access to healthcare. These reports state that 68 women had forced roadside births resulting in 34 miscarriages and that inadequate medical care during pregnancy was found to be the third cause of mortality among Palestinian women of reproductive age.\nThe aim is to “target the literal biological reproduction of Palestinian life”; these policies have shaped, Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues, a “death zone” for Palestinians and Palestinian women especially, as part of a larger, ongoing process of dispossession congruent with settler colonial practices elsewhere. This death zone is “the space where the biological, material and cultural reproduction of Palestinian social life is put at daily and intimate risk.” According to Shalhoub-Kevorkian, this “sexual violence is central to the larger structure of colonial power, its racialized machinery of domination, and its logic of elimination. Colonialism is itself structured by the logic of sexual violence.” Attacks on Palestinian women’s lives include  rape and other forms of gender-based torture in Israeli prisons, consistent with the UN’s findings that sexual violence as part of overarching violent conflict is “used as a means of inflicting terror upon the population at large” and “can also be part of a genocidal strategy”.\nFurthermore, as reported by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women Dubravka Šimonović, Israeli settlers also frequently attack little girls going to school, to such an extent that some families have become too afraid to send them. While this is a case of gendered human rights abuses committed by non-State actors, it is ultimately de facto endorsed by the Israeli State through their consistent ‘failure’ to investigate or prosecute perpetrators. Šimonović also reported on the traumatizing effect of Israeli home raids and demolitions, with a woman testifying that she took to sleeping fully covered in anticipation of soldiers’ entering her bedroom during a night raid, as has become all too customary.\n\nThat misogyny exists within Palestinian society is undeniable. However, the idea that Israel represents salvation from this misogyny, rather than embodying the racist and colonial structures that perpetuate it, is far more questionable. In fact, there is much evidence that weakening community structures, disruptions in law and order, economic hardship, forced migration and over-crowded living conditions in refugee/displacement camps, all of which Palestinians have experienced as a result of Israeli violence, are all factors that increase the risk of sexual and gender-based violence, especially against women and girls. Furthermore, the bureaucratic colonial fragmentation of Palestine into different areas of control, especially the division of the West Bank into areas A, B, and C and the divide between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is actually an obstacle to preventing this violence or holding its perpetrators accountable .\nPalestinian feminist scholars and organizers have been studying and resisting Israel’s violent practices against all Palestinians, and its gendered practices against Palestinian women in particular. As a result, we recognize that true liberation for Palestinian women is impossible with anything short of the liberation of all Palestinians from Israeli settler colonialism. As Palestinian feminists, human rights activists and representatives of women organizations declared in a statement of support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement:\n“The struggle of Palestinian feminists [is] as marginalized women who are deprived of equal rights and as part of an indigenous people suffering under a regime of occupation and apartheid. We cannot accept the backseat reserved for an obedient minority that must be filled in conferences or statements issued by Israeli groups. We are struggling for our rights, all of our rights, national, social and otherwise, and against all oppression.”\nPalestinian women reject all purplewashing attempts to minimize Israeli violence against us and all Palestinians, which only seeks to bolster Israel’s image at the expense of Palestinians’ rights. Palestinian women in the struggle are aware that they are fighting for the rights and human dignity of all, and that “feminism that doesn’t have an understanding of how it intersects with racial and ethnic oppression is simply a diversification of white supremacy.” We hope you will join us in working for the liberation of all Palestinians; and that the next time you see an pro-Israel organization brazenly attempt to use the feminist movement to cover for colonialism, you can see that purple really isn’t Israel’s color.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!\n\nShalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera. Militarization and violence against women in conflict zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian case-study. Cambridge University Press, 2009.\n\nShalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera et al. Sexual Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism. Jadaliyya. November 17th, 2014. [Link]\n\nFarris, Sara R. In the name of women’s rights: The rise of femonationalism. Duke University Press, 2017.\nJad, Islah. Palestinian Women’s Activism: Nationalism, Secularism, Islamism. Syracuse University Press, 2018.\nAbdulhadi, Rabab. “Israeli Settler Colonialism in Context: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence.” Feminist Studies 45.2-3, 2019: 541-573.\nElia, Nada. “Justice is indivisible: Palestine as a feminist issue.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 6.1, 2017.\nSharoni, Simona, et al. “Transnational Feminist Solidarity in Times of Crisis: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement and Justice in/for Palestine.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 17.4, 2015: 654-670.\nAbdulhadi, Rabab, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber, eds. Arab and Arab American feminisms: gender, violence, and belonging. Syracuse University Press, 2011.\nAbu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim women need saving?. Vol. 15. No. 5. Sage UK: London, England: SAGE Publications, 2015."
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+{
+	"text": "In 2014, and during the annual Nakba day protests marking the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, Nadim Nuwarra and Mohammad Abu Dhaher were both shot and killed by Israeli forces in front of the Ofer military prison in Beitunia.\nThey were unarmed and far away from anything that could possibly be constituted as a risk to the soldiers. They were killed with live ammunition, and one of them was even shot in the back while walking away from the soldiers. They were standing over 90 meters away from the soldiers, for reference, that’s close to the length of a professional football field.\nWhat followed, was the typical song and dance that the IDF performed every time it is accused of war crimes and human rights violations against Palestinians.\nFirst, they denied that there was any use of live ammunition. The soldiers were only supposed to be firing rubber bullets. This was “corroborated” by an internal “investigation” that concurred that no live ammunition was used.  Second, they claimed that these two teenagers were shot by the soldiers in self-defense, as they were partaking in violent attacks against the soldiers who felt threatened. But before that, the idea was floated that they were actually killed by Palestinians who were firing at the IDF and killed them by mistake. The IDF changing its story multiple times is a staple of its damage control modus operandi, and can clearly be seen in other cases as well, such as the Mohammed Al Durra murder.\nThen the videos began to surface. Taken from multiple CCTV cameras in the vicinity, they showed that the teens were standing far away and were shot while they indisputably could not have been posing any threat, debunking the entire defense the IDF had been running with prior. As a matter of fact, one of them was actually walking away, with his back turned to the soldiers.\nNaturally, instead of investigating further, Israel ramped up its denial. The videos, they alleged, were faked and doctored. They were simply created to defame Israel and its army. As a matter of fact, Micahel Oren, former Israeli diplomat, resorted to the racist “Pallywood” trope, and accused the dead Palestinians of being crisis actors, and that nobody really died in the first place.\nShortly after, the spent bloody bullet was found in Nuwarra’s backpack, it had landed there after it exited his body. Of course, Israel claimed the bullet was planted there, and that it wasn’t even a real bullet used by the IDF. To challenge this, the family exhumed the body of their murdered child and had an autopsy confirm that indeed, the bullet wounds were consistent with this kind of live ammunition. However, the final nail in the coffin was when new footage from CNN surfaced, showing the soldier clearly shooting in the direction of Nuwarra at the same time of his death.\nFinally, after all of this struggle lasting months, and in the face of indisputable proof and evidence, the case went to trial.\nFrom the get go, the case of the murder of Abu Dhaher was thrown out for “lack of evidence”. Seeing the impossibly high standards of evidence needed to even get to court, it is not a surprise that 90% of investigations related to crimes against Palestinians never qualify for court. In typical Israeli fashion, these evidence standards are never consistently applied when it comes to prosecuting Palestinians in their 99% conviction rate military courts, where guilt is determined based on the flimsiest of excuses.\nThe soldier was initially charged with manslaughter, but later in a plea deal it was reduced to “causing death by negligence”. This joke of a sentence meant that he would only get a sentence of 9 months in prison, and since he had already been in custody for 2 months, only 7 months of his sentence remains. That is assuming he would even complete his sentence. This kind of sentencing is the norm.Another case, is the case of Razan al-Najjar, which is also emblematic of the IDF’s operational mode. She was a volunteer nurse who was shot tending to the wounded during the Gaza march of return protests of 2018, even though she posed no danger.  The IDF began its usual mantra, blamed Hamas for her death, and even released an edited video to try and defame Al-Najjar and make it seem that she was being used as a human shield.\nThis backfired when the full video was released that made no such claim. What it actually showed was how deceptively the IDF had edited the video to try and put words in Razan’s mouth. It seems killing her was not enough, now they needed to assassinate her character and shift the blame onto her as well. The whole issue was buried under the IDF’s “internal investigation” routine and nobody expects anything will come of it.\nBut, as shown, even in the extremely rare cases where the investigations lead to a trial, and in the infinitesimally rarer cases it actually finds a soldier to be guilty, the “punishments” are rather laughable. If you think the case of Nadim Nuwarra is an infuriating mockery of justice, it gets much worse. For example, the commander found to be responsible for the Kufr Qassim massacre where 49 Palestinians were murdered in cold blood was fined 10 measly pennies for giving the order to open fire on civilians. His accomplices were sentenced to very light jail time, but were all pardoned and set free within a year. So even in the rare case where these insulting sentences are given, it’s rare for an Israeli soldier to actually serve their sentence in full.\nBut these are far from exceptions to the rule, in Israel it seems like normalized savagery towards Palestinians is a prerequisite for a successful political or military career. We say this without any kind of exaggeration,  it is difficult to find an Israeli Prime Minister who has not been part of vicious war crimes against the Palestinians, from Rabin, Sharon, Shamir, to many others.\nAt the end of the day, the IDF is an army, and Israel is a settler colony. Violence and injustice are inherent parts of these entities. Nobody was expecting that Palestinians would receive a crumb of justice from these colonial institutions, however, it remains important to challenge the myth of the moral superiority of Israel, which is a central feature of its propaganda efforts.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
+}
+{
+	"text": "When you’re a serial violator of human rights and international law, it becomes imperative to try and cover up your atrocities as much as possible. This is especially the case when a cornerstone of your propaganda strategy revolves around projecting an image of morality and civilization.\nIn the light of the spread of smart phones and the ability of any bystander to document the systemic abuse of Israeli forces, Hasbara efforts had to similarly evolve to counter this new form of evidence. In the past, it was easier to dispel accusations by simply denying them, claiming that Palestinians were incapable of being objective, and that these accusations only aimed to delegitimize Israel. This was even the mainstream view of the Nakba, where the Palestinian narrative was dismissed in the West only to be indisputably confirmed by declassified Israeli war archives .\nFollowing a similar logic, advocates of Israel developed the incredibly racist concept of “Pallywood” to shed doubt on any photographic or video evidence of Israeli violations. According to this talking point, Palestinians produce fake media to demonize Israel. This could range from hiring crisis actors, to doctoring footage and editing it in a dishonest way that misrepresents reality.\nThe appeal of this to Israelis is clear, not only does it clear Israel from any wrong-doing that is caught on camera, it also frames Palestinians as untrustworthy schemers without integrity, hell-bent on making Israel look bad at any cost. This means that any photographic or video evidence, no matter how clear or concise, could ever be proof of Israeli violations.\nThis concept became popular among defenders of Israel in the second Intifada. Perhaps the most emblematic usage of this smear was in response to the murder of Muhammad al Durra, who was killed by Israeli gunfire during clashes between Palestinian resistance fighters and the IDF. Although many Palestinian children died during this week, what separated the case of Muhammad al Durra was that he died in his father’s arms, and more importantly, that it was caught on camera.\nNaturally, the first reactions from Israel was to claim that either the child is not dead, and that he was merely a crisis actor, or that if he died, he was actually killed by Palestinian gunfire to make Israel look bad. The video has been dissected and studied to exhaustion, with known conspiracy theorists such as Nahum Shahaf, coming up with “evidence” that debunks the video. Some of the ridiculously insulting “evidence” is the allegation that Al-Durra did not bleed when shot, but was holding a red piece of cloth to make it look like blood for the cameras. Needless to say, that the child was buried and his father is still traumatized to this day are inconvenient truths that are not addressed.\nBut as usual, the goal of propaganda is never to reach the truth. The goal of this talking point is to contest any kind of evidence against Israeli violations. That’s all it needs. Because in the minds of many, if a case is contested then it is not settled. It doesn’t even matter if this contestation is illogical or implausible, all it needs to do is exist for them to discard the whole case and pretend that Israel was vindicated. This has been the go-to approach of Israeli hasbara whenever an inconvenient video or photo surfaces.\nHowever, no matter how you look at it, these claims about Al-Durra are quite ridiculous. Either the former child is alive in hiding, with absolutely no evidence at all for the last 20 years, with his entire family still living the charade, not to mention the buried body. Or the other implication, is that Palestinians killed one of their own children just to make Israel look bad. Both of these scenarios are incredibly absurd and racist.\nTo suggest that Palestinians would murder an innocent child of their own just so that they could have some incriminating footage on Israel is immensely dehumanizing. Yet, this view is not so fringe in Israel. During Israel’s bloody 2014 assault on Gaza, Netanyahu addressed those raising concerns about the high number of murdered innocent civilians by claiming that:\n\n“They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can. They use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause. They want the more dead, the better.”\n\nTelegenically dead.\nThat’s all Palestinians were good for. In typical colonist fashion, they cannot even begin to comprehend the humanity of the colonized. Even in their death, the center of attention must remain on the settlers. To the settlers, the colonized do not have dreams or ambitions, they have no loved ones or family. They exist only as an undifferentiated monolith solely to make their lives more difficult.\n\nAnother case which demonstrates the intellectual dishonesty of this talking point is the case of Nadeem Nuwarra. In 2014, and during the annual Nakba day protests marking the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, Nadim Nuwarra and Mohammad Salameh were both shot and killed by Israeli forces in front of the Ofer military prison in Beitunia.\nThey were unarmed and far away from anything that could possibly be constituted as a risk to the soldiers, they were killed with live ammunition, and one of them was even shot in the back while walking away from the soldiers. They were standing over 90 meters away from the soldiers, for reference, that’s close to the length of a professional football field.\nWhat followed, was the typical song and dance that the IDF performed every time it is accused of war crimes and human rights violations against Palestinians.\nFirst, they denied that there was any use of live ammunition. The soldiers were only supposed to be firing rubber bullets. This was “corroborated” by an internal “investigation” that concurred that no live ammunition was used.  Second, they claimed that these two teenagers were shot by the soldiers in self-defense, as they were partaking in violent attacks against the soldiers who felt threatened. But before that, the idea was floated that they were actually killed by Palestinians who were firing at the IDF and killed them by mistake. The IDF changing its story multiple times is a staple of its damage control modus operandi.\nThen the videos began to surface. Taken from multiple CCTV cameras in the vicinity, they showed that the teens were standing far away and were shot while they indisputably could not have been posing any threat, debunking the entire defense the IDF had been running with prior.\nNaturally, this is where the smear of “Pallywood” reared its ugly head once again. The videos, they alleged, were faked and doctored. They were simply created to defame Israel and its army. As a matter of fact, Micahel Oren, former Israeli diplomat, claimed that the shot teens were actually Palestinian crisis actors, and baselessly claimed that nobody even died in the first place.\n\n“That film was edited and does not reflect the reality of the day in question, the violence,”\n\nclaimed Major Arye Shalicar, an IDF spokesperson. Moshe Ya’lon, even though he admit that he had not watched the film yet, was sure it was edited:\n\n“but I’ve seen lots of films that were edited [to distort what had happened]. This film I’ve not yet seen, but I know the system.”\n\nIsraeli Channel 2’s military correspondent Roni Daniel claimed that the film was a fake. To try and prove this, he quibbled about the position of hands of the teens being shot, and how it did not appear consistent with being shot.\nPro-Israel media “watchdog” Camera also claimed that something was amiss with the Palestinian story about what happened. Johnathan Tobin even claimed it was a blood libel akin to the case of Mohammed al Durra. In a Facebook post, Danny Ayalon also claimed that the video was fabricated.\nThese accusations and more were hurled at the victims. Shortly after, the spent bloody bullet was found in Nuwarra’s backpack, it had landed there after it exited his body. Of course, Israel claimed it was planted there and not real. To challenge this, the family exhumed the body of their murdered child and had an autopsy confirm that indeed, the bullet wounds were consistent with this kind of live ammunition. However, the final nail in the coffin of Israeli lies, was when new footage from CNN surfaced, showing the soldier clearly shooting in the direction of Nuwarra at the same time of death.\nOf course, none of these sources ever apologized for the disgusting dehumanization of the victims, or their claims of manufactured Palestinian suffering.\n\nThe false accusations of doctored footage are also quite a clear case of projection on the part of Israel. For example, Razan al Najjar was a volunteer nurse who was shot tending to the wounded during the Gaza protests of 2018, even though she posed no danger.  The IDF began its usual mantra of denials, and even released an edited video to try and defame Al-Najjar and make it seem that she was being used as a human shield. This backfired when the full video was released that made no such claim. The whole issue was buried under the IDF’s “internal investigation” to this day.\nTime and time again, these smears are shown to be false. There was even an attempt to frame a “die-in” protest in Cairo as a case of Palestinians in Gaza faking being dead. Is this not exactly what advocates of Israel claim Pallywood is? However, once again, it doesn’t matter. Because as I said, as far as propaganda goes, for many it’s enough to contest a video to discard it completely. Then they can go back to believing in the myth of the righteous Israeli state that never does wrong as opposed to the lying, bloodthirsty, backwards Palestinian who would do anything to harm it.\nThere will never be a form of evidence put forward by Palestinians, or any other group, that will not be defamed and attacked. This is not a uniquely Israeli trait. Oppressive systems have always accused the oppressed of exaggerating or lying about their lived experience.\nIn these particularly egregious cases, what propagandists are asking of you is to believe them over your own eyes, hearts, minds and historical precedents.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!\n\nAouragh, Miriyam. “Hasbara 2.0: Israel’s public diplomacy in the digital age.” Middle East Critique 25.3, 2016: 271-297.\nWang, Kuan-Yun. “Illegally Blonde: The Racialisation of Blondness and Visual Representations of Palestinian Activist Ahed Tamimi in American and Canadian Media.” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 19.1, 2020: 15-36.\nRoth-Rowland, Natasha. Why the ‘Pallywood’ myth endures. +972 Magazine. October 15th, 2020.\nHerman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. Random House, 2010."
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+{
+	"text": "Following the decisive defeat of the Mamluks in the battle of Marj Dabiq (1516), the Levant laid open for the conquering Ottoman armies. A few months later they would enter Jerusalem and usher in one of the longest chapters of Palestinian history, lasting over 400 years.\nJerusalem held an important place in Ottoman eyes due to its religious and historic significance. From the onset of their rule, sweeping and majestic construction projects were carried out which would become staples of Jerusalemite architecture and topography, such as the striking walls of Jerusalem erected by Suleiman the magnificent.\nOver its history, the Ottomans divided Palestine into various political configurations and divisions. The last of which came in 1887, where Palestine was divided into 3 districts (Sanjaks): Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre. The Sanjak of Jerusalem was of such importance to the Ottomans that it would be governed directly by Constantinople (Later Istanbul).\n\nThe population of these three at the time would amount to approximately 600,000, the vast majority of which were Sunni Muslim. Palestinian Christians made up around 10 percent of the population, while Jewish Palestinians numbered around 25,000, mainly situated in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safad and Tiberius.\nThe Ottoman Millet system and its various manifestations provided a certain degree of autonomy to minority religious and ethnic communities. While this system suffered from serious flaws, and its breadth and tolerance waxed and waned with different governors and social and economic circumstances, it was still superior to the outright persecution and pogroms which various religious groups on the European continent had to endure.\nRelations between the numerous religious groups in Palestine were generally stable and peaceful, nurtured by more than a millennium of coexistence and shared adversity. For example, the inscription on the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem reads “There is no God but Allah, and Abraham is his friend” in a nod to Christian and Jewish Ottomans, who like Muslims, are considered to be part of an Abrahamic religious tradition. Palestinian Muslims, perhaps uniquely so, were also in the habit of celebrating religious festivals in honor of the prophets and holy men of Judaism such as Reuben, son of Jacob. This attitude was also extended towards Christian Palestinians, where the keys of the Holy Sepulcher remain traditionally entrusted with a Muslim family to this day.\nHowever, as with any empire, there were times of peace and prosperity, as well as times of hardship and war. Towards the end of the life of the Ottoman empire, the latter was much more common than the former. With the advent of European-style nationalism and the weakening of the Ottoman state, the relations between the various ethnic groups and communities would fray. There were rebellions against Ottoman rule, and Palestine even managed to win autonomy for a good while under the leadership of Daher al-‘Umar, however, it would eventually be crushed by Constantinople. These tensions would later be exacerbated by the Young Turk Revolution and the increasing efforts to Turkify the various Ottoman provinces.\nThe empire would eventually collapse after its defeat in the first World War, and the various peoples who made up its population -some of whom had sided with the Allies against the Ottomans- looked towards independence and establishing their own nation states. This of course, would be thwarted, as the peoples fell from the domination of one empire to the domination of many others.\nIt was during the final few decades of this dramatic collapse that a certain Austro-Hungarian thinker, Theodor Herzl, was planting the seeds of a new political movement that would change Palestinian history forever.\nConvened in the Swiss city of Basel in 1897, the first Zionist congress included over 200 delegates from all over Europe. The program of the congress called for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, and to begin coordinating the settlement of Zionists there. This, according to Herzl, the founder of political Zionism and president of the Zionist congress, would constitute a “solution for the Jewish question” and emancipate the Jewish people from persecution.\nWhile there were other Zionist and proto-Zionist movements preceding this which had settled in Palestine, such as Hibbat Zion, the Zionist congress was the first to organize and marshal the colonization efforts in a centralized and effective way.\nZionism, then, is a settler-colonial political movement that calls for establishing a Jewish nation-state in Palestine with a Jewish majority. The issue here, of course, is that Palestine was already inhabited. The question of what to do with the native Palestinian Arabs animated much of the early discussions of the Zionist movement, though the consensus was that they needed to be removed somehow, either by agreement or by force. Indeed, there was no way to establish a Jewish majority state in Palestine without seriously displacing most of the native population.\nWhen we call Zionism settler-colonialism, we refer to a very specific phenomenon. Settler colonialism differs from classic colonialism, in that settler colonialism only initially and temporarily relies on an empire for their existence. In many situations, the colonists aren’t even from the empire supporting them, and end up fighting the very sponsor that ensured their survival in the first place. Another difference is that settlers are not merely interested in the resources of these new lands, but also in the lands themselves, and to carve out a new homeland for themselves in the area.\nModern day Zionists might recoil at Zionism being called a colonial ideology, yet in the early days, the Zionist movement was astonishingly honest about its existence as a form of colonialism. For example, Herzl wrote in 1902 to infamous colonizer Cecil Rhodes, arguing that Britain recognized the importance of “colonial expansion”:\n\n“You are being invited to help make history,” he wrote, “It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor ; not Englishmen, but Jews . How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.”\n\nVladimir Jabotinsky, in an essay titled The Iron Law (1925) stated that:\n\n“A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the future. If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find some rich man or benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else-or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempt to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is impossible, not difficult, not dangerous, but IMPOSSIBLE!… Zionism is a colonization adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important… to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonizing.”\n\nThese quotations are merely the tip of the iceberg, but lest you think we are cherry-picking and choosing out of context passages, we invite you to read their original writings. There are only so many mental gymnastics you can perform to try and find a different meaning to “Zionism is a colonization adventure.”\nTo drive this point even further, the first Zionist bank established was named the ‘Jewish Colonial Trust’ and the whole endeavor was supported by the ‘Palestine Jewish Colonization Association’ and the ‘Jewish Agency Colonization Department’.\n\nIt would only be a matter of time before the Zionist movement began sending settlers to Palestine and forming a foothold with the goal of taking over the entirety of Palestine. The Ottoman defeat in WW1 and Palestine becoming a British mandate was the golden opportunity that would allow them to fulfill these aims. This will be discussed in depth in the next introductory article.In the wake of its defeat in WW1, the Ottoman empire was dissolved and its regions carved up and divided among various European colonial powers. In the Levant, Palestine and Jordan fell under the mandate of the British, while Syria and Lebanon to that of the French. The British entered Jerusalem in 1917, and Palestine officially became a mandate in 1922.\n\nPalestine was considered a ‘Class A’ mandate, meaning that it possessed sufficiently advanced infrastructure and administrative capabilities as to be considered provisionally independent, though it would still be under the control of the allied forces until it was deemed ready for full independence. This, of course, would never come to pass.\nThe mandate of Palestine provided a golden opportunity for the Zionist movement to achieve its aims. The British were far more responsive to Zionist goals than the Ottomans were, and had earlier produced the Balfour Declaration promising the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine:\n\n“His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”\n\nDespite the lofty words of Lord Balfour, a colonial empire massacring people all over the globe is not animated by altruism. The British had no genuine sympathy for the plight of the historically oppressed Jewish people; Rather, they saw in the Zionist movement a mechanism through which British interests in the Levant and Suez could be realized.\nEmboldened by the Balfour Declaration and supportive British governors, the Zionist movement ramped up its colonization efforts and established a provisional proto-state within a state in Palestine, called the Yishuv. While the Yishuv’s relationship with the British had its ups and downs, the British provided the Zionists with explicit as well as tacit sponsorship which would allow them to thrive. Meanwhile, they would harshly repress any Palestinian movement or organization while turning a blind eye to Zionist expansion, which by the end of the mandate enabled the conquest and mass destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages and neighborhoods.\nThese are the circumstances and events which would ultimately culminate in the establishment of Israel through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the erasure of their society. The next article will focus on Zionist aspirations, partition, the final years of the mandate of Palestine, the war of 1948, and the Nakba, the original sin of Israel’s genesis.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
+}
+{
+	"text": "Even before the second Intifada, Israel had worked hard to cut off the Gaza Strip from the rest of Palestine. Travel between the West Bank and Gaza since the 1990s was always difficult, today it is virtually impossible for the general public. This was further exasperated by the military siege enacted by Israel following the Hamas take-over of the Strip in 2007. For the first time since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and Gaza Strip would now be politically separated once again.\nFor all intents and purposes, the Gaza Strip has been turned into a ghetto, with Israel besieging it from most sides. Egypt helps maintain this siege from its side. Gaza has undergone some brutal assaults and wars on its population due to various Israeli pretexts, such as the 2008 and 2014 wars which killed thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of children. This has made Gaza a convenient testing ground for Israeli arms manufacturers, who tout their equipment as “battle tested”.\nAs mentioned in the previous articles, the Gaza Strip is a small coastal enclave compromised mostly of refugees ethnically cleansed from their villages by Israel during the Nakba. As such, it does not have the capacity to support such a large population, and according to multiple reports, including a United Nations one, it is teetering towards being unlivable. The water aquifers are gradually becoming poisoned, and its civilian infrastructure is frequently destroyed by Israeli shelling and bombing.\nRecently, the refugees of Gaza organized themselves into the Great March of Return, which saw tens of thousands peacefully protesting at the edges of the besieged strip with the goal of ending the siege and for their right to return to their homes. This march was heavily demonized, with Israeli claiming they were “riots” manufactured by Hamas, and its participants were branded “terrorists” and mercilessly shot by Israeli snipers, despite them posing no threat to them. A prominent example of this was the murder of the Palestinian medic, Razan Al-Najjar, who was sniped while providing aid to the protestors. Israel even released doctored footage in an attempt to paint her as a threat, but it instantly backfired since it was apparent that it was tampered with . Almost 200 Palestinians lost their lives, and thousands were wounded and maimed for life.\nThe situation in the Gaza Strip continues to deteriorate, poverty, Covid-19 and other circumstances have pushed it to the edge of implosion with no end in sight.Following the destruction of much of its assets, and the Hamas take-over of the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Authority found itself in the midst of a serious legitimacy crisis. Oslo lay in ruins, and any attempt to resuscitate the process would remain unsuccessful. Meanwhile, the people grew restless and skeptical of the Palestinian leadership and their role in society. So the Palestinian Authority did what any other Arab regime would do in its place; crackdown on dissent, and restructure and strengthen its security forces.\nTo this end, it would receive ample support, especially from the United States. US. General Keith Dayton would oversee what was officially dubbed “the security sector reform”. This basically entailed training a new generation of Palestinian security and intelligence officers fiercely loyal to the Authority’s leadership. This “reform” saw the ballooning of the security sector and its budget. This would be accompanied by an unraveling of Yasser Arafat’s old patronage networks, and establishing new ones with allegiance to the post-Arafat leadership.\nThe new tactic of the Palestinian Authority shifted towards state-building, in the hope that if they could prove capable of building effective institutions, the world would deem them “worthy” of a state. Slowly, but surely, things such as resistance and the right of return would be phased out of the Palestinian leadership’s language, and the Palestinian revolution turned from a liberation movement to a quest for autonomy. Not only that, but the security sector “reforms” included a security coordination program with Israel, meaning that the Palestinian Authority would basically become a subcontractor to the occupation.\nDespite all of this, the Palestinian Authority never had any real “authority” to begin with, and this was by design. It is a purely administrative entity created to manage the “dirty work” of education, health and other burdens the occupying power is usually responsible for, while having absolutely no sovereignty or decision over any political aspect. This, of course, remains in the hands of Israel. For example, the Palestinian Authority can’t even determine who a Palestinian citizen is. The citizen registry for Palestinians is under the control of Israel. Meaning that if a Palestinian marries a non-Palestinian, their spouse will never be able to gain Palestinian citizenship as Israel’s demographic obsession would not allow for any preventable increase in the Palestinian population. Even Abbas needs to coordinate with the Israeli military to be able to visit other Palestinian cities, cities of a “country” he is supposedly president of.\nThe world, especially through its foreign aid, has effectively subsidized the Palestinian occupation and relieved Israel of many of its responsibilities, while maintaining all of the benefits.\nEven though these changes to the Palestinian Authority have received praise from the IMF, and other international organizations, many of which deemed them ready for statehood, this did not sway Israel who was never truly interested in a real Palestinian state. This prompted the Palestinian Authority to take symbolic gestures, such as stamping “State of Palestine” on its paperwork instead of the traditional “Palestinian Authority” insignia. This gesture, of course, fell flat on its face when Israel threatened to not recognize these documents, which forced them to backtrack from stamping any papers that needed Israeli approval. A symbolic move which was supposed to signal independence ended up proving the exact opposite.\nMeanwhile, not only would the occupation and colonization of the West Bank go on, but it would become even more entrenched. Although both militarily occupied, the form of the occupation in the West Bank differs to that in the Gaza Strip. Whereas the occupation in the Gaza Strip is maintained at long range through siege as well as aerial and artillery bombardment, in the West Bank this occupation experience revolves around the daily presence of an occupying military and policing force. As a result, there are context specific effects to the occupation in one region which are not as prominent in the other; for example, arrest of Palestinians is much more common in the West Bank than in the Gaza Strip, but the destruction of homes due to war and bombing is much more prevalent in the Gaza Strip. This is not to say that there are no deaths or demolitions in the West Bank, but the contrast between the regions is significant.\nAll aspects of life in the West Bank today are run by Israel, either directly or indirectly through the Palestinian Authority. This control extends from your basic rights, down to the most mundane of things, such as your phone coverage. Settlements continue to expand, now holding over 600,000 settlers with no indication of stopping. Increased areas are being annexed, and support for annexing area C is gaining more and more traction inside Israel. The annexation of the Jordan Valley, for example, has recently featured prominently in Israeli election campaigns.Although the Eastern part of Jerusalem is technically part of the West Bank, Israel has never treated it as such since its capture in the 1967 war. Claiming that the “eternal capital” has finally been reunited with its western counterpart, which Israel occupied in 1948. East Jerusalem was officially annexed in 1980. This annexation, of course was illegal and not recognized by the world community barring a few exceptions, such as the United States under Donald Trump.\nAlthough Israel claims that Jerusalem has been reunited, this is mostly in the realm of rhetoric and propaganda. East Jerusalem is subject to a slew of measures, laws and procedures that specifically target its majority Palestinian population. Palestinians are granted a special “residence” permit that is often revoked with the flimsiest pretexts. For example, if you were to study abroad or decide to move outside of Jerusalem, this could very easily get your residence revoked, forcing you to live in the West Bank instead.\nAs with every other area of Palestine, East Jerusalem has been undergoing serious colonization efforts, with the building of colonies and the transfer of settlers into it with the declared plan to have Jerusalem with a 74% Jewish population. Towards this end, discriminatory lawfare is waged against Palestinians to find justifications for their removal. Thousands of Palestinian families have lost their right to live in Jerusalem over the decades, in what can only be described as protracted and silent ethnic cleansing of the city. Accompanying this is the erasure of traditional Palestinian names and toponomy, and replacing them with Israeli and Jewish names.\nMassive discrimination in services, resource allocation and funding are the norm. Palestinian neighborhoods are underserviced, poorer and dirtier. You can read about this in detail [here].\nSettlers in Jerusalem, naturally, do not need to worry about any of this or the risk of losing their homes.A cornerstone of Israeli propaganda efforts is the claim that all Israeli citizens are equal, this claim aims to obfuscate the fact that Israel distinguishes between citizenship and nationality.\nWhat does this mean?\nYou can be a citizen of Israel but be a Druze national, or a Jewish national. Your nationality is determined by your ethnicity and it cannot be changed or challenged. Many of the rights you are accorded in Israel stem from your nationality not your citizenship. Meaning an “Arab” Israeli citizen and a Jewish Israeli citizen, while both citizens, enjoy different rights and privileges determined by their “nationality”. Seeing how Israel is an ethnocracy  it is not a mystery who this system privileges and who it discriminates against.\nThis is not merely discrimination in practice, but discrimination by law. Adalah have composed a database of discriminatory laws in Israel that disfavor non-Jewish Israelis. For example, the Law of Return and Absentees’ Property Law are but two examples of flagrant racism and discrimination in the Israeli legal system.\nThis is not some old, odd oversight, but a very deliberate part of the design of Israeli society. This is periodically reinforced whenever some Israelis petition the Supreme Court to recognize an Israeli nationality that does not discriminate based on ethnicity. A recent example of these petitions was in 2013, where the Supreme Court rejected such an idea on the grounds that it would “undermine Israel’s Jewishness“.\nIt says quite a lot about Israel that a unifying egalitarian identity not based around ethnicity would “pose a danger to Israel’s founding principle: to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people” as the court ruled.  The fact that such discrimination is seen as a cornerstone of Israeli society only reinforces its colonial ethnocratic nature, and undermines any claims to equality among citizens.\nBut this kind of discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg, as it only covers some aspects of de jure inequality. Inspecting the de facto discrimination against non-Jewish Israelis shines an even brighter light on Israel’s ethnocratic hierarchy.\nAlmost half of all Palestinian citizens of Israel live under the poverty line, with a considerable percentage close to the poverty line. They also have a considerably lower life expectancy, a higher infant mortality rate, less access to education and resources as well as less municipality and government funding. Should you be interested in delving into some of the more detailed aspects of this discrimination, you can read Adalah’s The Inequality Report. It is an excellent overview of many issues.\nAdditionally, you could read this report from the Adva center which illustrates quite clearly how this discrimination touches almost every aspect of life.\nFurthermore, most land inside the green line is off limits to Palestinian citizens of Israel. A large percentage of land in Israel is under the control of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which has:\n\n“..a specific mandate to develop land for and lease land only to Jews. Thus the 13 percent of land in Israel owned by the JNF is by definition off-limits to Palestinian Arab citizens, and when the ILA tenders leases for land owned by the JNF, it does so only to Jews—either Israeli citizens or Jews from the Diaspora. This arrangement makes the state directly complicit in overt discrimination against Arab citizens in land allocation and use..”.\n\nThe JNF is not the only entity blocking Palestinian citizens of Israel from purchasing, leasing or renting land and property, but also the so-called regional and local councils, which account for the vast majority of land. These councils have the authority to block anyone from settling in these areas that do not seem like a “good fit”, for example a religious community would not want to allow secular residents from moving in on the grounds that it would be against the spirit of their communities. In practice, this has translated into a virtual ban on non-Jewish Israelis moving into Jewish areas. In a Statement submitted by Habitat International Coalition and Adalah to the United Nations, it was estimated that almost 80% of the entire country is off limits to lease for Palestinian citizens of Israel. You can click here to read their full statement.\nNo matter how you look at it, Israeli society is a heavily segregated and hierarchical one. Whether through the legal system or just the attitudes of average Jewish Israelis, the ethnocratic nature of Israel and its obsession with ethnic gerrymandering always rises to the surface. Some would deny it, citing standards of living or some random “Arab” judge as a refutation of this point, but as discussed in [This] article, none of these challenge the extreme inequality -by design- of Israeli society. This denial is not unique to Israelis, we saw similar sentiments among white Americans who denied the existence of white supremacy, even though they reaped its benefits either directly or indirectly.Today, the Palestinians expelled during the Nakba and the Naksa and their descendants form the majority of the Palestinian people worldwide. Situated mostly in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, they continue to be denied the right of return despite many still holding the original deeds and keys to their houses, now expropriated by the Israeli state. They live under harsh conditions and yearn for the day they are able to return.\nNot only does Israel deny their right to return, but it has also been waging a war on the very concept of the Palestinian refugee, arguing for the redefinition of the term to exclude descendants. This would run counter to every refugee population in the world, which has its descendants recognized as refugees in the cases of protracted conflicts, such as in the occupied Western Sahara .\nThe return of Palestinian refugees is the core of the Palestinian question, and their expulsion formed the basis for the establishment of Israel. Therefore, any proposed solution that neglects this, as the Oslo framework did, is doomed to failure. These approaches are preoccupied with finding solutions to symptoms, rather than dare address the root cause, which is Zionist settler colonialism and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This can be clearly seen when taking the 1967 borders as their starting point, although today not even that is good enough for Israel, which seeks to annex increasing territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinians are then pressured to relinquish any rights or hopes for their millions of refugees, or their rights to live in over 80% of the land they were ethnically cleansed from.\nAs you can see from these articles, the democratic, progressive Israel we hear so much about in the mainstream media has never once existed. From its inception, it functioned as an ethnocracy with the intent of taking over as much land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible. Although a new tactic of Zionists is to try and claim that Zionism was a liberation movement with the aim of decolonization, this is belied by the very detailed writings left behind by movement founders.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "The right of return is a central issue in the Palestinian question. The refugees created by Israeli ethnic cleansing operations before and after the war of 1948 remain dispersed all over the globe, awaiting the day when they can return to their pillaged communities. Even though there have been countless resolutions calling for their return, Israel has remained adamant about not allowing this.\nThis is not a new policy, from the very beginning Israel purposefully destroyed hundreds of villages and shot any refugee who attempted to return to cement the new status quo .\nAs an ethnocracy, Israel has always been obsessed with demographics. So, it makes sense that it would do everything in its power to reduce the number of Palestinians as much as possible, while increasing the number of Jewish Israelis as much as possible. The fact that today the two populations between the river and the sea are reaching parity must be so infuriating to Israeli policy makers, to know that despite all the ethnic cleansing and millions of imported settlers that they are still not able to form a solid majority.\nThus, Palestinian refugees have always been in Israel’s crosshairs, not only physically but also discursively. We can see the effects of this when the status of Palestinian refugees is questioned. The popular talking point claims that Palestinian refugees are unique, and that no other refugee population can pass on their refugee status to their descendants. This, they argue, is proof that most Palestinian refugees are actually fake refugees, and that the only real refugees are the originally expelled population. Granted, of course, that this is in the unlikely event where they even acknowledge that any Palestinians were expelled to begin with, and they do not simply regurgitate other ahistoric myths such as the Arab orders to evacuate .\nTo begin with, it is important to understand that contrary to other refugees, Palestinian refugees are under the mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Normally refugees fall under the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). This, of course, only adds to the accusation that Palestinian refugees are treated differently than any other. In reality, however, it was due to the fact that the UNHCR did not exist at the time, and UNRWA was created as a special body specifically for the Palestinian refugee crisis.\nSo, does UNRWA treat Palestinian refugees differently than the UNHCR? Would Palestinian refugees be unable to pass on their status to their descendants if they were under the mandate of the UNHCR, for example?\nLet us inspect the main argument of the talking point, that Palestinian refugees are in the unique position of passing down their refugee status to their descendants:\nThis is simply nonsense.\nThe United Nations states that:\n\n“Under international law and the principle of family unity, the children of refugees and their descendants are also considered refugees until a durable solution is found.  Both UNRWA and UNHCR recognize descendants as refugees on this basis, a practice that has been widely accepted by the international community, including both donors and refugee hosting countries.”\n\nThe website continues:\n\n“Palestine refugees are not distinct from other protracted refugee situations such as those from Afghanistan or Somalia, where there are multiple generations of refugees, considered by UNHCR as refugees and supported as such. Protracted refugee situations are the result of the failure to find political solutions to their underlying political crises.“\n\nUNRWA spokesman, Chriss Dunnes, explains this further, stating that:\n\n“..refugee families everywhere retain their status as refugees until they fall within the terms of a cessation clause or are able to avail themselves of one of three durable solutions already mentioned — voluntary repatriation, local integration or resettlement in a third country.“\n\nSince none of these solutions have occurred for Palestinian refugees, then they and their descendants are still considered refugees. Palestinians are not unique in this regard, refugees from Afghanistan or the Western Sahara, for instance, are also multi-generational, because a solution to their political crises has not yet been reached.\nSome form of the argument claims that had Palestinian refugees been subjected to the UNHCR as opposed to UNRWA, most would not be classified as refugees due to resettlement or naturalization. The official UNRWA website refutes this completely:\n\n“…the protracted situation in which Palestine refugees live is not unique. UNHCR estimates that 78 per cent of all refugees under its mandate – 15.9 million refugees – were in protracted refugee situations at the end of 2017. According to UNHCR data, of the 20.1 million refugees under UNHCR protection in 2018, less than three percent of refugees (593,800) were repatriated back to their country of origin. Far fewer were resettled in a third country (92,400) or naturalized as citizens in their country of asylum (62,600). The vast majority remained refugees pending a solution to their plight.”\n\nThe attack on Palestinian refugees stems from the deep insecurity of Israel and its advocates, even if they refuse to admit it. The refugees are the living breathing evidence of Israel’s original sin, they are a stark reminder that heinous crimes were committed against the native population of Palestine. Despite all these efforts to define them out of existence, they are not going anywhere, and have a full right to return to their homes.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "As with anything Palestinian that rises to prominence, it becomes a magnet for anti-Palestinian sentiment. BDS is no exception, yet due to its non-violent nature it has been slightly harder to dismiss as outright terrorism. Therefore, elaborate interpretations and readings have been undertaken to frame the movement as the embodiment of evil, going as far as to ridiculously suggest that it is a prelude to genocide and a new Holocaust.\nNaturally, much of the misconceptions about BDS stem either from bad faith attacks such as the above, or from a lack of research on the movement and its goals. Some are simply the result of unfamiliarity with the Palestinian question. The following section will inspect some of the most prominent criticisms and misconceptions regarding the BDS movement.\n\nBDS calls for the destruction of Israel\nThis is perhaps the most common baseless smear directed against the BDS movement. As you saw from the goals of the movement, as well as its call for action, nowhere does it call for destruction. This is a bad faith reading of the movements third goal:\n\n“Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”\n\nSince this calls for the return of Palestinian refugees, this would mean threatening Israel’s Jewish majority. Naturally, the fact that this majority is only artificially maintained through expelling the natives is never brought up. I suppose it is an inconvenient fact to face that Israelis only have their homes because millions of Palestinians don’t have theirs.\nRegardless, if Israel were truly an egalitarian and democratic state, as its defenders so often insist, then it wouldn’t matter what the demographic make-up of the country is. A citizen is a citizen. However, Israel is not a democracy, but an ethnocracy built around privileging Jewish Israelis over everyone else . This pushes Israel to instate racist laws that discriminate against Palestinians, even those it begrudgingly calls citizens. This ethnocratic logic animates much of Israel’s demographic obsessions, and gives credence to the utterly dehumanizing view that Palestinian babies are demographic threats, because they endanger an absolute Jewish majority.\nCould you imagine any other state saying “we need to maintain a majority of X ethnic group” and instating racist laws to make it happen, and still be considered a liberal first world democracy?\nHowever, the return of refugees would effectively end the Israeli regime which has historically organized itself through discriminatory and colonial Zionist policies of ethnic supremacy. It is intellectually dishonest to claim that dismantling this racist system is tantamount for calling for the genocide of all Israelis, as it is often claimed. When the Apartheid regime in South Africa was defeated, this did not mean the physical destruction of South Africa as a state, or the genocide of the Afrikaner. However, critics of the ANC constantly falsely accused them of calling for the genocide of the white population, similar to how Israelis do today against Palestinians.\nIt should be noted, however, that the BDS movement takes no position on political solutions. It is purely a human rights movement, no matter what intentions are projected onto it. Naturally, its various members do have political positions, but these are not representative of the movement as a whole which has only the three objectives discussed above.\nBDS singles out Israel for punishment, and applies a double standard towards it\nThis is also a prominent argument put forward by critics of BDS. The argument is as follows:  There are human rights violators out there much worse than Israel, yet there are no campaigns aimed at isolating them and putting pressure on them. Therefore, the BDS campaign is practicing a double standard as it does not call for the boycott of other human rights violators and singles out Israel specifically.\nA more extreme version of this argument posits that since Israel is the only Jewish state, and this movement singles out Israel specifically, then the movement itself is de facto antisemitic in nature and is fueled by hatred for the Jewish people.\nThis criticism -if we assume good faith- betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what BDS is. The BDS movement was started by Palestinians specifically regarding their very own issue. It is not a universal scale of justice that metes out punishments on a global scale, rather it is an issue specific movement that focuses on the Palestinian question. People all over the world choose to answer this call for solidarity.\nFurthermore, this argument is an implicit admission of guilt. The objection does not even attempt to deny Israel’s wrongdoing, but rather seeks to distract from the fact by pointing fingers at others. This is a laughable attempt at shifting blame, could you imagine this argument in any other context?\nWas the Black Civil Rights movement full of hypocrites for boycotting the Montgomery Bus Company while their fellow Africans were being slaughtered in Algeria under French colonial rule?\nOf course not, and it is ridiculous to even suggest such a thing.\nNotice, however, how these violations in other countries are instrumentalized and wielded as a cudgel with no real interest in their impact. The latest spate of normalization with absolutist Arab monarchies shows that this concern was nothing more than a distraction tactic, as the Gulf countries used to be a favorite example for this maneuver. I’m certain they’ll be shifting to less friendly cases soon enough.\nHowever, if we wish to discuss Israel being singled out it should be noted that although Israel is one of the world’s leading countries when it comes to violating and ignoring UNSC resolutions, it is still afforded a special place among the nations and considered a democratic civilized first world country and is afforded special privileges, trade offers and partnerships not available to any other serial violator of human rights. If Israel is being singled out for anything, it is for its impunity to any real consequences for its violations.\nThe BDS movement harms academic freedom\nThis argument is as follows:\nThere are moderate voices within Israeli academia that sympathize with the Palestinians. By expanding the campaign to include academic targets for boycott, these voices are also damaged and silenced to where they cannot help create a just peace. Furthermore, it damages academic freedom which should be above politics.\nIsraeli academia, like virtually every sector of Israeli society, has a long history of not only complicity with Israeli colonialism, but active support for it. For example, part of Tel Aviv university lies on the ethnically cleansed ruins of the Palestinian village of Sheikh Muwannis. Israeli medical schools store Palestinian bodies which are then used as bargaining chips against their families. Israeli universities help develop the weapons which are then tested on Palestinians, and the tech which control Palestinian lives. But this is hardly the only ways in which Israeli universities aid in the dispossession of Palestinians; as institutions of ideological production and reproduction, they contribute to the maintenance of colonial thought in Israeli society, creating moral justifications for the colonization of Palestine and repression of Palestinians.\nAnti-Apartheid South African activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu, asserts that:\n\n“Israeli Universities are an intimate part of the Israeli regime, by active choice…. Israeli universities produce the research, technology, arguments and leaders for maintaining the occupation. BGU is no exception. By maintaining links to both the Israeli defence forces and the arms industry, BGU structurally supports and facilitates the Israeli occupation. For example, BGU offers a fast-tracked programme of training to Israeli Air Force pilots.”\n\nDespite all of this, the BDS movement does not target individual Israeli persons, whether academic or otherwise, but targets mainly Israeli institutions and those representing them in an official capacity. An Israeli professor would not be boycotted purely for being Israeli.\nHowever, there is good reason to suspect that these champions of academic freedom are not sincere in their assertions. For instance, never once during both Intifadas which saw the closure, bombing and raiding of Palestinian universities, did the:\n\n“..senate of any Israeli university pass a resolution protesting the frequent closure of Palestinian universities [by Israel], let alone voice protest the devastation sowed there during the last uprising.”\n\nThis silence on the violation of Palestinian academic freedom was hardly a one-time occurrence. Israeli professor Menachem Fisch et al. designed a social experiment in the aftermath of the bombing of the Islamic University in Gaza during the war in 2008, where he circulated a petition among Israeli academics to denounce this attack against academic freedom and Palestinians right to education. Out of the 9000 academics contacted (5000 of which were senior faculty academics), a mere 4% of them agreed to sign the petition.\nThis sudden interest in academic freedom should only be understood as an insincere and cynical pretext to demonize the BDS movement, and nothing more.\nThe BDS movement harms sympathetic Israelis\nAs mentioned earlier, the BDS movement does not target random Israeli individuals. BDS targets the Israeli government, as well as institutions, organizations and their representatives which are complicit in the repression and dispossession of Palestinians.\nThe BDS movement is one sided and assigns all blame to Israel\nSettler colonialism is by definition asymmetric and one sided.\nIt is disingenuous to appeal to a false equivalence or a “both sides” approach when it comes to the Palestinian question. It is the Israelis who are colonizing the Palestinians, and it is the Israelis who are building settlements and annexing Palestinian land. Israelis hold the power between the river and the sea. We are not speaking of a conflict between two countries, but an expansionist settler colony versus a native population.\nThe target of the BDS campaign should be restricted to the illegal Israeli settlements\nSome argue that the scope of BDS is too indiscriminate, and that we should focus our attention instead on the illegal Israeli settlements themselves, rather than Israel. There are multiple issues with this line of thought; most glaring of which is that settlements and other illegal policies are not self-perpetrating, and neither are they occurring in a vacuum. Settlements need to be built, maintained, protected, developed, and all this is performed gleefully by Israel, which has always sought to maximize its land-grabs.\nIsrael actively incentivizes the transfer of its population into the settlements by declaring them “National Priority areas”, meaning that they are the recipients of generous state subsidies in multiple areas, such as housing and education. Furthermore, Israel’s violations of international law are not related only to the areas it occupied in the 1967 war, but to the entirety of the land it controls, including inside the green line.\nHowever, even if you were to remain unconvinced by all of the above, this type of targeted boycott is unfeasible for practical reasons as well. From a distance, looking at static maps it might appear that the green line neatly dissects Palestine into 1948 and 1967 territories, on the ground the green line simply does not exist for Israelis. Hundreds of thousands of settlers commute to work every day over the green line, and it is not a factor in everyday Israeli life. For all intents and purposes the settlements are part of Israel, and not a neat separate entity that can be easily singled out for boycotts.\nBDS should not include a boycott against Israeli culture\nBDS does not target individual Israeli artists, but institutions or those complicit in the oppression of Palestinians and the whitewashing of Israeli crimes.\nIsrael has always been very public about using cultural means to improve its image abroad, and to divert attention away from its oppression of the Palestinians. A recent example is Israel hosting Eurovision in Tel Aviv in an attempt to put a pluralistic and “pretty face” on the state, and whitewash its human rights violations. It should be noted that Israel is not unique in this regard, as Apartheid South Africa also hosted music festivals and cultural events in an effort to change perceptions of the racist state.\nIn this context, cultural activities gain a new role, one that is complicit in oppression. Even things that seem inconsequential in the grand scheme of things all contribute to whitewashing Israel’s image. For example, Maxim magazine’s infamous “Women of Israel Defence Forces” article was deemed so benefecial to Israel’s international reputation that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs threw a party celebrating its publication.\nThe BDS movement harms Palestinian workers\nWhen all other pretexts for why Israel shouldn’t be held responsible for its violation of international law fail, critics of BDS become fierce advocates of the Palestinian worker. Suddenly, the welfare of the Palestinians is their chief concern, and we cannot boycott Israel because many Palestinians who work in settlements and inside the green line would lose their jobs. Similar to those who suddenly discover the sanctity of academic freedom when boycotting Israeli academia is mentioned, the sincerity of these claims is questionable at best.\nHowever, should anyone actually care about the plight of Palestinian workers, supporting BDS to end the occupation is a much better way to accomplish that. While approximately 120,000 Palestinians work in settlements and inside the green line, it is estimated that these settlements and occupation policies cost Palestinians 110,000 jobs per year according to UNCTAD. Meaning that had there been no Israeli stranglehold on the Palestinian economy, and had there been no settlements stealing the most fertile and resource rich areas, Palestinians could have created nearly two million new jobs for themselves since the year 2000. This would have gone much further towards improving the lives of Palestinian workers than maintaining their status as exploited labor in an ethnocracy that sees them as inferior.\nFurthermore, it is important to remember that the BDS call to action came from Palestinian civil society, which includes its labor and trade unions who remain proud signatories to this day. Support for BDS among Palestinians is virtually unanimous, and any qualms about it are due to concerns over effectiveness, rather than thinking it would cause harm.\nInterestingly enough, this is a carbon copy of the argument used against boycotting Apartheid South Africa, where the people benefiting from exploiting cheap Black labor suddenly became concerned about worker wellbeing. It remains as transparently cynical today as it was back then.\n“There are some pretty powerful elements in the world that are active in the matter – within countries, including friendly countries, in various organizations of workers, academics, consumers, green parties…and this drive boils down to a large movement called BDS, which is what they did with South Africa. It won’t happen at once. It will begin, like an iceberg, to advance on us from all corners.” – Ehud Barak, 2011.\n\nWhen it comes to the effectiveness of BDS, you will find that arguments range from calling the movement “flimsy” and ineffective, all the way to calling it an “existential threat” to the very survival of Israel.\nConcretely measuring the effectiveness of the BDS movement is difficult, because many of its effects are non-material in nature. For example, how does one quantify the cancellation of a concert or conference in Israel? Simply looking at the loss of potential income is inadequate to reflect the psychological or discursive effects of such an event. Even more complicated is measuring the reluctance to host Israelis or any other action involving Israel simply due to a desire to avoid controversy, rather than actually being part of the boycott movement.\nOn the economic front, there are more tools to measure losses. For instance, a study carried out by the RAND corporation, entitled “The costs of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” estimates that if the current trends continue, BDS would escalate in the next decade to cost Israel close to 2% of its GDP, around 9 billion dollars per year. It should be noted that this was calculated mainly in opportunity costs rather than in direct damage. However, it is once again important to stress that there are many aspects and potential loss of business that cannot be anticipated or accounted for.\nWe can argue at length about these points, however, there are signs that Israel’s fear of the BDS campaign is genuine. The responsibility for combating the campaign has been moved from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Ministry of Strategic Affairs. This is the same ministry responsible for tackling urgent matters relating to Israel’s “national security”. Pro-Israel mega donors have hosted secret conferences to come up with and fund strategies to combat BDS all over the globe. Israeli lobbying groups have worked hard to push for the criminalization of BDS in some American states.\nWhy go to all of these lengths if Israel perceives BDS as powerless and ineffective?\nBecause the real power of the BDS movement lies outside its material effects. Yes, some economic pressure on Israel is good, but nobody was arguing that the BDS movement was going to topple the Israeli economy, nor were they arguing that BDS alone would liberate Palestine. The effectiveness of BDS stems from its ability to raise awareness, speak truth to power, and bring to light parallels that Israel cannot combat. The discursive ability of BDS to shift the conversation, as well as its grassroots mass participatory nature, makes it a much bigger threat to Israel than the loss of a few billion dollars. This is where its strength lies, and as it becomes more mainstream among activists and campuses all over the world, this strength will only grow."
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+	"text": "While by no means the first to put forward this myth, it was greatly popularized by Joan Peters in her book From Time Immemorial, where she attempted to empirically “prove” this, by inspecting population records from various sources. Needless to say, that at the time it was a smash-hit among Zionists in the United States. Finally, there was this meticulous scholarly work that proved once and for all that the Palestinians as a people were fictitious, while simultaneously relieving Israel from all moral responsibility for creating millions of refugees. Praise for the book rained in from every corner, Saul Bellow wrote that “millions of people the world over, smothered by false history and propaganda, will be grateful for this clear account of the origins of the Palestinians.” Theodor White, Barbara Tuchman, Walter Reich, Lucy Dawidowicz, Elie Wiesel and many, many others lauded the book for its insight and analysis.\nWow, this seems like the real deal!\nHowever, before I start packing up my belongings to exile my fictitious self, perhaps some further investigation is warranted.\nThe main argument of this myth relies on so much misdirection, cherry-picking of data, outright falsification of sources, jumping to conclusions and relying on assumptions, to the point where I struggle to imagine any of these reviewers actually having read the book. At least not without overlooking enough egregious academic misconduct to land you in front of a disciplinary committee. The book was such naked, unsubstantiated propaganda that Noam Chomsky thinks it was probably put together by some intelligence agency, with Peters merely signing her name onto it.\nPeter’s main argument is that the growth of the Palestinian Arab population was not natural, and was rather the result of some secret migration that was somehow left undocumented. This is done mainly through a tortured twisting of her sources and purposefully omitting qualifiers and any data which contradicts her assertion.\nNaturally, I am not the first to write about Peter’s manipulation of sources and bad faith interpretation of data, nor will I be the last. I will not list in this article every single inconsistency or error in Peter’s writing, as that would probably take a book in itself. Thankfully, this work has already been done for us, and you can browse detailed breakdowns of Peter’s work in the “Further reading” section. Perhaps the best known debunking of Peter’s book comes from Norman Finkelstein, who meticulously documented the problems in detail. For example, Finkelstein uses this claim to illustrate the way Peter’s manipulates quotes and data:\nPeters “relies” on Carr-Saunders World Population to present the claim that:\n“Medical and sanitary progress has made little headway among the Palestinian Arabs as yet, and cannot account for any considerable fall in the death-rate.”\nHowever, if you are as diligent as Finkelstein, and check the source being relied upon, it paints quite a different picture:\n\n“Medical and sanitary progress, so far as it affects the personal health and customs, has made little headway among the Palestinian Arabs as yet, and cannot account for any considerable fall in the death-rate. But general administrative measures, in the region of quarantine, for example, have been designed in the light of modern knowledge and have been adequately carried out. Measures of this kind can be enforced almost overnight. … Therefore we can find in these administrative changes, brought about by the British occupation of Palestine, what is in any case a tenable explanation of the natural increase of population among Arabs.”\n\nThat is to say, that medical and sanitary progress in the personal health and customs had not yet made headway, however, implemented administrative measures such as quarantines and other measures had been implemented and is seen by Carr-Saunders as a likely explanation for the decrease in death rates.\nNotice how dropping the important signifier, and removing the information from its original context completely flipped the conclusions of the paragraph. This practice is repeated often throughout the entire book. Another method used to inflate numbers to support her argument, is to suggest that any evidence of something is but “the tip of the iceberg” to quote Finkelstein. She asserts that since the British turned a blind eye to Arab illegal immigration, then only the most flagrant cases were actually deported. That means that for every reported deportation of an Arab immigrant from Palestine, there must have been many others whose conduct was not so flagrant as to be deported. Naturally, she arrived to the conclusion that the British turned a blind eye to Arab immigration through tortured manipulation of data, similar to the example shown above.\nIt should be noted that this myth was difficult to argue even when it first emerged.  For example, the Anglo-American Survey of Palestine in 1946 concluded that:\n\nThat each [temporary migration into Palestine] may lead to a residue of illegal permanent settlers is possible, but, if the residue were of significant size, it would be reflected in systematic disturbances of the rates of Arab vital occurrences. No such systematic disturbances are observed. It is sometimes alleged that the high rate of Arab natural increase is due to a large concealed immigration from the neighbouring countries. This is an erroneous inference. Researches reveal that the high rate of fertility of the Moslem Arab woman has remained unchanged for half a century. The low rate of Arab natural increase before 1914 was caused by:\n\n(a) the removal in significant numbers of men in the early nubile years for military service in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, many of whom never returned and others of whom returned in the late years of life; and (b) the lack of effective control of endemic and epidemic diseases that in those years led to high mortality rates.\n\nThere is also ample evidence that her sources are often outright false or fabricated, for example Anthony Lewis brings up how Peters cites a report by the Institute for Palestine Studies which”…found that 68 percent of the Arabs who became refugees in 1948 ‘left without seeing an Israeli soldier.”’ Lewis informs us, that the report “was actually about refugees in the 1967 war, and the percentage was of just 37 refugees who were studied.” Other sources are utterly useless and unreliable, such as the journals and hearsay of random European travelers to Palestine, which we’re supposed to believe over a century of population and census data.\nFortunately for us, the love affair with this book did not spread outside the United States. As a matter of fact, it was severely panned by critics in the United Kingdom, and even failed to find traction in Israel itself, with Israeli academics and historians calling it nonsense.\nUnfortunately for us, the book is still widespread in the United States, and has received multiple reprints, even today and after its thorough debunking, it still maintains a 4.5 out of 5 star rating on Amazon and other online book retailers.\nAt the risk of repeating myself, but as always, propaganda does not care for facts, but for political utility, and in this case, it is naked to see that the political message is all that matters. I find it difficult to believe that all these “esteemed” reviewers somehow managed to miss all the issues apparent in the book. Sadly, this belief is reinforced by the fact that even when the problems with the book were made apparent, barely any of these reviewers recanted their position. Even Elie Wiesel, who was made aware of the problems early on never recanted his support for the book, choosing to remain silent instead, as his blurb, praise and name continued to be printed in each subsequent edition of the book. I would have liked to remind the late Mr. Wiesel that silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented, but I suppose he always did have a blind spot for Palestinian torment.\nUltimately, Peters’ book was relegated to the dustbin of history, at least in academia. It is exceedingly difficult to quote from this book and be taken seriously as a scholar. However, the pseudo-scientific illusion of empiricism that undergirds her writing still animates many dehumanizing myths regarding Palestinians to this day.\nPeters fabricates, misrepresents and cherry-picks her way through hundreds of pages in an attempt to deny the existence of the Palestinian people and absolve Israel of its original sin. Her attempts have been, and will remain unsuccessful. The truth tends to find a way, if not now, then in the future, and as the popular saying goes: “You can’t cover the sun with a sieve”.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!\n\nSaid, Edward W., and Christopher Hitchens, eds. Blaming the victims: Spurious scholarship and the Palestinian question. Verso, 2001.\nFinkelstein, Norman G. Image and reality of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Verso, 2003.\n\nKamel, Lorenzo. Imperial perceptions of Palestine: British influence and power in late Ottoman times. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.\n\nChomsky, Noam. “The fate of an honest intellectual.” Understanding Power: The indispensable Chomsky, 2002: 244-248.\nLewis, Anthony. ABROAD AT HOME; There Were No Indians, The New York Times, January 13th, 1986.\nGilmour, Ian, and David Gilmour. “Pseudo-Travellers.” Journal of Palestine studies, 14.4, 1985: 129-141.\nPorath, Yehoshua. “Mrs. Peters’s Palestine.” New York Review of Books, 1986."
+}
+{
+	"text": "A common phenomenon surrounding the question of Palestine is that many seem to be under the impression that the “conflict” is ancient, and has been raging on for thousands of years. This is quite far from the truth, as the Palestinian question is quite modern, relatively speaking. There is virtually unanimous scholarly consensus that it certainly doesn’t extend thousands of years into the past.  The roots and causes of the Palestinian question can be traced quite clearly,  should you be interested in learning about them in detail.\nTo briefly recap, the beginning of the question of Palestine is rooted in the Zionist movement, and its goal of colonizing Palestine to establish a Zionist settler ethno-state there. The first Zionist conference took place at the very end of the 19th century (1897), hardly ancient history.  However, while it’s true that this conference marked a turning point in the organization of Zionist settlement in Palestine, there were earlier attempts by Zionist “pioneers” to settle in Palestine,  such as Haim Chisin, but none of these attempts predated the Zionist movement by more than a few decades. It is also worth noting that at the time, the entire concept of nation states was a relatively novel idea, especially so in the Middle East.\nIn some of the more extreme versions of this misconception, some even go further to say that the whole region has been at war since time immemorial, and the question of Palestine is just an extension of that. This is the result of an Orientalist understanding of the Middle East which coalesces various political actors with diverse ideologies, contexts, motivations and goals into one chaotic mass at war with itself, where no differentiation can be discerned. Consequently, the Middle East becomes an exceptional arena for bloodshed and barbarity. Naturally, this same standard is never applied to Europe, for example, which was responsible for some of the most bloody and destructive wars in human history, neither is it applied to the various settler colonies around the globe which built their wealth and power on slavery and genocide.\nWhen viewed in this manner, all grievances and conflicts in the area become ancient, and petty, with no logic or context behind them. All actors become irrational; it flattens over struggles and equalizes all parties. Suddenly, there are no oppressors or oppressed, no colonists or colonized. Resistance becomes identical to domination, and everything is dismissed as illogical and undifferentiated violence typical of the backwards peoples inhabiting the region.\nThis shallow analysis of the question of Palestine serves multiple functions; First, it is an attractive and easy way to comment on the situation without actually saying anything or taking a side. It is convenient because it spares you the need to do any research or take a stance while simultaneously morally elevating yourself over the “backwards” people in the region. This is done in an attempt to project a false image of understanding or nuance.\nHowever, more nefariously, this talking point can serve to justify brutal Israeli practices by appealing to a false historicism; since Israel is in such a “bad neighborhood” which has always been governed by exceptional barbaric violence, Israel is forced to return in kind even if it didn’t want to. After all, Israel must be tough to survive in such a region, and any measure it takes is justified. Indeed, how could we condemn Israel for its domination of Palestinians when Arabs also kill other Arabs on the daily? It’s just how things work in the Middle East, they reason.\nThe parallels to the racist “Black on Black violence” arguments on Turtle Island are quite apparent. They both rely on a false, decontextualized, shallow and reductive understanding of the struggles at hand to shift blame onto the victims.\nRegardless of how and when this “perpetual ancient warfare” talking point is used, it is a sure sign that the person practicing it is misinformed at best, or that they are purposefully being intellectually dishonest in an attempt to absolve Israel of its atrocious human rights record. In either case, it is not a claim that can withstand any scrutiny, especially when it is retroactively employed to analyze a struggle against settler colonialism in an era before these concepts were even invented.\nSo no, the question of Palestine is not some ancient blood feud between eternally warring peoples, it is a recent struggle resulting from settler colonialism infused with reactionary ethnonationalism, both relatively new concepts originating in the last couple of centuries. The analysis of the question of Palestine through any other lens will produce a flawed and misleading understanding of the facts on the ground and will result in shallow and ahistorical interpretations of the region as the one discussed above.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
+}
+{
+	"text": "Hardly a discussion on Palestine passes by without somebody inevitably bringing up how “complicated” of an issue it is. At this point, it almost seems like an obligatory disclaimer that must be declared in order to be taken seriously when such an occasion arises. This is repeated so frequently that you’d think Palestine is some uniquely convoluted, one-of-a-kind issue, requiring years of dedicated study to grasp and truly comprehend, let alone to comment on in an informed manner.  But how complicated is it, really?\nI won’t be going into the roots of the question of Palestine or how we arrived at the current status quo, however, you can browse our introductory articles [here] on the matter should you be interested. What this article seeks to address is this claim to exceptional complexity that only seems to come up today when discussing Palestine.\nAppeals to complexity, especially in the context of settler colonialism, have been historically employed in an attempt to defend the indefensible. For example, during Apartheid in South Africa, white South African’s would commonly retort that things weren’t so black and white, if you can forgive the pun. Similarly, those defending slavery in the United States would argue that while releasing the slaves was the moral thing to do, it was more complicated than that, because it would too greatly threaten the status quo and the economy. Some try to market such arguments as “nuance”, but in reality, they primarily serve the purpose of apologia for heinous oppression.\nDo you notice how it’s usually never elaborated how the question of Palestine is so complicated? Do you notice how often this is employed -especially- when discussing the refugees’ right to return, or anything that would pass for common sense in any other situation?\nThis is not a coincidence. This idea has very deliberately been nurtured over the years, and it serves multiple purposes. The arcanization of Palestine effectively shuts down dialogue, and prevents people from taking a well-defined stance. Even things that seem straightforward are imbued with an air of mystique, where bald faced atrocities are given the benefit of the doubt. It can’t possibly be that simple or straightforward, no, there must be another explanation. After all, you’re not an expert and it’s just such a complicated mess which has been going on for so long, right?\nThis mainly affects people who are just learning about Palestine, or who don’t feel confident enough to take a clear stance. Combine this with the widespread -albeit erroneous- understanding where neutrality is mistaken for objectivity, you can see why it’s much easier to prevaricate in order to avoid being seen as biased or ill informed.\nThis arcanization serves to make Palestine exceptional, meaning that our normal judgment or morality go out of the window; they do not apply here due to these special circumstances.\nNormally, it would be difficult to argue against the right of refugees to return to their homes, but in the case of Palestine these are special refugees created under special circumstances . Our conventional approaches to law or morality are framed as ill fitting and lacking in refinement or nuance.\nIsrael openly colonizing the West Bank is different due its complicated history, it is not occupied it is contested. Consequently, Israel can then argue that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply either. Palestinian prisoners are unique and captured under special circumstances, therefore, they cannot be viewed as prisoners of war, nor can they be viewed as civilians deserving of a civilian court or due process. It’s quite versatile and convenient.\nIt’s complicated because it is special, it’s special because it’s complicated. The cycle continues, and Palestinians continue to lose their lives and lands, yet find themselves unable to clearly indict their tormentors lest they be accused of lacking nuance. These exceptions aim to legitimize what cannot be legitimized and defend what cannot be defended. So that you can look at injustice, oppression and domination and tell yourself it’s not as clear-cut as it looks.\nAn appeal to complexity is also a way to silence your own conscience, as I’m sure liberal Zionists grappling with their cognitive dissonance can attest. Palestine becomes “complicated” when you view yourself as a progressive, but simultaneously need to twist yourself into a knot to try and justify racist Israeli demographic obsessions, ethnic cleansing and militarism, none of which you’d support under any other circumstance.\nIllan Pappe discusses this arcanization of Palestine, writing that:\n\n“The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve. Indeed, the story of Palestine has been told before: European settlers coming to a foreign land, settling there, and either committing genocide against or expelling the indigenous people. The Zionists have not invented anything new in this respect. But Israel succeeded nonetheless, with the help of its allies everywhere, in building a multilayered explanation that is so complex that only Israel can understand it. Any interference from the outside world is immediately castigated as naïve at best or anti-Semitic at worst.”\n\nFor the sake of clarity, Palestine is just as deep and worthy of study as any other anti-colonial struggle, the objection in this article is to framing it as exceptional in its complexity in an effort to obfuscate the reality on the ground. The question of Palestine is not exceptional, we can trace its origins, chronicle its events and trajectories and analyze its politics all quite well. There are decades of scholarship on the matter for reference.\nWe must reject the arcanization of the question of Palestine, and see it in line with other anti-colonial struggles all over the world. If something is deemed an injustice elsewhere, then it cannot be deemed “complicated” in Palestine.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+{
+	"text": "This misconception is often based on an Orientalist understanding of the Middle East which boils everything down to religious sectarianism. This is quite common today, as if middle easterners are just incapable of living with others. How many times have you seen a misguided pundit boil down complex histories, struggles, political actors with diverse ideologies, contexts, motivations and goals into a simplistic Manichean battle between Sunnis and Shias?\nConsequently, when viewed in this manner all grievances and conflicts in the area become petty, with no logic or context behind them other than fulfilling some divine commandment. All actors become irrational; it flattens all struggles and equalizes all parties. Suddenly, there are no oppressors or oppressed, no colonists or colonized. Resistance becomes identical to domination, and everything is dismissed as illogical religious superstition typical of the backwards peoples inhabiting the region.\nThese shallow analyses of the question of Palestine serve multiple functions; First, it is an attractive and easy way to comment without actually saying anything of worth. It is convenient, because it spares you the need to do any research or take a stance while projecting a false image of understanding or nuance.\nHowever, more nefariously, this talking point can serve as a justification for brutal violence. For example, a large portion of American Evangelicals view the “restoration” of Israel as necessary to bring around the end times, and the return of Jesus Christ. In such a case, the oppression of Palestinians becomes a matter of holy significance. This plays a prominent role in many “faithwashing” initiatives .\nHumans are quite adept at masking their intentions behind an altruistic and noble facade. Not long ago, the United States attempted to legitimize its invasion of Iraq by claiming it was actually bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqis. Similarly, religion has been cynically instrumentalized to legitimize and mask political goals when it comes to Palestine. Indeed, many do view the Palestinian question as tied to religion, but the origins are firmly rooted in an anti-colonial struggle.\nThere would have still been Palestinian resistance to Zionism regardless of the religion of the colonists or the colonized. There would have still been Palestinian resistance to Zionism even if Palestine had no religious significance to anyone on the planet. This has been proven time and time again by liberation movements all over the globe.\nFurthermore, and perhaps more importantly, we cannot allow Israel to succeed in its conflation of Zionism with Judaism. We cannot allow Israel to speak in the name of and represent world Jewry. When the question of Palestine is erroneously viewed as a holy war, then these Israeli claims are inadvertently reinforced and legitimized. This simplistic view also erases Jewish allies of Palestine, and overlooks Muslim allies of Israel. Not to mention that it completely misunderstands the dynamics of both societies.\nFor instance, what of Christian Palestinians? What of secular Palestinians? They also fought against and suffered from Zionist settler colonialism. It would be absurd to suggest that these groups were motivated by wanting to participate in a “Muslim holy war”, as many claim.\nWhenever this “holy war ” talking point is used, it is a sure sign that the person practicing it is either -at best- misinformed, or is purposefully cultivating a clash of civilizations narrative to justify one aim or the other. In either case, it is not a claim that can withstand any scrutiny, especially when it is simplistically employed to analyze a heterogeneous society’s struggle against settler colonialism in an area full of liberation movements.\nSo no, the question of Palestine is not some holy war between eternally warring peoples, it is a recent struggle resulting from settler colonialism infused with reactionary ethno-nationalism, both relatively new concepts originating in the last couple of centuries. The analysis of the question of Palestine through any other lens will produce a flawed and misleading understanding of the facts on the ground, and will result in shallow and ahistorical interpretations of the region as the one discussed above.\n\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+{
+	"text": "That multiple sites in Palestine, particularly in Jerusalem, have religious significance to Christians, Muslims and Jews is not what is being contested, nor is the idea that a dedication to a political cause or peace and justice cannot stem from one’s personal religious beliefs. Rather, what is being contested is that Palestinians continue to resist Zionism for purely religious reasons or that the roots of the colonization of Palestine are religious.\nThe founding fathers of political Zionism, including David Ben-Gurion, certainly didn’t view their aspirations for Palestine as religious; they were nearly all atheists or religiously indifferent, and Zionism itself from its onset “enjoyed little support from key Jewish figures”. As historian Nur Masalha has explained in detail, political Zionism emerged from the conditions of late-nineteenth century Eastern and Central Europe as a radical break from 2,000 years of rabbinical Judaism and Jewish tradition. The ‘Land of Israel’ was revered by generations of Jews as a place of holy pilgrimage, not as a future secular state, and while generations of Jews expressed their yearning for “Zion” through prayers and customs, only very recently has this yearning become understood as in any way literal. Instead, early political Zionists most frequently framed their goals in Palestine in the colonial terms popular at the time, such as the idea that Zionists as Westerners were better equipped to cultivate the land than the natives.\nNo wonder then that 80% of early Zionist settlers did not even settle in Jerusalem, including Ben-Gurion himself, who could not be bothered to visit Jerusalem until three years after arriving. This is due to the fact that Zionist settlers at the time deemed Jerusalem too multi-religious and pluralistic for the founding of the ethnonationalist society of their dreams. Not only was it “full of aliens” (native Arabs) but it was also inhabited by the “old Jewish Yishuv”, whose members were part of the anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox community. As a result, Zionists preferred to build the new exclusively Jewish settlement of Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean coast. The notion that political Zionism and the founding of the Israeli state were predicated on the realization of millennia of religious longing is ex post facto justification. Rather, Zionism, like the European nationalisms before it, is an example of nation-building through the invention of tradition: cherry-picking collective memory and manipulating the religious past for political purposes.The political utility of this manipulation was quite apparent to Ben-Gurion, even telling the British Royal Commission visiting Mandatory Palestine that “the Bible is our mandate”. Like many of the other founding fathers of Zionism, his own lack of religious faith did not prevent him from understanding how vital Western and particularly Western Christian support would be to establishing an Israeli state.\nThis pandering certainly paid off; Christian Zionists and British imperialists, significantly British prime minister Lloyd George and his foreign secretary Arthur Balfour saw the interests of the Zionist movement and their own interests as so compatible it resulted in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. They believed that a ’Jewish Palestine’ would act as a foothold for British imperialism along the main route to India, and would act as a bulwark against communism following the Bolshevik revolution, which the British elite (correctly) saw as ‘the antithesis for everything which British liberalism stood for’. Furthermore, it would reduce the influx of Jewish refugees into Britain, and, as a bonus, would bring about Armageddon, a belief central to Christian Zionists’ worldview, efficiently combining patronizing attitudes towards Jews with imperialist foreign policies towards the Middle East.\nSo influential was Christian Zionists’ fixation on Palestine that catering to this fixation played a significant role in why Nazareth would become the only major Palestinian city in what is today Israel to not be ethnically cleansed. Despite Ben-Gurion’s order to “drive them out” as part of his ‘Judaisation of the Galilee’ campaign, Ben Dunkelman, a Canadian Jew who was the commander of the Israeli army’s Seventh Armoured Brigade, disobeyed orders to expel Nazareth’s residents. He believed Christian Palestinians needed protecting, a view he did not extend to Muslim Palestinians. In terms of not upsetting Zionists’ Western benefactors, he was correct to do so, because pressure from the Vatican eventually forced Israel to allow the return of some Christian Palestinians who were forcibly displaced (though as historian Illan Pappe has noted, many refused to do so without their Muslim neighbors).\nSince then, Christian Zionists’ obsession with Palestine at the expense of Palestinians has continued to develop with the full support of the Israeli state, especially after the United States took over Britain’s role as Israel’s main benefactor. It is no wonder that Israel continues to encourage this obsession, as it has proven politically useful. As of late 2019, tourism to Israel has been growing by about 10% a year according to the Israeli tourism ministry, with a tourism official sharing how most U.S. tourists are Christians, and a growing share of them are evangelicals. These tourists can freely visit the Christian religious sites which many Palestinian Christians cannot, and are gleefully shuffled into museums which highlight Byzantine archaeological remains while ignoring Islamic remains as politically expedient “highlights of history” regarding the various cultural, religious, and political empires that have marked Jerusalem’s past.\nPerhaps more importantly, as support for Israel continues to wane among American youth, liberals, minorities and women (it is strongest among older, well-to-do, conservative white men), Israel has found a winning strategy in courting its American Evangelical supporters. It’s a numbers game really; while Israel fashions itself as representing the Jewish people, it need not worry about surveys finding that U.S. Jews are more likely than Christians to say Trump favors the Israelis too much, how younger Jews are less likely to be emotionally attached to Israel, or how 82 percent of American Jews are more apt to stand with human rights and international law and freely criticize Israeli. Why bother when as of 2020, Christians United for Israel, only one of the many pro-Israel lobbying group in the U.S, boasts of 10 million members, more than the entire Jewish population in either the United States or Israel.\nOverall, the Christian Right has been found to constitute the largest social movement in the U.S and the largest voting bloc within the Republican Party, and its support for U.S. imperialist policy vis-a-vis Israel for years has culminated in billions of dollars of aid. This is in addition to the millions evangelicals have poured into West Bank settlement projects over the past 10 years, estimated at somewhere between $50 million and $65 million.\nWhat this love affair between Israel and its Christian Zionist supporters is really helping accomplish is the faithwashing of Israel’s oppression of all Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians, who are not exactly feeling liberated by these Western Christians’ violent and colonial interpretation of the Bible.\nRather, as an early 2020 opinion poll among Palestinian Christians revealed, 62% believe that Israel’s end goal is to expel them from their homeland, 83% of Palestinian Christians are worried about violence by Israeli settlers, and 73% are worried about the continued occupation of their lands. The result of these oppressive conditions contradicts Zionists’ claims that Palestinian Christians are emigrating because of “extremist” Muslim Palestinians; instead 32.6% opted to emigrate due to the loss of freedom and absence of safety amidst the occupation, 26.4% left because of the deteriorating economic conditions, and another 19.7% emigrated due to political unrest, especially during the second Intifada .\nThis is within a context of repeated attacks against churches by Israeli settlers with incidents far exceeding indictments, lending credibility to Palestinians’ claims that the Israeli government allows settlers to commit these acts with impunity. Christian and Jewish Zionists trying their best to blame Palestinian Muslims for the mess they’ve created is in part a pathetic attempt at a divide-and-conquer strategy to turn Palestinian Muslims and Christians against each other, the failure of which has thus far been quite infuriating to Israel. Instead, Palestinian Christians continue to take on leading roles in defining Palestinian nationalism and resistance to Israel’s occupation, despite Israel’s marketing as the Middle East’s only outpost of ‘civilization’. This blame game is also part of the instrumentalization of Islamophobia and anti-Arab (specifically anti-Palestinian) racism to garner support for their colonial project.Frequently, when any Christian -Palestinian or otherwise- speaks out against Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights, their criticism is equated with antisemitism, with the prescribed solution being Christian-Jewish “interfaith dialogue,” an activity that is closely linked to the long-term Christian program to reconcile with Jews for millennia of church persecution. In this way, Christians are permitted to consider the urgent issue of Palestinian human rights only within the context of European Christian penitence for Jewish persecution. This is evident in Christian Zionist groups like Bridges For Peace and the International Christian Embassy for Jerusalem, who describe their missions as “hope and reconciliation” and “teaching the history of Christian antisemitism” as part of a broader mission to mobilize Christian support for Israel. Unfortunately, this tactic is not completely unsuccessful; for many Christians, at leadership levels as well as in the general ranks, preserving hard-won connections with the Jewish community supersedes considerations of human rights issues.\nThese cynical accusations of antisemitism also lead us to how Islamophobia is used to faithwash Israel’s settler-colonial interests, specifically the dehumanizing and ahistorical claim that Palestinians, especially Muslim Palestinians are uniquely antisemitic compared to enlightened Westerners. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was quite confident that he could rely on this ahistorical framing when repeatedly claiming that it was a Palestinian Mufti who was responsible for Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jewish people (seriously).\nThe idea that Palestinians and Muslims more broadly are inculcated to be irrationally violent and hateful towards the “Jewish State” and thus need to be rehabilitated into “civilized’ and “balanced” views of Israel abounds in op-ed pages and news broadcasts. Mark Schneier, ‘rabbi to the stars’ and one of the founders of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding seeking to “improve Muslim-Jewish relations” put it this way:\n“First, this is not a war between Israel and Arabs. This is not a war between Muslims and Jews. Rather, it is a war between moderation and extremism; modernity and medievalism; civilization and barbarism.”\nSchneier and those heading similar organizations have appointed themselves, in all their magnanimous wisdom, to figuring out who the Good Muslims are. This talking point can be boiled down to the outrageous idea that Palestinians who object to being ethnically cleansed, murdered en masse, and to the theft of their land really are only doing so because the perpetrators of these acts are doing so in the name of a Jewish State. It has also opened up nice little career paths for these Good Muslims: so-called leaders and representatives positioning themselves as Reformers from within. Surely these workshops and itineraries focused on “interfaith dialogue” will get these annoying Palestinians to pipe down about their oppression.Abdullah Antpeli is one of the Good Muslims who has so bravely stepped forward to reign in the backwards hordes. At the time of writing he is Duke University’s Muslim Chaplain, who organized an ‘interfaith’ all-expenses paid program called the Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI) which has notoriously been attended by members such as Rabia Chaudry and Wajahat Ali. The program has included primarily non-Palestinian Muslim Americans, ultimately disconnected from Israeli colonialism yet made the representatives of those suffering under it.\nThe program has also come under fire for its cooperation with Zionist institutions, namely the Shalom Hartman Institute (SHI), which is a liberal Zionist educational institute partnered with the AIPAC lobby in its mission to demonize and otherwise block attempts to boycott Israel due to its human rights violations. SHI also maintains close ties with the Israeli military. The individuals at its helm are actively engaged in the intimidation of American citizens critical of Israel’s policies as part of efforts to drive a wedge between “soft critics and hard deligitimisers”, and as was made clear on its website regarding the MLI program, equates Israel’s actions and Zionism in general with all Jews everywhere.\nAs such, MLI’s coordinated trips to Israel are in violation of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC)’s call for a boycott of projects that bring international delegations, faith-based or otherwise, for visits to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) in a manner that is complicit with Israel’s regime of occupation, colonialism and apartheid. This is because overall, SHI is demonstrably not interested in merely teaching Muslim leaders more about Judaism than it is justifying Zionism; in fact, the curriculum designed for these Muslim leaders was titled “Encountering Israel: Independence, Peoplehood, and Power.”\nFinally, seeing as SHI is not only partially funded by Islamophobic foundations but is chaired by the president of a family foundation that has provided significant funding to Islamophobic projects, it seems counterintuitive that they should claim to be “bridging the divide” between Muslim and Jewish communities.Despite these apparent contradictions, we can expect more discourse and more of these initiatives which present the magical solution to a century or so of settler-colonialism as interfaith hand-holding sessions. This will continue even as Israeli settlers attack Muslim places of worship and as the Temple Mount movement gains in strength in its goal to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque and replace it with the Third Temple. Far more important to the Gulf and other Muslim states is the political usefulness of formally announcing diplomatic ties with Israel.\nWhile ‘interfaith’ delegations such as government-backed “This is Bahrain” are aiming to provide a cover for these diplomatic ties as moves towards interfaith harmony, a scratch below the surface reveals motives for these diplomatic ties far more plausible than that states like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain have become interested overnight in religious tolerance. Bahrain is home to the US Navy’s regional headquarters, and an acceptance of relations with Israel on the part of these Gulf monarchies comes with promises of arms acquisitions, U.S. diplomatic support in geopolitical matters, as well as preserving the status quo of absolutist rule at home.\nDirectly after Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) signed a deal normalizing ties, prominent Emirati social media accounts, some with government links, warned that anyone in the UAE criticizing the deal should be reported to the authorities. One post linked to an app released by the Attorney General’s Office which allows users to easily report tweets that threaten “the basic principles of social security.” According to experts and activists, in the past critical social media posts have resulted in detention, forced disappearances and torture.\nA prominent example of this is the case of Ahmed Mansoor, a well-known Emirati rights activist targeted by the Israel-based NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in 2016. Israeli spyware has allowed Emirati authorities to “control any activity in the public and private space,” says Andreas Krieg, a risk consultant and professor at the Defense Studies Department of King’s College London. “It has contributed to a constraint of the freedom of speech over the past decade that is unprecedented in its rigidity, even in the Gulf“. This is simply a continuation of the proud Israeli tradition of providing arms and dangerous technology to the most repressive regimes in the world at pretty much any given point in time, including to Apartheid South Africa.\nUltimately, faithwashing through these normalization efforts come at a time where multi-faith alliances under the premise of shared values of equality, justice and human rights are being formed. The Presbyterian Church recently moved to divest its holdings from US corporations complicit in the oppression of Palestinians, non-Zionist Jewish religious communal spaces are being carved out, and the US Council of Muslim Organizations dropped Emgage, an American Muslim political advocacy organization over its ties to pro-Israel lobby groups.\nAll the aforementioned present an alternative to the deeply sectarian and racist establishment discourse on Israel which erases Christian Palestinians in favor of Western evangelicals and which projects Muslims and Jews as inherently antagonistic to each other. This framing is complicit in the stoking of Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Arab racism in service of Israel’s positioning as a garrison state for America’s interests and is in contradiction to the much more nuanced history of Muslim-Jewish relations.\nPrincipled human rights defenders, activists, and organizers will and must reject the hegemonic efforts to demand Palestinians accept that Israel has a ‘right to exist’ as a an (inherently undemocratic) Jewish state on the ruins of their villages and the bones of their loved ones. Justice in Palestine means that the religiosity of anyone living from the river to the sea does not supersede the rights of anyone else, and that above all else, Palestinians’ rights to self-determination and to living in freedom and justice is no longer denied by settler-colonial structures and ideas under the guise of interfaith heart-to-hearts.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+{
+	"text": "Israel has long worked hard to portray itself as a guardian of religious plurality and freedom, especially when it comes to the Christian Palestinian population in Palestine. It is no secret that Palestine holds immense importance to many religions, and the facade of tolerance would go a long way towards cultivating a progressive image.\nThe problem with all of this, of course, is that Israel is an ethnocracy clearly built to leverage one group over all else. All of this talk of tolerance and equality goes out the window when you actually look into the de facto and de jure discrimination that form the basis of Israeli society .\nNaturally, this has not stopped advocates of Israel of projecting this discrimination onto the Palestinians themselves, claiming that Palestinian Christians are oppressed by their Muslim neighbors and the Palestinian Authority. They point to the dwindling Christian population of the West Bank as proof of this assertion. Let us take a deeper look at the claims and see if there is any evidence to support these accusations.\nFirst, it is worth mentioning that throughout its history, Israel has cared very little about the different religions or sects of Palestinians, only that they were in the way of its expansionist colonial project [You can read more here]. Bombs and bullets don’t tend to discriminate, neither do sweeping campaigns of ethnic cleansing that resulted in the destruction and depopulation of approximately 600 Palestinian villages.\nPerhaps one of the more striking stories of Palestinian Christian and Muslim solidarity comes from the story of the village of Mujaydil, Pappe writes that:\n\n“The village of Mujaydil had 2000 inhabitants, most of whom fled to Nazareth before the soldiers reached their houses.  For some reason the army left these intact. In 1950, after the intervention of the Pope in Rome, the Christians were offered the opportunity to move back but refused to do so without their Muslim neighbours.“\n\nAs a response, Israel razed half the village and burnt down one of its two mosques. Many Palestinians were shot in an attempt to return to Al-Mujaydil to tend to their crops, eventually people stopped trying due to so many deaths. Today the village has been wiped off the map, with a forest growing on top of it. The only evidence of Palestinian life are the remains of a damaged monastery and church that remain to tell the story.\nThe idea that Israel is some grand protector of Christians in Palestine can be so easily dispelled by simply talking to an actual Palestinian Christian. I’m certain that the Palestinian Christian refugees all over the world would have a good laugh at the notion.With this context out of the way, let us return to the original question regarding Palestinian Christians leaving Palestine: What are the reasons? Is it as claimed that Christians feel discriminated against? Are their Muslim neighbors harassing them? Do they feel like they simply don’t have a place in Palestinian society?\nThere have been multiple studies on this phenomenon, and Dr. Rev. Mitri Raheb has become a specialist in this topic. From his review of recent studies, in addition to those done over the last 20 years, he came to the following conclusions on why Palestinian Christians opted to emigrate:\n\n32.6% opted to emigrate due to the loss of freedom and absence of safety amidst the occupation.\n26.4% left because of the deteriorating economic conditions.\n19.7% emigrated due to political unrest, especially during the second Intifada.\n0.3% were motivated to leave for religious purposes. This percentage is so small that it dismisses as irrelevant the premise of religion as a main cause for emigration.\n\nIn a completely unsurprising turn of events, the number one reason for Palestinian Christians emigrating is the Israeli occupation. Just one look at how Bethlehem has been turned into a militarized Ghetto will reveal the inhumane treatment of Palestinians and the tremendous harm they endure every single day.\nAs a matter of fact, the majority of Palestinian Christians (62%) believe that Israel’s end goal is to expel them from their homeland. Given Israel’s track record, who can argue otherwise? 83% of Palestinian Christians are worried about settlers, and 73% are worried about the continued occupation of their lands.\nStudies show that Palestinian Christians actually feel safer on average than their Muslim neighbors. The overwhelming majority said that they do not suffer from discrimination when dealing with people and society. Almost all (92%) reported feeling comfortable discussing their religion with a Muslim friend. This sounds nothing like the hostile and discriminatory society that advocates of Israel describe.\nThe point of these numbers is not to paint an unrealistic or rosy picture of Palestinian society. Of course, there exists prejudice, like in every society on earth. The same study also revealed that there are many aspects that need improving to make Palestine a more inclusive society, such as the Palestinian Basic Law as well as elements of social conservatism. The point is to refute Israeli claims of Palestinian backwardness and intolerance, and to reject it positioning itself as the savior of Palestinian Christians. Especially when Israeli society is sustained by and replete with racism towards all kinds of Palestinians, for example being spat on by Israelis is a staple of Christian Palestinian Clergy life in Jerusalem.\nA further aspect that often goes unappreciated is that a considerable portion of support for Israel around the world comes from Evangelical and Christian Zionists, who believe that an Israeli state is crucial to trigger Armageddon. Pandering to these groups has been rather profitable, and there are entire faithwashing organizations dedicated to strengthening these ties . Naturally, these Christian Zionists care nothing for the plight of Palestinian Christians, or even for Jewish Israelis, as they simply see them as a means towards the end days, where they will be forced to convert to Christianity or die.\nAt the end of the day, Israel does not -and never has- cared about the plight of Palestinian Christians further than being able to use them in its Hasbara efforts. The framing of Palestinian society as backwards and intolerant has long been a staple of Israeli claims, but as the numbers show, Israel was in fact the main cause for the emigration of Palestinian Christians.\nPalestinian Christians are an integral part of our culture and identity, they have provided our society with some of our most brilliant intellectuals, and some of our fiercest resistance fighters. We must strongly combat their erasure, no matter the source, and confidently declare that these divide and conquer tactics will not erode our unity.\n\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "It should be noted that various Zionist leaders and groups also sought similar alliances with Hitler and Mussolini. The Mufti believed, as many Zionist leaders did at the time, that Britain was the obstacle for the realization of their goal, and that an alliance with the axis forces was the best way to remove said obstacle.\nFor example, on more than one occasion Avraham Stern, founder and leader of the infamous Stern gang (Lehi), sought to forge an alliance with Hitler, even offering to take part in the war on Germany’s side. All of this would be in return for German support to establish a “totalitarian Hebrew republic” in Palestine. This isn’t some small fringe group, members of Lehi would go on to occupy the highest echelons of Israeli government, and even the position of Prime Minister. Stern is still revered today in Israel, and has a settlement named in his honor, as well as a postage stamp.\nAs a matter of fact, there was an entire Naval Academy in fascist Italy to train Zionist militias. This was the Betar Naval Academy, and it was built and operated with fascist blessings. Many future commanders of the Israeli navy would train here under fascist supervision. The cadets at this academy were supportive of Mussolini’s regime, and supported Italy’s expansionist colonial wars in Africa, most notably the second Italo-Ethiopian war.\nHowever, when cases such as these are brought up, it is often claimed that these were alliances of necessity; that the Zionist militias merely followed the adage of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Suddenly, it becomes a nuanced discussion on political expedience with no allusion to any ideological kinship, with real attempts to situate their actions in their historical context.\nOn the other hand, when it comes to Palestinians, all of this is stripped away, and the only explanation is that the Mufti was an enthusiastic Nazi, and all of his actions were animated purely by irrational hatred. Could it also possibly be the case that he also sought the “enemy of his enemy”? We can argue all day about the intentions of all these people, and speculate about their actions and motivations, and it is not the aim of this article to absolve anyone, however, it calls for intellectual and moral consistency. If by seeking an alliance with Hitler and Mussolini to combat the British you brand the Mufti a Nazi and a fascist, then at least consistently apply this same logic to various Zionist leaders and militias who did the exact same thing.\nUltimately, none of this justifies the exaggerated importance relegated to the role of the Mufti, who when all things considered, was a rather powerless politician in exile who couldn’t even muster his own people to fight at the outset of the 1948 war. Suggesting that he was the mastermind behind the genocide of European Jewry is Holocaust-denial for the sake of demonizing Palestinians.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+{
+	"text": "“Do you affirm Israel’s right to exist?”\nWe would be surprised if you were at all involved in Palestinian activism and had not come across this question in one form or the other. This question often comes out of the blue and is unrelated to the discussion at hand. This is because it is not asked in good faith or to further any kind of dialogue, but rather to create a “gotcha” moment and derail the conversation.\nTo begin with, you will notice that you never ever hear of a state’s right to exist outside of the context of Israel. This is because this right does not exist. People have a right to self-determination, but this does not mean that a state -any state- has an inherent right to exist. After all, there are thousands of ethnic groups in the world and not even 200 countries. States either exist or they don’t, and as we’ve discussed [before], states and nations are not static entities, as they often change in form, parameters and even names over their history. Could you imagine the argument that former Yugoslavia had a right to exist? Who would have bestowed this right? Who would have upheld it, and how?\nFrom the get-go, this is a ridiculous question that has absolutely no legal backing in international law or international relations. You’ve never heard, for example, of Belgium affirming the right of Canada to exist as a state.\nTo reiterate, the goal of this question is not to contribute to dialogue, but rather to shut it down. This is because there has been a concentrated effort on part of Israel and its advocates to conflate Israel with the Jewish people as a whole. When you combine this with long history of persecution of the Jewish people, any hesitation in answering this question in the affirmative is enough to paint you as a bloodthirsty antisemite. This is further aided by the typical settler anxiety shared by beneficiaries of settler colonialism everywhere, where any alternative to the current oppressive matrix of control is framed as genocidal in intent . We saw this particularly in South Africa, where it was argued that full equality would mean the complete destruction of not only South Africa as a state, but the annihilation of the white minority entirely.\nBut let us try and imagine this question in any other settler colonial context: Could you imagine asking any indigenous nation on Turtle Island whether the United States or Canada have a right to exist? Keep in mind that these states could only exist through the destruction of indigenous life, language and culture.\nIt doesn’t feel right, does it? How could anyone demand that these nations rubber-stamp their own dispossession with approval, and lend it legitimacy?\nIf we naturalize the idea that nation states are inherently legitimate, and champion the false notion that they have a right to exist anchored in international law, then this restricts our ability to critique any country’s foundations. Suddenly, acknowledging the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the attempted ethnocide of the Palestinian people in any meaningful way becomes an infringement upon Israel’s fabled right to exist. By “meaningful” we are not speaking of mere empty acknowledgment that functions to signal a superficial settler regret while continuing to profit off the dispossession of the natives, but a material acknowledgment that aims to be the first step in righting historical wrongs."
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+{
+	"text": "A frequently recurring theme when discussing the history of Palestine, is the question of “who was there first?”. The implication being, whoever was there first deserves ownership of the land. I have lost count of how many times I have encountered the argument that “The Jewish people have been in Palestine before the Muslims/Arabs,” or a variation thereof. This has always struck me as an interesting example of how people learn just enough history to support their world view, separating it completely from any historical context or the larger picture of the region.\nSince this question is so widespread, and since I see it answered in different, and in my opinion, unhelpful ways, we would like to open up the topic for wider discussion.\nThe argument is simple to follow: Palestinians today are mostly Arabs. The Arabs came to the Levant with the Muslim conquest of the region. Therefore, Arabs -and as an extension Palestinians- have only been in Palestine and the Levant since the seventh century AD.\nThere are a couple of glaring problems with this line of thought. First of all, there is a clear conflation of Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians. None of these are interchangeable. Arabs have had a long history in the Levant before the advent of Islam. For example, The Nabataean kingdom ruled over Jordan, southern Palestine and Sinai a whole millennium before Muslims ever set foot in the area. Another example would be the Ghassanid kingdom, which was a Christian Arab kingdom that extended over vast areas of the region. As a matter of fact, many prominent Christian families in Palestine today, such as Maalouf, Haddad and Khoury, can trace their lineage back to the Ghassanid kingdom.\nThe second problem with this is that there is a misunderstanding of the process that is the Arabization of the Middle East and North Africa. Once again, we must view the Islamization of newly conquered lands and their Arabization as two distinct phenomena. The Islamization process began instantly, albeit slowly. Persia, for example took over 2 centuries to become a majority Muslim province. The Levant, much longer. The Arabization of conquered provinces though, began later than their Islamization. The beginning of this process can be traced back to the Marwanid dynasty of the Ummayad Caliphate. Until that point, each province was ruled mostly with its own language, laws and currency. The process of the Arabization of the state united all these under Arabic speaking officials, and made it law that the language of state and of commerce would become Arabic. Thus, it became advantageous to assimilate into this identity, as many government positions and trade deals were offered only to Muslim Arabs.\nSo although the vast majority of the population of these lands were not ethnically Arab, they came to identify as such over a millennium. Arab stopped being a purely ethnic identity, and morphed into a mainly cultural and linguistic one. In contrast to European colonialism of the new world, where the native population was mostly eradicated to make place for the invaders, the process in MENA is one of the conquered peoples mixing with and coming to identify as their conquerors without being physically removed, if not as Arabs, then as Muslims.\nFollowing from this, the Palestinian Arabs of today did not suddenly appear from the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century to settle in Palestine, but are the same indigenous peoples living there who changed how they identified over time. This includes the descendants of every group that has ever called Palestine their home. When regions change rulers, they don’t normally change populations. Throughout history, peoples have often changed how they identified politically. The Sardinians eventually became Italians, Prussians became Germans. It would be laughable to suggest that the Sardinians were kicked out and replaced by a distinct foreign Italian people. We must separate the political nationalist identity of people from their personhood as human beings, as nationalism is a relatively modern concept, especially in the Middle East.\nNaturally, no region is a closed container. Trade, immigration, invasion and intermarriage all played a role in creating the current buildup of Palestinian society. There were many additions to the people of the land over the millennia. However, the fact remains that there was never a process where Arab or Muslim conquerors completely replaced the native population living there, only added to them.\n\nSo, what does this all mean for Palestine?\nAbsolutely nothing.\nAlthough the argument has many ahistorical assumptions and claims, it is not these which form its greatest weakness. The whole argument is a trap. The basic implication of this line of argumentation is as follows:\nIf the Jewish people were in Palestine before the Arabs, then the land belongs to them. Therefore, the creation of Israel would be justified.\nFrom my experience, whenever this argument is used, the automatic response of Palestinians is to say that their ancestors were there first. These ancestors being the Canaanites. The idea that Palestinians are the descendants of only one particular group in a region with mass migrations and dozens of different empires and peoples is not only ahistorical, but this line of thought indirectly legitimizes the original argument they are fighting against.\nThis is because it implies that the only reason Israel’s creation is unjustified is because their Palestinian ancestors were there first. It implies that the problem with the argument lies in the details, not that the argument as a whole is absolute nonsense and shouldn’t even be entertained.\nThe ethnic cleansing, massacres and colonialism needed to establish Israel can never be justified, regardless of who was there first. It’s a moot point. Even if we follow the argument that Palestinians have only been there for 1300 years, does this suddenly legitimize the expulsion of hundreds of thousands? Of course not. There is no possible scenario where it is excusable to ethnically cleanse a people and colonize their lands. Human rights apply to people universally, regardless of whether they have lived in an area for a year or ten thousand years.\nIf we reject the “we were there first” argument, and not treat it as a legitimizing factor for Israel’s creation, then we can focus on the real history, without any ideological agendas. We could trace how our pasts intersected throughout the centuries. After all, there is indeed Jewish history in Palestine. This history forms a part of the Palestinian past and heritage, just like every other group, kingdom or empire that settled there does. We must stop viewing Palestinian and Jewish histories as competing, mutually exclusive entities, because for most of history they have not been.\nThese positions can be maintained while simultaneously rejecting Zionism and its colonialism. After all, this ideologically driven impulse to imagine our ancestors as some closed, well defined, unchanging homogenous group having exclusive ownership over lands corresponding to modern day borders has nothing to do with the actual history of the area, and everything to do with modern notions of ethnic nationalism and colonialism.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!\n\nMasalha, Nur. Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History. Zed Books Ltd., 2018.\nEl-Haj, Nadia Abu. Facts on the ground: Archaeological practice and territorial self-fashioning in Israeli society. University of Chicago Press, 2008.\nHjelm, Ingrid, et al., eds. A New Critical Approach to the History of Palestine: Palestine History and Heritage Project 1. Routledge, 2019.\nBowersock, Glen W. “Palestine: ancient history and modern politics.” Journal of Palestine Studies 14.4, 1985: 49-57."
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+	"text": "These anxieties are hardly unique to Jewish Israelis; settlers in many different colonies throughout history have echoed these same sentiments. If we were to take a look at the narrative surrounding anti-Apartheid South Africa activism and boycotts, we would find eerily similar projections and arguments.\nFor example, In an article for the Globe and Mail under the title “The good side of white South Africa” Kenneth Walker argued that ending the Apartheid system and giving everyone an equal vote would be a “a recipe for slaughter in South Africa”. Others, such as Shingler, echoed similar claims, saying that anti-racist activists were actually not interested in ending Apartheid as a policy, but in South Africa as a society. Others came out to claim these activists were actually motivated by “anti-white racism”, fueled by “Black imperialism”. Political comics displayed a giant soviet bear, bearing down on South Africa declaring “We shall drive South Africa into the Sea!”\nSound familiar?\nAs Fred Moten once said:\n\n“Settlers always think they’re defending themselves. That’s why they build forts on other people’s land. And then they freak out over the fact that they are surrounded. And they’re still surrounded.“\n\nSimilarly, in Israel the rights of Palestinian refugees are positioned as a diametric opposite to the very life of the Israeli settler. The return of said refugees then becomes nothing short of annihilation. Therefore, not only does the settler seek to deny the return of the native refugees, but to attack the entire concept of these refugees having any rights to begin with.\nHowever, in the rare cases where Israeli advocates even acknowledge that Palestinian refugees were wronged, and that their dispersal around the world was due to Israeli actions, the argument becomes that while it is tragic, it is the only way to keep the Jewish people safe. Once again, this pretense is hardly unique to Jewish Israelis, as a matter of fact, similar arguments were used against the abolition of slavery in the United States. For example, Thomas Jefferson likened slavery to a wolf:  “we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”\nHow utterly ridiculous this all sounds now.\nWhile the first approach is crude and vile propaganda, designed to instigate fear and panic, it is par for the course for settler societies. Perhaps the second approach stands out a little bit more for its brazen attempt at manipulation. In a final endeavor to center their experiences and erase their victims, settlers frame themselves as the stars of their own tragedy, in the end they were the tragic victims of fate, forced to wield injustice for the sake of self-preservation.\nUnderlying the logic of both of these approaches are racist assumptions that the colonized are barbaric, bloodthirsty and ruthless. It is a deeply dehumanizing logic, steeped in every colonial and Orientalist trope. The idea that a free Palestine would inevitably lead to genocide comes from the same logic. As a matter of fact, for all the claims of the Palestinians wanting to push Israelis into the sea, only the opposite has occurred in reality. Projecting genocidal intent onto even the mildest calls for justice for Palestinians has long been a staple of Israeli Hasbara, these intellectually dishonest interpretations are par for the course. But what is it exactly that Palestinians are calling for when they chant this phrase?\nThere is no point in denying the reality on the ground: There exists one nuclear-armed power between the river and the sea, and it is not the Palestinians. While the Palestinian Authority has some limited administrative powers in certain areas, it has absolutely no sovereign powers. As a matter of fact, Israel even determines who is a Palestinian citizen and who is not, as it is in de facto control of the Palestinian citizen registry. Israel exercises its control and hegemony through a matrix of control consisting of a mish-mash of different legal systems and practices for different ethnicities in different areas.\nWhen Palestinians call for freedom from the river to the sea, they are calling for decolonization and the dismantling of this racist colonial entity which dominates their lives, and seek to replace it with a state that would not exist at the expense of the subjugation of others.\nThis is hardly a new or radical position, such an entity was suggested by the Arab states as a counter-proposal to the 1947 partition plan. Naturally, this was rejected by the Zionists. That we barely ever hear about the offers that the Yishuv/Israel rejected should be an indicator of the nature of mainstream discussions on Palestine and the silencing of Palestinian voices. The Palestinian Liberation Organization also called for establishing a secular, democratic unitary state for all its citizens. Naturally, none of these proposals included genocide, ethnic cleansing or mass murder.\nRegardless of your ideological leanings, the reality is that we are already living under a de facto one-state reality. Israeli politicians proudly boast about never allowing a Palestinian state to materialize. Israeli school books already erase the green line. Israel already rules the lives of everyone there. Palestinians calling for the dissolution of this naked colonialism is legitimate and just. The fact that Palestinians are even asked to guarantee the well-being and welfare of their oppressors as they are killed, imprisoned and brutally repressed daily is a testament to their utter dehumanization.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+{
+	"text": "However, there is an argument that although the plan never came to fruition, the UNGA recommendation to partition Palestine to establish a Jewish state conferred the legal authority to create such a state. As a matter of fact, this can be seen in the declaration of the establishment of the state of Israel.\nThis argument falls flat on its face when we take into account that the United Nations, both its General Assembly as well as its Security Council do not have the jurisdiction to impose political solutions, especially without the consent of those it affects. There is nothing in the UN charter that confers such authority to the United Nations. Indeed, this was brought up during discussions on the matter.\nWarren Austin, the US representative at the Security Council stated that:\n\n“The Charter of the United Nations does not empower the Security Council to enforce a political settlement whether it is pursuant to a recommendation of the General Assembly or of the Security Council itself […] The Security Council’s action, in other words, is directed to keeping the peace and not to enforcing partition.”\n\nFurthermore, not only would this be outside the scope of the United Nations’ power, it would as a matter of fact run counter to its mandate. This was even brought up by The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine itself:\n\n“With regard to the principle of self-determination, although international recognition was extended to this principle at the end of the First World War and it was adhered to with regard to the other Arab territories, at the time of the creation of the ‘A’ Mandates, it was not applied to Palestine, obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there. Actually, it may well be said that the Jewish National Home and the sui generis Mandate for Palestine run counter to that principle.”\n\nThis is a direct admission that the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine runs counter to the principle of self-determination for Palestinians already living there. The United Nations needed to twist itself into a knot and make an exception to their own charter to recommend the partition of Palestine. Despite these efforts, the United Nations did not manage to partition Palestine, and even if it did it would be void due to it not being within its powers.\nFurthermore, the selective nature of Israeli appeals to the UN are quite well-documented. In this instance, the UN is touted as the supreme arbiter of justice and international consensus, but the moment it decrees anything bearing on Israeli interests, or criticizing its violation of international law, it is suddenly a cowardly, corrupt organization intent on spreading antisemitism. An organization that is framed as a source of legitimacy is instantly discarded when it becomes inconvenient.\nSo no, Israel was not established through the United Nations. Israel was established through warfare and the creation of facts on the ground. Facts it created through the massacre of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of villages . This is how the modern state of Israel came into the world, and no amount of sophistry or euphemization can lend that any legitimacy.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+{
+	"text": "One of the more recent approaches to the demonization of Palestinians is the claim that the Palestinian Authority subsidizes “terrorism”, or what advocates of Israel gleefully call “pay to slay”. Listening to these sources, you’d think that the Palestinian Authority pays out bounties to incentivize Palestinians to go out and randomly attack Israelis. As per usual, this kind of talking point intentionally distorts and misrepresents reality.\nWhat actually occurs is that the Palestinian Authority provides a small amount of money for the family of those put in jail so that they can sustain themselves. This applies to every single Palestinian prisoner who has spent a certain amount of time in Israeli jail, regardless of charges. Suggesting that this forms an incentive to go out and attack Israelis is as ridiculous as suggesting that meager unemployment benefits incentivize unemployment.\nThis family support is especially important considering that Israel practices a cruel form of collective punishment, where it demolishes the home of anyone suspected of being a “terrorist”. In such a condition, the family needs all the help it can get. Unless you believe that the family should starve in the street after becoming homeless solely due to them being related to an alleged “terrorist”, then you can see the necessity of such measures.\nAnother aspect that often goes unappreciated, is that part of these payments ends up in Israeli coffers anyway, as Israeli prisons are well-known for their negligence, and lack many basic necessities. Much of these payments are spent on providing for the basic needs of these prisoners in Israeli jails. This has been rather lucrative for Israel, as many a business have popped up whose practices revolve around exploiting thousands of prisoners with no other options, charging obscene amounts of money for blankets and other basic items.Furthermore, the Israeli military court system that tries Palestinians and designates them as guilty of “terrorism” is notoriously racist and discriminatory. Bearing in mind that civilians shouldn’t be tried in military courts to begin with, they have an astonishing 99.7% conviction rate, meaning that you’re virtually guaranteed to be convicted of something regardless of your guilt or innocence. As if that isn’t bad enough, it has been widely documented that torture is still de facto the standard operating procedure in Israeli prisons to extract false confessions, and it’s very common for interrogators to force Palestinians to sign documents in Hebrew which they do not even understand. This is an especially popular tactic with children detainees who are more easily intimidated and manipulated.\nAs for the designation of “terrorist” itself, it is applied liberally and without even a second thought when it comes to Palestinians. For example, when Israel seized private Palestinian land to expand an illegal settlement, Palestinians responded by erecting a small encampment called Bab al-Shams on it as a peaceful demonstration against this action. Naturally, they were accused of practicing “construction terrorism” by Israelis and promptly beat, repressed, arrested and removed from the land. Another example was when Palestinians were preparing a case against Israel in the International Criminal Court, they were accused of practicing “legal terrorism“. Palestinian prisoner hunger strikes are described as “Terrorism in Prison“. Naturally, none of this would qualify as terrorism from an international law perspective, however, Israel uses this designation indiscriminately to demonize and ostracize any kind of Palestinian resistance, no matter how peaceful.\nAccording to international law, it is legitimate for an occupied people to resist occupation by any means available to them. United Nations resolution 37/43:\n\n“Reaffirms 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”.\n\nIt continues:\n\n“Reaffirms the inalienable right of the Namibian people, the Palestinian people and all peoples under foreign and colonial domination to self-determination, national independence, territorial integrity, national unity and sovereignty without outside interference”.\n\nHowever, even if such a right was not enshrined in international law, it is natural for humans to want to rid themselves of domination and oppression. But since even the most peaceful methods are enough to paint Palestinians as terrorists, armed struggle would undoubtedly result in worse. However, historically this has been the norm for many a liberation movement. Even Nelson Mandela was called a terrorist in his struggle against Apartheid, MLK was called a “self-seeking rabble–rouser” and was accused of fomenting violence with his marches. Those who fight for freedom are always vilified by the reactionary powers of their time, Palestinians are no exception.\nThe more you research the long history of Palestinian resistance, whether armed or unarmed, you very quickly come to realize that the issue is the very concept of resistance, not its methods. It would seem like the only way Palestinians can escape this accusation is by just laying down and dying, but even then they’d probably be accused of “telegenically dying” to make Israel look bad, as Netanyahu once claimed .It is, however, quite amusing that the Palestinian Authority has such a negative reputation among mainstream Israelis. If anything, the Palestinian Authority has been an incredible boon for Israel and its expansionist project. It is a deeply unpopular body among Palestinians for exactly that reason.\nBy nominally participating in the sham that is the Oslo peace process, Israel managed to transfer all of its responsibilities as an occupying power onto the Palestinian Authority while maintaining effective control over the entirety of the area. There is no point in denying the reality on the ground: There exists one sovereign power between the river and the sea. While the Palestinian Authority has some limited administrative powers in certain areas, it has absolutely no sovereign powers. As a matter of fact, Israel de facto even determines who is a Palestinian citizen and who is not through control of the civilian registry, that is how complete Israeli control is. So, to summarize, Israel still has all the benefits of an occupying power while having none of the responsibilities. Even worse, since much of the Palestinian Authority’s functions are supported by the international community through foreign aid, Israel has managed to reap the benefits of a well subsidized occupation.\nSecurity coordination between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, a cornerstone of the post-Intifada status quo, has greatly contributed to the repression of Palestinians and the criminalization of their resistance. It’s no coincidence that the Palestinian Authority is often described as a subcontractor for the occupation, because for all intents and purposes this has become its role, and this is how many Palestinians view it.\nThe fact that most Israelis see the Palestinian Authority as an enemy speaks to how little information they have about the current status quo, or how anything functions under their occupation of Palestinian society. They have swallowed wholly Israeli state propaganda designed to reinforce a bunker mentality, where Israel is always the victim and anyone ever asking anything of it is tantamount to genocidal incitement.\nThe vilification of Palestinians through outright falsities like the “pay to slay” and “pallywood” smears are designed to legitimize Israeli intransigence and expansionism. After all, if the other side is so untrustworthy and evil, why even give them one inch? Why compromise on anything? This becomes especially more egregious when you realize that Israel’s “compromise” during the Oslo negotiations was to simply lessen its violations of international law. With enough demonization, even that can be dropped, and Israel’s colonial landgrabs can continue unperturbed.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "While pinkwashing does quite frequently operate as a propaganda or public relations strategy, a deeper understanding of how it functions regarding Palestine and Palestinians reveals that pinkwashing is also the inevitable manifestation of the intrinsically homophobic and Orientalist nature of Zionism, which itself is a manifestation of European colonial thought. As Palestinian queer rights organization Al Qaws has explained, “pinkwashing is the symptom, settler-colonialism is the root sickness.” The pinkwashing of Israel relies on the understanding that the East remains stubbornly backwards regarding homosexuality because of a refusal to learn from Western progressivism. However, as Joseph A. Boone outlines in “The Homoerotics of Orientalism”, this is ignoring several hundred years of history where “it was the uptight Christian West that accused the debauched Muslim East of harboring what it euphemistically called the ‘male vice’ (sodomy)”.\nThe Middle East was associated with ‘sexual deviancy’ and ‘effeminity’ whose mores and values good Christians must remain on guard against. The movements for modern nation-state building in what is now Turkey and Iran actually saw the adoption of heterosexual norms “at least in part as a response to the European representations of its civilizational ‘backwardness’ and sexual ‘irregularities’”. In Turkey, “unabashedly frank references to same-sex acts and desire were written out of the historical record and repressed from collective memory in the name of western style modernization”, while “the price of Persia’s emergence as the new Iranian nation-state was the official eclipse of its long-standing history of male homoerotic bonds as ‘pre-modern’ and the cultivation of heteroeroticism as the new norm.” Overall, the modern West was positively associated with heteronormativity which the Middle East was deemed in need of emulating in order to enter the realm of progressive modernity.\nThere is a long, complicated history of homophobic aspersions between not only the constructed binary of the East and West, but also between, for example, the Abbasid Caliphate and the Persian empire, with the former blaming the latter for being a “gay influence”. That today, many Islamic conservatives depict homosexuality as a foreign contagion in the name of nation-building and “cultural authenticity” is merely an outgrowth of the aforementioned historical relations. In the process, the history of homoerotic relations among males once intricately interwoven into the fabric of Muslim culture is being erased and denied.\nThis is not to oversimplify how homophobia functions in the Middle East, or to lay blame on the West; rather, it is to understand that current depictions of homophobia in the region as resistance to “Western modernity” obscures how these understandings of sexuality we have today, are in fact modern; they are the result of modern nation-state building and the accompanying construction of the “Other” as inferior, to be stigmatized, exploited and discriminated against.\nIt also obscures how the present-day colloquial deployment of “Islamic sexual repression” narratives currently plaguing human rights, liberal queer, and feminist discourses came to be. This paradox at the heart of Orientalist notions of sexuality, where Muslims are simultaneously hypersexual and repressed, informs the dehumanization of Muslims in general and the sexual violence enacted against the prisoners deemed “terrorists” (whether by the U.S. or Israel) in particular.\nWhich leads to how the discursive strategy of how racist understandings of sexuality is currently being weaponized in order to uphold present day imperialism and colonial political aims. This necessarily includes the Zionist project in Palestine, which was only possible because of historical processes in Europe. Pertinent to this article, the same European masculine values which deemed Muslims as sexually deviant were also weaponized against Jewish people in antisemitic acts and depictions which deemed Jewish men “effeminate”. Zionist founders were later keen to combat these historic allegations. This has manifested in the conflation of masculinity with the national army, with the dominant masculinity in Israel identified with the Jewish combat soldier and “deemed an emblem of good citizenship” This desire for masculinity is in fact a precondition for the Zionist enterprise—which would later evolve into a violent, militaristic culture.\nWhile “the Jew had been both feminized and Orientalized in Europe, the Zionist culture similarly feminized and Orientalized the indigenous Palestinian Arabs, who were also seen as inadequate. The Israeli state, then, must attempt to transcend the contradictions in needing to appease homophobic supporters of Israel among, say, Western Evangelicals, who constitute the majority of supporters of Israel in the U.S while simultaneously projecting the image of Israel as a gay haven in certain Western secular contexts.\nThese efforts to transcend these contradictions can best be understood through the lens of homonationalism. This term was coined by Jasbir K. Puar in her excellent Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. In it she describes homonationalism as the framework in which certain homosexual constituencies are able to embrace and be embraced by nationalist agendas, including the imperial expansion endemic to the war on terror. Basically, (primarily, but not exclusively) white cisgender queers can assimilate into the nation, such as through openly joining the national army and buying into a combination of ethnic chauvinism, religious nationalism, toxic masculinity, and the Islamophobia so crucial to the war on terror.\nThis is evident in multiple Western countries where, for example, gay politicians have risen in the ranks of conservative political parties, all who articulate Muslim populations as an especial threat to LGBTQIA+ communities. Naturally, this is despite the exhortations by some queer Muslims who insist that their religious and family struggles are not much different from those of their Christian or Jewish counterparts. Gay rights, in other words, have been absorbed into what Puar calls the ‘human rights industrial complex’, which operates through the foregrounding of western countries as champions of human rights and non-western (read: Muslim) countries as their enemies. Implicit to this complex is the notion that religious and racial communities are more homophobic than white mainstream queer communities are racist, or that a critique of homophobia within one’s home community is deemed more pressing than a critique of racism within mainstream queer communities. The logic of homonationalism which underpins pinkwashing strategies is not compatible with queer liberation or the elimination of oppression as a whole. Rather, this logic is in service of broader imperialist aims and thus cannot include those queer people who have been racialized or otherwise deemed enemies of the state.Israeli prime minister Netanyahu in a joint meeting of the U.S Congress declared that the Middle East is “a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted. Israel stands out. It is different.” Missing from this narrative, of course, is how Israel profits from the very persecution he describes through Israeli spyware being used to crackdown on dissidents, including queer people.\nHowever, what is significant here is how the “Israeli Arabs” were spoken about, rather than to. Similarly, StandWithUs’s previously mentioned advertisements which declared Tel Aviv, a “gay paradise” for Palestinians has nothing to do with what’s best for Palestinians at all. After all, as Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) have pointed out, “there is no pink door in the apartheid wall”. Queer Palestinians, like all Palestinians, live under the control of a state that has deemed them demographic threats, obstacles in the way of a Jewish State by and for Jews. Most Palestinians have never set foot in Tel Aviv for this reason, and in general Israel prioritizes ethnicity and demographics above all else, including asylum cases.\nThese statements and advertisements are meant to accomplish the following goals: (1) Israel being absolved of its colonial and military policies which has resulted in the loss of countless Palestinian lives. (2) Israel being contextualized by the Middle East but ceasing to be located there; Israel should be judged according to ‘regional standards’ while also being treated as a cultural outpost of Europe (which they get to be! Tickets to see Israel in Eurovision, anyone?)Israel being praised for supposedly being so ‘queer-friendly’ is dependent on Palestinians (and Arabs and Muslims in general) being demonized as uniformly homophobic. This is evident in the report released in 2008 by the Israel Project extolling Israel’s progressive values. The report stated that “There are several explanations about how Israel has come to embrace its gay and lesbian community. One is that the family as an institution is central to Israeli Jewish society. Therefore, parents would rather accept their lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) children than let homophobia destroy family unity”. As Steven Salaita excellently analyzed in Chapter 4 of his work Israel’s Dead Soul, Sexuality, Violence, and Modernity in Israel: The Paradise of Not Being Arab, the purpose of such a grotesque statement is to imply that Palestinians:\n“are neither family oriented nor tolerant; they are willing to sacrifice their own children to their irrational beliefs, or they are so irrational as to be unable to make such a choice. Even in its exaltation of Israeli open-mindedness, the Israel Project betrays its own implicit homophobia: homosexuality is not embraced by Israeli Jews; it is merely tolerated in the interest of family unity. It is not something Israeli Jews would ever accept; it simply presents a difficult obstacle that they are reluctantly willing to overlook.”\nThis was perhaps more revealing than the Israel Project intended, but it underscored how the language of LGBTQIA+ rights is being co-opted in the interest of Israeli foreign policy and the tourism industry even as homophobia remains rife in Israeli society. When Israel’s Ministry of Tourism, The Tel Aviv Tourism Board and Israel’s largest LGBT organization, The Agudah, joined together to launch TEL AVIV GAY VIBE, an online tourism campaign to promote Tel Aviv as a travel destination, it was met with the following (verbatim) comments:\n\nSurely nothing to be proud of. Shameful\nHaredim!!!!\nGay avek also cute slogan  (Yiddish for go away)\nYes by all means bring hordes of aids\nInviting destruction full speed\n\nOpposition to Israel’s so proudly touted pride parades has also reached the point of violence, with an ultra-Orthodox man who was imprisoned in 2005 for stabbing several people at a pride parade doing the same in 2015 following his release.\nAs Sarah Schulman explains, “Overall, Israel is a profoundly homophobic society. The dominance of religious fundamentalists, the sexism and the proximity to family and family oppression makes life very difficult for most people on the LGBT spectrum in Israel.”, while Aeyal Gross, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, explains that “gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.” As Samira Saraya, one of the co-founders of Aswat, an LGBTI+ organization for Palestinian women has further elucidated, “If you are an Israeli gay man who served in the army, looks masculine, acts ‘normal’, and has a secure job, then you are treated well. For the rest of us, things are much less rosy.” That it is to say, if you do not somehow ‘compensate’ for your queer identity in ways conducive to Israel’s ethnonationalist project vis a vis homonationalism, you are even further outside the margins of the Zionist ideal and thus more vulnerable to the brunt of homophobia and racism.\nZionism’s obsession with ensuring a Jewish majority comes with pressure to produce as many children as possible to resolve what Zionists have outright declared as the ‘demographic problem’, adding another obstacle to those who would prefer same-sex partners. This was attested to by Israeli scholar and queer rights activist Amit Kama, who has worked on a government survey to attract more gay tourists to Israel even as he himself was forced to marry his partner outside of the country.\nAlmost lost in all the rainbow confetti and the condescending hand-wringing over Palestinian or Muslim homophobia is how in Israel, all marital issues are under the control of the Orthodox rabbinic authorities; thus, there is no civil marriage in Israel, only religious marriage. Orthodox Rabbinate representatives supporting the law against civil marriage and gay couple being able to be married with cite a wish to “guarantee the Jewish future of the state of Israel” and protect against “assimilation”.\nThe weaponized understating of this queerphobic in Israeli society functions through treating Palestinians “as a site onto which queerphobic Zionists may project their queerphobic fantasies”, as articulated in Saffo Papantonopoulou’s excellent article, “Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude”. In it she details transphobic abuse directed her way which demanded she stop criticizing Israel, as it is supposedly the only place in the Middle East where she could expect to be treated “equal to a male or female heterosexual” and not be met with violence that they so graciously went so far as to describe in detail to her. She explains that Zionists’ deflections of their own queerphobia onto Palestinians is meant to “allow the queerphobic Zionist to live out his own queerphobic fantasy while simultaneously deploying a pretext of caring about queers.”\nThe identification of Tel Aviv as gay-friendly even by those who harbor queerphobia then is presented as a “gift to all queers” who are in fact meant to feel grateful for being ‘allowed’ to thrive or even live.\n“Under the Zionist economy of gratitude, the transgender subject is perpetually indebted to capitalism and the West for allowing her to exist. The properly delimited space for the transgender subject within this ideology is essentially one confined to an apoliticized space of pride parades and gay bars, but never the front lines of an antimperial or anticolonial project. Hence, the queerphobic Zionist can pass the gift of his racist colonial phobia as well as his queerphobia on to the transgender subject…I am supposed to feel vulnerable, afraid, and attacked, in order that I may pass on that gift of death to the supposedly transphobic Palestinian”.Pinkwashing is as prevalent as it is because it is not limited to those on the right, with instances of the logic of pinkwashing internalized and regurgitated even by self-professed radical groups. A prescient example of this was seen in response to ‘‘No Pride without Palestinians,’’ a queer coalition based in New York City, who sought to move World Pride 2006 outside of Jerusalem, arguing that Palestinian queers (and many Arabs from neighboring countries) would be banned from the celebrations, and those already present risked intensified surveillance, policing, harassment, and deportation. OutRage! a British queer group, waltzed in carrying placards commanding ‘‘Israel: stop persecuting Palestine! Palestine: stop persecuting queers!’’ and ‘‘Stop ‘honour’ killing women and gays in Palestine.’’\nThis seemingly innocuous and politically correct messaging, stemming from the group’s commitment to protest ‘‘Islamophobia and homophobia,’’ negates the ways in which oppression by a settler-colonial state might sustain or even create the conditions for social ills, including homophobia. Their equation of Israeli oppression of all Palestinians with Palestinian homophobia did so by taking for granted the Israeli state narrative that it does not, in fact, “persecute queers”, foremost among them Palestinian queers. Furthermore, it takes for granted that queerphobia is a more pressing threat to queer Palestinians than colonialism, as if these could ever be separated.\nThis is of similar thinking to an Israeli student who asked Palestinian queer scholar Sa’ed Atshan during a pinkwashing panel why he couldn’t log onto Grindr in Hebron, with another queer student asking about the absence of gay clubs in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison which barely has electricity or potable water.\nAs Atshan replied “Is whether or not Grindr is used among Palestinians a more important question than the conditions in Hebron that Palestinians endure as a result of the Israeli occupation there? How does use of Grindr become a marker of Palestinian civilizational value?…It perplexed me that the absence of gay clubs in Gaza is more outrageous to some people than is the reality of queer and straight Palestinians in Gaza struggling to survive amid unspeakable conditions imposed by Israel.”\nWhat pinkwashing also does is obscure how a society under constant assault is put on the defensive and thus cannot undertake the scope of work needed to fully eradicate social ills. With decades of Zionists negating and attacking Palestinian culture and identity as either nonexistent, inconsequential, threatening, or all of the above, Palestinian society as a whole has become very zealous about what it perceives to be its traditions and culture. As Rima with Aswat explained, “The majority of the society rejects behaviors and changes that “threaten” its heterosexuality and patriarchy, since they are perceived as a threat to the continuity [emphasis added] of the uniqueness of our culture”-while obviously incorrect and dangerous thinking, it is fueled by the constant violence against Palestinians in the name of Zionism and the feeling of insecurity this engenders. The ramifications of this thinking to Palestinians themselves is evident when the Palestinian Authority periodically assigns itself the role of morality police to “protect” Palestinian society from being “infiltrated and corrupted by homosexuals and agents of the West”. The threat of Israel and Zionism to Palestinian coupled with the identification of queerness as a Western phenomenon ends up galvanizing reactionary responses, leaving marginalized Palestinian more vulnerable to multiple forms of violence.[Warning:  Descriptions of sexual assault, torture and queerphobia. Click to skip]\n\nHere it is worthwhile to delineate how Israel also draws upon racialized homophobia and transphobia in its abuse of Palestinians. This includes the blackmailing of queer Palestinians, with a former Israeli Intelligence corps member sharing that in training to disregard Palestinians’ privacy and manipulate their personal lives for Israeli state interests, “we actually learned to memorise and filter different words for ‘gay’, in Arabic.”\nEven more horrifically, there are detailed accounts from Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails of verbal and sexual harassment which use homophobia and transphobia as a threat. One 16 year old described a police officer as telling him that “‘I will fuck you and you will sing on my dick’ as part of his threats. Another 23 year old recounted how an Israeli secret service member shouted “you terrorist, I’ll fuck you like a homosexual!”, while another in a separate report described being harassed by an interrogator who asked “Are you a homosexual? You look like a woman. Have you ever fucked a woman?”. Still another detainee described how they were threatened with having their brother undergo a sex change against their will, saying “They put me in an investigation room with a glass partition and on the other side I saw my brother, dressed as a woman, immodest, in a mini-skirt. […] They said that they […] had arranged for him a sex-change surgery in Jerusalem.”\nThese are not isolated cases, as Israel’s extensive use of sexual harassment and assault as a form of torture against Palestinians are well documented. The reasons for this are betrayed even in the very report most of the aforementioned testimony was drawn from, with the author declaring that “Sexual torture and ill-treatment, including forced nudity and curses with sexual contents, may have particularly deep and sometimes long-lasting humiliating effects among Arab men. This is grounded in the notion of honour, which is basic in social life in much of the Muslim world.” Here the author is taking for granted the idea that Arab and Muslim men (though here he is using the terms interchangeably) are more sensitive to being sexually harassed and assaulted than their western counterparts. He seems to, whether subconsciously or not, believe that the perpetrators of these acts are comparatively enlightened rather than perpetuating the old use of sexual violence against men in armed conflicts and the concurrent bigoted dynamics of emasculation, feminization and/or homosexualization as insult.\n[End of descriptions of sexual assault, torture and queerphobia]\nTo revisit Puar, the paradox at the heart of such an Orientalist notion of sexuality is reanimated through the objectification of the Muslim terrorist as a torture object, who is both sexually conservative, modest and fearful of nudity (and it is interesting how this conceptualization is rendered both sympathetically and as a problem), as well as queer, animalistic, barbarian, and unable to control his (or her) urges but having an innate “indecency” waiting to be released. In Brothers and Others in Arms: The Making of Love and War in Israeli Combat Units, Danny Kaplan argues that this sexualization is neither tangential nor incidental to the project of conquest but, rather, is central to it: ‘‘[The] eroticization of enemy targets . . . triggers the objectification process.’’\nNot only are homophobia and transphobia weaponized against Palestinians in such a manner by the magical rainbow state of Israel, it ends up leaving queer Palestinians vulnerable to the ramifications of queerness being associated with collaboration. As Al Qaws has written:\n“this pervasive linking of non-normative sexuality and Palestinian collaboration has become a term and identity of its own in the Palestinian imaginary and reality: isqat…this false connection with Israel and collaboration associates queer people with treason, dishonesty, untrustworthiness, and fraudulence, and therefore works to substantiate a very specific kind of homophobic fear within Palestine”.\nThe use of homophobia and queerphobia as a cudgel on behalf of Israel is certainly not conducive to queer liberation and is an abhorrent practice. It also must be contextualized in the overarching repression and oppression all Palestinians face, with Palestinians regularly extorted for a variety of reasons, from needing healthcare to wishing to hide marital infidelity to wanting to marry and live with a Palestinian with a differently colored ID card. Whatever individual experiences Palestinians have are shaped by the oppressive hold of Zionism.\n\nThrough pinkwashing, Palestinians are reduced to either being a victim of internal Palestinian homophobia in need of saving or to a violent perpetrator of homophobia among Palestinians and terrorism against Israelis. They are forced to walk a tightrope between having queerphobia exploited by Israel as carte blanche for their own dispossession and the ways in which Zionist colonialism shapes the queerphobia they face within their own communities. What is needed is dedication to ending all forms of oppression against Palestinians. Queer Palestinian organizers are calling for the promotion of Palestinian LGBTQ rights to be done in a way that challenges the appropriation and weaponization of that cause by Israeli organizations and instead engages first and foremost with Palestinians, rather than perpetuating the erasure of Palestinians inherent to Zionism.\n\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+{
+	"text": "That multiple sites in Palestine, particularly in Jerusalem, have religious significance to Christians, Muslims and Jews is not what is being contested, nor is the idea that a dedication to a political cause or peace and justice cannot stem from one’s personal religious beliefs. Rather, what is being contested is that Palestinians continue to resist Zionism for purely religious reasons or that the roots of the colonization of Palestine are religious.\nThe founding fathers of political Zionism, including David Ben-Gurion, certainly didn’t view their aspirations for Palestine as religious; they were nearly all atheists or religiously indifferent, and Zionism itself from its onset “enjoyed little support from key Jewish figures”. As historian Nur Masalha has explained in detail, political Zionism emerged from the conditions of late-nineteenth century Eastern and Central Europe as a radical break from 2,000 years of rabbinical Judaism and Jewish tradition. The ‘Land of Israel’ was revered by generations of Jews as a place of holy pilgrimage, not as a future secular state, and while generations of Jews expressed their yearning for “Zion” through prayers and customs, only very recently has this yearning become understood as in any way literal. Instead, early political Zionists most frequently framed their goals in Palestine in the colonial terms popular at the time, such as the idea that Zionists as Westerners were better equipped to cultivate the land than the natives.\nNo wonder then that 80% of early Zionist settlers did not even settle in Jerusalem, including Ben-Gurion himself, who could not be bothered to visit Jerusalem until three years after arriving. This is due to the fact that Zionist settlers at the time deemed Jerusalem too multi-religious and pluralistic for the founding of the ethnonationalist society of their dreams. Not only was it “full of aliens” (native Arabs) but it was also inhabited by the “old Jewish Yishuv”, whose members were part of the anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox community. As a result, Zionists preferred to build the new exclusively Jewish settlement of Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean coast. The notion that political Zionism and the founding of the Israeli state were predicated on the realization of millennia of religious longing is ex post facto justification. Rather, Zionism, like the European nationalisms before it, is an example of nation-building through the invention of tradition: cherry-picking collective memory and manipulating the religious past for political purposes.The political utility of this manipulation was quite apparent to Ben-Gurion, even telling the British Royal Commission visiting Mandatory Palestine that “the Bible is our mandate”. Like many of the other founding fathers of Zionism, his own lack of religious faith did not prevent him from understanding how vital Western and particularly Western Christian support would be to establishing an Israeli state.\nThis pandering certainly paid off; Christian Zionists and British imperialists, significantly British prime minister Lloyd George and his foreign secretary Arthur Balfour saw the interests of the Zionist movement and their own interests as so compatible it resulted in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. They believed that a ’Jewish Palestine’ would act as a foothold for British imperialism along the main route to India, and would act as a bulwark against communism following the Bolshevik revolution, which the British elite (correctly) saw as ‘the antithesis for everything which British liberalism stood for’. Furthermore, it would reduce the influx of Jewish refugees into Britain, and, as a bonus, would bring about Armageddon, a belief central to Christian Zionists’ worldview, efficiently combining patronizing attitudes towards Jews with imperialist foreign policies towards the Middle East.\nSo influential was Christian Zionists’ fixation on Palestine that catering to this fixation played a significant role in why Nazareth would become the only major Palestinian city in what is today Israel to not be ethnically cleansed. Despite Ben-Gurion’s order to “drive them out” as part of his ‘Judaisation of the Galilee’ campaign, Ben Dunkelman, a Canadian Jew who was the commander of the Israeli army’s Seventh Armoured Brigade, disobeyed orders to expel Nazareth’s residents. He believed Christian Palestinians needed protecting, a view he did not extend to Muslim Palestinians. In terms of not upsetting Zionists’ Western benefactors, he was correct to do so, because pressure from the Vatican eventually forced Israel to allow the return of some Christian Palestinians who were forcibly displaced (though as historian Illan Pappe has noted, many refused to do so without their Muslim neighbors).\nSince then, Christian Zionists’ obsession with Palestine at the expense of Palestinians has continued to develop with the full support of the Israeli state, especially after the United States took over Britain’s role as Israel’s main benefactor. It is no wonder that Israel continues to encourage this obsession, as it has proven politically useful. As of late 2019, tourism to Israel has been growing by about 10% a year according to the Israeli tourism ministry, with a tourism official sharing how most U.S. tourists are Christians, and a growing share of them are evangelicals. These tourists can freely visit the Christian religious sites which many Palestinian Christians cannot, and are gleefully shuffled into museums which highlight Byzantine archaeological remains while ignoring Islamic remains as politically expedient “highlights of history” regarding the various cultural, religious, and political empires that have marked Jerusalem’s past.\nPerhaps more importantly, as support for Israel continues to wane among American youth, liberals, minorities and women (it is strongest among older, well-to-do, conservative white men), Israel has found a winning strategy in courting its American Evangelical supporters. It’s a numbers game really; while Israel fashions itself as representing the Jewish people, it need not worry about surveys finding that U.S. Jews are more likely than Christians to say Trump favors the Israelis too much, how younger Jews are less likely to be emotionally attached to Israel, or how 82 percent of American Jews are more apt to stand with human rights and international law and freely criticize Israeli. Why bother when as of 2020, Christians United for Israel, only one of the many pro-Israel lobbying group in the U.S, boasts of 10 million members, more than the entire Jewish population in either the United States or Israel.\nOverall, the Christian Right has been found to constitute the largest social movement in the U.S and the largest voting bloc within the Republican Party, and its support for U.S. imperialist policy vis-a-vis Israel for years has culminated in billions of dollars of aid. This is in addition to the millions evangelicals have poured into West Bank settlement projects over the past 10 years, estimated at somewhere between $50 million and $65 million.\nWhat this love affair between Israel and its Christian Zionist supporters is really helping accomplish is the faithwashing of Israel’s oppression of all Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians, who are not exactly feeling liberated by these Western Christians’ violent and colonial interpretation of the Bible.\nRather, as an early 2020 opinion poll among Palestinian Christians revealed, 62% believe that Israel’s end goal is to expel them from their homeland, 83% of Palestinian Christians are worried about violence by Israeli settlers, and 73% are worried about the continued occupation of their lands. The result of these oppressive conditions contradicts Zionists’ claims that Palestinian Christians are emigrating because of “extremist” Muslim Palestinians; instead 32.6% opted to emigrate due to the loss of freedom and absence of safety amidst the occupation, 26.4% left because of the deteriorating economic conditions, and another 19.7% emigrated due to political unrest, especially during the second Intifada .\nThis is within a context of repeated attacks against churches by Israeli settlers with incidents far exceeding indictments, lending credibility to Palestinians’ claims that the Israeli government allows settlers to commit these acts with impunity. Christian and Jewish Zionists trying their best to blame Palestinian Muslims for the mess they’ve created is in part a pathetic attempt at a divide-and-conquer strategy to turn Palestinian Muslims and Christians against each other, the failure of which has thus far been quite infuriating to Israel. Instead, Palestinian Christians continue to take on leading roles in defining Palestinian nationalism and resistance to Israel’s occupation, despite Israel’s marketing as the Middle East’s only outpost of ‘civilization’. This blame game is also part of the instrumentalization of Islamophobia and anti-Arab (specifically anti-Palestinian) racism to garner support for their colonial project.Frequently, when any Christian -Palestinian or otherwise- speaks out against Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights, their criticism is equated with antisemitism, with the prescribed solution being Christian-Jewish “interfaith dialogue,” an activity that is closely linked to the long-term Christian program to reconcile with Jews for millennia of church persecution. In this way, Christians are permitted to consider the urgent issue of Palestinian human rights only within the context of European Christian penitence for Jewish persecution. This is evident in Christian Zionist groups like Bridges For Peace and the International Christian Embassy for Jerusalem, who describe their missions as “hope and reconciliation” and “teaching the history of Christian antisemitism” as part of a broader mission to mobilize Christian support for Israel. Unfortunately, this tactic is not completely unsuccessful; for many Christians, at leadership levels as well as in the general ranks, preserving hard-won connections with the Jewish community supersedes considerations of human rights issues.\nThese cynical accusations of antisemitism also lead us to how Islamophobia is used to faithwash Israel’s settler-colonial interests, specifically the dehumanizing and ahistorical claim that Palestinians, especially Muslim Palestinians are uniquely antisemitic compared to enlightened Westerners. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was quite confident that he could rely on this ahistorical framing when repeatedly claiming that it was a Palestinian Mufti who was responsible for Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jewish people (seriously).\nThe idea that Palestinians and Muslims more broadly are inculcated to be irrationally violent and hateful towards the “Jewish State” and thus need to be rehabilitated into “civilized’ and “balanced” views of Israel abounds in op-ed pages and news broadcasts. Mark Schneier, ‘rabbi to the stars’ and one of the founders of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding seeking to “improve Muslim-Jewish relations” put it this way:\n“First, this is not a war between Israel and Arabs. This is not a war between Muslims and Jews. Rather, it is a war between moderation and extremism; modernity and medievalism; civilization and barbarism.”\nSchneier and those heading similar organizations have appointed themselves, in all their magnanimous wisdom, to figuring out who the Good Muslims are. This talking point can be boiled down to the outrageous idea that Palestinians who object to being ethnically cleansed, murdered en masse, and to the theft of their land really are only doing so because the perpetrators of these acts are doing so in the name of a Jewish State. It has also opened up nice little career paths for these Good Muslims: so-called leaders and representatives positioning themselves as Reformers from within. Surely these workshops and itineraries focused on “interfaith dialogue” will get these annoying Palestinians to pipe down about their oppression.Abdullah Antpeli is one of the Good Muslims who has so bravely stepped forward to reign in the backwards hordes. At the time of writing he is Duke University’s Muslim Chaplain, who organized an ‘interfaith’ all-expenses paid program called the Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI) which has notoriously been attended by members such as Rabia Chaudry and Wajahat Ali. The program has included primarily non-Palestinian Muslim Americans, ultimately disconnected from Israeli colonialism yet made the representatives of those suffering under it.\nThe program has also come under fire for its cooperation with Zionist institutions, namely the Shalom Hartman Institute (SHI), which is a liberal Zionist educational institute partnered with the AIPAC lobby in its mission to demonize and otherwise block attempts to boycott Israel due to its human rights violations. SHI also maintains close ties with the Israeli military. The individuals at its helm are actively engaged in the intimidation of American citizens critical of Israel’s policies as part of efforts to drive a wedge between “soft critics and hard deligitimisers”, and as was made clear on its website regarding the MLI program, equates Israel’s actions and Zionism in general with all Jews everywhere.\nAs such, MLI’s coordinated trips to Israel are in violation of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC)’s call for a boycott of projects that bring international delegations, faith-based or otherwise, for visits to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) in a manner that is complicit with Israel’s regime of occupation, colonialism and apartheid. This is because overall, SHI is demonstrably not interested in merely teaching Muslim leaders more about Judaism than it is justifying Zionism; in fact, the curriculum designed for these Muslim leaders was titled “Encountering Israel: Independence, Peoplehood, and Power.”\nFinally, seeing as SHI is not only partially funded by Islamophobic foundations but is chaired by the president of a family foundation that has provided significant funding to Islamophobic projects, it seems counterintuitive that they should claim to be “bridging the divide” between Muslim and Jewish communities.Despite these apparent contradictions, we can expect more discourse and more of these initiatives which present the magical solution to a century or so of settler-colonialism as interfaith hand-holding sessions. This will continue even as Israeli settlers attack Muslim places of worship and as the Temple Mount movement gains in strength in its goal to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque and replace it with the Third Temple. Far more important to the Gulf and other Muslim states is the political usefulness of formally announcing diplomatic ties with Israel.\nWhile ‘interfaith’ delegations such as government-backed “This is Bahrain” are aiming to provide a cover for these diplomatic ties as moves towards interfaith harmony, a scratch below the surface reveals motives for these diplomatic ties far more plausible than that states like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain have become interested overnight in religious tolerance. Bahrain is home to the US Navy’s regional headquarters, and an acceptance of relations with Israel on the part of these Gulf monarchies comes with promises of arms acquisitions, U.S. diplomatic support in geopolitical matters, as well as preserving the status quo of absolutist rule at home.\nDirectly after Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) signed a deal normalizing ties, prominent Emirati social media accounts, some with government links, warned that anyone in the UAE criticizing the deal should be reported to the authorities. One post linked to an app released by the Attorney General’s Office which allows users to easily report tweets that threaten “the basic principles of social security.” According to experts and activists, in the past critical social media posts have resulted in detention, forced disappearances and torture.\nA prominent example of this is the case of Ahmed Mansoor, a well-known Emirati rights activist targeted by the Israel-based NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in 2016. Israeli spyware has allowed Emirati authorities to “control any activity in the public and private space,” says Andreas Krieg, a risk consultant and professor at the Defense Studies Department of King’s College London. “It has contributed to a constraint of the freedom of speech over the past decade that is unprecedented in its rigidity, even in the Gulf“. This is simply a continuation of the proud Israeli tradition of providing arms and dangerous technology to the most repressive regimes in the world at pretty much any given point in time, including to Apartheid South Africa.\nUltimately, faithwashing through these normalization efforts come at a time where multi-faith alliances under the premise of shared values of equality, justice and human rights are being formed. The Presbyterian Church recently moved to divest its holdings from US corporations complicit in the oppression of Palestinians, non-Zionist Jewish religious communal spaces are being carved out, and the US Council of Muslim Organizations dropped Emgage, an American Muslim political advocacy organization over its ties to pro-Israel lobby groups.\nAll the aforementioned present an alternative to the deeply sectarian and racist establishment discourse on Israel which erases Christian Palestinians in favor of Western evangelicals and which projects Muslims and Jews as inherently antagonistic to each other. This framing is complicit in the stoking of Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Arab racism in service of Israel’s positioning as a garrison state for America’s interests and is in contradiction to the much more nuanced history of Muslim-Jewish relations.\nPrincipled human rights defenders, activists, and organizers will and must reject the hegemonic efforts to demand Palestinians accept that Israel has a ‘right to exist’ as a an (inherently undemocratic) Jewish state on the ruins of their villages and the bones of their loved ones. Justice in Palestine means that the religiosity of anyone living from the river to the sea does not supersede the rights of anyone else, and that above all else, Palestinians’ rights to self-determination and to living in freedom and justice is no longer denied by settler-colonial structures and ideas under the guise of interfaith heart-to-hearts.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "Despite the absurdity of the chauvinism in using humanitarian aid to distract from its colonial violence, Israel’s bluewashing strategy is nonetheless pursued across several social media platforms as well as on the Israeli government’s website. Most insultingly, these pages also mention aid Israel has allowed to enter the besieged Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank it is increasingly dotting with illegal settlements. To really drive in the ridiculousness of Israel boasting of giving aid to the Palestinians under its occupation, it is worthwhile to delve into the context of how Israel is ultimately the root cause of the issues their aid is purporting to help. Let’s take a look at some of Israel’s claims that it proudly displays on its official websites:\n“Despite attacks by Hamas, Israel maintains an ongoing humanitarian corridor for the transfer of perishable and staple food items to Gaza.”\nHere Israel begins by placing Hamas’s actions in a vacuum, rather than within its rightful context. Most of those who live in the Gaza Strip are refugees of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaigns during the Nakba which made founding the State of Israel possible. All resistance to Israel from Gaza has been borne out of this catastrophe. Israel here is also absolving itself of its responsibility for Gaza’s present state. Before 1948, Gaza City had been a prosperous market town functioning as a collecting and forwarding center for the citrus, wheat, and barley crops of the Gaza District. Much of its population had worked in the surrounding countryside, and many of the Gazan landowners and farmers had owned or worked on citrus groves and pastures outside the area that became the Gaza Strip. The Nakba drastically altered the situation. Gaza was cut off from its normal sources of supply and from its markets in the areas that became Israel.\nThe economy was ravaged: within a few months the strip had come to depend almost entirely on imports. Many refugees attempted to return to their homes during those initial months, but such attempts were dangerous. The presence of land mines was evident from the dead camels, donkeys, and cattle along the highway. Despite this, hundreds of refugees still tried daily to return-but none were allowed by the Israelis. Decades later, Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip are still fighting for their right to return, as evidenced by the Great March of Return (GMR) which began in 2018. The GMR consisted of Palestinians marching towards the barrier separating them from their villages and in turn being shot dead by Israeli snipers or intentionally disabled by exploding “butterfly bullets”.\nThus, this framing that Israel is acting benevolently despite Hamas’s supposedly irrational violence obscures how Israel began wreaking havoc on Palestinian lives decades before Hamas even existed. This havoc includes how Gaza’s food insecurity began in 1948 and has been allowed to continue since through Israeli violence and domination, despite Israeli claims that the pulling out of settlements from Gaza marked the end of its rule over the strip. Even this “transfer of food items” to Gaza being boasted of is dependent on the whims of the Israeli government and in the past has been blocked while the army was raining bombs down on Gaza, including on UN schools.\n“21,200 international organization staff members entered the Gaza Strip.”\nAgain shamelessly minimizing the devastating impact of total Israeli control over who and what can enter and leave the Gaza Strip and why these staff members need to enter in the first place, this also belies how as recently as 2018, Israel was exposed as having sent in an Israeli commando unit into Gaza undercover as humanitarian aid workers. This is a war crime, and rightfully so as it endangers all actual humanitarian aid workers by placing them under a cloud of suspicion, essentially using these aid workers as human shields.\n“22,849 Palestinians exited the Strip, among them 10,544 patients and their companions, exiting for medical treatment in Israel.”\nThis bluewashing of the Palestinians in Gaza who despite all obstacles were able to leave for proper medical treatment as an act of generosity covers up how Israel is responsible for the abysmal state of Palestinian healthcare. This figure simply ignores how Israel is increasingly limiting the number of Palestinians who are allowed to access the lifesaving care they need, while Gaza’s healthcare system – subjected to half a century of occupation and over a decade of blockade – is left unable to meet the needs of its population. Furthermore, Israel does not allow Palestinians in Gaza to reopen their airport or build a seaport, leaving Palestinians dependent on foreign ports for travel abroad.\nTravel to the West Bank from Gaza is also restricted, even for medical treatments: a recent heartbreaking story was of a young Palestinian girl with cancer who eventually died in a hospital in Nablus, after her treatment was delayed and her parents were denied permits to accompany her, a story that is tragically not unique. The precariousness of Palestinians’ access to healthcare has only been exacerbated by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, where with the UN’s plan to facilitate permits stalled, Israel only approved half of the urgent medical permit requests from Gaza by late spring 2020. Thus, many Palestinians who contracted COVID-19 and who suffered from preexisting conditions have been prevented from receiving adequate medical attention, including access to ventilators.\nMoreover, the pharmaceutical market in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is bound by economic agreements with Israel and has been structured in furtherance of Israeli interests at the expense of Palestinians. This is accomplished through the blocking of less expensive pharmaceuticals from neighboring countries, forcing a reliance on Israeli pharmaceuticals, as well as the limiting of raw material imports and the exports of medicines which places a huge burden on Palestinian pharmaceutical manufacturers. In the case of the Gaza Strip, medicines are allowed in but not out, placing the burden of dealing with expired medications on Gaza’s over-capacitated toxic waste processing sites. This has resulted in the pollution of water resources in Gaza which in and of itself leads to further health problems in the population.\n“Coordination and processing of requests regarding humanitarian infrastructure, such as water, sewage and electricity systems in the Gaza Strip is conducted between COGAT (the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation) and the Palestinian Authority”\nHow generous to ‘process humanitarian requests’ as an occupying power after bombing and destroying Gaza’s water pipelines, sewage treatment centers, electricity systems , and its power plant in the first place. Since then, Israel has not only delayed but benefitted and profited from rebuilding through the “Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism.” Under this mechanism, basic commodities such as cement are deemed a “dual-use material” and thus are subjected to a complicated bureaucratic system of surveillance and Israeli pre-approval which pushes many Palestinians to resort to price-gauged black market goods.\nFamilies wishing to rebuild their destroyed homes have their personal information passed on to Israel who can reject these requests at will, but only after being given unfettered access to everything from family ID card numbers to GPS coordinates. Meanwhile Israeli companies profit while international donors foot the bill for Israeli destruction even when this includes donor-funded structures. One small example is how 10% of the Israeli cement industry is made up of cement sales to Gaza. This is unsurprising considering the hoops Gaza cement companies have to jump through; one factory owner had to install a dozen security cameras with two video-monitoring systems that run 24 hours a day. Due to Gaza’s frequent blackouts (courtesy of Israeli destruction of infrastructure) the factory owner had to buy a pair of battery backups to ensure a steady stream of power. If the lights go out, the internet connection fails, or a storm knocks out a camera, the factory risks being shut down under mechanism rules.\nOverall, Palestinians are left with little choice but to either risk buying illegal and exorbitantly priced necessary goods or be subjected to a long and humiliating process to be allowed to access supplies made by the same people who destroyed their homes. All of this is then cynically exploited and spun as a feel-good humanitarian show of kindness.“In 2009, the West Bank enjoyed a significant economic recovery thanks to measures taken by Israel to support economic activity. A number of infrastructure projects are currently in different stages of implementation in the West Bank. These projects will help improve the standard of living for the local population, including among others the upgrading of water, and sanitation infrastructures.”\nIsrael’s continuous attempts to obfuscate its occupation of the West Bank also extends to its bluewashing efforts. Israel simultaneously seeks to take over as much Palestinian land as possible, and deprives Palestinians of any kind of authority or sovereignty, but also frames the West Bank as some poor neighboring country when it suits it. Here Israel is ignoring its status as the occupier of Palestinian land, framing its actions as “economic aid” rather than as its actual responsibilities under international law as the occupying power.\nDespite Israel’s delusions about making the desert bloom , the economy of the West Bank was described as thriving before being occupied in 1967, generating “significant production and income that sustained a growing population of 1 million people”. Since then the Paris Protocol to the Oslo Accords, which was ostensibly signed decades ago to supposedly strengthen the Palestinian economy, has instead resulted in a captive Palestinian market dependent on Israel.  Israel has imposed restrictions on the movement of goods so that they can only move freely from Israel to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but not vice versa, privileging Israeli goods. This is evident in how the West Bank and the Gaza Strip account for only 3% of total Israeli trade.\nIsrael has also imposed restrictions on the movement of goods within the West Bank, further fragmenting the Palestinian economy into small and disconnected markets and increasing the time and cost needed to transport goods from one area of the West Bank to another. Furthermore, under the Paris Protocol, Israel collects customs duties on imports destined for the Palestinian market, which are required to go through Israel, as well as indirect taxes on Israeli products sold to the Palestinian market and income taxes from Palestinians employed in Israel or the settlements. Ultimately, most of the money Palestinians earn flows back into the Israeli economy in one way or another. This is not to even mention how damaging the illegal Israeli settlements are to the Palestinian economy. Settlements result in prices for land and water being greatly increased, resulting in very high construction costs, especially for industrial enterprises, which severely hampers Palestinian industrial development.\nThat Israel is also speaking of assisting with “water upgrades” in the context of settlements is also fascinating, seeing as the settlements hoard water from Palestinians to the extent that 599,901 settlers use six times more water than the whole Palestinian population in the West Bank, some 2.86 million Palestinians as of 2015.  Both absolutely and proportionately, Israelis use a far greater amount of the region’s total water resources, while Palestinian water use does not even meet the minimum daily standard recommended by the World Health Organization. Israel also controls a disproportionate amount of the two water systems it shares with Palestine, effectively controlling 100 percent of the Jordan River basin, more than 80 percent of underground water resources from the Western (Mountain) aquifer, and 85% of groundwater resources available in the West Bank – accounting for 25 percent of Israel’s water consumption. Israel hoards water, dries up Palestinian wells and springs, and increases the price of water through checkpoint delays. Turns out the secret to Israel’s “water miracle” is plain old fashioned theft.\nFinally, one needs only look at the multiple instances of sewage dumped on Palestinian villages by Israeli settlers, including on a school, to understand exactly what these claims of helping Palestinians in the West Bank with sanitation infrastructure are worth.\nOverall, Israeli “humanitarian aid” to the Palestinians living under Israeli colonialism can be best described by one of Malcolm X’s most profound quotes:\n“If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even pulled the knife out much less healed the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.”Lebanon\nWhile Israeli bluewashing of ‘aid’ given to Palestinians under occupation is most egregious, these propaganda efforts are not restricted to Palestine. Following the August 2020 Beirut port explosion, Israeli hasbarists descended like vultures on the tragedy, expressing hollow condolences and making a big show and dance about Tel Aviv city hall being lit up in the colors of the Lebanese flag. Most cynical was the official Israeli army twitter account, which declared that Israel had graciously offered humanitarian aid and medical assistance. We are expected to believe this is a touching change of heart on the part of Israel, when it was only in 2017 that the former Israeli defense minister threatened to “send Lebanon back to the Middle Ages”, this after having already killed between 15,000 to 20,000 people in the 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon which preceded over two decades of occupation.\nIt was only a few years after Israel withdrew from Lebanon following a UN resolution when it again invaded in 2006 and fired more than a million cluster munitions and missiles into the country. Some of those missiles had messages written on them by Israeli children, obviously incapable of fully grasping the horror these missiles would unleash. Even an Israeli army officer described 2006 as “insane and monstrous” as the army “covered entire towns in cluster bombs.” Monstrous it was, as 1,100 people were killed and some 4,400 injured, the vast majority civilians.\nIt cannot even be claimed that these civilians were “collateral damage” with the reveal of the infamous Dahiya Doctrine. The doctrine is named after the southern suburb of Beirut, known as the Dahiya, which was totally devastated through bombardment, where the IDF dropped two-thousand-pound bombs. Eizenkot laid out how total destruction and mass casualties was actually the aim, later declaring that “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. . . . We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases”, brazenly describing a strategy of collective punishment. As is typical, the Dahiya doctrine was never mentioned in statements by U.S. politicians, or in the reporting of the war by most of the mainstream American media. It is within this context that Israel publicly declares the offer of “aid”. This allows Israel to receive a pat on the back for “rising above politics”, and Lebanon’s refusal to partake in this PR stunt can then be depicted as an example of the irrational Arab stubbornness and hatred of peace which poor Israel must contend with.\nSyria\nSimilarly to Palestine and Lebanon, Israel also uses aid to Syria to bluewash its war crimes, despite Syrians being yet another people who have had to deal with Israeli bombs and occupation. Israel has been occupying Syria’s Golan Heights for decades due to its geostrategic advantages and its beautiful natural landscape now dotted with illegal settlements. The occupation of the Golan Heights resulted in the ethnic cleansing of over 100,000 Syrians, and the destruction of dozens of villages. Israel has also carried out multiple air strikes in Syria, killing a whole family in January 2021 alone and through its medical and material support for Al Nusra Front, initially Al- Qaeda’s branch in Syria, has only  worsened the devastation of the Syrian civil war.\nIsrael has of course chosen to deemphasize such stories, instead focusing its bluewashing efforts on some 177 Syrians being treated in Israeli hospitals. Israel acts like this miniscule expenditure of resources on a very small number of Syrians is impressive in the context of a war that resulted in millions of Syrian refugees, the vast majority of whom fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan. It is also in effect ignoring how the ethnic cleansing campaigns which made Israel possible resulted in hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees ending up in Syria, barred from returning to their homes purely because they are not Jewish. The purpose of this aid is not to make up for the damage and destruction caused in any meaningful way; rather, it is about garnering good press from a Western media more than happy to provide it.\nKashmir, Haiti, the Philippines, Nepal.\nIsrael’s destruction is of course most immediately felt in the Middle East, but it has a long and sordid history of providing weaponry and support to some of the most odious repressive regimes in modern history. This also includes India, which has sent special forces to train with the Israeli army and has become one of Israel’s biggest customers for weaponry. It uses this weaponry in no insignificant part to strengthen its occupation of Kashmir, which is strikingly similar to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, not only in practice but also in its justification as part of the ‘war on Islamist terror’. In 2019, the Indian consul-general in New York even suggested that “India should follow the Israeli model, and build settlements in the Kashmir Valley to secure the return of Hindus”. Yet the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website has the gall to brag of some aid to Kashmir following the 2005 earthquake, even as Israel helps increase the efficacy of Indian brutality which has left Kashmiris more vulnerable to natural disasters.\nHowever, Israel need not have a role in a country’s suffering to exploit it. The same foreign affairs page brags of aid given to Haiti following the devastating 2010 earthquake and to the Philippines following a storm in 2009. In 2015, Israel also touted aid given to Nepal following a devastating earthquake, all of which was painstakingly covered in a sophisticated multimedia propaganda effort. The incentives for this campaign are clear; as the Israeli army’s former chief medical officer has claimed, these efforts “contribute to Israeli hasbara (public relations efforts) and “help bring respect to Israel.” Israel uses this aid to present itself as a gift to the world thanks to its unique technical expertise and goodwill. Meanwhile, the same week that Israeli forces were deployed to the Philippines, Palestinian children in Gaza were wading to school in sewage because of the collapse of infrastructure due to the Israeli blockade.\nAt the time of writing, the Covid-19 pandemic rages on. When Israel hasn’t been using the pandemic as cover to ramp up its horrific policies such as home demolitions, it’s been using it as a PR moment, quickly administering more vaccines per capita than any other country- a task made more feasible by limiting vaccines to citizens rather than all those under its control. Though it should be noted here that even for those Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, there have been noted discrepancies in vaccination rates, due in part to less resources being allocated to information campaigns conducted in Arabic against the backdrop of the history of systemic discrimination against non-Jews in Israel overall.\nMake no mistake- despite the Palestinian Authority and Hamas supposedly being the official governments of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is really in charge. Israel controls the borders and currency and collects taxes on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA); even in areas like Ramallah, supposedly under the complete control of the Palestinian Authority (Area A), Israel reserves the right to enter the city at any time. This system, where West Bank settlers are vaccinated while the Palestinians mere kilometers away are ignored until it’s time to burst into their homes and arrest them in the middle of the night, is what has led Palestinians, allies and the international community to deem Israel as instituting medical or vaccine apartheid.\nOnly after this pushback did Israel start vaccinating some Palestinians in the West Bank, and even then has thus far limited their efforts to exploited workers in settlements because of their direct contact with Israelis. The millions of other Palestinians under Israeli rule have been left waiting while Israel practices vaccine diplomacy– vaccinating diplomats, and promising vaccines for diplomatic favors such as states moving their embassy to Jerusalem. As a result, Guatemala has moved its embassy to Jerusalem, while Honduras has pledged to do so, Hungary has set up a trade mission in Jerusalem, and the Czech Republic has promised to open a diplomatic office there, to name a few examples. Despite some legal challenges to Israel’s vaccine export plans, Israel is still negotiating sending out over 100,000 doses which are set to expire before the end of May, even as Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have had to go under lockdown yet again. Israel is doing its best to give nearly everyone a vaccine as long as they are not a Palestinian. Currently, the government is working to acquire an additional 36 million doses, despite millions of unused vaccines going to waste. Should this contract be signed, Israel will officially have seven times its population in vaccines.\nAt the end of the day, Covid-19 does not care about Israel’s painstakingly crafted supremacist system, from a purely public health perspective health perspective, everyone from the river to the sea must be vaccinated as soon as possible if this pandemic is ever going to end. Those who are not among the ranks pressuring Israel to make this happen, and are instead praising Israel as a ‘health model’ as it uses vaccines as bargaining chips while the Palestinians under its boot are dying, are complicit in this egregious form of bluewashing.\nIt is of course morally incoherent to work to save lives in some places while actively destroying lives in others, or to expect applause for the offer of band-aids to the same people you have mortally wounded. Yet this is what Israel is doing with its bluewashing campaigns; Israel’s goal is applause for technological expertise and aid to drown out the suffering it is causing Palestinians and others in the region. Surely their lives are equal to the lives of those in Haiti, the Philippines, Nepal or anywhere else in the world. Israel must not be allowed to exploit disasters, especially the ones it has caused, to distract from its war crimes, crimes against humanity, and colonization.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "Luckily for us, 416 Labs has already done this hard work for us, and monitored major US newspapers using Natural Language Processing techniques to see how biased they are on the question of Palestine. If you’ve been in any way following what is going on in Palestine, I’m certain that the following will be of no great surprise to you.\nThe study found that Israeli sources are near two and half times (250%) more likely to be quoted than Palestinian ones, meaning that Israelis have had a huge advantage in framing how the US views current events in Palestine. It also found that over the last 50-year period, there has been a near 85% decline in the instances of the word occupation and its affiliated unigrams in Israel centric headlines. In the Palestine corpus, there has been a 65% decline in the word occupation and its affiliated unigrams, meaning that even mentioning the word occupation is becoming rarer and rarer. It seems even acknowledging what the Palestinians are going through is deemed too far for the editors and writers of these publications.\nAnother finding is that Israeli headlines were statistically more positive than Palestinian ones for all publications, except for the Washington Post. Mentions related to Palestinian aspirations, such as “Palestinian Refugees” have declined by 93% over the 50-year period.\nThe study concluded that the:\n\n“results..strongly support previous academic literature that assesses that the U.S. mainstream media’s coverage of the conflict favours Israel in terms of both the sheer quantity of stories covered, and by providing more opportunities to the Israelis to amplify their point of view. The overall sentiment of those stories calculated from the headlines of the five major U.S. newspapers was consistently more negative for Palestinian stories. On the other hand, the Palestinian narrative is highly underrepresented, and several key topics that help to identify the conflict in all its significance, remain understated.”\n\nThis is hardly the only study on the matter, for example, Jonas Xavier Caballero investigated the impact of media bias on news coverage during Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), the 3-week Israeli military assault on the Gaza Strip that resulted in the death of nearly 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. It found that although Palestinians died at a rate 106 times more than Israelis, the New York Times engaged in a practice of media bias that resulted in coverage of only 3% of Palestinian deaths in the headlines and first paragraphs. Upon analyzing the articles’ entireties, this study found that the New York Times covered 431% of Israeli deaths and only 17% of Palestinian deaths, a ratio of 25:1. Only 17% of Palestinian children deaths were covered in the full articles. This means that every Israeli death was covered multiple times in multiple pieces, whereas less than a fifth of Palestinian deaths were covered at all.\nAnother study by Jacek Glowacki found that Palestinian deaths were usually reported as “accidents”, while Israeli deaths were almost always reported as “victims of terrorism”.\nPerhaps one of the most infamous examples of the New York Time’s distortions of Palestinian death and Israeli war crimes was the case of the Israeli bombing of a cafe in Gaza which was hosting a World Cup viewing event. Instead of reporting on it like any other event, clearly identifying what occurred, they chose to run this craven headline:“Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup”\nAs if the missile was its own entity which decided by itself to blow up innocent Palestinians, completely removing the perpetrators of this horrible crime from the picture. This style is often used in US journalism to obfuscate reality, such as when they use the ridiculous “officer involved shooting” to cover the fact that the police murdered yet another person in cold blood. The title was changed after public outcry, but you can see the old title in the tweet.\nAnother egregious example of this style of headline writing comes following the bombing of four Palestinian boys playing football on the beach in Gaza. Instead of fulfilling their journalistic duty, the New York Times chose to report this heinous crime under the following headline:“Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and Into Center of Mideast Strife.”\nNotice the passive framing. Suddenly, it becomes the boys fault for being drawn to the beach, and there is absolutely no mention of what happened to them, and who caused it. The general “Mideast Strife” becomes responsible, relieving the IDF trooper pulling the trigger from any culpability.\nThese are just a few examples of how the media implicitly influences our perception of Palestinians and Israelis, and slowly builds a narrative that frames everything coming out of Palestine. This narrative constantly dehumanizes Palestinians, and portrays any criticism of Israel, no matter how based in reality, as a bloodthirsty smear emanating from antisemitism.\nThere is absolutely no media bias against Israel in the West, there is, however, ample academic and empirical evidence that there is a strong anti-Palestinian bias. Factual reporting on Israeli violations is not a bias, it is reality. Perhaps reality has an anti-Israel bias too.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "Redwashing refers to when a state or organization appeal to socialism or the image of progressive politics in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices.\nNote: While many Palestinian activists and allies have used redwashing to refer to Israel’s cynical weaponization of indigeneity discourse, and its attempted recruitment of the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island to cover up its settler-colonial nature, we have chosen here instead to use redwashing to refer to depictions of early Zionist institutions in Palestine as socialist, as well as current claims of Zionism being compatible with leftism or even progressivism. Still, the separate phenomenon of Israel’s audacious indigeneity claims is a significant one also worth critiquing, and so an article addressing this is forthcoming. However, it will be presented under the title of “Brownwashing”, as it will include an exploration of Israel’s exploitation of Arab cultural markers even amidst its deeply interwoven anti-Arab racism and orientalism.\n\n“Those are our comrades up on that hill, looking down on us from that settlement! How sweet of them. Careful, we can’t get any closer or they’ll shoot at us like they did last time.”\n\nThis was the tongue-in-cheek statement of a Jordan Valley guide as he led a small group of students and activists around the Jericho area to demonstrate the daily havoc Israeli settlements wreak on Palestinians. His statement was in reference to how the particular settlement he was referring to was a kibbutz, one of the agricultural collectives that built exclusively Jewish settlements on Palestinian land and militantly guarded them. Kibbutzim have been the subject of much flowery romanticized language, presented as an ideal of socialist egalitarianism. As Palestinians were forced to learn, the purpose of these kibbutzim and the ideas and actions of their founders were anything but egalitarian, and ultimately helped entrench a racist and capitalist system of domination which continues to exploit and dispossess Palestinians to this very day. Palestinians, like the Jordan Valley guide, have been forced to live with the consequences of Zionism’s settler-colonial manifestation, even and often especially by Zionists who touted socialist ideals of equality and anti-imperialism; after all, it was the Labor Zionists who engineered and put into action the catastrophic ethnic cleansing campaigns of the Nakba .\nUnfortunately, the portrayal of kibbutzim and Israel’s Labor founding fathers as socialists or leftists is a stubborn one which still pops up now and again despite all the evidence to the contrary. More commonly, those Zionists who consider themselves leftist or at least progressive (deemed by Palestinians as  “Progressive Except for Palestine”, or PEPs) have failed to reckon with how their professed ideology and the state they support lies in complete contradiction to any liberatory ideals. The purpose of this article then is to critique the ways in which redwashing, or the painting of the State of Israel and Zionism in practice, past or present, as leftist or progressive obscures the disastrous effects of Zionism on the indigenous Palestinian population. Zionist settler-colonialism, as with all forms of settler-colonialism, is and always will be incompatible with socialism. Thus, the Israeli state and Israeli society’s increased descent into right-wing fanaticism was largely inevitable, rather than an aberration or a betrayal of any supposed “earlier values” as some Zionists still wish to pretend.\n\n‘Socialist’ Zionists initially attempted to distance themselves from Theodor Herzl’s Zionist Congress, which opposed mixing Jewish nationalism and socialism, as well as from Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist movement, which was openly sympathetic to fascism, to the point where a Revisionist newspaper once ran a column which stated that Hitler’s movement “has both a shell and a kernel; the antisemitic shell is to be discarded, but not the anti-Marxist kernel”. The Socialist Zionist camp ranged from orthodox Marxists like Moses Hess and Ber Borochov to populist socialists like David Ben-Gurion (a Labor Zionist who would go on to become Israel’s first Prime Minister).\n‘Socialist’ Zionism was once the most significant iteration of Zionism, building off of the historical popularity of socialism among oppressed Jewish Europeans. However, vast numbers of them were deeply opposed to Zionism. In 1905, the anti-Zionist Bund, the revolutionary organization of Jewish workers, condemned Zionism both for its “solution” to antisemitism and for its colonization of Arabs and actively worked to drive out Zionists from their unions. In 1910, socialist Karl Kautsky wrote:\n\n“It is labor that gives people a right to the land in which it lives, thus Judaism can advance no claim on Palestine. On the basis of the right of labor and of democratic self determination, today Palestine does not belong to the Jews of Vienna, London, or New York, who claim it for Judaism, but to the Arabs of the same country, the great majority of the population.”\n\nNevertheless, ‘Socialist’ Zionists trudged on with attempting to combine liberatory socialism with reactionary ethnonationalism only to ultimately choose the latter. Hess, who was once an associate of Marx and Engels, would go on to write that if the choice must be made between Jewish Emancipation and Jewish Nationalism, then the former must be done away with, leading Marx and Engels to denounce him as “a proponent of bourgeois society.” Borochov founded the Workers of Zion (Po’ale Zion), which actually played a reactionary role in the Russian labor movement, arguing against any and all united action with non-Jewish workers, a mentality which will be explored in further detail regarding the engineered stratification of Jewish and Palestinian labor in Palestine. Ben-Gurion, who founded MAPAI (Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel, today’s Labor Party), pushed ideas of exclusive Jewish labor on lands owned by the Jewish Nationalist Fund, declaring in 1922 that “The only big concern which dominates our thinking and activity is the conquest of the land and building it through mass immigration (aliya). All the rest is only phraseology.”\nThe Labor Zionist movement did not raise any principled argument against private property, nor did it challenge the capitalist system. Its demand from the emerging bourgeoisie was for private capital to fulfill its role in developing the land and absorbing immigrants, and for Labor Zionism’s total monopoly over the local economy, its modes of production, and market share to expand the Zionist nationalist project. Overall, Ben-Gurion and his Labor Zionist ilk frequently and explicitly argued for the elevation of ethnic and nationalist interests over class solidarity, reinforcing social hierarchies, ethnic hegemony, and religious oppression.\nAs Ghassan Kanafani, one of the foremost Palestinian Marxists, wrote on the 1936 Palestine Revolt, the actually progressive labour movement between Jews and Arabs “..suffered crushing blows…the Zionist movement, which was rapidly becoming fascist in character and resorting to armed terrorism sought to isolate and destroy the Communist Party, most of whose leaders were Jews.” Indeed, the Labor Zionists would go on to unite with the Revisionists in 1945 to turn on their British benefactors and wage war on Palestinians.\nAnd so, Zionists of multiple tendencies worked to destroy the Palestinian economy, drive Palestinians out of the labor market, and attempted to erase the very memory they’d ever been there, much of which they were able to do with the support of the British. This meant carrying out a war on a number of fronts, reflected in the three slogans of the pioneer Zionists: “conquest of land,” “conquest of labor,” and “produce of the land”.\n\n“Conquest of the land” and “produce of the land” was strived for through the founding of kibbutzim. Historically, this facet of Zionist colonialism was perceived as having embodied the ostensibly socialist ideology of the Zionist labor institutions, with lands placed under the ownership of the nation for Jews to settle and cultivate. But this model was not derived from any affinity to socialist values; much of the literature on kibbutzim which uncritically depicts them as socialist projects ignores that there is no contradiction between state ownership of land and agricultural capitalism, and that that which requires analysis is the mode through which kibbutzim exploited the land and for what purpose.\nIn fact, the purpose of kibbutzim was set, not by their members, but by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), whose capital advancements in the form of land and other means of production came with economic and political stipulations, which included boycotting Palestinian workers. The JNF even went so far as to impose a penalty on any Jewish owner who would hire a Palestinian, all with the blessings of the British.  Kibbutzim’s value was not their “socialist traits” but the geo-political and military services which they provided to the Zionist colonial project. Kibbutzim went on to drive Palestinians off their lands and harvest their crops, with this appropriation of Palestinian property, a form of primitive accumulation occurred that allowed Zionist economic development and paved the way for the events of 1948.\nDecades on, non-Jews are still largely not allowed to be members of kibbutzim, unless to be exploited in menial jobs such as garbage disposal; a revealing example of this is when kibbutzim members found that cotton picking is cheaper when done by underpaid Palestinian women rather than by a modern combine. The women who do this work were called the “Fatima Combine” so much so that this expression has become part of colloquial Hebrew. A Druze who became a member of the kibbutz Sde-Boker, the kibbutz where Ben-Gurion ended his life, was able to do so only after joining the Israeli army and per the following conditions: Not to attempt to marry a Jewish girl before converting to Judaism, to observe the Jewish holidays, not to be conspicuous in observing Druze ceremonies, and several others of a similar nature. This Druze member accepted these humiliating conditions.\nRegarding kibbutzim’s militant nature, the result of the conditions through which kibbutzim were created is shown in the numbers of kibbutzim members who have taken part in Israeli military offenses. In 1982, when Beirut, the Palestinian refugee camps, and so many other localities in Lebanon were being mercilessly destroyed, kibbutzniks were 25 percent of the air force pilots and 30 percent of the army officer corps. What made the kibbutz so valuable was that it was “first and foremost, a militaristic institution, a place where the young are being educated to be unthinking soldiers and tough army officers. Everything else is subordinated to.”  That multiple Western socialists visited kibbutzim over the years and took part in redwashing their exclusionary, militaristic nature and regarded kibbutzim as progressive while dismissing Palestinian villages as primitive is more indicative of the orientalism of these Western socialists than anything regarding the kibbutzim themselves. Predictably, these Western socialists who tout kibbutzim as a progressive model took for granted the old Zionist line that there was no Palestinian working-class movement. As David Horowitz, Jewish Agency representative and first Governor of the Bank of Israel, claimed when he first settled in Palestine:\n\n“The fabric of social life in Palestine is not that of a modern industrial nation but rather that of an Oriental, backward, feudal society. These social conditions rob the fellah (Palestinian farmer) of the benefits that should have accrued to him through Jewish colonization.”\n\nThis talking point of course belied the complex nature of Palestinian collective landholding practices, oversimplifying the nature of land deeds as a means of arguing that Palestinians did not deserve the land in the first place, only Jews did.\n\n“Conquest of labor” was pursued by the Histadrut which drove forward the Zionist colonial project. The Histadrut is the overarching organization of Zionist workers’ trade unions, beginning by controlling key areas including economic production and marketing, defense, and control of the labor force, as well as creating jobs outside the free market so as to avoid competition with abundant and cheap Palestinian labor. The Histadrut thus introduced the irregular phenomenon of a “trade union” that established its own industrial, financial, construction, transport, and service enterprises. As Kanafani reported:\n\n“The Histadrut summed up its policy by declaring that ‘to allow Arabs to penetrate the Jewish labor market meant that the influx of Jewish capital would be employed to service Arab development, which is contrary to Zionist objectives’.”\n\nFurthermore, as Palestinian trade unionist George Mansour wrote of his time organizing with the Arab Workers Society leading up to the 1936 General Strike, the Histadrut’s fundamental aim was to introduce as many Jews as possible into every sector and to oust Palestinians as they did it. The view of Histadrut members was that:\n\n“No matter how many Arab workers are unemployed, they have no right to take any job which a possible immigrant might occupy. No Arab has the right to work in Jewish undertakings. If Arabs can be displaced in other work too, say, in Haifa or Jaffa ports, that is good. If a port can be established in Tel Aviv and Jaffa ports are ruined, that is good. If some Jews still employ Arab labour in their orange orchards, either because Arab labour is cheaper and better for this purpose, then the fact can be used as evidence of the employment provided by Zionism for Arabs. But if Arab labour can be pushed out by ‘picketing’ and ‘pressure’, that is much better. The Histadrut never employed a single Arab if it could help it; when it was forced to do so, it paid them half the wages that it paid to its own men; and whenever it could oust Arab from any sphere of work, it did so.”\n\nNahla Abdo in her brilliant article “Racism, Zionism, and the Palestinian Working Class” demonstrated how when political/diplomatic means to encourage Jewish employment over Palestinian employment failed, force was often used. Terror squads, referred to by the Histadrut as “Labor Guards” were formed in almost all settlements and construction sites which employed Palestinian workers. Composed of unemployed or new settlers looking for work, these “Labor Guards” were often engaged in disrupting the labor process and attacking both Palestinian workers and Jewish employers, such as the incident in the Palestinian village of Milabbis, known now as Kfar-Saba. In this incident, 40 of these armed guards were sent to force the Jewish owner-farmer of the settlement to dispense with the Palestinian laborers. When the farmer refused, he and other farmers-employers and the Palestinian workers were assaulted.\nDavid Hacohen, a Labor Party leader, in his own words confirms Kanafani, Mansour, and Abdo’s findings as he recalled the ideological difficulties of reconciling the dispossession of Palestinian workers with socialism, saying:\n\n“I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there…. To pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes, to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash the Arab eggs they had bought”.\n\nThis dogmatic pursual of Jewish labor made its mark, with the official census in 1937 indicating that the average Jewish worker received 145% more in wages than their Palestinian counterpart: These disparities reached ludicrous amounts, with Jewish workers being paid as high as 433% more in textile factories employing Jewish and Arab women, and 233% in tobacco factories. By July 1937, the real wages of the average Palestinian worker decreased 10% while those of a Jewish worker rose 10%. Overall, the experiences described affirms Gershon Shafir’s thesis that the very nature of Zionists’ goals -to create a national home for Jews in Palestine with a European standard of living- necessitated their developing a “militarist-nationalist approach to the Palestinians during their struggle to displace them and conquer their jobs.”\nThus, Zionism, in collaboration with the British, successfully undermined the development of a progressive Jewish labor movement and of Jewish-Arab Proletarian brotherhood, and the reactionary Histadrut completely dominated the Jewish labor movement. The influence of Palestinian progressive forces within Palestinian labor federations in Haifa and Jaffa diminished, leaving the ground open for their control by reactionary leaderships that monopolized political action.\n\nBy April 1951, not even three years after the founding of the State of Israel, Ben-Gurion had already declared that he viewed Israel to be neither a capitalist state nor a socialist one, but a Jewish one. Additionally, while numerous analyses have claimed that Israel was a “socialist-type” economy prior to the mid-1980s, the fact that Israel’s economy was state-controlled and directed for decades by the Labor Zionist movement was not a reflection of socialist ideology but an outgrowth of the context in which it developed: during the colonization period, the absence of a strong indigenous Jewish capitalist class led the state (or proto-state) to control investment, but this control was not antagonistic to private capital. On the contrary, from 1948 on, the state pursued policies aimed at nurturing a capitalist class by encouraging a few key families to undertake joint projects and investment with state and quasi-state enterprises. The turning point in this state-led class formation was the 1985 Economic Stabilization Plan (ESP), which led to the emergence of private capital as a class independent from the state.\nThe Israeli state also came to deeply rely on race and class antagonisms: with the expulsion of most of the indigenous Palestinian population in 1948, resulting in the absence of the readily exploitable working class traditionally found in colonial situations, the state embarked on a massive immigration program aimed at bringing Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (Mizrahi Jews) to settle in the new state. The imported Mizrahi Jews were able to constitute a working class on which the economic foundations of the country could be built. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 also increased the size of Israel’s domestic market and provided a new cheap and highly exploitable source of labor in the Palestinian population. By 1985, approximately one third of the West Bank and Gaza Strip labor force worked in Israel.\nThis proletarianization of the Palestinians allayed protests by Mizrahi Jews who were a rung up the ladder in comparison and often wished to cling to this relative privilege rather than fight back against the discrimination they faced from Ashkenazi Jews. Frequently, Mizrahi immigrants to Israel resented and continue to resent being identified with Arabs, Africans, and natives of any kind, and often their response has been to side with the most chauvinist, racist, and discriminatory elements of Israeli society. As members of the Israeli Communist Party Moche Machover and Akiva Orr wrote decades ago, there has not been:\n\n“..a single example of Israeli workers being mobilized on material or trade-union issues to challenge the Israeli regime itself; it is impossible to mobilize even a minority of the proletariat in this way. On the contrary, Israeli workers nearly always put their national loyalties before their class loyalties. Although this may change in the future, this does not remove the need for us to analyze why it has been so”.\n\nIt has been so because of the racist divides Zionism entrenched between non-Jewish and Jewish Arabs and between Palestinians and Jews overall. This divide must be borne in mind by those whose revolutionary strategy for Israeli society is based upon a future alliance of Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews, whether on the basis of their common exploited condition or on the basis of their cultural affinity, as the Israeli Black Panther party once did in regards to anti-Zionism and likening Israeli practices against Palestinians to U.S imperialism and the Palestinian struggle to the Black struggle in the U.S.\nAs Marx famously said, “a people oppressing another cannot itself be free”. He did not mean this merely as a moral judgment; he also meant that in a society whose rulers oppress another people, the exploited class which does not actively oppose this oppression inevitably becomes an accomplice in it, as Israeli Jews who do not oppose Zionism are complicit in the oppression of Palestinians.\n\nIn 1969, Jabra Nicola, a Palestinian communist, and Machover wrote:\n\n“The Palestinian people are waging a battle where they confront Zionism, which is supported by imperialism; from the rear they are menaced by the Arab regimes and by Arab reaction, which are also supported by imperialism. As long as imperialism has a real stake in the Middle East, it is unlikely to withdraw its support for Zionism, its natural ally, and to permit its overthrow; it will defend it to the last drop of Arab oil.”\n\nWe would go on to add that the usefulness of Israel on behalf of imperialism includes but goes far beyond “Arab oil”. Zionism from the onset had the support it did from the British in large part because most Zionist leaders presented their cause as a bulwark against the backwards Orientalist hordes. Even the left-leaning Zionists framed their activities in Palestine in this way, all of which obviously did not provide fertile ground for a socialist revolution.\nMore recently, In the case of the U.S.’s exorbitant spending on Israel which has only increased over time, its return on its investment is not economic profit. As was phrased decades ago, but remains true well into the 21st century:\n\n“Israel has been given a role not unlike that of a watchdog. One need not fear that it will exercise an aggressive policy towards the Arab states if this will contradict the interests of the USA and Britain. But should the West prefer for one reason or another to close its eyes one can rely on Israel to punish severely those of the neighboring states whose lack of manners towards the West has exceeded the proper limits.”\n\nIn fact, the entire Israeli economy is founded on the special political and military role which Zionism, and the settlers’ society, fulfill in the Middle East as a whole. Keeping this role in mind elucidates the reasons for why a massive part of the capital inflow into Israel is not intended for economic gain and is not subject to considerations of profitability. For example, donations raised by Zionists in the United States for transferring to another country, are regarded by the U.S Treasury as “charity donations” qualifying for income tax exemptions. These donations depend on the good will of the United States Treasury and it is only reasonable to assume that this good will would not continue were Israel to conduct a principled anti-imperialist policy. This means that although class conflicts do exist in Israeli society, they are constrained by the fact that the society as a whole is subsidized from the outside. This privileged status is related to Israel’s role in the region, and as long as this role continues there is little prospect of the internal social conflicts acquiring a revolutionary character.\n\nBernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 run for U.S. president sparked a new debate over the socialist nature of kibbutzim, with mainstream media collectively clutching pearls at his past on a commune. As is typical, Palestinians and especially Palestinian leftists were rendered invisible and certainly not asked or listened to on what kibbutzim really are. The erasure of Palestinian working class resistance to Zionism is perhaps even more true now than it was in the 20th century when the Zionist project was well underway, as now, socialism and leftism in general are more taboo than ever; few Zionists would actively identify as leftists, and young Israelis are growing more right-wing by the day. Instead, there is focus on vaguely depicting Zionism as “progressive”, eliding or excusing its racist history which still continues to undermine solidarity between Palestinians and Jews.\n\nSimply put, Zionist institutions and the state of Israel were never and cannot be socialist when imperialist-backed ethnonationalism was repeatedly chosen over the liberatory alternative Jewish and Palestinian communists tried to pose along the way. The current Likud and Kahanist, “death-to-Arabs”, capitalist hellscape that we’re stuck with today is thus not surprising, if not inevitable from the start. Still, a free liberatory Palestine for all based on class solidarity rather than ethnicity or religion is possible, but only through the mass rejection of Zionism and through collective movements to change the balance of power to make Israel’s political-military role in the region obsolete. Those still drawn in by the fantasy of Zionist socialism in Palestine would do well to abandon their Zionism and organize alongside Palestinians for a socialist reality.\n\nAbdo, Nahla. “Racism, Zionism and the Palestinian Working Class, 1920–1947.” Studies in Political Economy 37.1, 1992: 59-92. [Link]\nAbdo, Nahla. “Colonial Capitalism and Agrarian Social Structure: Palestine: A Case Study.” Economic and Political Weekly, 1991: PE73-PE84. [Link]\nMansour, George. “The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate (1937).” settler colonial studies 2.1, 2012: 190-205. [Link]\nHonig-Parnass, Tikva. The False Prophets of Peace: Liberal Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine. Haymarket Books, 2011.\nBober, Arie. The other Israel: The radical case against Zionism. Doubleday, 1972. [Link]\nKanafani, Ghassan. The 1936-39 revolt in Palestine. Committee for Democratic Palestine, 1972. [Link]\nAssi, Seraj. Why Kibbutzism Isn’t Socialism. Jacobin Magazine. August 10, 2016. [Link]\nShahak, Israel. “Israeli Society and the Kibbutzim.” Arab Studies Quarterly, 1985: 15-23.\nLockman, Zachary. Comrades and enemies: Arab and Jewish workers in Palestine, 1906-1948. Univ of California Press, 1996.\nLockman, Zachary. “The left in Israel: Zionism vs. socialism.” MERIP Reports 49 (1976): 3-18.\nHanieh, Adam. “From state-led growth to globalization: The evolution of Israeli capitalism.” Journal of Palestine Studies 32.4, 2003: 5-21.\nScottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, The Israeli Histadrut: an Apartheid institution. 2011. [Link]"
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+	"text": "Attempts to conflate the state of Israel, as well as Zionism, with Judaism has a long and sordid history. Consequently, even the mildest criticisms of Israeli policy can be twisted by bad-faith actors into having racist and even genocidal intent.\nThere is no doubt that antisemitism has been an incredibly destructive force throughout history, and that the Jewish people have been persecuted and put through pogrom after pogrom, as well as endured attempts at systematic annihilation. This is what makes it more tragic when we see that sometimes this very real history of persecution can be cynically weaponized to legitimize or deny the reality which Palestinians suffer under.\nThe recent rise to prominence of a distorted and shallow understanding of identity politics has been a boon to this kind of conflation. Suddenly we see Zionism being detached from its material history and presented as an integral part of Jewish identity. This is especially popular in the West, where young Zionists who are raised on propaganda and myths of the Zionist project come to treat it as inseparable from themselves. Here, we see the cynical twisting of social justice language to declare that only Zionists may define what Zionism is -As if it was a subjective phenomenon, with no material reality, founders, history, effects or victims- and that it was an attack on the Jewish people to oppose it or describe it as colonial.Questioning the legitimacy of criticism of Israel has a long history shrouded in many ambiguities. For his part, Natan Sharansky came up with a test to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism. He dubbed this approach the “3D test“. According to this test, the criticisms are evaluated based on the following criteria:\n1) Demonization. Which he described as when “Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion”.\n\nI imagine this point is left vague on purpose. How do we quantify “sensible”? Who is qualified to mete out judgment on what constitutes “sensibility”? For example, most Jewish Israelis don’t even view the West Bank as militarily occupied. Surely what’s sensible to them would go against the norms of international law and the very obvious and very well documented facts on the ground. Note that here the issue becomes not that Israel has not committed these alleged actions, but rather that the response is not to his liking.\n2) Double standards. Which he described as Israel being “singled out” or that criticism is “applied selectively”.\n\nThe idea that Israel is being singled out and treated differently is ubiquitous. However, it should be noted that although Israel is one of the world’s leading countries when it comes to violating the Geneva conventions and ignoring UNSC resolutions, it is still afforded a special place among the nations and considered a democratic civilized first world country and has access to special privileges, trade offers and partnerships not available to any other serial violator of human rights. If Israel is being singled out for anything, it is for its impunity to any real consequences for its violations. Nonetheless, once again, we see that the focus is not on denying the charges against Israel, but rather with quantifying how we should respond to them.\n3) Delegitimization. Which he described as questioning “Israel’s fundamental right to exist”.\n\nTo begin with, no state has a “fundamental right to exist”, not Israel nor any other in the world. . But beyond that, what does this mean in practice?\nIt means that the Palestinians, whose entire society and way of life was destroyed, whose villages were dynamited, whose people were ethnically cleansed, must embrace the state that now exists only due to their suffering.\nCould you imagine asking any indigenous nation on Turtle Island whether the United States or Canada have a right to exist? Who would demand that these nations rubber-stamp their own dispossession with approval, and lend it legitimacy?\nIf we naturalize the idea that nation states are inherently legitimate, and champion the false notion that they have a right to exist anchored in international law, then this restricts our ability to critique any country’s foundations. Suddenly, acknowledging the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the attempted ethnocide of the Palestinians people in any meaningful way becomes an infringement upon Israel’s fabled right to exist. I am not speaking of mere empty acknowledgment that functions to signal a superficial settler regret while continuing to profit off the dispossession of the natives, but an acknowledgment that aims to be the first step in righting historical wrongs.\nThe more you research what constitutes “legitimate” criticism of Israel, the more obvious it becomes that it is a cynical attempt to control the discussion. It really is quite convenient for advocates of Israel, as it diverts attention away from the charges at hand to quibbles about the proper way to criticize Israel. Once again, the speech of colonized peoples is policed and relegated to secondary importance after the comfort of the colonist."
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+	"text": "In general, the quest for two-states found its genesis in the diplomatic process in the 1970s which called for establishing a sovereign Palestinian state next to Israel. The first bilateral breakthrough in this process materialized in the -at the time- secret Oslo Accords where Palestinians, represented by the PLO, and Israelis agreed upon a declaration of principles that would lead to creating the Palestinian Authority. The Authority would act as an interim Palestinian government that would supposedly pave the way for a final settlement. These accords were mostly a declaration of principles which did not contain any parameters for how such a state would even look. As a matter of fact, the word “state” with regards to Palestinians was never mentioned once. It was two years later, in what is referred to as Oslo II, taking place in the Egyptian city of Taba, that negotiations earnestly began. In these negotiations more concrete parameters were discussed, as well as the logistics and method for instating the Palestinian Authority on the ground.\nThe Palestinian Authority was supposed to last no longer than 5 years, after which a sovereign Palestinian state would be established as a culmination of the negotiation process. Clearly, this did not materialize and the negotiation process stalled. In 2000, US. President Bill Clinton called for a summit at Camp David to try and nudge negotiations forward and put an end to the “conflict” once and for all.\nThe summit lasted for approximately two weeks, and needless to say, it failed in its objectives. Following this failure, there was a media frenzy blaming Arafat and the Palestinians for the negotiations breaking down.\nThe claim was that Barak offered the Palestinians everything they could ever want for peace, and that Arafat simply threw that all away. Articles started emerging saying that this was the perfect test for Arafat’s intentions and that he failed miserably, and asserted that the Palestinians refused to make any concessions or compromise on anything.\nThus, it became part of the “canon” that the Palestinians had -once again- rejected a peace offer by Israel, proving that Israelis really have no partner for peace, and that nothing could appease Palestinians.Let’s step away from the sensationalism and media spins of Camp David and take a bit of a deeper look into what Barak offered, and why it was rejected.\nTo begin with, the often-repeated line that Barak offered the Palestinians the Gaza Strip and 96% of the West Bank for a state is completely untrue. Barak offered the Palestinians 96% of Israel’s definition of the West Bank, meaning they did not include any of the areas already under Israeli control, such as settlements, the Dead Sea, and large parts of the Jordan Valley. This meant that Barak effectively annexed 10% of the West Bank to Israel, with an additional 8-12% remaining under “temporary” Israeli control for a period of time.\nIn return for this annexation, Palestinians would be offered 1% of desert land near the Gaza Strip. Thus, Palestinians would need to give up 10% of the most fertile land in the West Bank, in exchange for 1% of desert land. Not to mention that if the past record is any indicator, the additional 8-12% under “temporary” Israeli control would remain so forever.\nIn addition to all of this, Israel demanded permanent control of Palestinian airspace, three permanent military installations manned by Israeli troops in the West Bank, Israeli presence at Palestinian border crossings, and special “security arrangements” along the borders with Jordan which effectively annexed additional land.\nThe cherry on top of all of these stipulations, is that Israel would be allowed to invade at any point in cases of “emergency”. As you can imagine, what constituted an emergency was left incredibly vague and up to interpretation. The Palestinian state would be demilitarized, and the Palestinian government would not be able to enter into alliances without Israeli permission. None of these are ingredients for the creation of an actual sovereign state.\nBut the Israeli conditions did not end here. In the case of East Jerusalem, which was supposed to be the capital of the Palestinian state, Israel refused any form of Palestinian sovereignty over the majority of the city, including many Palestinian neighborhoods. It should be noted that the PA agreed to Israeli sovereignty over Jewish neighborhoods and the Buraq wall, and even proposed Israel annex settlements in East Jerusalem in return for land swaps elsewhere. This was met with Israeli intransigence, and an insistence that the Noble Sanctuary remain under Israeli sovereignty, and that a part of it should be reserved for Jewish worshippers.\nFurthermore, when it came to the right of return, Israel refused to admit any responsibility for the millions of refugees it created . The only thing it offered was a very limited return of a very limited number of refugees over a very long period of time.\nUltimately, this “generous offer” amounted to turning the West Bank into non-contiguous cantons, crisscrossed by a network of settlements, roads and Israeli areas. Even the supposed “capital” of the Palestinian state would mostly be under Israeli control, with stipulations and conditions that stripped any real sovereignty from any area of the supposed Palestinian “state”. Not even the sky above Palestinian heads would be under their control, nor the water under their feet, as Israel still demanded access to water resources under the West Bank.\nTo add insult to injury, Israel was adamant that Arafat declare “the conflict over” with the signing of these accords, meaning that Palestinians could never ask for anything more after this.\nAs I’m sure you’ll agree, none of this was conducive for the establishment of a real, sovereign and viable Palestinian state. How could anyone accept a state where they don’t even have control over their own capital?\nEven Shlomo Ben Ami, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, and one of the main negotiators at Camp David, later candidly admitted later that:\n\n“Camp David was not the missed opportunity for the Palestinians, and if I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well.”\n\nAs it stands, Palestinian aspirations cannot be allowed to exceed the ceiling of Israeli table scraps. What is acceptable to Palestinians never enters the discussion, which must always be tailored to what Israel is willing to concede. This becomes even more infuriating once you realize that Israel is not really conceding anything; ending its occupation and stopping its settlement activities is merely following international law. It is not a sacrifice -it should be the default position.\nThis is how all of the “generous” Israeli peace offers play out. The majority of people who hear about this on the news have no clue what the parameters of the offer are. All they hear is that the Palestinians have rejected yet another “peace” initiative by Israel . This is why Israel focuses on the number of offers, because it distracts from their content, similar to the above example regarding army numbers in 1948.\nAll of this feels completely irrelevant today. We’re talking about some failed negotiation summit from a couple of decades ago. Hell, many of its participants have actually passed away since. We bring attention to Camp David not specifically because we believe Camp David needs revisiting, but for it to serve as an archetypal example of how Israel has always approached negotiations with the Palestinians, and how any justified rejection of absurd stipulations leads to decades of accusations and smears.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "Nearly 80 years before the Holocaust, a group which came to be known as the “Bilu pioneers” came to settle in Palestine. It was comprised of primarily Russian Jewish settlers who viewed their mission in Palestine as a pioneering one towards “the physical upbuilding of the land as contributing toward both a revitalization of the Jewish nation and the reemergence of Jewish masculinity and virility”. While this group predated Zionism as a political movement as we understand it today, it would not be unreasonable to call it proto-Zionist.\nUnsurprisingly, and like all colonialist movements at the time, they had the same condescending and racist attitude towards the Palestinians living there. In a rare moment of reflection, one of the group leaders, Chaim Chissin, wrote the following entry in his diary, after failing to grow any crops:\n\n“Whenever the Arabs told us that it was already too late to sow barley, or that the land was unsuited for it, we never hesitated to tell the ‘barbarians,’ with considerable self assurance, ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter. We’ll plow deep, we’ll turn the soil inside out, we’ll harrow it clean, and then you’ll see what a crop we’ll have!’ We provided ourselves with big plows, sunk them deep into the soil, and cruelly whipped our horses which were cruelly exhausted. Our self-confidence had no limits. We looked down on the Arabs, assuming that it was not they who should teach us, but we who would show these barbarians’ what a European could accomplish on this neglected land with the use of perfect tools and rational methods of cultivation. The only trouble was that we ourselves knew about European methods of cultivation only from hearsay, and our agriculturalist, too, knew very little [about conditions in Palestine].”\n\nThe Bilu pioneers would be followed by other groups, such as the Hibbat Zion. Some would fail and leave, others would remain. However, the shift in the quality and organization of Zionist colonialism would begin in 1897. Convened in the Swiss city of Basel, the first Zionist congress included over 200 delegates from all over Europe. The program of the congress called for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, and to begin coordinating the settlement of Zionists there. The Zionist congress distinguished itself from previous attempts at settling Palestine by being the first to organize and marshal colonization efforts in a centralized and effective manner.\nAll of these efforts to colonize Palestine began nearly a century before the Holocaust, and was already picking up steam after the first world war. By the end of the 1800s, Theodor Herzl -the founder of political Zionism- was sending out letters to imperialist powers all over the globe in an attempt to elicit their aid in colonizing Palestine. Perhaps the most infamous is his letter to Cecil Rhodes, arguing that Britain recognized the importance of “colonial expansion”:\n“You are being invited to help make history,” he wrote, “It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen, but Jews. How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.”\nFollowing from the above, the colonization and ethnic cleansing of Palestine were a precondition for the success of the Zionist movement, and these were being planned long before even the first world war. This was encapsulated by a conversation overheard and documented by Moshe Smilansky in 1891:\n\n“We should go east, into Transjordan. That would be a test for our movement.”\n“Nonsense… isn’t there enough land in Judea and Galilee?”\n“The land in Judea and Galilee is occupied by the Arabs.”\n“Well, we’ll take it from them.”\n“How?” (Silence.)\n“A revolutionary doesn’t ask naive questions.”\n“Well then, ‘revolutionary,’ tell us how.”\n“It is very simple, we’ll harass them until they get out… Let them go to Transjordan.”\n“And are we going to abandon all of Transjordan?” asks an anxious voice.\n“As soon as we have a big settlement here we’ll seize the land, we’ll become strong, and then we’ll take care of the Left Bank [of the Jordan River], we’ll expel them from there, too. Let them go back to the Arab countries.”\nThe second problem with this misconception is that it assumes that world powers operate based on a system of morals, or that they can be compelled to “do what is right”. A cursory glance at history would show how misguided an idea this is. While the French waxed poetic about defeating fascism in the wake of the second world war, they were committing genocide against the people of Algeria. French intellectuals would write about how the various peoples of the French colonies were better off living under their domination. Since then the “Allies” would prop up tyrannical and bloody regimes the world over to protect their interests. As de Gaulle once famously said, France has no friends, only interests.\nThis is the context of the establishment of Israel; it was supported by the hegemonic imperialist powers of the time, not because they suddenly grew a conscience, but because it was deemed strategic for their interests. A glimpse at the political landscape today reveals that remarkably little has changed with this arrangement. While Western countries pay lip service to the façade of a “rules based international order”, their actions betray their intentions. Human rights are only as useful as their ability to be instrumentalized to their benefit.\nListening to western diplomatic statements justifying sanctions on Russia, for example, you’d be forgiven for thinking international law was a holy set of commandments, faithfully adhered to as a matter of principle. However, you’ll soon snap out of it when you hear the same diplomats prevaricate and collectively shrug when asked to comment on Israeli annexation of territory, or the brutal war crimes in Yemen. Germany, which loves to act contrite and endlessly prattles on about how many lessons it learned from its genocidal past, couldn’t even pretend to care that it is supplying nuclear-capable submarines to an Apartheid state, by the admission of the largest human rights organizations in the world.\nIt is not a coincidence that Israel has always enjoyed the backing of the colonial powers of the world, especially the settler colonies which share similar origin stories, and it is not a coincidence that Israel is basically a client state of the world’s imperialist hegemon. Israel was useful to these powers at the time of its establishment, and it continues to function as an outpost for imperialism in the region today.\nThe Holocaust was undoubtedly one of the greatest tragedies of modern history, where millions of innocents were murdered in an unspeakably cruel and industrialized manner. Also true is that this was not the reason for the creation of Israel, which had its colonial seeds planted nearly a century prior. It was not remorse that motivated the colonial powers to support Israel, powers which were actively committing genocide against multiple colonized populations. Framing the creation of Israel as repentance for the Holocaust is not only historically inaccurate, but deliberately paints the legitimate rejection of its creation at the expense of the Palestinians as complicity with Nazi genocide. It transfers Europe’s guilt onto Palestinians, where they become the embodiment of everything the grandchildren of fascists claim to despise in their grand quest for (empty, symbolic) redemption. A redemption with the theatrics and loud proclamations of regret and change, but none of the substance. At the end of the day, nothing can justify the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, who share no blame for the barbarity of Europe’s pogroms and genocides.\nPalestine has always been home to countless refugee populations; Jewish people fleeing persecution and finding a safe home in Palestine was never the issue. The issue is that these ideals of coexistence were never reciprocated by the Zionist movement, who showed disdain towards Palestinians from the very beginning and sought to take over the land. It sanctioned its own settlers working with Palestinians, even calling Arab labor an “illness” and forming a segregated trade union that banned non-Jewish members.\nIn 1928, the Palestinian leadership even voted to allow Zionist settlers equal representation in the future bodies of the state, despite them being a minority who had barely just arrived. The Zionist leadership rejected this, of course. Even after this, in 1947 the Palestinians suggested replacing the Mandate with the formation of a unitary state for all those living between the river and the sea, to no avail. These gestures were brushed aside, as they did not benefit the Zionist leadership who never intended to come to Palestine to live as equals.\nFor decades Palestinians have been massacred, their homes stolen and destroyed, ethnically cleansed into refugee camps and denied their right of return. The notion that these colonial powers were ever concerned about Jewish safety as they fomented the conditions that made pogroms possible and denied Jewish refugees safety within their own borders is absurd. So too is the idea that Jewish people from all over the world must all live in a singular nation-state in the Middle East where they are a demographic majority to be safe, that the eradication of anti-Semitism around the world is a lost cause, and that whatever violence is wreaked upon Palestinians for the maintenance of this regressive demographics-obsessed state is justifiable.\nIt would instead behoove us all to question what it really means to make sure that never again can millions be so dehumanized as to make their dispossession and their violent deaths be widely seen as justified. The way that the Israeli government and Israeli society at large legitimize the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the name of this state, which includes but is not limited to calling Palestinians death-loving terrorists incapable of loving their children, brazenly discussing rape as a form of collective punishment, and pontificating the logistics of the mass-transfer of Palestinians to other countries, is in fact laying the groundwork that makes mass extermination feasible.\nWestern countries who were complicit in the Holocaust and in other genocides against colonized peoples did not and cannot wash their hands of these crimes by backing a racist settler-colonial project. To believe so is to deny the actual historical conditions that made creating the state of Israel possible, and to keep us all further away from a world free of racist colonial oppression and its bloody consequences.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "As a result of social media platforms such as Facebook censoring Palestinian content, including the Palestinian flag, images of watermelon slices have become ubiquitous in pro-Palestine circles. This harkens back to Israel banning anything Palestinian that could be interpreted as making a political statement, or displaying nationalistic imagery, including the Palestinian flag. The adopters of the watermelon claim that after Israel banned the colors of the Palestinian flag, Palestinians resorted to displaying slices of watermelon instead, as they mimicked the colors of the flag -red, black, green and white. This method for bypassing Israeli censors allegedly prospered during the first Intifada where it became a widespread practice.\nWhile the intentions of this adoption are admirable, there is very little evidence to suggest such a practice took place, especially during the first Intifada. We suspect that this belief arose from a misunderstanding stemming from this interview with Sliman Mansour, the prominent Palestinian artist.\nMansour and his fellow artists’ exhibition was shut down due to its “political nature”. Not only was the Palestinian flag not allowed, but anything mimicking its colors was also totally banned. So, one of the artists asked “What if I were to make a flower of red, green, black and white?” To which the soldier replied:\n\n‘It will be confiscated. Even if you paint a watermelon, it will be confiscated.’\n\nMansour himself does not recollect any artist using the watermelon in their art as a political statement. It was all as hypothetical as the aforementioned flower his colleague asked about.\nThere is no mention at all of this practice in the literature of the first Intifada. There are references to people using the watermelon as an example of the banned color combination -which we are not disputing- but none of the widespread use of watermelon slices as a political statement or as a substitute for the Palestinian flag.\nThere is one singular New York Times story from 1993 that mentions watermelon slices:\n\n“In the Gaza Strip, where young men were once arrested for carrying sliced watermelons – thus displaying the red, black and green Palestinian colours – soldiers stand by, blase, as processions march by waving the once-banned flag,”\n\nThis detail was later retracted, due to insufficient evidence of this ever happening. You will notice that most stories covering the watermelon phenomenon today link back to this same article. Of course, Israel has been known to arrest Palestinians for the flimsiest of pretexts, so this is not entirely outside the realm of possibility. However, there is little to suggest it was a widespread practice.\nAdditionally, we reached out to several members who were active in the popular committees of the Intifada regarding this issue, none of them could recollect anyone ever using watermelons as symbols of resistance.\nNaturally, we are open to any kind of correction, and if there is some mention in literature we missed or a reliable documented source, we are happy to update the article as necessary. However, if this practice was as widespread as claimed, we wouldn’t need to be searching this deeply for a mention of it, in both Arabic and English sources.Revolutionary movements tend to produce revolutionary iconography. These symbols can take a wide variety of forms ranging from art, to even the revolutionaries themselves becoming immortalized. However, there is also a danger inherent to the adoption of symbols, or rather what or who is chosen to be turned into a symbol.\nIt goes without saying that adopting a symbol based on a myth leaves it open to attacks from Hasbara organizations and other pro-Israel groups. The go-to tactic of these groups is to cling to any factual inaccuracies -no matter how minuscule- in an attempt to discredit the entire movement. You need only browse a website like “NGO Monitor” to find a mountain of examples of sentences broken down, taken out of context, and twisted beyond recognition to frame them as antisemitic. Nevertheless, Palestinian content will be attacked regardless of how factual it is, with the legions of Nakba deniers attesting to this fact. Fear of defamation from pro-Israel advocates is not the main concern here, but rather something a bit more complicated that the pro-Palestine movement needs to reckon with.\nThe adoption of something or someone as a symbol can often be the quickest way to diffuse it and empty it of its radical significance. Take the revolutionary legacy of Nelson Mandela for example. Upon his death, western media rushed to call him a “man of peace”, describing how his principled non-violence paved the way for the fall of Apartheid South Africa. What was conspicuously missing from these obituaries, is the fact that Nelson Mandela underwent military training, established the military wing of the ANC, and planned attacks against the Apartheid government. What was also missing, is the fact that at the time these newspapers called him a terrorist, and published opinion pieces on why Apartheid had “nuances”, and how equal voting rights was a “recipe for slaughter”.\nThe revolution is taken out of the revolutionary, and they become a harmless icon, divorced from their radical politics and actions. They are declawed, and a distorted, tame version of their life is propagated and celebrated by the very forces they dedicated their lives to fighting. Unfortunately, such an occurrence is not unique to our present day, as Lenin so succinctly wrote more than a century ago:\n\n“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred, and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their deaths, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names, to a certain extent, for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes, and with the object of duping the latter, while, at the same time, robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge, and vulgarizing it.”\n\nAnother pertinent example is Martin Luther King, whose real, radical politics are glossed over, morphing into a caricature upon which any stance or position can be projected. At the end of the day, distorted and misquoted tidbits from his long struggle amount to “MLK wouldn’t want you to make me uncomfortable”. That is quite clearly the complete antithesis of MLK’s increasingly radical politics, which posed such a threat to the U.S. empire that he was assassinated.\nAs you might have surmised, this is no longer about mere watermelons, but a growing trend in Palestine advocacy. As the struggle for Palestinian rights becomes more mainstream, it will undoubtedly attract a more diverse range of supporters, not all of who necessarily share the same radical politics that birthed the Palestinian revolution. Suddenly, being involved in some aspects of Palestine solidarity does not mean the automatic end to your career that it used to. In this context, reformists will emerge; that is, those who strive for inclusion in imperialist systems rather than their dismantlement, and who believe that if they moderate the Palestinian call for freedom enough, they can still climb, both socially and professionally.\nThere is a reason why the myth of the watermelon gained so much momentum without even the most basic of fact-checking. Because it is respectable. It is safe, it is easy, it is convenient. Why do you think the originators of this symbol chose the first Intifada as its supposed genesis?\nBecause it is considered the “good” Intifada, the unarmed one, the peaceful one, the mythical and ideal version of Palestinians. The one you can support without that large a risk to your career or social standing in the west. This is naturally contrasted with the second Intifada, the “bad” one, the armed one.\nThere is a recent trend in Palestinian solidarity circles to turn the Palestinian into the perfect victim. Perhaps this is done in an effort to draw more sympathy for Palestinians, but it has -at times unintentionally- created a mythic, sanitized, meek version of Palestinians who would rather wave watermelons at their tormentors instead of picking up a rifle to resist their colonization.\nTo be clear: we are not saying that anyone using this symbol subscribes to the views described above. Neither are we saying that this cannot be an effective part of resistance and awareness-spreading. Our fear is that symbolic gestures alone will come to dominate the Palestine solidarity movement, to the detriment of Palestinians on the ground.\nUnfortunately, we could already see vestiges of such politics during the last Israeli onslaught on the Gaza Strip. People were full-heartedly supportive of the Palestinians of Jerusalem, as they resisted the eviction of their homes in Sheikh Jarrah with what little was available to them. The moment the Palestinians in Gaza chose to support them militarily, however, the tune changed. Suddenly, many pundits and “allies” started wagging their fingers, talking about it not being the “time” or “the way” to resist Israeli colonialism, despite the action being overwhelmingly supported by the very Palestinians on the ground in Jerusalem they claimed to champion.\nSteven Salaita wrote an excellent article on this kind of conditional support:\n\n“Watch how your favorite pundit reacts when Palestinians take up armed struggle or consort with actors beyond the U.S. sphere of influence.  Does the pundit drop the crowd-pleasing slogans and start yammering about strategic errors and moral failures among the resistance?  Does the pundit exhibit a sudden compulsion to nuance?  Does the pundit begin ruminating about how this-or-that U.S. enemy is actually worse than Israel?  Those are your tells.”\n\nOnce again, we are not saying anyone using the watermelon or propagating the myth practices these politics intentionally or otherwise. Rather, it is our concern that its ahistorical prominence represents the latest attempt at respectability politics within Palestine solidarity circles. It can have its uses, but the attempts of its originators to claim it as some Intifada political tradition is perhaps misguided at best, and malicious at worst. Unlike Israelis, we do not need to exaggerate or conjure historical events from thin air. As always, the truth is on our side.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "The electoral defeat of Benjamin Netanyahu has been the cause of many a celebration. This was especially the case among supporters of Israel who still believe themselves to be liberals or progressives.  Finally! King Bibi was dethroned, after more than a decade in office. Maybe now Israel can return to its original values -the values that Netanyahu supposedly betrayed.\nOver the years we have heard time and time again how Netanyahu was an “aberration” from Israel’s alleged democratic and progressive core. Thus, Netanyahu became a bit of a convenient scapegoat upon which Israel’s sins could be piled. This is a familiar tactic that is often employed by the Zionist left, where they have created a mythological version of Israeli history before “things went wrong”. This mythology is fluid and ever-changing, adapting to any current narrative with the purpose of absolving Israel from all wrongdoing. The occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem in 1967 is often invoked in this context .\nSuddenly, the defenders of the “only democracy in the Middle East” were beseeching people not to lump in the people of Israel with their democratically elected representatives. As if that government formed itself and Netanyahu wasn’t elected as Prime Minister multiple times. It appears that the propaganda of appealing to Israeli democracy is only so useful until the time comes for any kind of collective responsibility.\nFor the liberal Zionist, combatting the perceived loss of Israeli morality and legitimacy worldwide is paramount. After all, it is becoming increasingly difficult to defend Israel and still be accepted in progressive circles. This is not a uniquely Israeli trait, as we saw a similar phenomenon upon the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. Liberals all over the country bemoaned how Trump’s actions were “un-American”, and were eroding the United States’ moral standing, completely ignoring how Trump was a symptom rather than a root cause of racism and reactionary politics in the U.S. They too, mistakenly believed that removing Trump would solve these issues.\nAs in the U.S, in Israel Netanyahu was also a symptom, and a deeply racist, ethno-nationalist settler society has always been the root cause.Like all settler societies, Israeli society depends on the dispossession of the natives to exist. Consequently, extreme dehumanization of Palestinians is necessary to justify the war crimes frequently committed; after all, if Israelis viewed Palestinians as equally human, they wouldn’t be able to so easily brush aside the systems of oppression and domination they benefit from.\nDecades of brainwashing and incitement against the native Palestinians are evident in the daily attitudes of the Jewish Israeli population. We’re not even talking about Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza Strip, but the Palestinians they refer to as “Arabs” who hold the same citizenship, and who are frequently tokenized to prove how egalitarian and democratic Israel is. For instance, 79% of Jewish Israelis believe they should get preferential treatment over “Arabs”. Half of Jewish Israelis believe that “Arabs” should be completely ethnically cleansed.\nNone of these sentiments are new, as an older poll from 2007 found that 75% of Jewish Israelis didn’t approve of living in the same apartment building with “Arabs”. Over a half of them considered marrying an “Arab” to be national treason. 55% were for open segregation, keeping ethnicities apart in entertainment sites. Half of Jewish Israelis wanted their government to encourage “Arabs” to emigrate, and a large portion (40%) wanted “Arab” voting rights revoked. Clearly, these racist views have only grown.\nThese attitudes are also intergenerational, and cut across ideology and demographics. Nearly two thirds of Jewish Israeli teenagers believe that “Arabs” are less intelligent, less cultured, and violent. This was during Ehud Olmert’s tenure as Prime Minister, and before Netanyahu’s long reign. Since then, these attitudes have remained, as today approximately half of the religious, and a quarter of secular Jewish teenagers in Israel are in favor or stripping “Arabs” of their nationality.\nOne of the most popular Israeli football teams, Beitar Jerusalem, is renowned for its racist slogans, chanting “may your village be burned” whenever going up against a team with any “Arab” players.\nAs you have surely noticed, we have been referring to “Arabs” in parenthesis; this is because most Palestinians living within the green line see themselves as Palestinian Arabs, not merely as Arabs. Naturally, this is a threat to the Israeli narrative of the non-existence of Palestinians as a people . Even as they are tokenized in international Israeli propaganda efforts, their actual identity is denied and erased.\nNone of these attitudes were created by Netanyahu, and none of them are unintentional or isolated phenomena. As mentioned earlier, they are part and parcel of Israel as a settler colony. Naturally, a colonial society will also produce a colonial “left”, and even a colonial “peace” movement. This was exemplified by Yitzhak Rabin, who many Israelis consider to be a dove and peace-maker. The issue, of course, is that Rabin was a notorious war criminal responsible for many atrocities against Palestinians. One of them was the policy of breaking the bones of any Palestinian arrested during the first Intifada, and another was signing the order for the ethnic cleansing of Lydda and starting the infamous Lydda death march.\nTens of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes in Lydda, and forced to march to Ramallah in a single file. No water or aid was given, and hundreds died on the way. Chilling testimonies from the survivors evoke genocidal massacres committed by imperialist forces all over the globe:\n\n“While marching in the blazing heat, he [Shammut] spotted some water. He rushed to fill a pot he was carrying. He later recalled: “At that moment, a jeep pulled up with three people. One of them, a Zionist officer, got out. He pulled a gun and put it to my head and ordered me to put the water down.” The Arab teenager had no choice but to obey. Ismail would never forget the thirst of the thousands of people who trudged on, not knowing where they were going. He saw people chewing grass in the hope of obtaining a bit of moisture. Others drank their children’s urine. By the roadside pregnant women were prematurely delivering babies, their labour brought on by the strain of their ordeal. None of these infants survived. Since no one had any opportunity to bury the dead, they were covered with grass and abandoned. Eventually Ismail managed to get some water out of sight of the Israeli soldiers. Although the water was dirty and obviously polluted he drank some while soaking his clothes in the reddish liquid. As Ismail attempted to return to his family, people followed him hoping to get a few drops of the precious fluid. One woman sucked at his moist shirt.”\n\nEven this supposed “dove” never agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian state, but a “state-minus” with no real sovereignty [you can read more about this here]. Ultimately, the debate on the “peace” process in Israeli society was not a disagreement over the subjugation of Palestinians, but over what form it would take. Even this was considered a step too far, and Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli, with his supporters often referred to as “leftist traitors”."
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+	"text": "Liberal Zionists are not unique in this nostalgia for the past. Beneficiaries of imperialism are always looking back fondly on the “good old days”, which they imagine represented a better form of society. For instance, half of white Americans say that things were better in 1950 than they are today.\nTo put that into perspective, half of white Americans think that a society with segregation, where you needed to sit at the back of the bus if you weren’t white, where there were lynchings of Black people, was preferable to society today. And why not? They weren’t the ones facing any of this tyranny. They weren’t the ones being murdered in cold blood in the street.\nA large portion of white Britons are also nostalgic for the days of the British empire, one of the most bloody and colonial empires in history. Half of those who voted “leave” during Brexit would prefer that Britain be an empire again. Once again, why wouldn’t they? They enjoyed the spoils of colonialism, and never needed to suffer its consequences. It wasn’t them being enslaved and butchered.\nFor the liberal Zionist, their nostalgia is not related to a perceived loss of power such as the examples above. It is about a perceived loss of morality and legitimacy. It is about Israel’s reputation, about them being unable to support Israel without feeling guilt or seeming reactionary. However, the most significant difference here is that the nostalgic “uncorrupted Israel” these liberal Zionists yearn for is fictitious. The Israel they imagine before 1967 has no basis in reality, and is a result of a national mythology cultivated by intense propaganda.\nUltimately, the common thread uniting all of this nostalgia is the complete erasure of its victims.Just like any other colonizer, Israelis are impressively self-centered. Settler narcissism knows no bounds, as even as they lament the occupation of 1967, it is not out of concern for the Palestinians, who are the direct victims oppressed by this brutal military dictatorship. Instead, their focus is on themselves:\n\n“The greatest damage has been internal. The settlement enterprise has become a divisive factor in Israeli society, sowing bitter rivalries among Jews not seen since the end of the Second Temple period, a story with its own tragic ending.”\n\nEven when Israelis oppress, they are still the victims. As if this “settlement enterprise” happened in a vacuum, without any people being displaced, killed or oppressed. The real damage, it seems, is how it became a divisive factor for Israelis, because Palestinians have always been invisible collateral damage to the Zionist project. As a matter of fact, great efforts were implemented to erase Palestinians’ presence; entire forests, parks and nature reserves were created with the sole purpose of hiding the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages. It appears that these efforts have been successful when it comes to the Israeli public, because the only way someone could possibly believe that pre-1967 Israel was on the “right side of history” is if you completely excise Palestinians from this history.\nThe willful ignorance needed to sustain this view is quite impressive, considering that Palestinians in the newly established Israeli state lived under martial law, needing permits to even leave their neighborhoods or villages. The living conditions in these communities were so abysmal that an Israeli politician at the time described them as “fenced concentration camps”.\nWe remind you that these were supposed to be the so-called “Arab Israelis” which were citizens of the state. They remained living under such conditions until 1966, basically a year before the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. As a matter of fact, the reason Israelis were able to so easily seize and administer the newly occupied areas was because they simply transferred the same structures and systems used on Palestinians living under Israeli control after 1948.\nFurthermore, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians would not stop after the war; Palestinians in the Naqab, as well as those close to the ceasefire lines, would continue to face mass expulsions into the 1950s. This should solidly dispel the myth that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was an unplanned consequence of war, as it continued years afterwards . Many massacres and mass killings took place during this period against Palestinians who were supposedly “equal citizens of Israel”. For instance, the Kufr Qassim massacre claimed 49 Palestinians, who were murdered in cold blood by Israel. To drive in how dehumanized and erased Palestinians are, the commander responsible for giving the order to open fire was fined 10 measly pennies. This is what the life of 49 Palestinians was worth. His accomplices were sentenced to very light jail time, but were all pardoned and set free within a year.\nGiven these facts, the idea that Israel somehow lost its way after 1967 is quite laughable. The tactics used to dehumanize and dominate Palestinians in 1967 occupied areas were pioneered and tested on Palestinians in 1948 occupied areas. Ethnically cleansing 800,000 Palestinians and destroying over 500 villages is not some small aberration to the noble Zionist project, but a necessary precondition for the existence of the Israeli state today.As we always emphasize, the occupation of 1967 is a symptom, not the root cause of the question of Palestine . Trying to understand the Palestinian revolution by starting at 1967 will produce a flawed, incomplete and selective understanding of the conditions on the ground today.\nDespite their insistence to the opposite, Zionists are largely uninformed and selective about the history of their ideology and state. This is because for the most part, the information they get is from either Israeli or Zionist media and education sources. One need only look at some of the colossal myths still popular in Zionist circles today, to see how effective this brainwashing has been. The vast majority of these myths are lazy, and could be dispelled through a basic investigation of primary sources. When it comes to the story of the founding of Israel, Avi Shlaim argues that the disconnect between the Zionist narrative and reality is aided by the fact that:\n\n“Most of the voluminous literature on the war was written not by professional historians but by participants, by politicians, soldiers, official historians and by a large host of sympathetic chroniclers, journalists, biographers and hagiographers.”\n\nTherefore, most “historical” knowledge Israelis and Zionists have are from sources relegated to the realm of political claim-making rather than honestly reflecting actual events. Combine this with the silencing of Palestinians, willful ignorance and reactionary ethno-nationalist chauvinism and you have a recipe for an impenetrable bunker mentality. Liberal Zionists are not immune to this mentality, as we see their cognitive dissonance and contradictory politics all the time. They talk about the rights of refugees and asylum seekers in the West, and revert to blood and soil fascists the moment the right of return for Palestinians is mentioned, discarding their “progressive” charade and ranting about “demographic threats”.\nSimply put, liberal Zionists live in denial. They are in denial about how Israel was founded, how Israelis came to have their homes, how Israel operates, and how it is sustained. They never ask themselves why Israel was supported by the biggest colonial powers at the time. They never ask why they are supported today by the largest imperialist hegemon in history. They make-believe that they are part of some liberation movement, while being sponsored by the forces squashing liberation movements all over the world.\nIt is easy for them to condemn the occupation, as far as they are concerned 80% of the territory is enough. Some even look down on the West Bank settlers as uncivilized, thinking that somehow the colonization of Palestine in 1948 was different than what the West Bank settlers are doing today, or that their homes were acquired in a different manner than the infamous Yacov in Sheikh Jarrah. They live in a bubble, claiming “this isn’t the Israel I believe in” whenever a new heinous war crime is committed by a state that could only exist due to heinous war crimes. This denialism is akin to Americans saying “this is un-American” whenever something terribly American happens.\nInvoking a mythical idealized version of Israel that never existed serves mainly to assuage liberal Zionist guilt about supporting Israel today. Regardless of how loud they protest, Israel is increasingly being identified with reactionary and fascist movements all over the world. With every war crime committed, support for Israel becomes more of a taboo in progressive circles. Claiming that Israel has merely “lost its way” is a coping mechanism to keep pretending that this is a temporary state of affairs, that Israel at its core is good, and thus worthy of continuous support.\nNaturally, this means that they must concede that Israel has some faults, but this criticism is reserved and shallow, focusing on individuals rather than systems, and definitely not interested in root causes. This saves them from having to admit that Israel as a whole has been a racist, colonial endeavor, or confront their own complicity in the destruction of Palestinian society. Fortunately, this tactic has been transparent and ineffective. As a result, there are personalities on the Zionist “left” whose sole purpose is to endlessly whine about how they aren’t welcome in progressive circles anymore, naturally accusing those circles of antisemitism rather than inspecting their own reactionary politics.\nIn reality, for Palestinians there has never existed a “good” Israel which was corrupted. It is an impossibility, and a complete contradiction of terms. Israel was built at the expense of the destruction and subjugation of Palestinian society. The only way liberal Zionists think Israel was on the “right track” in this period is because, like their right-wing counterparts, they don’t view Palestinians as equally human.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "While Trump is perhaps one of the most well-known cases of an antisemite being embraced by defenders of Israel, he is far from the only one. Israel is a darling of the global far-right and white supremacists everywhere, despite the apparent contradiction of terms at first glance.\nThe love affair between Israel and far-right strongmen all across the globe has been widely documented. Viktor Orban, infamous Prime Minister of Hungary, is a prominent example of this. He promoted “anti-Semitic imagery of powerful Jewish financiers scheming to control the world” and spread conspiracy theories about George Soros wanting to “flood Europe with Muslims”. Orban also sought to honor Hungarian Nazi collaborator Miklos Horthy, who oversaw the killing of half a million Jews in Hungary. Yet he is a staunch supporter of Israel, which he invokes whenever anyone criticizes his bigotry.\nJair Bolsonaro also falls into this category; while he declares his love for Israel and waves its flag, his army honored a Nazi war criminal -decorated by Hitler himself- who had fled to Brazil. The AFD, Germany’s far-right populist party, also found support for Israel to be a convenient way to whitewash its antisemitism domestically.\nBut what is it that attracts these reactionary movements to Israel? Why do they profess love for Israel internationally while championing antisemitic and racist politics locally?\nFar-right fascists love Israel for multiple reasons:\n1) Israel serves as a model for the ethno-state that they seek to build. For the far-right, Zionism as an ideology and a movement is something to be emulated. White nationalist and neo-Nazi Richard Spencer proclaimed himself to be a “white Zionist”. He also went on to describe Israel as “the most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state” — the “one that I turn to for guidance.” What is humorous here, is that this white nationalist possesses a more sober understanding of Zionism than most liberal Zionists do.\n2) Israel and the far-right have in common their xenophobia, anti-migrant politics, and Islamophobia. They both see themselves as guardians of “Western civilization” and a bulwark against the East. Their political messaging is inundated with “war on terror” scaremongering, and a chilling obsession with demographics. Israel is more than happy to accommodate these groups, no matter how antisemitic they are, as long as they are supportive of Israeli policies. A prominent instance of such was a visit by a group of German far-right, anti-Muslim bloggers, who toured the streets of Israel expressing their desire to blow up mosques, and calling African refugees “invaders”. Unsurprisingly, as they visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust victims memorial, it became apparent that this group was full of Holocaust deniers, but since they spoke about the importance of supporting Israel’s fight against “the Muslim problem”, they were seen as friends and allies. Meanwhile, Jewish proponents of BDS have not been allowed entry at the border.\n3) Finally, if all goes according to plan and these movements succeed in establishing their ethno-states, Israel would receive the Jewish population of these countries. In this way, these movements get to establish their racist entities, and Israel would benefit from the exodus of these Jewish communities to bolster its Jewish population. Unfortunately, the well-being or safety of these communities never enters into the equation. This is hardly a new position for the Zionist movement, as Ben Gurion in the 1930s famously said:\n\n“If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.”\n\nFrom a Zionist standpoint, this is clear to understand, as to Zionists only a Jewish state could ensure the long-term safety and prosperity of the Jewish people. Such thinking only reinforces the natural kinship between Zionism and other reactionary ethno-nationalist movements and parties.Sadly, none of what was described above is new. Historically speaking, some of the most dedicated supporters of Zionism have been raging antisemites themselves. Even the infamous Lord Balfour implemented anti-Jewish laws, and saw the Zionist movement as a way to:\n“Mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.”\nNaturally, these racist views and prejudices extended to other “races”:\n\n“We have to face the facts. Men are not born equal, the white and black races are not born with equal capacities: they are born with different capacities which education cannot and will not change.”\n\nYet somehow, many Zionists today are under the delusion that a colonial, racist Empire massacring natives all across the globe, and ruthlessly squashing liberation movements, chose to support the creation of Israel out of the goodness of its heart. Instead of correctly viewing the patronage of Zionism as a continuation of imperialist policy, they choose to deceive themselves into thinking it is some grand gesture aimed at redemption.\nSupport for Zionism in the United States had similar colonial roots. Zionists, understanding the need for Western support, emphasized how similar they were to the American pioneers in their desire to “tame” the wild land, and vanquish the savage natives. This was before the liberal Zionists of today tried to re-frame colonial ethno-nationalism as an indigenous rights movement.\nThese pleas resonated the most among Christian Zionists, who until today form the largest body of support for Zionism and Israel in the United States, if not the world. Christian Zionists offered their support to the Zionist movement not out of any humanistic or altruistic considerations, but out of religious ones. According to their beliefs, Israel needed to be restored before the second coming of Christ so Armageddon could occur. During these events, the Jewish people would be forced to convert to Christianity or die.\nWith support for Israel dwindling among Jewish youth in the United States -to the point where ~40% of them agree that Israel is an Apartheid state- maintaining the support of Christian Zionists becomes paramount. Even though groups like Christians United for Israel (CUFI) hope to see the Jewish people either convert or die, Israel would rather cater to them than the Jewish people it claims to represent. Quite simply, just one of the many Christian Zionist organizations such as CUFI has more members than the entirety of the Jewish population in the United States. This is a support base that is dogmatically committed to Israel, and is not swayed by considerations of human rights or international law.\nOverall, the Christian Right has been found to constitute the largest social movement in the U.S and the largest voting bloc within the Republican Party, and its support for U.S. imperialist policy vis-a-vis Israel for years has culminated in billions of dollars of aid. This is in addition to the millions evangelicals have poured into West Bank settlement projects over the past 10 years, estimated at somewhere between $50 million and $65 million.\nUltimately, we find ourselves in a situation where antisemites who are supportive of Israel come to be branded as “allies of the Jewish people”, and Jewish critics of Israel are called the new “antisemites”. Meanwhile, Palestinians can’t sneeze without being accused of inciting genocide.\nTime and time again, Israel, the self-proclaimed Jewish state, has been shown to throw world Jewry under the bus if it furthers its aims. It would ally itself with the most reactionary forces on earth if it was deemed beneficial to the state. We must refute Israel’s claim to represent the Jewish people worldwide and reject its false accusations of antisemitism whenever it is rightly denigrated. Ultimately, we must reject Israel’s claims to moral authority on what does and does not constitute antisemitism, as this authority is seriously unearned.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "Framing is important. Being able to dictate the narrative, to be given the freedom to explain events in a way sympathetic to your worldview can be an incredibly powerful tool. As many studies have shown, there has been an empirically proven bias towards the Zionist and Israeli narrative in US media. This means that Israelis have had enormous advantages in framing what is happening in Palestine.\nPalestinian Author Mourid Barghouti wrote:\n\n“It is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story from “Secondly.” […] Start your story with “Secondly,” and the world will be turned upside-down. Start your story with “Secondly,” and the arrows of the native Americans are the original criminals and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim. It is enough to start with “Secondly,” for the anger of the Black man against the white to be barbarous.”\n\nHe continues:\n\n“You only need to start your story with “Secondly,” and the burned Vietnamese will have wounded the humanity of the napalm, and Victor Jara’s songs will be the shameful thing and not Pinochet’s bullets, which killed so many thousands in the Santiago stadium. It is enough to start the story with “Secondly,” for my grandmother, Umm ‘Ata, to become the criminal and Ariel Sharon her victim.”\n\nThe selective “telling” of the story, is exactly what Israel aims to achieve by framing all its military operations as “self-defense”. Invoking self-defense shifts the conversation from Israeli settler colonialism, and focuses it on any reactions to said colonialism.  It compartmentalizes current events into separate decontextualized “escalations” that Israel must “handle”. This is done to avoid situating anything into its proper historical context.\nIf you limit the scope of the story and begin it with Hamas’ rockets, suddenly they become the aggressors. What gets swept under the rug is the entire history of Zionist settler colonialism -which predates every Palestinian faction existing today- or how the Gaza Strip was created, why there are millions of refugees, and why they are prevented from going home or from having the most fundamental of human rights. Even Hamas’ Arabic acronym translates into “The Islamic Resistance Movement”, which should clue you that it was formed as a reaction to resist something. Stripping this information from the story completely changes its conclusions.\nThis rhetorical method has been applied to even the most ludicrous scenarios, such as framing a sneak attack on Egypt in 1967 as a “preemptive defensive strike” . Because no matter what Israel does, it always argues that it is purely for defensive reasons.The whole situation is quite ridiculous when you think about it.\nWhat does it even mean for a settler colony to defend itself against the natives it is colonizing? What does it mean for an entity that can only exist through the negation of Palestinians to defend itself from said Palestinians?\nSettler colonialism by its very definition necessitates violence and oppression. They are so constant that they seep into every facet of life for the colonized. There are no periods of “calm” or “normalcy” for the Palestinians. Take the average Palestinian living in Gaza, for example. They are a refugee who had their family ethnically cleansed simply because they were not Jewish, and would thus be an inconvenient “demographic threat” to Israeli ethnocracy. This person has the right, by any means possible, to try and reclaim their stolen rights. That cannot under any possible scenario be construed as aggression which could warrant “self-defense”. Even more, Israel wants to reserve the “right” to occupy Palestinians, torment them, besiege them, ethnically cleanse them and steal their land, homes and livelihoods and claim self-defense against any push-back to this oppression.\nIt boggles the mind that we have people demanding that the colonized and militarily occupied population must guarantee the safety of their oppressors and tormentors. It is akin to a mugger claiming self-defense when their victim fights back against their mugging.\nThis is hardly unique to Zionism and Israel; colonial forces throughout history have always sought to frame their racist colonialist expansionism as “self-defense” or as acts of mere “self-preservation”.\nThomas Jefferson even argued against abolishing slavery using this exact same logic, citing “self-preservation” as the reason why this barbaric practice must continue. Imagine the audacity of arguing that the slave masters were acting in self-defense against their slaves.\nNaturally, this example is not meant to equate the oppression between the victims of slavery on Turtle Island and those of Israeli colonialism, but to highlight the ridiculous ways in which reactionary forces consistently frame their aggression as self-defense.Israel has a long history of arguing about its dubious “rights”.\nAn infamous example is its “right to exist” which has no basis in international law, nor does it have any practical meaning . It would not be an exaggeration to say that Israel’s legal claims have always gone hand in hand with masking its colonial expansionist agenda. After all, Israel still claims that the West Bank and Gaza strip are unoccupied, even with its troops, siege, settlements and military bases; their argument is that for an occupation to exist, a territory must be part of a sovereign state, which the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were not. This same justification is used to argue that the Geneva conventions, and international and humanitarian law in general, don’t apply to Palestinians. Of course, this argument was never accepted by the international community, which still maintains that these areas are occupied.\nLong story short, Israeli legal claims should be taken with a mountain of salt.\nHowever, due to the long-standing refusal of said international community to hold Israel accountable, Palestinians have become jaded by international law. Decades of advisory opinions and resolutions have gone ignored by Israel and the international community, even as Israel’s violations have become more brazen. Were international law be actually applied, Israel’s “right” to self-defense wouldn’t pass muster.\nThe major flaw with Israel’s claims is that quite simply no legal right can be derived from an illegal act. What are the illegal acts in question?\n\nIsrael’s foundation and actions are predicated on denying the Palestinian people the right to self-determination. Peoples the world over have this right, and according to international law, an occupying power cannot suppress any insurrection or resistance which is struggling to gain self-determination.\nIsrael’s occupation of Palestine has crossed into a permanent occupation, whereas Israel has created permanent new facts on the ground, such as the illegal transfer of its settler population into the occupied areas.\n\nBasically, Israel’s actions are illegal to begin with, and therefore it cannot claim any right to “defend” these actions.\nIt should be noted that resistance or insurrection here does not necessarily mean “peaceful” or “popular” resistance, but includes all means possible.\nUnited Nations resolution 37/43:\n\n“Reaffirms 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”.\n\nIt continues:\n\n“Reaffirms the inalienable right of the Namibian people, the Palestinian people and all peoples under foreign and colonial domination to self-determination, national independence, territorial integrity, national unity and sovereignty without outside interference”.\n\nEven if such a right was not enshrined in international law, Palestinians have a moral right to rid themselves of domination and oppression.\nRegardless of what type of resistance Palestinians choose, they will be designated as terrorist aggressors anyway. When Israel seized private Palestinian land to expand an illegal settlement, Palestinians responded by erecting a small encampment called Bab al-Shams on it as a peaceful demonstration against this action. Naturally, they were accused of practicing “construction terrorism” by Israelis and promptly beat, repressed, arrested and removed from the land. When Palestinians started preparing a case against Israel in the International Criminal Court, they were accused of practicing “legal terrorism“. Palestinian prisoner hunger strikes are described as “Terrorism in Prison”. None of this would qualify as terrorism from an international law perspective; however, Israel uses this designation indiscriminately to demonize and ostracize any kind of Palestinian resistance, no matter what it looks like, while simultaneously claiming its monstrous repression as defensive. There must be consistent and principled pushback against the ludicrous claim of Israeli “self-defense”. It is the Palestinians who are defending themselves against settler-colonial, ethnonationalist aggression, and who surely need the support more than an imperialist backed nuclear state.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "Producing a complicated-looking table and claiming it proves your argument may seem impressive. It might even convince those less-acquainted with the history and facts on the ground. After all, it looks so “scientific”. However, these attempts to imbue propaganda with empirical validity collapse under even the briefest of scrutiny.\nAn oft-used tactic is to cite actual data from real sources but to remove them from their context, and proceed to project meaning onto them which isn’t supported or claimed by the original source. Even grifters and genocide deniers use copious amounts of citations and data in their racist publications, but as mentioned previously, they usually tend to be decontextualized, distorted and cherry-picked to build a certain narrative while suppressing contradictory evidence.\nIndeed, statistics can be lazily used to claim relationships between different phenomena. Let’s look at an example of how the same data can be decontextualized and used to reach radically different conclusions:\nIn a certain city, the health of citizens was measured and given a numerical value. After reviewing the data, it became apparent that the average health of citizens in a specific area of the city was significantly less than the city-wide average. What conclusions can we draw from these numbers?\nPoverty has been known to have adverse effects on health. People living in poorer neighborhoods tend to have lower life expectancies, as they have less access to healthy nutrition, less time to take care of themselves, and less access to healthcare. This area could simply be a poor neighborhood.\nAn alternative explanation is that this area houses a chemical plant that has been known to dump its toxic waste nearby, decreasing the overall health of the residents of the area.\nPerhaps the whole idea of the area reducing health is erroneous to begin with, and the lower health average is simply due to it being the location of a hospital complex. Meaning that people with poor health congregate in this area rather than the area itself being the cause.\nAs you can see, without knowing enough about the context and history of this city, the same data -no matter how accurate- cannot tell us the real story or help us to draw conclusions or causal relationships. This is why propagandists love statistics, because they are wagering that you are not familiar enough with the context or history and that these raw decontextualized numbers will convince you. This is why it is also critical to not only look at how the numbers are used, but also where they came from to begin with.\nIt is a mistake to think of all data as neutral and objective. It was produced by humans who are -at best- influenced by their social context no matter how objective they try to be, and at worst engineer the data specifically to reinforce a narrative or argument.\nThis is why you should always ask yourself, who is asking the questions? Why are they asking the questions? How did they arrive at their numbers? Do they have any interest in skewing results one way or another?\nPro-Israel organizations are infamous for designing misleading surveys, where the questions are heavily slanted to produce certain outcomes.Denying or minimizing the Nakba is nothing new. A brief look at our myths section shows that the Palestinian refugees and their ethnic cleansing have always been the target of Israeli propaganda. From blaming the Palestinians for their own expulsion, to claiming that no expulsions happened at all, you will find contradictory talking points to fit any purpose.\nWhat these myths have in common is their dishonesty in how they present information. They either decontextualize data to influence conclusions, or they build an argument on erroneous assumptions and projections. This myth mixes both these approaches.\nFrom the get-go, it launches its argument from a false definition of ethnic cleansing, conflating it with outright genocide. While it is argued that ethnic cleansing is a form of genocide, it can vary in the methods used. For example, you do not need to wipe out an ethnic group to practice ethnic cleansing. The term “ethnic cleansing” came to prominence after its widespread practice in the regions of former Yugoslavia, a United Nations Commission of Experts referred to ethnic cleansing as:\n\n“… a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”\n\nThis is not a mere misunderstanding by hasbarists, but a deliberate twisting of the term to make a slanted argument not compatible with the full definition.\n(Similarly, the term Apartheid is often incorrectly used to mean a complete carbon copy of South Africa when the definition of Apartheid says no such thing. There are many examples and types of Apartheid. The insistence on this false definition is to distract you from that fact and to stop you from judging Israel by the criteria of the legal definition.)\nWith the information above in mind, it becomes clear that looking at the total population number to determine if any ethnic cleansing happened is not in and of itself a useful indicator. Indeed, if everyone was pushed out of New York into Austin, the total population number of New Yorkers would not differ. This would not change the fact that the entire population of New York was expelled.\nWhen the correct dates and areas are specified, not even openly pro-Israel websites like Jewish Virtual Library can dispute the fact that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from the areas people today call “Israel”:(The table has been abridged for brevity. You can access the full table here)\nThis is the reason why many Zionist memes trying to “debunk” this historical fact often begin their table after 1948. This kind of cherry-picking of data, and the suppression of inconvenient facts is rife in the Zionist narrative of the Nakba.It is no surprise that social media has also become a battleground for hearts and minds when it comes to Palestine. Zionist propaganda has always adapted to whatever is trendy at the time; at its inception, it argued that the Zionists were enlightened colonists who would bring the “backwards” Palestine into civilization, a feat the natives could not accomplish. As colonialism fell out of favor, suddenly Zionist colonizers started rebranding themselves as a force for decolonization, the absolute opposite of their forefathers.\nToday, with the recent rise to prominence of a distorted and shallow understanding of identity politics in the US, we see that hasbarists are once again adapting according to popular rhetoric. Suddenly, we see Zionism being detached from its material history and presented as an integral part of an identity. This is especially popular in the West, where young Zionists who are raised on propaganda and myths of the Zionist project come to treat it as inseparable from themselves. Here, we see the cynical twisting of social justice language to frame any criticism of Israel as antisemitic.\nIn this context, many Zionist “influencers” -often on the payroll of Israel and its various hasbara organizations- have risen to prominence, spreading disinformation and propaganda couched in progressive language. One such propagandist is Hen Mazzig, who recently shared a laughably bad series of images “debunking” the Nakba, using terrible statistics to try and flip reality on its head:I’m certain that you can instantly see some of the problems with this graph. Twitter user Terriblestats published a series of short videos absolutely demolishing the claims presented.\nYou will notice that they utilize many of the methods to lie with statistics explored earlier in the article. For example, the graph conveniently inspects the areas of “West Bank, Gaza Strip, Israel” to measure any population change. This is similar to the New York and Austin example above; they are trying to tell you since no population decreased in this area there was no ethnic cleansing. This is clearly false. Another problem with this chart is that it purposefully lacks any kind of data points, obscuring the fact that many Palestinians were expelled to neighboring Arab countries.\nThis brings us to our next point: The data. Mazzig claims the data is from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS). The PCBS can indeed be a good source of information on Palestinians today; however, notice how no specific report is cited, just a whole website full of hundreds of reports. The specific numbers used by this chart cannot be verified from the website by a cursory look at the majority of their population statistics.\nEven the way the chart is designed would not pass a Statistics 101 class, as it doesn’t even present consistent units of measurement. Notice how the first notch is 30 years, and the remaining ones are 10. If we look at the other graphics in the post, the years and the population being measured are also inconsistent. This was done deliberately to affect the steepness of the inclination of the line on the graph, and by doing so imply a more “rapid” change than what actually occurred.\nOnce again, we strongly recommend looking at the short videos from Terriblestats for a more illustrated explanation of this post and how it is fudging the numbers.\nUltimately, none of the people spreading these images and memes will fact-check them. We see this all the time in Zionist propaganda. We have seen claim after claim of posts “debunking” well-documented Palestinian history and events by simply contesting them, without providing any real evidence or argument. Quite often, the “debunkings” rely on distortions and outright lies like the case above.\nBut as we usually say, the goal of propaganda is never to reflect reality. Propaganda exists to make political claims and justify them. It doesn’t even matter if these claims are illogical, all they need to do is support a certain worldview or ideology and its apologists will uncritically adopt it. As our website consistently demonstrates, these ahistorical talking points and dishonest framings comprise much of Zionist propaganda, where ridiculous claims that could be debunked within a minute of research become the cornerstone of a narrative.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "In yet another attempt to legitimize the Israeli take-over of Palestine, it was put forward by advocates of Israel that Palestinians had simply sold their land to the Zionist movement. Later, after witnessing how these lands were transformed into a paradise, Palestinians came to regret their decision and claimed that Israel stole their land. This conveniently ties together multiple Zionist myths and talking points into one neat package.\nWhile this fairytale would certainly appeal to anyone trying to morally absolve themselves from the implications of their expropriation of large swathes of territory, unfortunately for them, detailed land purchase records exist. I’m sure you can already tell that these records dispel this ridiculous assertion.\nThe British were meticulous record keepers, and we have detailed numbers of the land purchased by the various Zionist organizations:For reference, Mandatory Palestine as a whole had a territory of 26,625,600 dunams. The most generous estimations of Zionist land holdings were 2,000,000 dunums by 1948. For reference, a dunam is 1000 square meters. An acre is four dunams.\nAs you can see, at most the combined Zionist purchasing power could barely acquire 5-7% of the land, depending on source. Needless to say, huge swathes of it being strewn around the entire territory and being non-contiguous. Due to the ease with which this talking point can be debunked, it gradually fell out of favor -relatively speaking- among Israelis. However, it has since seen a resurgence among Arab Zionists desperate for normalization with Israel. In their eyes, this myth needs to be true so that they can blame the Palestinians for their own dispossession and legitimize their cynical political maneuvering.This talking point is further undermined by Israel’s own legislation and policy following the Nakba . The ethnic cleansing of Palestine would not stop after the war of 1948, Palestinians in the Naqab, as well as those close to the ceasefire lines would continue to face mass expulsions into the 1950s. In the same period, Israel issued the infamous Absentee’s Property Law. This law was instrumental in systematically seizing the property of all the refugees it had created, this included their homes, farms, land and even the contents of their bank accounts. Through this law, the state took control of everything remaining behind when the refugees were expelled, and if not contested or claimed, they would then become the property of the state, free to be utilized in any way it saw fit. Given the fact that any refugee attempting to return was shot, you can see how this law served merely as a fig leaf to legitimize what can only be described as naked theft. A step which would be unnecessary had the Zionists actually purchased the land on which Israel was erected, as some ridiculously claim.\nThis in conjunction with the Land Acquisitions Law allowed for the mass transfer of the entire Palestinian economy to the Israeli state. Practically overnight, the state gained control of over 739,750 agricultural acres, vast majority of which were of excellent quality, 73,000 houses, 7800 workshops and 6 million pounds. This dropped the cost of settling a Zionist family in Palestine from 8000$ to 1500$, effectively subsidizing the creation of the Israeli state and kickstarting its economy.\nSo, while we have already shown that the record shows no such large-scale purchase of the land as asserted, let us take a deeper look at these smaller purchases and discuss their implications.\nFirst, it is important to note that the majority of the land purchased by Zionists were not sold by Palestinians, but rather by large absentee landlords, living mostly in Lebanon and Syria. Khalidi estimates that a little over the third (of the 5-7%) were sold by absentee landlords of Palestinian origin. And only 6% of the (5-7%) were sold by local landlords or peasants. These estimates are mostly corroborated by Walter Lehn and based on reports from the Jewish Agency that confirmed that the majority of land purchased was from large absentee landlords.\nThere is also evidence that suggests that these local sellers did not always wish to sell their land. For example, one mode of land extraction was when the Jewish National Fund gave loans to farmers with the precondition that their land would be used as collateral, and when the farmer ultimately defaulted on their payments, they would take possession of the land. In other cases, these peasants thought they were simply selling land to new neighbors. They did not know that they were selling their land for the erection of a new foreign colonial state that sought to dispossess them.\nFurthermore, even if the percentage of the territories purchased by Zionist settlers was higher, this would not entitle them to sovereignty over it.\nUltimately, the question of Palestine is not about property rights. It is about settler colonialism and the attempted ethnocide of an entire people. Palestinians deserve to return to their homes and live in dignity, regardless how much private property they lost or didn’t lose.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "To begin with, The Palestinian Citizenship Order of 1925, which created the category of Palestinian citizen, determined the conditions for the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship. I will not quote or discuss this in great detail, however, should you wish to learn more, please feel free to read the entirety of the order.\nQafisheh discussed the key provisions introduced by the order that would have lasting effects on the demographic future of Palestine:\n\n“One relates to the automatic change of the inhabitants’ nationality from Ottoman subjects into Palestinian citizens. The second regulated the nationality of Palestine’s natives residing abroad. The third was designed to grant Palestinian nationality to immigrants by naturalization.”\n\nIn this detailed discussion there is absolutely nothing legally substantiating the claims that only Zionists were considered Palestinians during the mandate period. It is also not a coincidence that virtually all Zionist settlers were relegated to the third category. Indeed, all it takes is a glance at the Nüfus (Ottoman population registry) or the much later British mandate census data to clearly see a minority settler population growing next to a large native majority. I will not be going into the details of population numbers, but if you are at all interested in the minutiae of census and population information in Palestine, then I would recommend obtaining a copy of Justin McCarthy’s The population of Palestine: Population history and statistics of the late Ottoman period and the Mandate.\nBut this goes beyond mere legalistic terminology. Another implied aspect of this claim is that while Palestinians might have legally been citizens of the mandate, they did not identify as Palestinians, but rather as Arabs.While the mandatory period did see a rise of Palestinians identifying with the idea of a greater Arab nation, this did not preclude regional Palestinian identity and sense of belonging. It is not a contradiction to identify both as an Arab and a Palestinian, as was the case for many. The roots of modern Palestinian identity can be traced back to Ottoman times, but it arguably started crystallizing in its modern form during the WW1 period. It is important to keep in mind that nationalism as a whole first touched the region around that period.\nThere are multiple elements that coalesced to create this proto-Palestinian identity, first of which was the significant religious attachment to Palestine as a holy land by the people living there. Of course, Palestine has been an important religious nexus throughout history, but this feeling of attachment was particularly strong among those living there.\nAnother element is the distribution of Ottoman administrative boundaries and the special status afforded to Palestine. According to Khalidi:\n\n“from 1874 onwards, the sanjaq of Jerusalem, including the districts of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Beersheeba, Gaza, and Jaffa, was a separate unit administered independently from any other Ottoman province.“\n\nPreviously, Jerusalem was the capital of the larger province (Vilayet) of Palestine (Filastin) which includes the vast majority of what is now considered Palestine.\nA third element is the fierce local loyalties and attachments, especially in the larger cities. Khalidi dubbed this “Urban Patriotism”.  Nabulsis, Gazans, Jerusalemites, etc all took pride in their cities and their local histories. Evidence of this can be seen in Palestinian family names, such as “Al-Nabulsi” (of Nablus) or “Al-Khalili” (of Hebron) and many other cities, towns and villages. With modernization and the spread of transport, communication, education, and notions of nationalism throughout the region, this local attachment evolved to include areas outside of the direct city or town and came to resemble what we understand today as nationalism more closely.\nIt is important to emphasize that all of this preceded any encounter with Zionism. This is important to understand, because there is a common assertion that Palestinian identity grew as a consequence of Zionist colonialism of Palestine, even though no such claim is made for the neighboring countries which all developed identities and nationalisms of their own. It is worth noting, however, that for Palestinians, the Zionists were yet another imperial or colonial force in a history full of such forces, be it the Ottomans who the Palestinians rebelled against, the British, or any other.\nHowever, this does not mean that Palestinian identity was not influenced at all by its encounters with European or Zionist colonialism. For example, Najib ‘Azuri, and in response to Zionist goals in Palestine, wrote in 1908 that the progress of “the land of Palestine” depends on expanding and raising the status of Jerusalem.\nEvidence of early Palestinian identification and attachment to the land is abundant. One need not look only at some of the larger indicators, such as the founding of the Filastin (Palestine) newspaper in Jaffa in 1911, but also at the smaller ones, such as a group of Palestinian immigrants to Chile founding a football club and naming it Deportivo Palestino in 1920.\nBut let us cut to the chase and stop dancing around the main premise of this talking point:\nThis talking point is designed to lend legitimacy to the Zionist settlers, and strip it away from the indigenous Palestinians. Ultimately, this aims at whitewashing the crimes committed against Palestinians by implying that they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.\nBut even if you swallow this premise wholly, and come to internalize it. What then? Does the national identification (or lack thereof) of the Palestinians mean that they were legitimate targets for ethnic cleansing? Even if we accept the ridiculous premise that the Palestinians were “just Arabs”, how does this justify the destruction of hundreds of villages and the subjugation of millions?\nIt doesn’t, and it can’t.\nFrom the onset, this talking point is not only racist, but highly ineffectual if followed to its logical conclusion. Palestinians exist, and no amount of revisionist and ideological twisting of history can erase that. The erasure of the indigenous population is a staple in all settler colonial contexts, Palestine is no exception.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "If you have seriously researched the question of Palestine for any amount of time, then it is safe to say that you have come across your fair share of wild and unsubstantiated claims and arguments from advocates of Israel. Perhaps one of the more consistently asserted ones is the claim that the name Palestine originated with the Romans, and came into existence as a punishment by the Romans against the Jewish people.\nIt is quite interesting how selective people can be when they read history. They often learn just enough to support their world view, separating it completely from any historical context or the larger picture of the region. I do not know where this talking point comes from, or who popularized it, but it is simply incorrect, and frankly quite comical in how lazy it is. Without exaggeration, this talking point could be debunked with a 10 second search, that’s how easily disproven it is. However, even the crudest of propaganda can be useful as a teaching tool. Keep in mind, of course, that when it comes to history there is a wealth of details and nuances involved which keep it from being a simplistic black and white affair, that’s why ethno-nationalists with their dualistic worldviews tend to have terrible historical literacy.\nThe very first traces of the name Palestine come from the time of Ramses II and III, roughly around the mid-12th century BC. There is an inscription dated to around 1150 BC at the Medinet Habu temple in Luxor which refers to the Peleset (PLST) among those who fought against Ramses III. Today we know the Peleset as the Philistines.\nInterestingly enough, it was long thought that the Philistines were sea-faring marauders, possibly Aegean in origin who invaded the Levant. This would neatly tie them into the Biblical narrative. However, there has been mounting evidence to suggest that the Philistines were actually an indigenous population originating in the region. According to advocates of this relatively new approach to the origins of the Philistines, the evidence has always been there, but in their haste to match archaeological evidence to the Biblical narrative many historians and archaeologists overlooked certain inconsistencies and contradictory evidence. You will find that much of the history of Palestine falls into this same trap, and many of the myths regarding Palestine today emanate from trying to force a Biblical narrative onto history with little -if any- corroborating evidence.\nRegardless of their origins, their name came to be associated with the area, not only in ancient Egyptian inscriptions, but also in ancient Assyrian inscriptions. For example, various Assyrian inscriptions from the 8th and 7th century BC refer to the area as “Palashtu”. This is the result of the Philistines’ influence and their intermingling and integration with the various peoples inhabiting the Levant. Prior to this, the area was more commonly known as Djahi, Retenu or Canaan, but beginning from the late Bronze age onwards, and as a result of said Philistine influence, the term Palashtu or Palestine came to replace them.\nAccording to Nur Masalha, their influence can still be felt today:\n\n“..almost all the toponyms of the cities of Philistia: Gaza (Ghazzah), Askelon (‘Asqalan), Ashdod (Isdud), Tantur (Tantura), Gath (Jat), Ekron (‘Aqir) survived into the modern era and were preserved in the modern Palestinian Arabic names and were mostly depopulated by Israel in 1948.“\n\nIt was during Classical Antiquity and the Hellenistic period (~500-135 BC) that the name “Palestine” as we know it today took form. The use of the terms Palaistine or Phalastin were widespread in the literature of the period. Philosophers and scientists such as Ptolemy and Aristotle spoke of Palaistine, and Herodotus’ Histories commonly used the name Palestine.\nIn these writings, the use of the name Palaistine did not refer solely to the areas ruled by the Philistines at one point or another, but to wider swaths of the region, in some cases even stretching as far as what we would today call Jordan.\nThere are many more examples of the usage of the term or its cognates, and it is not the intention of this article to delve too deeply into the history of these uses. However, if you find the history of the name interesting then the further reading section has some recommendations that you might find to your liking. Regardless, it is quite clear that this name originated well before the Romans or their conquest of Palestine.\nAs with all propaganda, conveying historical or factual accuracy is not the intended goal. These claims serve mainly to demonize Palestinians and frame them as usurpers to the land, and attempt to tie them to the Roman persecution of the Jewish people. This is purely ideologically motivated with no basis in reality or history, and its widespread use speaks to the prevalence of blind regurgitation of talking points in Zionist circles without any kind of evidence or historical knowledge.\nBut think about this for a moment: If such a basic falsity which could be debunked with a 10 second search is so widespread and internalized among defenders of Israel, can you imagine all the other, more complicated falsities that form the basis of their talking points?\nSadly, this animates much of the mainstream debate on Palestine, and Palestinians must constantly and consistently re-litigate false claims they had debunked decades ago to no avail. It is my hope that one day we will not have to fight these battles anymore, and the region can recover its hijacked history.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!"
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+	"text": "One of the more recent myths that have gained traction among defenders of Israel is the claim that the actual mandate of Palestine flag had a star of David on it. This is usually accompanied by an image of an old book displaying this flag. In their mind, this proves without a doubt that Palestine was always Zionist even during the mandate period. This also neatly complements other popular myths, such as “Arabs moved to Palestine because of Zionist innovation”  or “Palestinian referred only to Jewish citizens of the mandate” .\nThe fact that this claim and image went viral in some pro-Israel circles is a testament to how history and facts have become subservient to reinforcing certain ideologically driven narratives. Without exaggeration, this talking point could be dispelled with a 5 second internet search. But as with all propaganda, conveying historical or factual accuracy is not the intended goal of these claims. These claims serve mainly to flip reality on its head, and indigenize the colonists while portraying Palestinians as outsiders and usurpers to the land.\nBut what is the story of this flag, and where did it come from, and why is it being employed so frequently in Zionist talking points?\n\nThe origins of this claim comes from this image, which was taken from a French dictionary titled Le Petit Larousse Illustré:\n\nThis flag appeared in the dictionary from the early 1920s until the late 1930s. However, even a cursory glimpse at the provided image shows that there are other erroneously labeled flags. For example, the flag of Morocco is incorrect, so is the Soviet Union flag. Browsing through the other pages and editions of the dictionary reveals that there are other errors in their flag section, such as quite a bizarre flag for the short-lived kingdom of Hejaz which is a pure fabrication.\n\nUnsurprisingly, images from the dictionary started to turn up cropped in a way as to exclude the other flags on the page in an attempt to lend it more legitimacy.\nThe only evidence of the use of this flag was from an image in National Geographic in the 1930s of a steam ship named “Emanuel” which was operated by the Hofiya shipping company. It should be noted that this was not considered the official flag even among Zionist groups or the Yishuv, as other shipping companies did not fly this flag. It is still unknown what drove the dictionary to select this specific flag to represent the official mandate of Palestine flag at the time, but seeing the other errors in their flag section it seems that mistakes of this kind were par for the course.\nNeedless to say, no, this was not the official flag of the mandate of Palestine. It was never used officially or recognized. It was most likely used by one Zionist group or the other in Palestine, but never in an official capacity.\n\nIt is worth mentioning that there also existed various Palestinian flags from that same period. There was actually a contest to design an Arab Palestinian flag. Similarly, they were never considered official or recognized by the mandate authorities, and nobody claimed they were. In typical Zionist propaganda fashion, this is never mentioned. The cherry-picking of information and omission of inconvenient data is the standard modus operandi for these talking points.\n\nThe popularity of this talking point stems from Zionist settler’s yearning to prove their exclusive ownership of the land. This becomes harder to argue when the majority of them arrived barely a couple of  decades before the founding of Israel in 1948, and even then, they were not numerous enough to form a solid majority even in their assigned land partition. This insecurity translates into another attempt to rewrite history in a way which is more friendly to their national mythology, regardless of its veracity.\nWhat stands out about this attempt, however, is how ridiculous it is on every level. Not only could it be debunked in a matter of seconds, but it’s quite a futile claim to begin with. Let’s say for the sake of argument that this was indeed the flag of the mandate of Palestine, what would this prove? I would like to remind you that the flag of mandatory Palestine was a colonial flag, it was not a flag that any of the indigenous population regarded warmly. Would this not simply reinforce the position that Zionist settlers were colonists, or at the very least propped up by colonial powers?\nI somehow doubt the people spreading this talking point thought that far ahead.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!\n\nKhalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. Metropolitan Books, 2020.\nKhalidi, Rashid. Palestinian identity: The construction of modern national consciousness. Columbia University Press, 2010.\nKhalidi, Rashid, ed. The origins of Arab nationalism. Columbia University Press, 1991.\nMuslih, Muhammad. “Arab politics and the rise of Palestinian nationalism.” Journal of Palestine Studies 16.4, 1987: 77-94.\nAnderson, Benedict. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso books, 2006.\nHobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The invention of tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2012.\nWeber, Eugen. Peasants into Frenchmen: the modernization of rural France, 1870-1914. Stanford University Press, 1976."
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+	"text": "A frequently recurring theme when discussing the history of Palestine, is the question of “who was there first?”. The implication being, whoever was there first deserves ownership of the land. I have lost count of how many times I have encountered the argument that “The Jewish people have been in Palestine before the Muslims/Arabs,” or a variation thereof. This has always struck me as an interesting example of how people learn just enough history to support their world view, separating it completely from any historical context or the larger picture of the region.\nSince this question is so widespread, and since I see it answered in different, and in my opinion, unhelpful ways, I would like to open up the topic for wider discussion.\nThe argument is simple to follow: Palestinians today are mostly Arabs. The Arabs came to the Levant with the Muslim conquest of the region. Therefore, Arabs -and as an extension Palestinians- have only been in Palestine and the Levant since the seventh century AD.\nThere are a couple of glaring problems with this line of thought. First of all, there is a clear conflation of Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians. None of these are interchangeable. Arabs have had a long history in the Levant before the advent of Islam. For example, The Nabataean kingdom ruled over Jordan, southern Palestine and Sinai a whole millennium before Muslims ever set foot in the area. Another example would be the Ghassanid kingdom, which was a Christian Arab kingdom that extended over vast areas of the region. As a matter of fact, many prominent Christian families in Palestine today, such as Maalouf, Haddad and Khoury, can trace their lineage back to the Ghassanid kingdom.\nThe second problem with this is that there is a misunderstanding of the process that is the Arabization of the Middle East and North Africa. Once again, we must view the Islamization of newly conquered lands and their Arabization as two distinct phenomena. The Islamization process began instantly, albeit slowly. Persia, for example took over 2 centuries to become a majority Muslim province. The Levant, much longer. The Arabization of conquered provinces though, began later than their Islamization. The beginning of this process can be traced back to the Marwanid dynasty of the Ummayad Caliphate. Until that point, each province was ruled mostly with its own language, laws and currency. The process of the Arabization of the state united all these under Arabic speaking officials, and made it law that the language of state and of commerce would become Arabic. Thus, it became advantageous to assimilate into this identity, as many government positions and trade deals were offered only to Muslim Arabs.\nSo although the vast majority of the population of these lands were not ethnically Arab, they came to identify as such over a millennium. Arab stopped being a purely ethnic identity, and morphed into a mainly cultural and linguistic one. In contrast to European colonialism of the new world, where the native population was mostly eradicated to make place for the invaders, the process in MENA is one of the conquered peoples mixing with and coming to identify as their conquerors without being physically removed, if not as Arabs, then as Muslims.\nFollowing from this, the Palestinian Arabs of today did not suddenly appear from the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century to settle in Palestine, but are the same indigenous peoples living there who changed how they identified over time. This includes the descendants of every group that has ever called Palestine their home. When regions change rulers, they don’t normally change populations. Throughout history, peoples have often changed how they identified politically. The Sardinians eventually became Italians, Prussians became Germans. It would be laughable to suggest that the Sardinians were kicked out and replaced by a distinct foreign Italian people. We must separate the political nationalist identity of people from their personhood as human beings, as nationalism is a relatively modern concept, especially in the Middle East.\nNaturally, no region is a closed container. Trade, immigration, invasion and intermarriage all played a role in creating the current buildup of Palestinian society. There were many additions to the people of the land over the millennia. However, the fact remains that there was never a process where Arab or Muslim conquerors completely replaced the native population living there, only added to them.\n\nSo, what does this all mean for Palestine?\nAbsolutely nothing.\nAlthough the argument has many ahistorical assumptions and claims, it is not these which form its greatest weakness. The whole argument is a trap. The basic implication of this line of argumentation is as follows:\nIf the Jewish people were in Palestine before the Arabs, then the land belongs to them. Therefore, the creation of Israel would be justified.\nFrom my experience, whenever this argument is used, the automatic response of Palestinians is to say that their ancestors were there first. These ancestors being the Canaanites. The idea that Palestinians are the descendants of only one particular group in a region with mass migrations and dozens of different empires and peoples is not only ahistorical, but this line of thought indirectly legitimizes the original argument they are fighting against.\nThis is because it implies that the only reason Israel’s creation is unjustified is because their Palestinian ancestors were there first. It implies that the problem with the argument lies in the details, not that the argument as a whole is absolute nonsense and shouldn’t even be entertained.\nThe ethnic cleansing, massacres and colonialism needed to establish Israel can never be justified, regardless of who was there first. It’s a moot point. Even if we follow the argument that Palestinians have only been there for 1300 years, does this suddenly legitimize the expulsion of hundreds of thousands? Of course not. There is no possible scenario where it is excusable to ethnically cleanse a people and colonize their lands. Human rights apply to people universally, regardless of whether they have lived in an area for a year or ten thousand years.\nIf we reject the “we were there first” argument, and not treat it as a legitimizing factor for Israel’s creation, then we can focus on the real history, without any ideological agendas. We could trace how our pasts intersected throughout the centuries. After all, there is indeed Jewish history in Palestine. This history forms a part of the Palestinian past and heritage, just like every other group, kingdom or empire that settled there does. We must stop viewing Palestinian and Jewish histories as competing, mutually exclusive entities, because for most of history they have not been.\nThese positions can be maintained while simultaneously rejecting Zionism and its colonialism. After all, this ideologically driven impulse to imagine our ancestors as some closed, well defined, unchanging homogenous group having exclusive ownership over lands corresponding to modern day borders has nothing to do with the actual history of the area, and everything to do with modern notions of ethnic nationalism and colonialism.\nLearn something new?\nConsider sharing the article, or support us by becoming a patron on Patreon!\n\nMasalha, Nur. Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History. Zed Books Ltd., 2018.\nEl-Haj, Nadia Abu. Facts on the ground: Archaeological practice and territorial self-fashioning in Israeli society. University of Chicago Press, 2008.\nHjelm, Ingrid, et al., eds. A New Critical Approach to the History of Palestine: Palestine History and Heritage Project 1. Routledge, 2019.\nBowersock, Glen W. “Palestine: ancient history and modern politics.” Journal of Palestine Studies 14.4, 1985: 49-57."
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