Hazem Jamjoum - History of Palestine

Speaker 1: Hazem Jamjoum is the editor of Al Majdal, the English-language quarterly magazine of the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights in Bethlehem, Palestine. Alternate Focus sat down with Hazem in his office in the West Bank, where he explained the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Hazem Jamjoum: And the idea was that by blowing up these villages and eliminating their physical presence, refugees would be less likely to return since their homes were no longer there. And it would make the landscape, it would sort of de-Palestinianize the landscape. Basically, it would no longer look like there was a village there. So you're erasing the memory of Palestinian presence on the land.

Speaker 1: Hazem Jamjoum is the editor of Al Majdal, the English-language quarterly magazine of the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights in Bethlehem, Palestine. Alternate Focus sat down with Hazem in his office in the West Bank, where he explained the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Hazem Jamjoum: Well, the roots of what we call the Nakba, which is the Arabic word for catastrophe, also called the 1948 war, and for the Zionist movement is called the War of Independence, actually go back to Europe in the late 19th century. And the idea was after centuries of antisemitism and actually sort of a peak or spike in antisemitism during that period, there were different responses within the Jewish community in Europe to how to deal with antisemitism. And so as we see actually with immigrant communities in Europe and North America today, one of the very common responses was what we could call assimilation, or sort of duck down and hope nobody notices that you're Jewish. Another response within the community was more sort of radical or even revolutionary, which saw antisemitism as just one side of the oppression brought about by these European regimes. And so they were calling for different things like the overthrow of these systems because they were capitalist and imperialist. And that anti-Semitism was just one side of these many different aspects of these oppressive regimes. In the late 19th century, there emerged a new response to anti-Semitism, which was very much informed by European culture at the time. specifically the idea that if you're European, you have some kind of right to go to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and colonize, and that the indigenous communities in these areas could be treated the same as the trees and the rocks and the other mineral resources. They didn't really have rights, so to speak. Another aspect was this new idea of the nation, that the humanity is divided into these types of people. So there's Germans, there's British, and for each one of these nations, there's some kind of right to a political entity, a state. And so it's this period that we see German unification under the idea of a state for the German people, et cetera. So the idea was that as a response to antisemitism, we can consider the Jewish people, and this is a unique case because it's a religious group before this idea comes out, that this religious group is a nation and deserves a state, and by having this state somewhere outside of Europe, that we can colonize elsewhere, this would be the response to anti-Semitism. This state would protect the Jewish people from anti-Semitism, and it would be a place where Jewish people could come together and make thrive. Also, interestingly, this idea of the Jewish state is invested with the different sort of utopic ideas and visions of different kinds of political trends within the Jewish community. So Jewish socialists in Europe thought of the state as the socialist workers' state, while fascists within the Jewish community saw this as, you know, the ethnically pure Jewish state that was in line with their political thinking. So there's a very wide spectrum of... This movement becomes called Zionism, and a very wide spectrum of Zionist thought, what the state would look like. And there were even ideas... I mean, the Palestinian community within Zionist thought is largely invisible. But as Jewish colonization begins and people begin to realize not only are there people in Palestine, but there are in fact, there's a thriving economy and a culture and it's part of a wider civilization in the region. some thoughts begin to emerge as to how to create, for example, the worker state of Jewish and non-Jewish Palestinian workers, or of one state for all of the people on the land. But the idea of the Jewish state remains, and remains the dominant idea. It wasn't always Palestine that was the main goal. Different trends within the Zionist movement had different ideas. It's notable that the religious Jewish establishment opposed Zionism overall because it was counter to the teachings or the scriptures. The idea of creating the Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah was considered a form of heresy by many rabbis. Zionists got over this by saying that, no, by creating the Jewish state, we could accelerate the coming of the Messiah. So to make kind of a long story short, the decision to come to Palestine is made at a conference at the end of the century that's held in Basel in Switzerland. And institutions are set up to facilitate this goal. The main institution is one called the Zionist Organization. In the early 50s, it's renamed the World Zionist Organization. And this is the main umbrella of the Zionist movement and continues to be until today. The act of bringing Jewish people from outside of Palestine to Palestine that responsibility is given to something called the Jewish Colonization Agency. After World War I, the word colonization is no longer in vogue, so the name of the organization is changed to the Jewish Agency. And this becomes a kind of de facto government of the Jewish community in Palestine in the 20s, 30s, and early 40s. And the leadership of the Jewish agency become the same people who become the prime minister and the ministers and the government and the leading officials of the Israeli state after it's established. The other main organization here is something called the Jewish National Fund. And it was given the responsibility and set up to acquire land in Palestine and neighboring areas. for the purpose of settling Jewish people and in a sense exclusively Jewish people. This organization also continues to exist today although after 1948 it changed its public image because what it began to do was to plant trees in parks and forests which are built on the land of Palestinian refugees. Most often you can actually see the destroyed villages as you walk through these parks and forests. And it set out in earnest. I mean, most of this required massive fundraising abroad. And this money was used both to bring Jewish people in through the working of the Jewish agency and to try to acquire land. Palestinians began to wake up to this in the 20s. What had happened is in World War I, the British had defeated the Ottoman Empire and its allies. And so Palestine came under British occupation or what was euphemistically called the mandate. So Palestine was sort of held in trust by the British. And what the British had done in 1917 was promised the Jewish people a homeland in the land of Palestine. This was the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917. And it's notable that Balfour himself was a prominent anti-Semite. He's on record in the British Parliament saying that we shouldn't have Jewish people in Britain. And this is sort of one of the early signs of the kind of common interests between the Zionist movement, which wanted Jewish people to leave Europe and go somewhere else, and many of the anti-Semitic currents in Europe, which wanted no Jewish people to be in Europe. Now, in the 20s and 30s, the British begin to really help the Zionist movement. How? By facilitating immigration, Jewish immigration into Palestine. In the 30s, when there's a Palestinian uprising, the British begin to arm and train Jewish police forces, what they call the settlement police. Jewish military units are trained specifically on how to punish a village, which involved home demolitions and sort of gathering people into central spaces and different kinds of collective punishment, and a host of other laws that gave preferential treatment to Jewish community members in the fields of work, in the fields of different kinds of services, facilitating the transfer of land from Palestinians to the Jewish National Fund and other Zionist organizations. And most notably, and this is probably one of the most important things, is that with the coming to power of Nazism and fascism in Europe, and eventually the Holocaust, there's a large, large number of Jewish people who just don't want to be in Europe anymore, refugees of the Holocaust. And what countries like the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia do is they close off their borders to Jewish refugees. Again, this is very much a sign of antisemitism in what we call the West. And on the ground meant that a Jewish refugee from the Holocaust had very few options on where to go. And one of the only options was Palestine. So even if they were not ideologically Zionist, then one of their only options was to actually come to Palestine. So there's a huge influx of Jewish refugees trying to come to Palestine. And in this sort of horrendous way, this is kind of a Zionist dream in the sense that there are now many more Jewish people who want to come to Palestine. And the only way to create a Jewish state in Palestine is if Jewish people actually come to Palestine. The main problem that the Zionist movement had, and they discover this when they start to come here and see that there's actually people and there's a society and there's an economy and there's a culture, is that to create a Jewish state, you need a Jewish majority, but the majority is Palestinian, is the indigenous people who are not Jewish. So beginning in the 20s and more earnest in 30s and the 40s, the leaders of the movement begin to think in earnest. Logistically, how do we go about creating a Jewish state? Before this, again, the Palestinians were invisible. Palestinians would voluntarily just leave because they were asked to. As it progressed, there were more ideas of how to sort of pay people to leave, entice them, create job opportunities outside of the country, sort of different proposals on how to get Palestinians to voluntarily leave. But also from very early on, in the 20s but definitely in the 30s, Zionist leaders begin to write down their thoughts in letters to one another, to other family members, etc. That the way to create the Jewish state would have to be by getting rid of this Palestinian majority, so that those remaining would be the Jewish majority. Now, there aren't very many ways to do this. One way would be to kill off as many Palestinians as possible, which would be genocide. Another way would be what was done in South Africa, where you had an indigenous majority, and what the colonizing minority did was said, okay, you can stay, but you don't exist politically. No vote, no presence in parliament, which means that you don't actually exist politically. You only exist as far as your exploitable labor exists. And option three is kick out the largest number of the indigenous community. which is what the Zionist leaders had begun contemplating. They used different words for it, transfer, population exchange, et cetera. But the idea is to entice, force as many Palestinians as possible to leave. And beginning in the 30s, the sort of military wing of the Zionist movement begins to put together the actual logistical military plan for how to do this. And this plan is revised three times. And the fourth version is Plan D, or in Hebrew, Plan Dalet. And really what the movement is waiting for is the opportunity to begin the implementation of what's been called the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, or forcing the largest number of Palestinians to leave the country. The opportunity comes when Britain, after World War II, overextended, unable to maintain the areas of its vast empire that it couldn't continue to hold on to cheaply, specifically India and Palestine, hands over responsibility of these two places to the United Nations, the newly formed United Nations, and says, it's your problem now. You deal with it. And what the United Nations does is it forms a committee and sends them over to discuss or to find out, to propose what the United Nations can do. And this committee comes to Palestine. The Palestinians and the Arabs boycott the committee because there's an understanding that it's looking into how to create a Jewish state on a land that Palestinians and Arabs had been living on for centuries and didn't see how it was that they were legitimately going to create a Jewish state. So there was a boycott and so the people that the committee only spoke to were from the Zionist movement for the most part. Ultimately, what the slight majority in the committee recommends is partition. The minority says that no, it should remain one state for both people. The minority decision is that there should be two states. It hands over about 56% of the land. to the Zionist movement and says, this will be the Jewish majority state. Jerusalem and Bethlehem get transformed into this special corpus separatum, an internationally operated zone. And then the 43% of the land, the remaining part, is to be the Arab majority state. Now, it's very important. This is called the UN Partition Resolution or UN General Assembly Resolution 181. And it's very important to note that even though all the Palestinians and Arabs opposed it, and there's a lot of questions about the legitimacy of this resolution to begin with, the resolution itself does not call for population exchange. In the case of India, it does specifically say that there should be population exchange, and there was the horrendous results that we saw with the deaths of thousands of Hindus and Muslims in the process of population exchange. In the case of Palestine, the resolution is actually quite clear that Palestinians and Jews have the option of where they want to live. They can choose to stay in the piece of land that they are in, and they can choose to move to the other one. And they have the right fully to citizenship. And if they're going to be given a property, they have the right to compensation for that property. And so even this fundamental aspect of what's called the Partition Plan or Resolution 181 ends up being violated by the Zionist movement. Now, when the UN issues this on November 29th, 1947, this resolution, this is essentially the spark of the 1948 war. Basically, the Zionist movement has now received international legitimacy to create its own state. Now, we should note that by this time, by 1947, the Zionist movement, with all of the refugees coming from Europe and with all of the work of the Jewish Colonization Agency until then, had only basically accumulated about 600,000 Jewish migrants into Palestine, while there were about 1.2 to 1.3 million non-Jewish Palestinians. So one third of the population, a far stretch from being a majority. Also, in terms of land, the work of the Jewish National Fund, and a lot of it has a big question mark on it in terms of buying property from absentee landlords who had acquired the land in pretty tricky ways, recruiting Palestinian collaborators to buy land because Palestinians, once they realized what was up, stopped selling land to the Jewish National Fund. but had only acquired about 6.7% of the land, a very tiny part of, I mean, not tiny, tiny, but a very small part of the land. So here, again, the problem was stated very clearly. 1947, we're only one third of the population, we only control 6.7% of the land. To create this Jewish state that we're dreaming of, we need this 600,000 to become the majority, and we need to take control of most of the land. And so the plan is put in place, Plan Dalit, which we talked about, the logistics of how to create this Jewish state begins. And the plan essentially calls for connecting existing Jewish settlements to one another, so clearing out Palestinian towns and villages between them, as well as clearing out Palestinian villages from borders with the neighboring Arab states in case of Arab attack. And this is what takes place. I mean, the plan officially begins its implementation in March of 1948. Between March and May of that year, about half of the Palestinian refugees are expelled. About 300,000 Palestinians become refugees. And on May 14th, Israel is declared an independent state. After this, Arab armies invade. Of course, there's also sort of the way that the official story is that these massive armies come and this little state of Israel defends itself and wins. And in the course of the war, people leave and become refugees. So that's the official story of why there are Palestinian refugees and why Palestinian refugees are the Arab state's fault for invading in the first place. So, of course, we should remember that half of these refugees were expelled before any Arab state invaded, quote-unquote. But also that most of these Arab states were either newly independent or still under some form of mandate system, as was the case with Syria and Lebanon. The Egyptian army sent in basically soldiers with very little training and very old weapons, many of which were dysfunctional. And they were... They didn't have much success militarily to the point that one of the battalions that almost stayed intact went back to Egypt with the express intent of getting rid of the monarchy in Egypt, and within four years had done so. And Jamal Abdel Nasser, who became the president of Egypt after the removal of the monarchy, fought in Palestine, in Fallujah. The only really trained and armed Arab army was the Jordanian army, which also had control over the Iraqi army since they were coming through Jordan. And the Zionist leadership had already sort of made a deal with the Jordanians that the Jordanians would get the West Bank and Israel could do what it pleased with the rest of the country. And I mean, Palestinian refugees, many of them knew this long before because they saw the behavior of the army the Jordanian army when it came in. But I mean, the research has been done pretty conclusively in the Israeli archives on this deal by an Israeli professor named Avi Schleim in a book called Collusion Across the Jordan. So it wasn't really a miraculous victory. It was a much better armed and trained army, much of which was trained in the fight against the Nazis in Europe. So trained by official European armies and by the British here in Palestine. So most of the way that the Palestinian villages and towns were dealt with in 1948 was that the army would come in and surround them for two or three sides, leaving one side open towards the closest border. So the idea wasn't to kill off as many Palestinians as possible, it was to force them to leave specifically to cross a border and become refugees. Usually, and there's a general pattern for how this took place, the army would come in and use artillery bombardment to force as many people to leave before the ground troops would go in. Later in 1948, the Israeli military acquired an air force and the villages that were attacked after this experienced aerial bombardment as well. After this, the village would be occupied physically by ground troops. Those who remained would be rounded up in a central area. The men would be separated from the women and children. The women and children would be forced to flee, often with guns blaring behind them. The men The Jewish National Fund had kept files on each Palestinian town and village, which had the name of the village, the types of crops grown, the size of its land, but also the names of Palestinian collaborators who'd worked with the Jewish National Fund, as well as Palestinians who'd been involved with the resistance. And so they would often use these collaborators to kind of pick out those who were involved in the resistance. They would be executed. And then those men who remained would either be put into prison camps, into labor camps, or forced to leave as well. So this is the general pattern, but every village has its own unique story as well. So some villages hold out for three months, four months, five months, facing a series of assaults, military assaults. Other villages, the military bombardment was enough to make them so afraid for their lives that they left. The use of massacres by the Zionist forces was also very effective. I mean, they committed these massacres, but also ensured that news of these massacres would travel. So one of the most famous of these is the Der Yaseen massacre in April of 1948. And I mean, the cases of rape and looting and murder and then parading the bodies in the streets of Jerusalem made it so that news of this massacre traveled very, very quickly and frightened people to the point where they were much more likely to leave their village. It's near Jerusalem, Der Yassin, which is also near Bethlehem. So many of the refugees here in this area who are from the villages and towns close to Bethlehem and Jerusalem are ones where it's very common in sort of Nakba survivor stories to hear that Der Yassin was one of the main reasons that they left. News of Der Yassin made them, as soon as they heard that the Zionist forces were coming, they left. for fear that what happened at Deir Yassin would happen to them. A small military units would also come after the village or town was occupied and the army had moved on. A small military unit would come in responsible for looting anything valuable in the homes and then just blowing up the houses. And the idea was that by blowing up these villages and eliminating their physical presence, Refugees would be less likely to return since their homes were no longer there. And it would make the landscape, it would sort of de-Palestinianize the landscape. Basically, it would no longer look like there was a village there. So you're erasing the memory of Palestinian presence on the land. By the end of the Nakba, around 13,000 Palestinians had been killed. Over 530 towns and villages had been depopulated and destroyed. and over 750,000 Palestinians had become refugees. Some Palestinians who were displaced from their towns and villages didn't cross a border and sort of remained in the state but living somewhere else. These are what we would call internally displaced people. Today there's about 300,000 Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel who continue to be internally displaced. They live in the state, they have citizenship in the state, but their lands in the village have been confiscated and they're not allowed to go back to their village and live there. Many of these villages, again, have been transformed into Jewish National Fund parks and forests. In other cases, it's land that's now part of an Israeli kibbutz or moshav or city or town. In the cities, Palestinians who were able to remain in the cities, and this is a very tiny minority, were most often concentrated into one neighborhood in the city. So in Jerusalem, it was Baqa neighborhood. In Jaffa, it was Ajami neighborhood. And these cities were sealed off physically, and between 1948 and 1966, Israel governed Palestinians with a separate set of laws than it governed its Jewish citizens. The citizens, Palestinians who remained and became citizens, were governed under what we call military laws, to an extension of the emergency laws that the British had put in place. One of the defining aspects of these laws was that it controlled mobility into and out of Palestinian villages and those neighborhoods that Palestinians were confined to during these years from 48 to 66. So you needed written permission from the military commander of your sort of reservation or of your area to be able to leave or come back in. There's only one law in the Jewish law books that expressly discriminates between Jewish and non-Jewish, which is the 1950 Law of Return. It says anyone who is Jewish can come to or come back to the land of Israel and become a full citizen. The way that discrimination works in Israel is usually laws work in combination or in reference to another law, where, for example, you need to... be someone who would qualify for the law of return in order to get certain privileges. So it doesn't say you need to be Jewish, but it indirectly says that. Or the state will sort of devolve part of its sovereignty to an organization or institution that does discriminate, but it's not in the law book. So for example, responsibility over most of the land in the part of Palestine that was taken in 1948, or Israel, is directly or indirectly under the control of the Jewish National Fund. 16% of the land is directly under the control of the Jewish National Fund. And most of the rest, about 78%, is under the control of something called the Israeli Lands Administration, which the Jewish National Fund appoints around half of its board members. So this is the indirect part. So that's 93% approximately of the land of Israel, which is under sort of the Jewish National Fund decides. And again, in its own constitution, the Jewish National Fund's purpose is exclusively Jewish settlement, Jewish colonization. Now in these cities, and this is one of the big ironies of the many, of the thousands of ironies in this land, Jewish immigrants coming to these cities saw a neighborhood which was fenced off, people needed military permission to come in and out, and only had one word for it, which is ghetto. And so if you go to Jaffa or Lyd or Ramleh, These neighborhoods are still referred to as the ghetto, even by the Palestinian residents, many of whom still believe until today that the word ghetto is the Hebrew word for Palestinian neighborhood. So this is specifically the case in Lyd and Ramleh. So between 48 and 66, the Israeli government confiscated thousands of dunams or acres of what remained in Palestinian hands. And the way that this would work is, for example, the laws would work in combination. Like I said, there's about 22 laws, military laws. These were the kind of, the equivalent of our constitution for Palestinian citizens of Israel during this period. So one law would enable the military to come into an area and declare it a closed military area, which means no Palestinians can be here. And so the Palestinians would be kicked out. Another law would say that if a land is left uncultivated for three years, it becomes property of the state. So you'd be kicked out of your land because it's been transformed into a military area. Three years later, you'd be summoned to a court or you'd receive a piece of paper that says your land's been confiscated or is now property of the state because it's been uncultivated for over three years. And if you go to challenge it and say, well, your military is the one that kicked me out, the response will be, well, you can take that up with the military. We're just applying the law here. So this is how these thousands of acres were taken from Palestinians during this period. Now, a lot of people talk about the situation in Palestine as being very complicated and complex and hard to understand. In my view, it isn't that hard to understand. There is complexity if you want to look at the details of Israeli laws and how this works and how laws work in combination with one another. But overall, if you want to understand what's happening here, it can be summarized in one line. The main purpose of the Zionist movement was and continues to be maximum land under exclusive Jewish control, minimum Palestinians on that land. If you understand this, you understand what happened in 1948, you understand the purpose of the military regime between 1948 and 1966, you understand what happened in the 1967 war and since in the West Bank and Gaza, and continues to happen every day today. I'm going to talk a little bit about the Negev, just because it's, you know, some people have called, Salman Abbasidda calls it the forgotten half of Palestine. And in many ways, he's right, because people generally don't know what's happening in the south of Palestine. The Naqab, or Negev as it's known in Hebrew, is the south of Palestine. It's largely a desert area, and the Palestinians who inhabit it are what anthropologists call Bedouin, and they themselves call themselves Bedouin. And it's a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle where people travel often within a certain area, but a large area. And life depends on pasture, sort of raising sheep and goats, as well as agriculture when there's enough water or there's good rainfall. And in some cases, trade, sort of being the merchants between one area and another. So the Bedouin of Palestine, or Palestinian Bedouin, in 1948, the vast majority of them were expelled. So out of the 90 to 110,000 Bedouin Palestinians before 1948, about 10,000 only remained. The rest were forced to leave. And when I say forced to leave, just because some people also say that, well, people left of their own volition, or in times of war, people leave. The fact of the matter is that even if they weren't forced to leave at gunpoint, which many people were, but many people just left, like I said, news of massacres or because there was a war happening, What Israel did after its establishment was ensure that anybody who did leave wasn't able to come back. They were called infiltrators, anyone who tried to come back. And the orders of border patrols were to arrest or shoot on sight anyone who was trying to come back. And many people died, actually, because they were shot at as infiltrators. And some people did manage to come back in. Also, I should note that all of the land of the refugees and the displaced people was confiscated by the state of Israel, which passed a law called the Absentee Property Law in 1950. And all of this land, which is over 80% of what Israel considers its own state land now, and Jewish National Fund controlled land, is absentee property. For those people who are internally displaced, the Palestinians whose villages or towns were destroyed, but they managed to stay within the state and they're citizens of the state, their property is absentee property. It's been taken by the state. But since they're not really absentees, they're still there. Israeli law has essentially created a new... a new status, their present absentees, sort of apparently a contradiction, but they're present physically in the state, but they're absentees as far as their property is concerned. Now, in the case of the Negev, or the Naqab, the vast majority, or all Bedouin, Palestinians who remained, were concentrated in the area around Be'er Sheva, which was called the area of the fence. Even though most of it didn't have a physical fence surrounding it, you needed military permission to be able to leave this area or to enter it. And in 1965, what Israel did was it passed a law called the Planning Law, which essentially outlines, it's a big, massive law, maybe one of the largest laws in the world, which essentially lists all of the towns, villages, cities of the Israeli state. And It doesn't list many of the Palestinian villages. 46 villages in the Naqab are not listed. And in the Galilee also, several villages are not listed. These become known as the unrecognized villages. And these unrecognized villages, because they're not recognized, they don't appear on any state map. But they also receive no municipal services. So no electricity, no water, no roads, no sewage, no waste collection, largely no schools, and any other essential services that you can think of. Also, because they're not recognized as resident villages, places where people live, the houses that they live in are subject to demolition. And so those houses have been, there's been an ongoing process since 65 until today of destroying those houses. And the fact that people don't know about it is why it's the forgotten half of Palestine, essentially. In the late 60s, what Israel decided to do, and this was because these Bedouin Palestinians were a form of continuity between Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank, was to further remove them from these unrecognized villages. And the plan was to recognize some of the villages and force everyone into them. They're actually called concentration towns. So these concentration towns, there were seven towns, they became towns, that were recognized and became concentration towns. And Israeli policy since then has been trying to cram Palestinians from the unrecognized villages into the concentration towns, which are the poorest towns by far, the poorest towns in Israel. So there's been an acceleration of house demolition and policies that aim to displace Palestinian Bedouin from the unrecognized villages into the concentration towns. Some of these policies, I mean, many of these policies hit at the economic life of Bedouin Palestinians, which involves laws that severely restrict their ability to raise their flocks, their goats. I mean, there's a law specifically dealing with the black goat, and black goats, like camels, are kind of an indigenous species to the desert. But this law says that they're a hazard to the environment. And so black goats being a hazard to the environment, any stray black goat becomes property of the state. And the state can kill it, can do whatever pleases with it. In the late 70s, Ariel Sharon, who was specifically interested in the case of Palestinian Bedouin, and the Israeli policy officially calls these things Judaization. Sort of kicking out Palestinians and making an area predominantly Jewish is what they call Judaization. So the Judaization of the Negev was one of the kind of pet projects of Ariel Sharon. In the late 70s, he becomes the Minister of Agriculture and forms a military unit that answers to the Ministry of Agriculture. They were called Green Patrols. And these Green Patrols would drive around and find any Palestinian who was sort of grazing his goats. And they would drive down with their jeeps and sort of honk the horns and shoot their guns in the air. And the goats would disperse. And so then it was a race between the shepherd and the Green Patrol as to who could go and collect the goats faster. In some cases, they would just shoot the goats. And actually, during the Nakba and until today, the process of essentially killing the goats themselves and the sheep and the camels and everything else that are raised by Bedouin Palestinians has been a mainstay of the ongoing displacement, forced displacement of Bedouin Palestinians. Whether through actually using poison, so for example, between 2002 and 2004, The military would fly planes that would spray Roundup herbicide, poisonous herbicide, definitely poisonous to animals and humans. And on the package, I think it says you cannot aerially spray this because it's too dangerous. They would spray from the air, and many people got very, very sick. Some people died. There was high rates of miscarriages, but also many goats died. Thousands of goats died. Also restricting access to water and to pastures, especially on drought years, is one way that the Israeli government has effectively also killed off many of these flocks, the shepherds. So it's very much an ongoing case of, a living case of the ongoing Nakba. But of course, everywhere in Palestine you see the ongoing Nakba. So until today, Palestinian citizens of Israel in the cities of Jaffa, Lyd, Abqa, and definitely in Jerusalem, are facing an accelerated program of Judaization. In Jaffa, those who remained in the Ajami neighborhood, the ghetto, today about 500 houses are subject to eviction and demolition. So that's thousands of people, 500 families that are gonna be kicked out of their homes. Specifically to destroy the home, I mean, in all of these cases in the cities, it's called development. Jewish development or Zionist development. And development essentially means it's gentrification. The idea is to tear down these houses and build expensive condominiums and shopping malls, most often for Jewish people living abroad to come here for the summer or for the winter as they see fit. So it's this dual process of gentrification and Judaization. So some people are going to make a lot of money selling these condos, and the Zionist ideologues are going to be very happy because Jaffa has many or far fewer Palestinians in it. In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as the Golan Heights from Syria and Sinai from Egypt. Essentially this formed a bit of a problem for the Israelis in the sense that given the underlying maxim of the Zionist movement, maximum land under exclusive Jewish control and minimum Palestinians on it, there were many more Palestinians now under Israeli control. Now what happened in 1967 was Israel forcibly expelled another 450,000 Palestinians. Half of them were refugees from 1948, being displaced for the second time. So they needed a plan on how to deal with this much larger number of Palestinians under their control. And the solution sort of came from a military officer and minister by the name of Yigal Alon. And this Alon plan, basically calls for, first of all, completely annexing the area, this area called the Latrun area, between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. where there's three Palestinian villages, Amwas, Yalu, and Beit Nuba. And these villages, 10,000 residents of these villages are immediately expelled and the villages are flattened. Today on the site, there's a Jewish National Fund park funded by the Canadian arm of the Jewish National Fund. It's called Canada Park. and visitors can come and picnic on the ruins of the village. And what remains of the ruins of the village, there's little signs that talk about how this is an ancient bath or an ancient well, but nothing, of course. And this is the case throughout 48 Palestine or Israel, where any kind of historical plaque or official history will completely erase and not mention any Palestinian presence. If Palestinians are mentioned, they're mentioned as kind of barbarians. So you'll see in Yaffa, for example, plaques that talk about the history of Yaffa over thousands of years. But the only time that Arabs and Palestinians are mentioned is to say that in the 20s or 30s, they attacked the Jewish community. There was a savage attack. So this is the case in Canada Park as well. The two central parts of the Elan plan are, one, to split the West Bank into two parts, a northern part and a southern part, with Jerusalem as the divider, the idea being that Jerusalem would become completely under Israeli control and then would be continued down to the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley using perhaps the most important Israeli settlement in the West Bank, which is called Ma'ali Adumim. And then the second crucial part of the Erlon plan is to eliminate any Palestinian presence on the border with Jordan, specifically the Jordan Valley, so the area of the West Bank north of the Dead Sea, and where it's the lowest point in the world, altitude-wise. And it's also one of the most fertile areas in Palestine. There's a lot of water, groundwater and surface water, wells and the river. And because it's warm all year round, you can grow two or three crops in a year. So there were a lot of people living there. Only about 10,000 people remained. This includes the city of Jericho, which is the oldest city in the world, oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. It was established something like 9,000 B.C. So the Jordan Valley and Jerusalem are the initial sites of what we can call the ongoing Nakba in the West Bank. In Jerusalem, many residents, of course, are forced to leave, are expelled throughout the West Bank and to Jordan. And since then, Jerusalem has been the site of heavy Judaization. Today, the Israeli, the municipality, the Jerusalem, Israeli-controlled Jerusalem municipality, basically its official policy is that no more than 30% of the city's residents can be Palestinian. This is what they call Local Outline Plan 2000 or something like this, which is essentially the master plan for the city. The municipality and other organizations that are part of the Israeli state and the Zionist movement heavily fund Jewish settlement in the city, particularly in the Palestinian neighborhoods. and the old city. And licensing for Palestinian homes, even if you want to build an extra floor on top of your existing house, are virtually impossible to get. People's homes are destroyed pretty consistently under the pretext that they're not licensed. And more recently, they're using the excuse that, to the effect that the destruction of your home will serve the purpose of the Jewish state. So will serve the purpose of Judaizing the city. So more explicit even on this front. Palestinian religious and cultural life in Jerusalem is heavily restricted. Over the past year, people trying to commemorate the Nakba or this initiative to nominate Jerusalem as the Arab cultural capital for 2009. Most of these activities have faced police repression, arresting the organizers and shutting down the events. And that's just this year. Access to the religious holy sites, like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Aqsa Mosque, the noble sanctuary, et cetera, is heavily restricted. First of all, Palestinians in the West Bank outside of Jerusalem are not allowed into Jerusalem without military permit. And for the important prayers, they just don't give permits to anyone below the age of 45, sometimes 55. In the Jordan Valley, like I said, most of the residents were expelled with only about 10,000 people remaining. Since then, Israel has reclassified the area largely as military zones, so closed military areas. Basically, the emergency laws, military laws that were implemented against Palestinians in the 48 areas were then implemented against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. So it's the same, it's military order 125 that declares an area a closed military zone in 48 areas in Israel and also here. So most of these areas in the Jordan Valley were declared closed military areas, but there's other sort of more seemingly benign ways of displacing people. Some areas are declared natural reserves, you know, for animals or for trees, and the Palestinian residents have to leave these areas. So Palestinian presence in the Jordan Valley is very, I mean, has been under ongoing forced displacement over the past 40 years, but today there's a push to essentially eliminate Palestinian presence outside of five villages in the Jordan Valley and the city of Jericho, or their towns actually, zoned as Area B under the Oslo Agreements. So through the 70s and 80s basically, and particularly beginning in the late 70s, there's a big push to, we can call this attitude, why carve up the West Bank into two reservations when we can cut it up into more? And this is again, this is Ariel Sharon's main project, especially beginning in the late 70s. The idea being, One, we can give a green light to the more religiously motivated Zionists who see the West Bank, which they call Judea and Samaria, as the site of the old kingdom of David and Solomon and will want to go and settle there. And so this green light is given. The idea being that civilians can come in and set up homes or even like tents or caravans, anywhere, and then the army would be obligated to go and protect them. And so through the 70s, 80s, and then definitely in the 90s, there's a big explosion of these kinds of activities. And the idea being that, and always, invariably, settlements are on hilltops. So they always take the most strategic part of the land, and then this divides Palestinian communities from one another. And then as these settlements expand, Palestinian farmland, and in some cases the villages themselves, become the land that the settlement wants, and the people are displaced as a result. Now, so this is called the Sharon Plan, actually, in the late 70s, and is the kind of the blueprint for what became the Oslo Accords. The main obstacle for Sharon, and for any Israeli regime, to implement this vision of Palestinians sort of encircled within their communities, where the rest of the land is taken control of by the Israeli government. Again, under the idea, maximum land under exclusive Jewish control, minimum Palestinians on it. So the idea would be that if we can't kick all the Palestinians out, those who remain can be encircled. This is what's happening in the Negev, this is what's happening in the Galilee and in the Triangle, and definitely in the West Bank. Gaza has been encircled since the mid-90s, completely. And for the past two years, this encirclement has meant a siege. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out. Unless, you know, they can dig a tunnel, which is what they've done with the border with Egypt. But other than that, it's a pretty tight siege, which has cost thousands of lives, but also made life hell, in addition to the constant military bombardment and military assaults that take place. all under the pretext of there's some homemade rockets that are fired into Sderot, into nearby Israeli areas. I mean, the refugees of Gaza in particular, for the most part, are no more than 20 kilometers away from their original lands. So Gaza is 1.5 million people. 1.1 million people in Gaza are refugees. So over two-thirds of people in Gaza are refugees. The issue of Gaza, in addition to being an issue of military occupation and humanitarian crisis, is primarily a refugee issue. Gaza would not be a problem if the refugees were allowed to go back to their homes. In the case of the West Bank, the main, and this also applies to Gaza, the main issue facing the Israeli regime was in order, if we're going to encircle and segregate Palestinians into these small pockets that Israel controls the surroundings, there needs to be a Palestinian partner who controls the daily lives of Palestinians and polices inside these areas so that they don't form any threat to the Israeli population. state or Israeli security outside. So in the late 70s, the Israeli government initiates a plan to form something called village leagues, which is this kind of Palestinian partner that's essentially a proxy for the Israeli government. This is not a new thing. In North America, for example, indigenous native communities are governed by their tribal councils. In Canada, they're called band councils. And these are very tightly controlled, at least their budgets are, from Washington or from Ottawa. In Palestine, the village leagues also, the main reason for their failure was that the Palestine Liberation Organization which the campaign against it and I mean the main one of the central mottos of the Palestine Liberation Organization is that the PLO is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and so people didn't fall for the village leagues this was the lesson for Israel that either we have to eliminate the PLO in order to sort of implement this idea of the encircled Palestinian communities governed by loyal, obedient Palestinians. Or we need to get the PLO itself to play this role for us. And the result was the combination. I mean, through the series of defeats in the 80s, the leadership or what remained of the leadership of the PLO accepted the Oslo Agreements. And the Oslo Agreements are, at their core, the blueprint for the implementation of this kind of system, this Bantustan apartheid system in the West Bank. Just in Bethlehem, four or five nights a week, the army comes in to arrest someone. And if they're not coming in to Dheesha, they're coming in to Aida camp. So what the Oslo Agreement does is it transforms what remains of the leadership of the PLO into something called the Palestinian Authority. And this Palestinian Authority essentially And I mean, some people accuse the PLO leadership of treason and this and that for this. Looking at the time that this agreement was signed, there were very few options open to the PLO. It was either essentially cease to exist altogether. And I mean, some people will say, well, you should have just done that. Or try to find some kind of solution, some kind of settlement. The idea being like live to fight another day. But what they knowingly or unknowingly, and I think like they knew what they were signing on to, but didn't know how far it would go. and just how tightly Israel intended to squeeze them. Was they agreed to a solution, or not solution, they agreed to this arrangement whereby they would, the Palestinian Authority would take control and they would essentially become a municipality. They would take municipal control over certain Palestinian areas, particularly the high density areas, so the cities and the big towns. And Israel would take control over the rest. And then the agreement say that in the future, we'll start transferring some of the rest of the West Bank and Gaza over, if you're good, if you're obedient. And obedient and good means officially what's called clamping down on terrorism. On the ground, it means that any Palestinian activism, it becomes the responsibility of this Palestinian liberation movement leadership to clamp down on liberation movement activities. Armed, unarmed, doesn't matter. As long as there are activists in the society, and the society is trying to protect itself against the ongoing Israeli military assaults, and to try to reclaim any of the land that was taken, has been taken by the occupation and the apartheid regime, then it becomes the Palestinian Authority's responsibility. And so the motto of Israel during the 90s and everyone who was watching news during this period remembers, Yasser Arafat and the PA are not doing enough to clamp down on terrorism. We'd hear this almost every day in the news. And it would be the excuse, the cover, for Israel just continuing with the implementation of the maximum land under Jewish control, minimum Palestinians on the land. The way that that looked in the West Bank was an explosion of settlement activity. The number of settlers in the 90s doubled after the signing of the Oslo Agreements, even though the Oslo Agreement talked about the process of removing settlements, et cetera. In addition to the explosion of the settlement activity, again, hundreds if not thousands of acres of Palestinian land are confiscated during this period outside of these area A, the Palestinian high density population centers, the cities and the towns. And then mobility begins to be restricted. Basically, Israel establishes hundreds of checkpoints throughout the West Bank and Gaza to control movement in and out of Palestinian cities, the Area A areas. And it's all dependent on Palestinian ID cards. The Palestinian Authority also becomes responsible to issue Palestinian ID cards, the main purpose of which is for use at Israeli military checkpoints. So again, intentionally or unintentionally, the Palestinian Authority becomes this administrative mediator for the Israeli apartheid system, particularly the mobility restriction regime and the area of security. So what the Oslo Agreements also sort of include is an agreement that Israel can build these things called bypass roads, which aren't what they sound like, you know, dirt roads that are tiny. They're these massive multi-lane roads with what they called sanitary areas on both sides, and then barbed wire fence in many cases, sort of with an electric charge on both sides. And so these roads connect the settlements to one another and connect the settlements to the rest of the country. And if you look at them on a map, you see that the combination of the settlements, these settler roads or bypass roads, which Palestinians, of course, have no access to, and because of the fences, you can't even cross the street, so it's essentially a border, in addition to the military bases and the military roads, again, which Palestinians can't access, carve up the entirety of the West Bank into little islands. Some of them big islands, some of them little islands. All of it relative, of course. And all of this is taking place on less than 20% of historic Palestine. So the negotiation process becomes, which part of this 20% is Israel willing to hand over to the Palestinians? And this still continues to be what the negotiation, the peace process, so-called, is essentially negotiating over this 19, 20% of historic Palestine. So, you know, in 2000 at the Camp David Accords, where Barak made his so-called most generous offer ever of 97%, this was 97% of the 20%. And as Israeli professor Jeff Halper puts it, in a prison, the prisoners control 97% of the prison. It's the 3% of the walls and the barbed wire and the watchtowers that makes it a prison. And this was exactly what the West Bank had turned into. Of course, it's much more than 3% that the Israelis control, and it continues to grow. Actually, around half of the land of the West Bank is essentially controlled by the settlements and the different infrastructure. And then 2002, 2003 is the kind of everything is made concrete, literally, with the construction of Israel's separation wall, also called the apartheid wall and the confiscation wall. and the protective or preventative wall. The main excuse is that it'll keep suicide bombers out of Israeli cities and protect Jewish civilians. In reality, what it does is it just creates a wall around Palestinian areas with watchtowers. So there's a physical transformation of what remains of Palestine, both in Gaza and the West Bank, into prisons, into open air prisons. And the wall is still being constructed and phase three of the wall is even aims to completely confiscate what remains of the Jordan Valley and what they call the eastern border. It's most severe or you can see it most severely in Jerusalem and Qalqilya and sort of northern West Bank and in Jerusalem, but it affects all of the eastern side of sort of the western side of the West Bank as well. But the walls is not all just concrete wall. Much of it is, I mean, it's the wall and its regime. So it's the wall and the settlements and the checkpoints and the fences and the roads and the military bases. This is what really what the wall is. It's the wall and its regime that has transformed Palestinian areas into open air prisons. And the process of confiscating the land of and forcibly displacing the Palestinians outside of the wall those who remain in these other areas is ongoing and accelerating. So every day there is home demolitions, land confiscations, settlement expansion, settlers harassing Palestinians, which is part of what makes people think that it'll be safer to leave where they are and go somewhere else. And the idea is to, like with the Negev, the Naqab, to concentrate all of the Palestinians of the West Bank into just the cities and to take control of the rest. and it's very evident it's hard to miss if you know what you're looking at uh... but israel tries to make it look beautiful for people who don't know so if you don't know and you come to the country and you hear about how the heroic jewish people after centuries of anti-semitism and the holocaust came and created a thriving economy and look how beautiful it is uh... of course they don't show you the west bank even on the israeli side of the wall it's often made to look pretty, or it's hidden behind a sand dune or a hill. So you can come here and not see this. But if you come to the West Bank, or if you know what it is that you're looking at, when you see a Palestinian house in neighborhood in Jaffa, or in Lid, or in Ramleh, or when you see the police stations in the Palestinian schools, then it's hard to miss. So for anyone who opens their eyes just enough, they'll see what's really happening here. Now, I started by talking about Zionism. The main issue continues to be Zionism. The idea, the racist, discriminatory idea, applied anywhere, this would be a racist and discriminatory idea. But it's particularly irritating here in the sense that this piece of land has been continuously inhabited maybe longer than most others in the world. And like I said, Jericho is the oldest city in the world, continuously inhabited. And over these 11, 12,000 years of people living here in cities and in towns, I mean, so many people have come through as conquerors, as guests, as refugees, as pilgrims. And so even if you look at our faces as Palestinians, you'll see the wide spectrum from white and blonde to black and dark haired, right? And sometimes two brothers or sisters, one will be much lighter, will be white and blonde and the other will be black and dark haired. And this is because the Palestinian identity, as a result, Palestinian identity itself is not a racial identity or an ethnic identity. And the idea that one group can come and say that this is just going to be exclusively ours to the exclusion of everybody else is ridiculous, it's a big crime. Like I said, it would be a crime anywhere for one group to come and say, And especially if they don't even live there, for them to come from outside and say, you, the indigenous people of the land, have no right to this land. It's a crime in North America. And it's a crime in South America. It's a crime in South Africa and in Australia. And it's an ongoing, brutal crime here. Maybe what makes it a little bit different here than in some of these other cases is that the actual physical, brutal, daily violence continues. So we have the same problems as native communities in North America and Australia and Latin America. of poverty, of ongoing land confiscation, of misery, but add to this F-16s and tanks, daily arrests, 11,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails, and just the sheer violence and brutality of daily life under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. And in Gaza, of course, perhaps one of the worst places to be right now in the world, given that there's no access to medicine, food, water, petrol. You can't move. Nobody can come from outside. You can't go outside, with very tiny exceptions, where it's all governed by the Israeli military and what it allows to happen. So this is why we consider, you know, we called what happened in 1948 the Nakba or the catastrophe, but it wasn't a singular event that came and ended. The refugees are still refugees. Today, there's around 7 million Palestinian refugees, many of whom languishing in refugee camps still with high population density, high disease rates, and rampant poverty and vulnerability. In the case of Iraq, Palestinian refugees who were considered a little bit better off than Palestinian refugees elsewhere after the US occupation of Iraq were essentially made vulnerable to, I mean, thousands have been kidnapped, disappeared, tortured, killed, and those who weren't essentially tried to run, tried to go and find safety elsewhere. Jordan and Syria wouldn't let them in, and so the thousands of Palestinian refugees ended up on these border camps. between on the borders of Jordan and Iraq and on the borders of Syria and Iraq. And now we're just waiting for a country to say, okay, we'll take in five families, we'll take in 20 families, we'll take in 30 families. In the case of Lebanon, Palestinians still are not, refugees are still not allowed to work in over 70 jobs. And if you can't find work, then why go to school? The situation in the camps is really horrible, and particularly because of the vulnerability. And this was highlighted last year in 2007 when, you know, a small band of non-Palestinian, largely non-Palestinian armed militants came and used the camp, the northern camp of Nahar al-Bared as their base of operations. And the Lebanese army, partly also to show that it still had some muscle after it was Hezbollah that repelled the Israeli attack, went in and just destroyed the entire camp. It flattened it. I saw a picture of Nahar al-Barith, and I honestly thought it was an ashtray. And it took me a while to figure out that these were actually just the rubble of the houses. Right? And I mean, refugee camps for the past 60 years have been subject to this. In 1970, the Jordanian military wanted to essentially kick out the PLO and focused its military might on the Palestinian refugee civilians in the refugee camps, often by besieging them and bombarding them with artillery. In the case of Lebanon, throughout the civil war, particularly after the PLO left and the fighters weren't able to defend the camps anymore, right after there was the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, but even before that, the Syrians and the fascist parties within Lebanon had besieged and destroyed the camps of Tal al-Zaatar, of Jisr al-Basha, and then after this, allies of various regimes, through the war of the camps, had besieged Sabra and Shatila again, Rashidiyya camp, Burj al-Barajni camp, In the West Bank and Gaza, of course, the refugee camps have been particularly hard hit in terms of the just brutal violence. You know, most recent examples are, of course, in Gaza, where the camps are continually under military assault. But also in the West Bank, you know, we remember Jenin refugee camp, what happened there under Operation, quote unquote, Defensive Shield when the army came in. with the bombs and the bullets but also with the bulldozers and basically took out the central neighborhood in the refugee camp and killed tens of people, massacred them. The bullet holes in the school at Aida camp are still there for you to see. In some places things have been renovated and taken off but And every night, and this is no exaggeration, every night, one of the refugee camps in the West Bank, if not more, experiences a military invasion for the purpose of extracting a prisoner, to basically arrest someone or more. Just in Bethlehem, four or five nights a week, the army comes in to arrest someone. And if they're not coming into Dheesha, they're coming into Aida camp. and the same is with the refugee camps in Nablus and around Ramallah. So in addition to all of the other things that we've talked about, displacement and refugees and economic conditions and squeezing us into areas that are open-air prisons, there's just the sheer fact of a brutal military occupation. You know, it's soldiers who run the West Bank. And the law here is not the law passed by a parliament. An international law has, you know, they can criticize, they can say that we condemn the UN issues these kinds of reports regularly because it's UN workers who actually come under attack sometimes in the West Bank and in Gaza. The UN doesn't look at what happens in 48 Palestine in Israel, right? So there's very little coming out from the international community on what's happening in the Negev or in the Palestinian cities or in the Galilee. But in the West Bank and Gaza, you know, there's reports that come out. The UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories just came out. This committee isn't allowed to come into Palestine. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory is not allowed in. to look at what's happening. After the Jenin refugee camp, the UN wasn't able to send a committee, a fact-finding mission, because Israel wouldn't let them in. But what does come out is just ignored. There's an International Court of Justice opinion. This is like the highest court in the world, supposedly, that says, yes, the wall and its associated regime are illegal. They're a war crime and a crime against humanity. And Israel says, all right, so? Right? And this is Israel's response to these things. OK, so? Or no, it's not. Come do something about it. And the reason that Israel is able to do all of this continually is because the international community, all right, these reports and these condemnations come out, but they're not willing to do anything about it. On the contrary, the European Union just upgraded its trade relationship with Israel. The United States continually upgrades its support for Israel. Barack Obama just hired one of the most ardent Zionists in the United States as the White House Chief of Staff. So the relations with Israel and the support for Israel only increases on the material level. Money, weapons, diplomatic support, visits, celebrations. Every leader in Europe and North America came and celebrated the 60th birthday of Israel. George Bush spoke in the Knesset to sing happy birthday for Israel. Meanwhile, that same week, people were being arrested and killed in Gaza and in the West Bank, and houses were being destroyed in the Negev and in the West Bank and in Gaza. So this is what allows Israel to continue to do this. I mean, most of these missiles and bombs and bullets are made in the U.S. and shipped here. So the bullets in the people who are killed here are made in the USA, as are the F-16s and the bombs dropped by them, etc., All right, as far as I understand it, the official Israeli line after 1948 was, one, we were attacked by Arab armies and there was a war and we won. And in the course of a war, people get frightened and flee. Two, Arab leaders issued radio broadcasts to Palestinians telling them to leave. Now, on both of these counts, there's some huge historical flaw. First of all, let's start with the radio broadcasts. Basically, all the radio broadcasts were archived by the British, and the archives are still there for anyone to go and look at, and there's not one Arab radio broadcast telling people to leave. In fact, later on in the war, there's tens of radio broadcasts telling people to stay because these Arab regimes didn't want any more Palestinian refugees flooding in. Two, the idea of the, you know, at first the Arab armies invaded, and then we, Israel, defended ourselves, and in the course of the war, people left. It's just historically completely inaccurate, right? Arab armies did not invade until May 15th. And everything before that is Israeli military forces implementing Plan Dalet. And this is all in the Israeli military archive. And for the most part, it's Israeli historians who have brought out these documents, some of them Zionists. Benny Morris, who has written one of the main textbooks on this, his position is our big mistake was we didn't kick out all of the Palestinians in 1948. So he's no pro-Palestinian. But in his research, he says, no, the military talks about each village that we destroyed and we kicked the people out. Right? And this is before the establishment of the state, and then even more so after the establishment of the state, right? Like, it didn't require massive military prowess to defeat the Arab armies of the time, when you've already sort of neutralized the Jordanian and Iraqi armies, which are the only ones that are an army to speak of at the time, through an agreement. So most of the military efforts were still, were continued to be, I mean, after Plan Dalit had been implemented and the communities were connected and the borders were cleared out of the Palestinian community, the military was just, why should we stop here? And they just kept going and cleared out as much of the land as they could, which meant everything except the West Bank and Gaza. So now today, it's much more muddled, right? People still rehash the old myths, like the radio broadcasts. People still talk about radio broadcasts, even though three separate sets of historians have gone into the archive and said, no, no, they're not here. There's no radio broadcast. But still, if you go onto some Zionist websites, you'll find, no, no, but there were radio broadcasts. And people left because the Arabs told them to leave. Two, even though also the well-researched record is very clear on the fact that Israeli military operations aim to kick Palestinians out of this, also on the intentionality, the premeditated nature of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the fact that people like David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharet and the big leaders of the Zionist movement had written and made it very clear that we're going to have to force Palestinians to leave. The main response to the issue of the refugees is, and I mean, this is where it all comes down, right? This is the central issue of Palestine, is if we allow the refugees return, it'll challenge the Jewish character of the state. Right? Plain and simple. And this argument is successful for some reason in Europe and North America. Like some people buy it. Oh, the Jewish character of the state. And I mean, maybe there's something understandable that the world still feels guilty about the Holocaust that they committed. particularly in Europe and this is some kind of like reparations for that but it wasn't Palestinians who committed the Holocaust and secondly it I mean you don't provide reparations for one crime by allowing another crime to be committed I've painted a very depressing picture, and it's a very tough situation here. But, of course, the people continue to be strong and steadfast. But one thing that if we want to find the hope and if we want to look for how people can help end what's happening here and try to reverse it, so that people can live with dignity, Jewish people and the indigenous Palestinian community can live with some form of dignity, both of them, not just one at the expense of the other, then we need to stop international support for Israel. The international community needs to say, OK, Israel, we're not going to support you anymore until you implement just international law. Palestinians aren't asking for more than this. There's something called international law. Supposedly, this is the will of the international community. Israel is a signatory to many of these things, like the Geneva Conventions. Just implement them or stop the violation of them. You know, it's very basic. Refugees, people who've been forced to leave their homes and forced into a situation where they can't come back to their homes, have the right to come back to their homes. I mean, it's pretty basic. Right? So, okay, Israel wants to talk about the demographic threat and this and that. It's only a demographic threat if the ideology underpinning your regime is a racist ideology that says Jews only. Well, sorry, not in Palestine. You know, if Palestine was an empty island before Jewish colonization, then you can have, you know, a Jewish only state, a Muslim only state, do whatever you want. Nobody's going to object. But if the majority of the people who were here before are not Jewish, and you come here to create an exclusively Jewish state, then you're going to face opposition. And the international community should not condone this kind of racism, especially when it causes so much destruction and death every day. So if we want to look for a sign of hope, we find it in this new emerging global movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions on Israel. And essentially what this movement is saying is there's three demands. Implement the rights of the Palestinian refugees to go back to their homes and reclaim their lands. Implement the right of Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality before the law, which means stop destroying their houses and stop evicting them from their homes and give them their land back. And dismantle this apartheid and occupation infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza. No more walls and checkpoints and military coming in and killing our children every day. These are the three demands. They're very basic. Okay, politically they're extremely complicated or whatever, but this is what the demands are. And isolate Israel until it implements just international law. Just what the international community already says is what it wills.