Free Palestine

By Z
January 8, 2024

“Jewish people have existed in the land long before Palestinians, making them its rightful owners.” This is a statement people use to justify the grounds for the occupation of land, stating the Prophet Abraham was actually there first from the direction of God. Zionism is a European settler-colonial movement that has even tried to deny the existence of the Palestinians. It justifies the appropriation of land, the expulsion and elimination of its people . Before the British Mandate on Palestine and the Balfour declaration, Jews in Palestine constituted only 4% of the population in 1852. About 13,000 Palestinian Jews were concentrated mostly in the districts of Jerusalem, Acre, and Nablus. 

The Jewish people claim that they inhabited Palestine 2000 years ago do not justify the theft of land and the murder and expulsion of the indigenous population. The suffering of Jews at the hands of the Germans does not justify their theft of Palestine and the murder and expulsion of the Palestinians. The Zionist movement began (founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897) the colonization of Palestine more than a decade before the rise of Nazism (German Workers’ Party changed their name circa 1920, to the commonly known Nazi Party) in Germany and its prosecution of European Jews. Israel exists at the expense of an indigenous population. 

Talking publicly online about Palestinian safety, freedom and hope does not negate the horrors that Jewish people have experienced throughout history. The need to repeatedly emphasize that anti-Zionism is not synonymous with anti-Semitism may be considered a burden on the Palestinian cause.

Excerpt from Jewish protester at Times Square NYC, in a video shared on the 14th of October: “Jews who are true to the Torah around the world have always been opposed to Zionism, to the state of Israel, because it is antithetical to our belief to have a Jewish state at all. Now that the state of Israel has been created in 1948 in Palestine by occupying other people’s land, oppressing the entire population and the continuation of killing and stealing, the land is in total violation of not only human rights and international laws but it also goes against the very basics of Jewish belief.“ We are out here to stand in sympathy with the people of Palestine to say that everything that Israel does to Palestinians is illegitimate, goes against the Jewish religion. The only solution is to hopefully bring a peaceful dismantlement to the state of Israel, which is the obstacle to peace because prior to the creation of Israel, there was peace in Palestine.” 

The two state solution means that you would need distinct borders. How do you even divide up a land between Jews and Arabs? There are so many Arab villages and towns and Jewish kibbutz and cities mingled around each other. The only viable solution, according to some,  is dissolving the borders - one state solution, and having everybody live on that land. For Palestinian supporters,  the land is named Palestine-naming it Israel would only undermine and negate everything the Palestinians have been attempting to free itself from in the first place. A state does not have to be labeled a specific name in order for minority groups  to live there. The one state solution is best in which everybody, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Palestinians, anybody of any faith or ethnicity, is given full democratic and civil rights. 

Jewish folks longed for a land devoted solely to them, and rightfully so. Their history of persecution around the world is nothing to scoff at: their pogroms, the Spanish inquisition, the Holocaust. They faced discrimination everywhere they went. The founders of Israel unfortunately adopted the same colonialistic mindset. Yosef Weitz, an Israeli founder,  wrote, “There is no room in the country for both [Arab and Jewish] peoples… there is no way but to transfer the [Palestinian] Arabs from here to the neighboring countries.” When your “state” is based on mass displacement of indigenous people, you can’t not expect people to fight back.