The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back no farther than to the end of World War I (WWI). After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WWI the empire broke apart with the modern day nation of Turkey coming into existence. The nations of Great Britain and France conquered large parts of the lands formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire, including the land of Palestine along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The majority of the people there were Palestinian, an ethnic group whose ancestors had lived in that region for at least 3,150 years with the name Peleshet appearing in Egyptian records as early as 1150 BC, records which further indicate that for at least thousands of years the Palestinian people have been natives of the area we today call Canaan, Palestine, and the Levant. Most Palestinians before World War I were (and are) Muslims (85%), the next largest religious group of Palestinians were (and are) Orthodox Christians as well (9.2%.) The Jewish population (both ethnically and religiously) was the smallest group (5.3%.) The groups largely got along well together and it wouldn’t be uncommon for a Christian to be educated in a Muslim school and celebrate Hanukkah with his/her Jewish friends, and vice versa. Take for example, the life of celebrated Palestinian poet Wasif Jawhariyyeh.
British Imperialism and the Mandate
This began to change when the British took over the area officially in 1920. The British purposefully designed the political organization of Palestine so that the different groups had to compete with one another for help from the British government. At the same time the British government began to bring European Jews into Palestine in an effort to weaken the power of the native Palestinian people by creating a large immigrant population loyal to the British government and dependent on it for their protection.
These European Jews were Zionists – people who believe in Zionism which is the claim that Jewish people have a right to form their own nation – wanted to turn Palestine into their own country because there had been a Jewish empire (Judea) there 2,000 years before in what is today southwest Palestine. This inevitably led to violence between the immigrants and native peoples as the immigrants moved in and took over land belonging to the Palestinians and the Palestinians resisting what they saw as an invasion of their lands by foreigners who wanted to take over everything. The British made this worse by using their political power to make it easier for the European immigrants to take lands that Palestinians were living on and kick them off of it. The more everyone was fighting each other, the easier it was for the British to control everything. This conflict over who would control the land and the government is the basis and cause of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and always has been, as Palestinian scholar Walid Khalidi explains in his history of pre-World War I Palestine explains:
The [British take over of of Palestine] was seen by the Palestinians as an Anglo-Zionist condominium and its terms as instruments for the implementation of the Zionist programme; it had been imposed on them by force, and they considered it to be both morally and legally invalid. The Palestinians constituted the vast majority of the population and owned the bulk of the land. Inevitably, the ensuing struggle centred on this status quo. The British and the Zionists were determined to subvert and revolutionise it, the Palestinians to defend and preserve it.
Before Their Diaspora as quoted here.
This is an important thing to understand. Often, people want to describe the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (and most conflicts between Israel and other Middle Eastern nations) as a religious war between Jews and Muslims. This poor understanding of the war not only misses the actual cause of the conflict – who has political power over the land of Palestine and its natural resources – and therefore makes any actual solution to the Conflict impossible, but it also leads to truly distorted views of all those involved. It makes the war seem impossible to solve, because how can you solve something that has been waging for thousands of years? But religion is, at best, just another factor of nationalism here, an illusion created by ignoring the fact that tens of thousands of Palestinians are Christians and ignoring the fact that no one is fighting over who was a greater prophet, Isaac or Ishmael. The conflict is and always has been about who will control the land and those who live upon it, with Israelis fighting to conquer more land while consolidating the lands they already rule and and the Palestinians fighting for survival by maintaining the lands that they have left and demanding a right to return to the lands they are their ancestors were driven from by force.
This reality can be seen in the Palestinian Revolt of 1936 to 1939. For the first time in a thousand years Palestinians of every age, sex, and religion rose up against their foreign oppressors. The reasons for this are straightforward – the importation of European Jews into Palestine by the British was steadily robbing Palestinians of their homes and lands:
Progress toward a Jewish national home had, however, been remarkable since 1918. Although the majority of the Jewish population was urban, the number of rural Zionist colonies had increased from 47 to about 200. Between 1922 and 1940 Jewish landholdings had risen from about 148,500 to 383,500 acres (about 60,100 to 155,200 hectares) and now constituted roughly one-seventh of the cultivatable land, and the Jewish population had grown from 83,790 to some 467,000, or nearly one-third of a total population of about 1,528,000. Tel Aviv had developed into an all-Jewish city of 150,000 inhabitants, and hundreds of millions of dollars of Jewish capital had been introduced into the region.
See previous link.
Palestinians could see the writing on the wall – unless they did something they would lose everything as a foreign population imported by a foreign ruler replaced the Palestinians in their own lands.
So the Palestinians fought back.
The revolt was multidimensional as Palestinians carried out a general strike and tax strike (meaning they refused to p[ay taxes) aimed at crippling the British occupying government by starving it of money that actually forced the closing of local British-controlled governments. At the same time they demanded that European Jewish immigration and land sells to European Jewish immigrants be stopped. In the countryside, Palestinians began to attack British and European Jewish settlements. The British were forced to send over 20,000 troops allied with 15,000 more soldiers provided by European Jewish militias to finally put down the revolt. The continued drive by the British to empower immigrant European Jews in Palestine, driven as it was by racism, made a greater conflict inevitable between the immigrants and native Palestinians – a war that could (and can) only end in Palestinian liberation or the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the land by the European invaders.
Israel – A European Colony in the Middle East
That larger war came after World War II when, in 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, known as the Partition Plan, which ordered the division of the British Mandate of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. This plan essentially seized half of the land Palestinians were living on and gave it to the new Jewish government. Many today ignore this fact and act as if the European Jewish colonists had always been in Palestine when they really were imperialist agents of the British Empire, invading and occupying the territory of a foreign people and ethnically cleansing the the lands under their control by driving the native Palestinians out at gunpoint. Of course these people, in defense of their homes, their religion, and their families, fought back against such violence and brutality when, on May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was created. The surrounding nations, acting to protect the Palestinians from losing their homes and from being ethnically cleansed by the foreign invaders, invaded the new state of Israel. This sparked the Arab-Israeli War as the allies of Palestine tried to prevent the Jewish immigrants from taking Palestinian lands for the new Jewish nation of Israel. The war ended in 1949 with Israel’s victory as it expanded to conquer lands not given it in the Partition Plan.
In what Palestinians today call al-Nakba (The Catastrophe), over 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes and off their lands which were now taken over by Israeli Jewish settlers. Over 531 Palestinian villages were completely wiped out as were 11 major urban communities. (see pg. 16) These horrific acts of ethnic cleansing were not something that happened just as a consequence of war. It had always been the plan. As early as 1938, Jewish leader and the future first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion had said, After we become a strong force as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand into the whole of Palestine.” As Dr. Ilan Pappe, Israeli historian and current Professor of History and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, explains in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by March 10,1948 (during the Arab-Israeli War) the Jewish leadership, all European immigrants, had already developed and put into action a detailed plan to forcibly ethnically cleanse Palestine by driving out all Palestinian people through military force. (see pgs. 15-16) As Jewish militia leader and future seventh Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin said in 1948, “The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) will be restored to the people of Israel, All of it. And forever.” This is why the Jewish militias had been ethnically cleansing the major cities under their control even before the Arab-Israeli War began. Genocidal warmongering on part of the European Jewish immigrants in the name of seizing the entire land of Palestine and either exterminating or exiling the land’s native inhabitants – the Palestinians – was always the goal.
In the end that full goal could not yet be fully achieved. The new Israeli armies were simply not yet that strong. So they settled. But substantial progress toward the ultimate goal of ethnic cleansing was made. Palestine was divided into 3 parts: the State of Israel (mostly Jewish), while the vast majority of Palestinians were segregated in a semi-reservation system to the West Bank (in eastern Palestine along the west bank of the Jordan River) and the Gaza Strip (in western Palestine). As nearly a million Palestinians were rendered completely destitute, and the newly invented Israelis (a nation and people which had never existed) swept in and seized control of the lands, homes, businesses, ranches, resources, and wealth the Palestinians were forced to leave behind as they fled the Israeli military machine. No wonder the Palestinians rightfully call this the Catastrophe.
Over the following years, tensions rose in the region, particularly between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Syria and Israel had being fighting in a low scale conflict throughout 1967. In June, Israeli leaders said they felt threatened by the way that Egypt, Syria’s ally, was stationing its soldiers along its western border in a way that prevented the Israeli city of Elat from having access to the Suez Canal. Then Israel attacked Egypt and Syria, starting the Six-Day War. After winning the war, Israel gained territorial control over the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt; the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan; and the Golan Heights from Syria. This meant that Israeli troops effectively took military control over all Palestinian territory and ethnically cleansed several Palestinian villages, destroying everything built in them and driving over 250,000 Palestinians from their homes forever. Some estimates range as high as 430,000 Palestinians driven from their lands and homes. The destruction this caused is obvious when one simply looks at the population disparity. The Palestinian population had been greater than the European Jewish immigrant population before World War II and equal to it after the Arab-Israeli War. By the end of the Six Day War and as a result of the ethnic cleansing efforts of the Israeli military this was no longer true. Three million Israelis now ruled over a Palestinian population just over one million, segregated into and divided between the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinians have been under direct military occupation from Israeli soldiers ever since, the victims of an oppressive apartheid state.
The First and Second Intifada
In 1987, in response to the continued violence of military occupation and the slow annexation of their land by Jewish settlers who we removing in and taking Palestinian lands and homes from them, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip rose up against the Israeli government in what is known as the First Intifada (or First “Shaking.”) On December 8, 1987, an Israeli vehicle ran over a car carrying four Palestinian workers in a refugee camp, in the northern Gaza Strip. The four Palestinians died and the camp broke out in spontaneous protests, which rapidly spread across the remainder of the Gaza Strip and into the West Bank.
Lasting until 1993, the First Intifada included everything from mass strikes, boycotts, refusal to pay taxes, and civil disobedience campaigns to riots and violence as Muslim and Christian Palestinians tried everything they could to shake off Israeli rule. Though failing in this goal the Intifada did create a homegrown Palestinian economy as well as underground and illegal Palestinian universities, schools, and medical clinics. Women also emerged as powerful social leaders in this and subsequent efforts at resisting Israeli military rule. The Intifada ended with the 1993 Oslo Accords in which the Palestinian Authority, the generally acknowledged Palestinian government, and Israel officially recognized one another. 1,962 Palestinians were killed as compared to 277 Israelis who died.
After almost a decade of suffering and the empty promises of a peace process that went nowhere (and Israel’s refusal to honor the agreements it made in the Oslo Peace Accords) the Second Intifada began September 2000 when Israeli general, political leader, and convicted war criminal Ariel Sharon invaded the al-Aqsa Mosque (“Dome of the Rock”) with hundreds of Israeli police. The mosque is one of the holiest sites in Islam, one of the holiest in Christianity as a site where Jesus taught, and is a treasured Palestinian heritage site. The Palestinians responsible for caring for the site resisted the armed and illegal invasion and seven of them were killed by Sharon’s police guard. As this news spread across the West Bank and Gaza Strip so did mass protests and marches. The tone changed and became more aggressive two days into the Second Intifada when Mohammad al-Durrah, a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy, was shot nine times on live television by Israeli soldiers.
The worsening violence saw Palestinians sacrificing themselves in order to kill Israeli occupiers and the Israeli military responding by further invading and destroying Palestinian villages. In 2001, Ariel Sharon, the guy who started the Intifada, became Prime Minister of Israel and intensified Israel’s military attacks by bombing Palestinian villages under the guise of eliminating “terrorists,” intentionally slaughtering innocent men, women, and children. This is no surprise as he, echoing the words of former Israeli Prime Ministers, publicly announced his intention to completely ethnically cleanse Palestine of all Palestinians:
It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.
Source 1 and Source 2
As I stated before, the genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians has always been part of the Israeli plan. Israelis today are very open and very clear that this is their intention, as can be seen in this video of interviews with Israelis on the streets of Jerusalem in 2017:
Ethnic cleansing and genocide are the goals Israelis have for Palestine.
Turning the remaining Palestinian lands into the world’s largest prisons is part of the plan to achieve those goals.
In 2002, the Israeli government began construction of the massive and illegal Separation Wall around the West Bank, destroying more Palestinian villages, homes, and farms in the process and, ultimately, taking control of another 10% of the West Bank. The Second Intifada ended in 2005. About 4,973 Palestinians and 1,137 Israelis died during it. After Israel left its direct occupation of the Gaza Strip and switched to outside occupation as it built a fence around Palestine and blockade its seaports in order to control all resources which entre and exit the Gaza Strip. As a result, the Gaza Strip has become what has been called the “world’s largest open-air prison.” The only rival for size is the West Bank itself which, still under direct Israeli occupation and surrounded by a massive wall designed to trap Palestinians inside of it, is very much also a massive open-air prison.
Or a concentration camp.
The World’s Largest Concentration Camps
What is a concentration camp? As the Encyclopaedia Britannica explains:
concentration camp, internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment, usually by executive decree or military order. Persons are placed in such camps often on the basis of identification with a particular ethnic or political group rather than as individuals and without benefit either of indictment or fair trial. Concentration camps are to be distinguished from prisons interning persons lawfully convicted of civil crimes and from prisoner-of-war camps in which captured military personnel are held under the laws of war.
Does this not describe what Israel is doing to the Palestinians this very moment?
The Palestinians trapped in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not imprisoned there because they have committed any crime. They are imprisoned because of their ethnic heritage – because they are Palestinian – and because they dare continue to exist. They are a minority population, with the Israeli population is significantly larger than the Palestinian population. There is no trial to determine if you should be imprisoned in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, you simply are imprisoned because you exist.
The Gaza Strip is permanently under siege with all access into and out of it controlled by the Israeli military. Around 56% of Palestinians in Gaza suffer in poverty, youth unemployment is at 63%, Israeli military strikes have destroyed the sewage system causing a huge increase in disease and causing over 95% of Gaza’s water to be rendered unsafe for drinking, over 50% of requests to travel outside of the Gaza Strip to get medical care are denied, Israeli military strikes have destroyed tens of thousands of homes and murdered thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children while the blockade prevents Palestinians from rebuilding by preventing them from having the resources to rebuild trapping thousands more in shanty towns, shacks, and ruins. No wonder that the Gaza Strip has been declared to be fundamentally unlivable and unable to support human life. The Israeli military has purposefully made it that way.
The West Bank exists under direct military occupation. There are 59 permanent checkpoints and an unlimited number of “flying checkpoints” that the Israeli military throws up on a whim wherever it wants, with 4,924 occurring between 2017 and 2018 alone. Palestinians are not allowed to use land anywhere near one of the 200+ illegal Jewish colonial settlements in the West Bank, effectively barring Palestinians from using 61% of the land in the West Bank, even if they personally own said land. Palestinians need a permit issued by the Israeli government just to leave the West Bank. These restrictions cause the West Bank to lose an estimated $9.46 billion dollars a year in business. In 2020, Israel demolished 848 Palestinian homes and business, forcing hundreds of peoples into homelessness and seizing their lands. Racist laws actively prevent Palestinians the right to live where they choose or to receive an education if courts decide these would undermine the “Jewish character” of the places they live or go to school. Israeli soldiers regularly commit war crimes by attacking, beating, and shooting Palestinian civilians, even children. Israeli soldiers regularly raid Palestinian homes at night to illegally arrest civilians and subject them to military tribunals. Israel even imprisons children in military prisons with 156 children being locked in Israeli military prisons in 2020. Palestinian prisoners, including imprisoned children, are regularly beaten and tortured by Israeli guards while in gaol. Even picking wild vegetables is a crime.
Can anyone reading these facts deny that the Palestinians are prisoners held under the violent control of an oppressive military that beats, tortures, and kills them all in an overall effort to slowly ethnically cleanse the land? All of the facts of Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip and West Bank align completely with the definition of a concentration camp. This brings the truth into stark clarity:
Israel, a nation supposedly founded by people fleeing extermination in European concentration camps and ethnic cleansing by the German military is currently operating the world’s two largest concentration camps and using its military to actively ethnically cleansing and exterminate the Palestinian people.
In 2015, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who governs the West Bank, announced that Palestinians would no longer be bound by the territorial divisions created by the Oslo Accords. And of course they wouldn’t. Israel never has and they’ve never been forced to do so. The Oslo Accords have been a dead letter, stupid meaningless fluff since they were written.
Since then, large scale violence has been sporadic, but low scale violence has been constant, especially violence by Israelis against the Palestinians. In the summer of 2014, a large military clash retroactively labeled the Gaza War occurred between the Israeli military and Hamas, the Palestinian group which controls the Gaza Strip. Hamas fired nearly three thousand homemade rockets at Israel, 90% of which were blocked according to Israel, and Israel retaliated with major military strikes against the Gaza Strip. The skirmish ended in late August 2014 with a cease-fire deal brokered by Egypt, but only after 73 Israelis and 2,251 Palestinians were killed. Once again the power differential, the sheer amount of lives lost, shows who is the real threat to whom.
Existence Is Resistance
In 2018, Israel’s penchant for violently imprisoning children in military prisons without fair trials made worldwide news when 16-year-old Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi gained worldwide attention. Tamimi was sentenced to eight months in prison by the Israeli government in a military court for slapping an Israeli soldier who was trespassing on her family’s land just an hour after the same Israeli soldier had shot her cousin Mohammed in the head with a rubber coated steel bullet, shattering his skull and requiring part of it be removed. Their story growing up under military occupation, experiencing the suffering it causes, and having the courage to resist instead of giving is the story of many Palestinian men, women, and children today. Since childhood Ahed has actively fought the Israeli occupation of her home, the constant dehumanization Palestinians are subjected to, and the endless violent oppression of the military rule that Israel has fascistically imposed on Palestine. The video of her interrogation demonstrates clearly how the Israeli military will threaten mass collective punishments, including threatening to arrest, hurt, exile, and kill entire families in order to terrorize the arrested into making false confessions.
Even before Tamimi became known for this story she had been in the news as part of a group that saved a Palestinian child from kidnapping (“arrest”) by an Israeli soldier. (Tamimi is the girl in the pink Tweety shirt.) This photo exhibition about her features a prominent picture of her at the age of twelve standing up to a whole group of armed Israeli soldiers during a protest in 2012. She, like all Palestinians, has a long and courageous history of resistance to the Israeli occupation and destruction of Palestine. Once released from her eight month prison term she vowed to continue resisting until the occupation ends no matter what happens. She has said that her “dream, my father’s dream, my mother’s dream, the dream of every Palestinian is to have our freedom.” Since her release she has become an icon of resistance and continues the struggle for Palestinian independence from Israeli control.
The Ongoing Catastrophe
In March and May of 2018, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip conducted weekly demonstrations at the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel. Called The Great Return March, the protest coincided with the seventieth anniversary of al-Nakba, the Catastrophe, the Palestinian refugee exodus that accompanied Israeli invasion in 1948. While most of the protesters were peaceful, some stormed the perimeter fence and threw rocks and other objects. According to the United Nations, 214 Palestinians, including 46 children, were killed, and over 36,100, including nearly 8,800 children were injured. One in five of those injured (over 8,000) were hit by live ammunition. In the same period only one Israeli soldier died and only seven were ever injured. Since this time protests of the blockade and their imprisonment have continued in Gaza every Friday. During these protests the Israelis have cumulatively shot more than 35,000 people, resulting in tens of thousands of people having lifelong disabilities and, as of May 2021, with around 100 people still awaiting reconstructive surgery and amputations. Video evidence has emerged which further shows that the Israeli military intentionally targeted (and continues to target) peaceful protestors, including women and children.
Today, 2021, sees Palestinians in worse conditions than ever before. The Israeli Separation Wall is near completion and has taken nearly 10% more of Palestinian lands on the West Bank from them. Jewish settlements have continued to expand farther into the West Bank, with Israelis continuing to take over Palestinian villages, lands, natural resources, and homes from them. Israel’s trade blockade continues to prevent needed goods from getting into the Gaza Strip. Conditions there have become so severe that it has been described as fundamentally unlivable. In 2020 and 2021, Covid-19 has hit there especially hard owing due to the lack of medical equipment, medicine, and vaccines that are prevented from getting to the Gaza Strip in any large numbers and to the mass poverty forced on the Palestinians living there because of the Israeli blockade.
American Aid For Genocide
What exactly is the role of the United States in all this? Well, despite some rough patches, Israel and the United States have been allies since the founding of Israel. The nation immediately became the US government’s closest and most dependable ally in the Middle East. The United States has used its role as one of the most powerful nations in the United Nations to prevent any attempts by Palestinians to gain recognition for themselves as an independent nation. The United States has sold Israel hundreds of billions of dollars in military gear and weapons. Israel is given $3 billion dollars every year by the USA as “Foreign Military Aid,” which Israel must then turn around and buy approximately $2.3 million worth of American made military weapons. This in addition to tens of billions of more dollars that Israel gets from the USA for other reasons. The US government will sometimes voice complaints about Israeli actions, such as calling on Israel to end its illegal settlement of Palestinian lands, but nothing is ever done by the US to actually try and stop it or hold Israel accountable for them.
Look at those numbers. The first one covers defense – money given directly to Israel which it then uses to but American guns, bombs, and military transport which it then directly uses to enact the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The second chart shows that tens of billions of dollars more are given to Israel for non-military spending, but this is just smoke and mirrors. Because Israel no longer has to spend its own money on its own non-military needs (it can spend money extorted from the American taxpayer instead) then Israel can turn around and spend the billions it would have had to spend on the military equipment and personnel needed to maintain its program of military occupation, oppression, and ethnic cleansing. The American money given to Israel for non-military spending is essentially just a subsidy that allows Israel to spend its own money on warmongering with no consequences. In other words, the American government is directly funding the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the destruction of the Palestinian people. Taxation is not only theft, it is genocide.
Imagine what the United States government could have done with that money. For just a billion dollars it could have bought every single man, woman, and child a luxurious home. It could have flooded education with money to do whatever could be imagined. It could have funded the healthcare programs of the government for everyone. Yes, I know the long run dangers of welfare programs. But if the government is going to spend tens of billions of dollars it could at least do it on something that gives some immediate benefit to the people of the country. Instead the US government spends that money on warmongering and ethnic cleansing. It just shows you the true priorities of the State itself and those who run it. And it isn’t seeing to the poor and the needy, no matter what its propaganda says otherwise.
And though images like the one below of Trump heights may make this seem like a “right wing” Republican position, that is far from the truth. For example, current American President Joe Biden is a left wing Democratic Party member has left almost all of Trump’s pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian policies in place, including titanic amounts of funding to Israel and recognizing Jerusalem as the national capital of Israel. Or look at Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. He is a Democrat, a dedicated leftist politician, a major political figure and powerbroker in the American Congress, and a dedicated defender and promoter of all things Israel, even as it is carrying out of of the most oppressive military occupations in modern history. Yes, supporting the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is a bipartisan position in major American politics.
Where Do We Go from Here?
There are numerous things you can do. One of the easiest things you can do is take part in the BDS Movement. Do everything you can to boycott Israeli goods and businesses that sell Israeli goods. Work to encourage everyone you can to withdraw any investments they have in Israeli organizations, businesses, or the Israeli government. Encourage people on an individual and national level to use their economic power by refusing to trade with Israel as long as it maintains the occupation of Palestine. At the same time you can research and purchase goods made in Palestine in order to provide needed money to Palestinian businesses. You can purposefully seek out and do business with Palestinian companies. You can invest in Palestinian trade, businesses, and aid organizations.
Refuse to support people and groups who support Israel. Work in your community to organize support for Palestine, speak truthfully and openly about what is actually happening in Israel. You can work to hold politicians accountable. Don’t vote for pro-Israel politicians. Call them on their lies, and propaganda. Try and destroy their political careers for their open support for Fascism, militarism, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder.
Make donations to organizations that directly work with and help Palestinians. Support Palestinian refugees as they struggle to survive having everything taken from them by the bloody Israeli military machine. I would love to see an actual tax protest, denying the government not just the money it uses to fund the slaughter of Palestinians by Israel but all money until it stops all its support for cruel, oppressive, and authoritarian actions at home and abroad would do wonders to make the world a better place. Starve the beast and watch its ability to accomplish anything collapse.
Above all, speak truth to power. Don’t let the politicians and propagandists fill your mouth with lies. Refuse to be a vehicle for the lies that are told about what is happening in Israel. It is not a religious conflict and it is not a conflict between two equal and opposing sides who both have legitimate claims. The so-called Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is really the struggle of the Palestinian people to survive in the face of ethnic, cultural, and racial cleansing and genocide. Tell the truth about what is happening in Palestine. In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. So be a revolutionary. Tell the truth.