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Ashamed by their failure to protect Europe’s Jews from Hitler’s camps and ever reluctant, for domestic political reasons, to allow large-scale immigration of the survivors, much of the international community recognized the Zionist demand for a state of their own in Palestine.
The partition plan gave 55 percent of the land of historic Palestine to the Jewish state and only 42 percent to the Palestinian Arab state. But Palestinians at the time made up 67 percent of the population and owned the vast majority of the land, while Jews made up 37 percent of the population and owned only 7 percent of the land.
European Jews created a state on territory where the majority of residents were the indigenous Palestinian population. And in order to achieve this state in which they would be the majority, the Zionists had to violently evict the Palestinian majority.
Meanwhile, the Arab countries that went to war with Israel in 1948 couldn’t defeat the newly established Zionist state, which had secured millions of dollars in aid from donors in the United States.
Israel’s campaign to ethnically cleanse the land of its native Palestinian population didn’t stop in 1948. It has never stopped.
Growing up under a foreign military occupation means living under the constant threat of state-sanctioned violence. It also means living with the total absence of freedom, which is the case for more than five million Palestinians in the occupied territories today. We’re not citizens of Israel; nor do we have a say or any political rights in the state that controls every aspect of our lives. We’re stuck with the inability to plan for our futures, to travel freely, or even to move about our territories from city to city without having to cross military checkpoints. We need permission to build
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Israel justifies controlling us and denying us our rights by claiming it’s about security. It has succeeded in convincing its own people and its supporters around the world that it needs to do so out of fear of existential elimination. But the facts tell a different story. Israel is a nuclear-armed country. It has had peace treaties in place with its neighboring Arab countries Egypt and Jordan since 1979 and 1994, respectively, and has normalized relations with a host of other Arab countries in recent years.
He was tear-gassed for the very first time before he even turned ten. But that didn’t deter him from devoting his life to activism in the hope of freeing Palestine—something
Some Palestinians end up serving years under administrative detention without ever knowing why they’re being held.
