@omarzaag3924:
“No one native to that land will dare do such things to the olives”
Mic drop
@danihasbini:
“No one native to that land will cut an olive tree”
@BasharZapen:
To every Zionist rushing to deny the genocide, have some fucking shame.
Enough. Just enough.
@februaryamelia6397:
I’m breaking into tears. I’m so sorry for the deafening silence amidst the atrocities. I’m so sorry that we, the world, have failed you
@DennisNelson-ee2il:
I’d heard this speech was incredibly powerful,but couldn’t have imagined just how devastatingly powerful.
@shysonofficial:
that violent coloniser on the right of the room really didn’t help his case by aggressively trying to put down Susan during her speech
@louisemalone67:
Exceptional speech, a privilege to hear. in between the numerous rude interruptions, just more colonial mindset trying to bore its way into where it doesn’t belong. Thank you Susan.
@Docjon5:
Extraordinary, haunting, beautiful words that pierce the heart and the soul, delivered with such grace, eloquence and dignity. A speech which will be remembered and revered like those of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Susan Abulhawa is truly a giant of our times.
@agluebottle:
I hear this speech and all I can think about is imagining my 2 year old son sleeping on me and my wife’s graves every night like some children do in Gaza. Absolutely heartbreaking. The things my government is funding in my name are vile beyond words. Both parties.
BRILLIANT HEART AND SOUL RIPPING (So rude and childish, the interrupting Zionists): Susan Abulhawa | This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide | 7/8 20:36 Min. by OxfordUnion, Dec 5, 2024
I will not be taking any points of information. So, kindly refrain from interrupting me.
Addressing the challenge of what to do about the indigenous inhabitants of the land, Chaim Weizmann, a Russian Jew, said to the World Zionist Congress in 1921 that Palestinians were akin to “the rocks of Judea, obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.”
David Grun, a Polish Jew, who changed his name to David Ben Gurion in order to sound relevant to the region, said, “We must expel Arabs and take their places.”
There are thousands of such conversations among the early Zionists who plotted and implemented the violent colonization of Palestine and the annihilation of her native people. But they were only partially successful, murdering or ethnically cleansing 80% of the Palestinians, which meant that 20% of us remained, an enduring obstacle to their colonial fantasies, which became the subject of their obsessions in the decades that followed, especially after conquering what remained of Palestine in 1967.
Zionists lamented our presence, and they debated publicly in all circles regarding what do about us: about the Palestinian birthrate, about our babies which they dub a demographic threat.
Benny Morris, who was meant to be here [invited for the Oxford debate, and declined], originally once publicly regretted that David Ben Gurion “did not finish the job” of getting rid of us all, which would have obviated what they refer to as the “Arab problem.”
Benjamin Netanyahu, a Polish Jew, whose real name is Benjamin Mileikowsky, bemoaned a missed opportunity during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising to expel large swaths of the Palestinian population “while world attention was focused on China.”
Some of their articulated solutions to the nuisance of our existence include a “break their bones” policy in the 1980s and 1990s, ordered by Yitzhak Rubitzov, a Ukrainian Jew, who changed his name to Yitzhak Rabin for the same reasons.
That horrific policy that crippled generations of Palestinians did not succeed in making us leave. And frustrated by Palestinian resilience, a new discourse arose, especially after a massive natural gas field was discovered off the coast of Northern Gaza worth trillions of dollars.
Gazan gas must be frac’d, which is mainly why I believe Canada’s supreme court ruled against our constitution and me in Ernst vs AER. 7/9 of the judges were appointed by Herr Steve Harper, a stanch Evangelical Christian Zionist. I expect most if not all of his judges are Zionists, appointed for that reason. Retired Rosalie Abella, not appointed by Harper, is also a Zionist and why I believe she was appointed. I think no Zionists ought to be allowed on courts in Canada; their inhumane racist beliefs render them incapable of serving “justice.” Another reason I believe the court ruled against me is because for Zionism to succeed in its elimination of Palestinians, it needs to globally wipe out our rights to freedom of expression/free speech, as was made clear by the violent abuses of the law by university administrators and police everywhere students and faculty lawfully protested for peace and an end to our gov’ts financing and aiding Israel’s mass murder of innocent women and kids (under the guise of calling them terrorists, as AER’s filthy scumbag lawyer, Glenn Solomon – I bet yet another Zionist, called me without any evidence). Zionism must end, and with its demise, I think Zionist judges must removed from courts, commissions, panels, etc.; I believe they and all others like Abella and Herr Harper need to be tried as accessories to Israel’s genocide and appropriately punished if found guilty.
This new discourse is echoed in the words of Colonel Efraim Eitan, who said in 2004, “we have to kill them all.”
Arnon Soffer, an Israeli so-called intellectual and political advisor, insisted [on May 21, 2004] that “we have to kill, and kill, and kill, all day, every day.”
When I was in Gaza this year, I saw a little boy no more than 9 years whose hands and part of his face had been blown off by a booby-trapped can of food that soldiers had left behind for Gaza’s starving children. I later learned that they also had left poisoned food for people in
Shuja’iyya. And in the 1980s and 1990s, Israeli soldiers had left booby-trapped toys in southern Lebanon that exploded when excited children picked them up.
The harm they do is diabolical, and yet they expect you to believe that they are the victims.
Invoking Europe’s holocaust and screaming Anti-Semitism, they expect you to suspend fundamental human reason to believe that the daily sniping of children with so called “kill shots,” that the bombing of entire neighborhoods that bury families alive and wipe out whole bloodlines is self-defence.
They want you to believe that a man who had not eaten a thing in over 72 hours, who kept fighting even when all he had was one functioning arm, that this man was motivated by some innate savagery and irrational hatred or jealousy of Jews, rather than the indominable yearning to see his people free in their own homeland.
It is clear to me that we are not here to debate whether Israel is an apartheid or genocidal state. This debate is ultimately about the worth of Palestinian lives. It’s about the worth of our schools, our research centers, our books, our art. It’s about the worth of the homes we worked all our lives to build, and which contain memories of generations. It’s about the worth of our humanity and our agency, of our bodies and ambitions.
Because if the roles were reversed:
if Palestinians had spent the last eight decades stealing Jewish homes, expelling, oppressing, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, killing, raping them;
- if Palestinians had killed an estimated 300,000 Jews in one year, targeted their journalists, theirthinkers, their healthcare workers, their athletes, their artists, bombed every Israeli hospital, university, library, museum, cultural center, synagogue, and simultaneously set up an observation platform where citizens came watch their slaughter as if a tourist attraction;
- if Palestinians had corralled them by the hundreds of thousands into flimsy tents, bombed them in so-called safe zones, burned them alive, cut off their food, and water, and medicine;
- if Palestinians made their children wander barefoot with empty pots; made them gather the flesh of their parents into plastic bags; bury their siblings, their cousins, their friends; made them sneak out from their tents at night to sleep on their parents’ graves; made them pray for death just to join their families and not be alone in this terrible world; if we terrorized them so utterly that their children lose their hair, lose their memory, lose their minds, and made those as young as 4 and 5 die of heart attacks;
- if we mercilessly forced their NICU [Neonatal Intensive Care Unit] babies to die, alone in hospital beds, crying until they could cry no more, died and decomposed in the same spot;
- if Palestinians used wheat flour aid trucks to lure starving Jews, then opened fire on them as they gathered to collect the day’s bread;
- if Palestinians finally allowed a food delivery into a shelter with hungry Jews, then set fire to the entire shelter and aid trucks before anyone could taste a bite of the food;
- if a Palestinian sniper bragged about blowing out 42 Jewish kneecaps in one day as one Israeli soldier did in 2019;
- if a Palestinian admitted to CNN that he ran over hundreds of Jews with his tank, their squished flesh lingering in the tank treads;
- if Palestinians were systematically raping Jewish doctors, patients, and other captives with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks, and fire extinguishers, sometimes raping them to death, as happened with Dr. Adnan al-Bursh and others;
- if Jewish women were forced to give birth in filth, get C-sections or leg amputations without anesthesia;
- if we destroyed their children, then decorated our tanks with their toys;
- if we killed or displaced their women then posed in their lingerie;
- if the world were watching the live-streamed systematic annihilation of Jews in real time; there would be no debating whether that constituted terrorism or genocide.
And yet two Palestinians – myself and Mohammed El-Kurd – showed up here to do just that, enduring the indignity of debating those who think our only life choices should be to leave our homeland, submit to their supremacy, or die quietly and politely.
But you would be wrong to think that I came to convince you of anything. This House Resolution, though well-meaning and appreciated, is of little consequence in the midst of this holocaust of our time.
I came in the spirit of Malcolm X and Jimmy Baldwin, both of whom stood here, and in Cambridge, before I was born, facing finely dressed well-spoken monsters who harbored the same supremacist ideologies as Zionism, these notions of entitlement and privilege, of
being divinely favored, or blessed, or chosen.
I’m here for the sake of history. To speak to generations not yet born, and for the chronicles of this extraordinary time where the carpet bombing of defenseless, indigenous societies is legitimized.
And I also came to speak directly to Zionists here and everywhere.
We let you into our homes when your own countries tried to murder you and everyone else turned you away. We fed you, and we clothed you, we gave you shelter, and we shared from the bounty of our land with you. And when the time was ripe, you kicked us out of our homes and homelands, then you killed and robbed and burned and looted our lives.
You carved out our hearts because it is clear that you do not know how to live in the world without dominating others.
You have crossed all lines and nurtured the most vile of human impulses. But the world is finally glimpsing the terror we have endured at your hands for so long, and they are seeing the reality of who yo are, and who you’ve always been. They watch in utter astonishment: the sadism, the glee, the joy, and the pleasure with which you conduct, watch, and cheer the daily details of breaking our bodies, our minds, our future, and our past.
But no matter what happens from here, no matter what fairytales you tell yourselves and tell the world, you will never truly belong to that land. You will never understand the sacredness of the olive trees whichmyou’ve been cutting down and burning for decades just to spite us, just to break our hearts a little more. No one native to that land would dare do such a thing to the olives. No one who belongs to that region would ever bomb or destroy such ancient heritage as Baalbek or Battir, or destroy ancient cemeteries as you destroy ours, like the Anglican cemetery in Jerusalem, or the resting place of ancient Muslim scholars and warriors in Maamanillah [unsure of spelling?]. Those who come from that land do not desecrate the dead; that’s why my family for centuries were the caretakers of the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, as laborers of faith and care for what we know is part of our ancestry and our story.
Your ancestors will always be buried in your actual homelands of Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere around the world whence you came, and Yemen. The mythos and the folklore of the land will always be alien to you.
You will never be literate in the sartorial language of the thobes we wear, which sprang from the land through our foremothers over centuries, every motif, every design and pattern speaking to the secrets of local lore, flora, birds, rivers, and wildlife.
What your real estate agents call in their high-priced listings, “old Arab home charm,” will always hold in their stones the stories and memories of our ancestors who built them. The ancient paintings and photos of the land will never contain you.
You will never know how it feels to be loved and supported by those who have nothing to gain from you, and in fact, everything to lose. You will never know the feeling of masses all over the world pouring into the streets and stadiums to chant and sing for your freedom. And it is not because you are Jewish, as you want everyone to believe, but because you are violent colonizers who think that your Jewishness entitles you to the home my grandfather and his brothers built with their own hands, on lands that had been in our family for centuries. It is because Zionism is a blight onto Judaism, it is a break in humanity.
You can change your names to sound relevant to the region, and you can pretend that falafel, and hummus, and zaatar are your ancient cuisines, but in the recesses of your being, you will always feel the sting of this epic forgery. That’s why even the drawings of our children hung on the wall at the U.N., or in a hospital ward, send your leaders and lawyers into hysteric meltdowns.
You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you “kill, and kill, and kill, all day, every day.” We are not the rocks that Chaim Weizmann thought you could clear from the land. We are its very soil! We are her rivers and her trees and her stories, because all of that was nurtured by our bodies and our lives over millennia of continuous, uninterrupted habitation of that patch of earth between the Jordan and Mediterranean waters, from our Canaanite, our Hebrew, our Philistine, and our Phoenician ancestors, to every conqueror or pilgrim who came and went, who married, or raped, or loved, or settled, or enslaved, or converted between religions, or prayed in that land, leaving pieces of themselves in our bodies and our heritage. The fabled, tumultuous stories of the land are quite literally in our DNA. You cannot kill or propagandize that away, no matter what death technology you use, or what Hollywood or corporate media
arsenals you deploy.
Someday, your impunity and arrogance will end. Palestine will be free. She will be restored to her multi-religious, multi-ethnic, pluralistic glory. We will restore and expand the trains that run from Cairo to Gaza, Jerusalem, Haifa, Tripoli, Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Kuwait, Sanaa, and so on. We will put an end to the Zionist-American war machine of domination, expansion, extraction, pollution, and looting.
And you will either leave, or you will finally learn to live with others as equals.”
EXCELLENT SPEECH ALSO: Mohammed El-Kurd | This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide | 1/8 11:25 Min. by OxfordUnion, Dec 5, 2024
Palestinian Activist Delivers Poignant Speech at Oxford Union, Calls for Justice and Liberation by R Powell, Dec 1, 2024, AmericasEuropeMid-EastNews
In a profoundly moving and meticulously crafted address, Palestinian author and human rights activist Susan Abulhawa captivated the Oxford Union during Thursday’s debate on the motion: “This House Believes Israel Is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide.” The motion passed with overwhelming support, 278 votes to 59, but it was Abulhawa’s speech that resonated deeply, leaving the audience in stunned silence.
Abulhawa, the daughter of Palestinians displaced during the 1967 war and the founder of the NGO Playgrounds for Palestine, laid bare the historical and ongoing struggles of her people under Israeli occupation. Her speech, delivered with calm yet unyielding resolve, painted a stark picture of Palestinian suffering and resilience.
… Abulhawa’s address not only emphasized the enduring spirit of the Palestinian people but also called attention to the systemic violence and dispossession that have defined their plight. She concluded by expressing hope for a future where justice prevails and Palestine is restored as a beacon of pluralism and peace.
Her speech at the Oxford Union is already being hailed as a pivotal moment, a searing testament to the Palestinian struggle and a call to the global conscience to act against injustice.
You’ll not erase us: Palestinian activist Susan Abulhawa’s speech at Oxford Union debate Edited by Ed Newman, Dec 5, 2024, radiohc.cu
You’ll not erase us: Palestinian activist Susan Abulhawa’s speech at Oxford Union debate
The Oxford Union at UK’s prestigious Oxford University hosted a historic debate on November 28, titled: “This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide.”
The debate followed arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli military affairs minister Yoav Gallant.
It featured U.S. political scientist Norman Finkelstein, American activist Miko Peled, Palestinian-American author and activist Susan Abulhawa and Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd.
They were pitted against British barrister Natasha Hausdorff and Israeli journalist Jonathan Sacerdoti, who argued against the motion.
We reproduce the full text of remarks delivered by Abulhawa, a noted Palestinian writer and human rights activist. She is the author of several books and the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine. …
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Omar email hidden; JavaScript is required:
In January, Israeli historian Lee Mordechai released a 124 page report with 1,400 footnotes detailing evidence of Israel’s genocide, which he continues to update. How many of you heard about it? witnessing-the-gaza-war.com/wp-content/u
This report, the 750 page memorial compiled by South Africa, the 827 page report by Forensic Architecture, and the 300pg report by Amnesty International all refer to the thousands of videos uploaded proudly by Israeli soldiers, which we’ve all seen, and which Western media/gov pretend not to.
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@NimerSultany Nov 15, 2024:
There is an increasing consensus that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza because the evidence is overwhelming. Here is a reminder of some of the available and useful resources: An initial syllabus:
13 October 2023, Raz Segal, jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-cas…
15 October 2023: Public Statement: Over 800 Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza
twailr.com/public-stateme…
2 November: UN experts call to prevent genocide: un.org/unispal/docume…
16 November: UN experts call to prevent genocide: ohchr.org/en/press-relea…
16 November, William Schabas: ccrjustice.org/sites/default/…
16 November: Holocaust and genocide scholars John Cox, Victoria Sanford, and Barry Trachtenberg declaration, ccrjustice.org/sites/default/…
29 December, South Africa submission to ICJ: icj-cij.org/sites/default/…
29 May, South Africa’s dossier of evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent, the UN Security Council: tinyurl.com/nb6ua4a5
Martin Shaw, x.com/martinshawx/st…
UN Expert Francesca Albanese, first report on the Genocide (March 2024): ohchr.org/sites/default/…
UN Expert Francesca Albanese, second report on the Genocide (October 2024): documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/……
John Quigley, “Legal Standard for Genocide Intent: An Uphill Climb for Israel in Gaza Suit”, 14 March, EJIL: ejiltalk.org/legal-standard…
UK Judges’ and Lawyers’ Open Letter Concerning Gaza, 3 April 2024: lawyersletter.uk
Jinan Bastaki, Gaza, Forced Displacement, and Genocide”, EJIL, April 2024, ejiltalk.org/gaza-forced-di…
Nimer Sultany, “A Threshold Crossed: On Genocidal Intent and the Duty to Prevent Genocide in Palestine”, May 2024: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
University Network for Human Rights report, May 2024: humanrightsnetwork.org/publications/g…
Aryeh Neier, NYRB, 6 June 2024: nybooks.com/articles/2024/…
UN Commission of Inquiry, 10 June: Detailed findings on the military operations and attacks carried out in the Occupied Palestinian Territory from 7 October to 31 December 2023: ohchr.org/sites/default/…
Oxfam, Water War Crimes report, July 2024: oxfam.org/en/press-relea…
Omer Bartov, 13 August: theguardian.com/world/article/…
Haaretz, “The Numbers Show: Gaza War Is One of the Bloodiest in the 21st Century”, 14 August: haaretz.com/middle-east-ne…
Maryam Jamshidi, On Genocidal Intent, August: opiniojuris.org/2024/08/02/ref…
Forensic Architecture: cartographic analysis of the genocide in support of South Africa’s case in the ICJ: forensic-architecture.org/investigation/……
AOAV analysis that shows that vast majority of killed in Gaza are civilians: aoav.org.uk/2024/casualtie…
10 October 2024: UN Commission of Inquiry: Israel’s destruction of the health system in Gaza ohchr.org/en/press-relea…
8 November 2024: UN Commission of Inquiry: 70 percent of verified victims (October – 30 April) were children and women: ohchr.org/en/documents/r…
12 November 2024: 8 aid organisations of the systematic violation ICJ orders on humanitarian assistance, thereby establishing genocidal intent: oxfam.org/en/press-relea…
14 November 2024: UN Special Committee Report ohchr.org/en/press-relea…
North Gaza:
9 October 2024: 18 Aid organisations warn of dramatic escalation of humanitarian catastrophe in northern Gaza: oxfam.org.uk/media/press-re…
15 October: 38 organisations: “Northern Gaza is being wiped off the map”: oxfam.org/en/press-relea…
1 November: statement by 15 UN and humanitarian organisations: bit.ly/40pLGqx
Supplement to the syllabus on Israeli genocide in Gaza:
“Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in Israel and Palestine since 7 October”, 9 December 2023, contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-current……
Forensic Architecture, 7 March 2024, “Humanitarian Violence: Israel’s Abuse of Preventative Measures in its 2023-2024 Genocidal Military Campaign in the Occupied Gaza Strip”, content.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/upl……
Amos Goldberg, 18 April 2024, “Yes, it is genocide”, thepalestineproject.medium.com/yes-it-is-geno……
“Amount of Israeli bombs dropped on Gaza surpasses that of World War II”, 4 June 2024, aa.com.tr/en/middle-east……
UN Expert Michael Fakhri, 17 July 2024: starvation, genocide, colonialism: ohchr.org/en/documents/t……
Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, 17 July 2024: “A Legal Justification for Genocide” jewishcurrents.org/human-shields-……
B’Tselem, August 2024, “Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps” btselem.org/sites/default/……
Meron Rappoport, 17 September 2024, “A plan to liquidate northern Gaza is gaining steam” 972mag.com/northern-gaza-……
Al-Haq, PCHR, Al-Mezan, “As Israel’s Genocide in Gaza Passes the One-Year Mark, International Inaction Fuels Renewed Wave of Genocidal Violence against Palestinians”, alhaq.org/advocacy/24756……
VOX, 25 October 24, “Is Israel committing genocide? Reexamining the question, a year later”: vox.com/politics/37891……
Amos Goldberg, 29 October 24, “What is happening in Gaza is a genocide because Gaza does not exist anymore”, Le Monde, lemonde.fr/en/opinion/art……
Haaretz, 6 November 2024, North Gaza: “‘A Siege Within a Siege’: How Israel’s Army Blocks Aid to Tens of Thousands of Gazans”, archive.ph/a3Arn
HRW, 14 November, ““Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged”: Israel’s Forced Displacement of Palestinians in Gaza” hrw.org/report/2024/11……
William Schabas, “Top genocide scholar calls Starmer and Lammy ‘hypocrites’ over Gaza stance,” 18 November, middleeasteye.net/news/top-genoc……
UN Special Committee warns General Assembly, 19 November, “A genocide is unfolding before our eyes: History will not forgive our inaction”, ohchr.org/en/statements-……
ICC, 21 November, “Situation in the State of Palestine: ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I rejects the State of Israel’s challenges to jurisdiction and issues warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant” icc-cpi.int/news/situation……
— Crucial legal background for period before the genocide:
ICJ, “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”, 19 July 2024, icj-cij.org/case/186/advis…
Adding resources regarding genocide in North Gaza
There is an ongoing genocide in Gaza,’ says Amnesty International secretary general 7 mins by CBC, Dec. 5, 2024
Human rights organization Amnesty International says in a new report that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and it needs to be stopped. Israel has dubbed the findings “entirely false.” But Agnès Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary general, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal that in six months of investigating, Israel hasn’t once responded to their questions or addressed their evidence.
@AssalRad:
Amnesty: Israel is committing genocide
UN Report: Israel’s conduct in Gaza consistent with genocide
UN Experts: This is genocide
Genocide Experts: Gaza is a textbook case of genocide
[Israel]: No we’re not
[USA]: We see no evidence of genocide, Israel says so
@ViewChester:
No worries. The State Department says Israel is investigating itself.
So it is all good.
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