#Palestinian Centre for Human Rights

[vyorei]

Calls for the ICC's Karim Khan to issue arrest warrants for Israeli authorities and Military personnel

Fuck yeah, shove Netanyahu and Gallant and all their child-murdering cronies in the goddamn Hague

[lessergoodnow]

Attacks against human rights defenders and obliteration of civic space in Gaza unacceptable, says UN expert

16 September 2024

Israeli Defence Forces continue to intentionally starve and kill civilians, while human rights defenders face enormous challenges conducting their peaceful work, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor said today.

In recent months the oldest human rights organisation in Gaza, the Palestinian Human Rights Centre (PCHR), has seen staff members killed and its offices damaged beyond repair in air strikes and ground attacks by the Israeli Defence Forces.

“There is literally no place left for human rights defenders and civil society actors to continue documenting the litany of human rights violations to which Israel is subjecting the people of the Gaza Strip,” the Special Rapporteur said.

Two women lawyers from the PCHR were killed in February 2024. Nour Abu al-Nour died along with her two-year-old daughter, her parents, and four siblings in an air raid on her house in Rafah on 20 February 2024. Two days later, Dana Yaghi and 37 family members were wiped out in an Israeli air raid on a house to which they had relocated for safety in Deir el-Balah, 14 km south of Gaza City.

“It is a terrible tragedy that justice for these two women human rights defenders, their family members and their children, seems so far away. Human rights defenders keep hope alive for justice through their work but are becoming victims themselves. This is why Israeli authorities seem so intent on targeting and silencing them,” she said.

The PCHR headquarters in Gaza City and branch offices in Jabalya, Khan Younis, and Rafah have all been severely damaged in air raids and ground attacks, forcing staff to relocate and rent office space and logistical support at skyrocketing prices, while some international funding has been suspended. They have also been subjected to a vitriolic online smear campaign by the Israeli group, NGO Monitor, which has falsely accused PCHR of being linked to terrorists.

“Human rights defenders have told me that they will continue their work despite this online defamation, which is targeted at drying up their international support and intimidating them,” Lawlor said.

“This organisation continues to bear witness, document and record gross human rights violations and war crimes. Many Palestinians have spoken to them on condition of anonymity. Such is their fear of Israeli repercussions if they are to be publicly identified.”

Recent media reports have highlighted Israeli surveillance of PCHR, and other Palestinian human rights organisations, including Al-Haq and Addameer in the Occupied West Bank, for much of the past decade, in relation to information they were submitting on Israeli human rights violations to the International Criminal Court.

“I repeat my call for human rights defenders to be recognised as essential in times of armed conflict, and to be protected. As independent observers, lawyers and researchers, they document and preserve evidence of violations of international humanitarian and human rights law and ensure the possibility of accountability and justice,” Lawlor said.

The physical integrity of Human Rights Defenders should be protected against attacks and harassment, unlawful killings should be promptly and independently investigated in accordance with international law, and measures adopted to protect them against future serious violations, she said.

The expert has previously raised these concerns with authorities in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territory.

[sayruq]

Trinity College Cambridge, the University of Cambridge's wealthiest constituent college, has decided to divest from all arms companies, Middle East Eye can reveal.This came after MEE revealed in February that Trinity had £61,735 ($78,089) invested in Israel's largest arms company, Elbit Systems, which produces 85 percent of the drones and land-based equipment used by the Israeli army. MEE also reported that the college had millions of dollars invested in other companies arming, supporting and profiting from Israel's war on Gaza. In response to this report, on 28 February the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), a UK-based rights group, issued a legal notice to Trinity College warning that its investments could make it potentially complicit in Israeli war crimes. The ICJP indicated in its legal notice that "officers, directors and shareholders at the college may be individually criminally liable if they maintain their investments in arms companies that are potentially complicit in Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity". MEE has learnt from three well-informed sources close to Trinity's student union that the college council, responsible for major financial and other decisions, voted to remove Trinity's investments from arms companies in early March. According to these sources, the college decided not to announce that it would divest from arms companies after an activist defaced a 1914 portrait of Lord Arthur Balfour - who authored the infamous Balfour Declaration - inside the college on 8 March.

[starlightshadowsworld]

Turkey has filed a case against Israel in the International Criminal Court.

For their ongoing genocide of the Palestinians.

"Today... we have filed a lawsuit with the International Criminal Court in The Hague against the Hitler of the 21st century of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who must stand trial for the genocide he committed in the Gaza Strip and all crimes against humanity."

And it's not just Turkey.

Algeria has filed a case against Israel with the International Criminal Court.

With their president Abdelmadjid Tebboune saying "Where is humanity? And where is the global conscience that has become absent regarding the genocide being committed?”

Algeria's case is being backed by Colombia.

3 Palestinian organisations Al-Haq, al-Mezan, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights are filing their own case against Israel in the International Criminal Court.

[fairuzfan]

AMAZING article about what it means to participate in anti-Zionism work both online and in person.

If your anti-zionism does not in any way acknowledge that it is a way of thought and practice led by and for Palestinians, then you need to reevaluate your "anti-zionism" label.

Some passages that felt especially relevant to tumblr:

If we accept, as those with even the most rudimentary understanding of history do, that zionism is an ongoing process of settler-colonialism, then the undoing of zionism requires anti-zionism, which should be understood as a process of decolonisation. Anti-zionism as a decolonial ideology then becomes rightly situated as an indigenous liberation movement. The resulting implication is two-fold. First, decolonial organising requires that we extract ourselves from the limitations of existing structures of power and knowledge and imagine a new, just world. Second, this understanding clarifies that the caretakers of anti-zionist thought are indigenous communities resisting colonial erasure, and it is from this analysis that the strategies, modes, and goals of decolonial praxis should flow. In simpler terms: Palestinians committed to decolonisation, not Western-based NGOs, are the primary authors of anti-zionist thought. We write this as a Palestinian and a Palestinian-American who live and work in Palestine, and have seen the impact of so-called ‘Western values’ and how the centring of the ‘human rights’ paradigm disrupts real decolonial efforts in Palestine and abroad. This is carried out in favour of maintaining the status quo and gaining proximity to power, using our slogans emptied of Palestinian historical analysis.

Anti-zionist organising is not a new notion, but until now the use of the term in organising circles has been mired with misunderstandings, vague definitions, or minimised outright. Some have incorrectly described anti-zionism as amounting to activities or thought limited to critiques of the present Israeli government – this is a dangerous misrepresentation. Understanding anti-zionism as decolonisation requires the articulation of a political movement with material, articulated goals: the restitution of ancestral territories and upholding the inviolable principle of indigenous repatriation and through the right of return, coupled with the deconstruction of zionist structures and the reconstitution of governing frameworks that are conceived, directed, and implemented by Palestinians.  Anti-zionism illuminates the necessity to return power to the indigenous community and the need for frameworks of justice and accountability for the settler communities that have waged a bloody, unrelenting hundred-year war on the people of Palestine. It means that anti-zionism is much more than a slogan. 

[...]

While our collective imaginations have not fully articulated what a liberated and decolonised Palestine looks like, the rough contours have been laid out repeatedly. Ask any Palestinian refugee displaced from Haifa, the lands of Sheikh Muwannis, or Deir Yassin – they will tell that a decolonised Palestine is, at a minimum, the right of Palestinians’ return to an autonomous political unit from the river to the sea. When self-proclaimed ‘anti-zionists’ use rhetoric like ‘Israel-Palestine’ – or worse, ‘Palestine-Israel’ – we wonder: where do you think ‘Israel’ exists? On which land does it lay, if not Palestine? This is nothing more than an attempt to legitimise a colonial state; the name you are looking for is Palestine – no hyphen required. At a minimum, anti-zionist formations should cut out language that forces upon Palestinians and non-Palestinian allies the violence of colonial theft. 

[...]

The common choice to centre the Oslo Accords, international humanitarian law, and the human rights paradigm over socio-historical Palestinian realities not only limits our analysis and political interventions; it restricts our imagination of what kind of future Palestinians deserve, sidelining questions of decolonization to convince us that it is the new, bad settlers in the West Bank who are the source of violence. Legitimate settlers, who reside within the bounds of Palestinian geographies stolen in 1948 like Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem, are different within this narrative. Like Breaking the Silence, they can be enlightened by learning the error of colonial violence carried out in service of the bad settlers. They can supposedly even be our solidarity partners – all without having to sacrifice a crumb of colonial privilege or denounce pre-1967 zionist violence in any of its cruel manifestations. As a result of this course of thought, solidarity organisations often showcase particular Israelis – those who renounce state violence in service of the bad settlers and their ongoing colonisation of the West Bank – in roles as professionals and peacemakers, positioning them on an equal intellectual, moral, or class footing with Palestinians. There is no recognition of the inherent imbalance of power between these Israelis and the Palestinians they purport to be in solidarity with – stripping away their settler status. The settler is taken out of the historical-political context which afforded them privileged status on stolen land, and is given the power to delineate the Palestinian experience. This is part of the historical occlusion of the zionist narrative, overlooking the context of settler-colonialism to read the settler as an individual, and omitting their class status as a settler. 

It is essential to note that Palestinians have never rejected Jewish indigeneity in Palestine. However, the liberation movement has differentiated between zionist settlers and Jewish natives. Palestinians have established a clear and rational framework for this distinction, like in the Thawabet, the National Charter of Palestine from 1968. Article 6 states, ‘The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.’ When individuals misread ‘decolonisation’ as ‘the mass killing or expulsion of Jews,’ it is often a reflection of their own entanglement in colonialism or a result of zionist propaganda. Perpetuating this rhetoric is a deliberate misinterpretation of Palestinian thought, which has maintained this position over a century of indigenous organising.  Even after 100 years of enduring ethnic cleansing, whole communities bombed and entire family lines erased, Palestinians have never, as a collective, called for the mass killing of Jews or Israelis. Anti-zionism cannot shy away from employing the historical-political definitions of ‘settler’ and ‘indigenous’ in their discourse to confront ahistorical readings of Palestinian decolonial thought and zionist propaganda. 

[...]

In the context of the United States, the most threatening zionist institutions are the entrenched political parties which function to maintain the status quo of the American empire, not Hillel groups on university campuses or even Christian zionist churches. While the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) engage in forms of violence that suppress Palestinian liberation and must not be minimised, it is crucial to recognise that the most consequential institutions in the context of settler-colonialism are not exclusively Jewish in their orientation or representation: the Republican and Democratic Party in the United States do arguably more to manufacture public consent for the slaughtering of Palestinians than the ADL and AIPAC combined. Even the Progressive Caucus and the majority of ‘The Squad’ are guilty of this.

Leila Shomali and Lara Kilani

[zvaigzdelasas]

A court in Germany has overturned a Europe-wide travel ban imposed by German authorities on Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, the British Palestinian surgeon who spent weeks saving lives in Gaza at the beginning of Israel’s ongoing genocide.

In recent weeks, Abu Sitta has been barred from entering France and the Netherlands in order to speak about the Israeli war crimes he witnessed during his 43 days working as a doctor under Israel’s savage and indiscriminate bombardment.[...]

The draconian German ban constituted “a serious breach of freedom of movement and expression in Europe and now a judge has ruled that the travel ban should be overturned,” said the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) and European Legal Support Centre (ELSC), which assisted in the case.

“This is a significant victory for freedom of speech and a significant turning point in challenging the chilling environment that many Palestinian human rights advocates have to operate in,” the two civil rights groups added.

The ban on Abu Sitta had also drawn criticism from Human Rights Watch, which asserted that the “attempts to prevent him from sharing his experience treating patients in Gaza risks undermining Germany’s commitment to protect and facilitate freedom of expression and assembly and to nondiscrimination.”

15 May 24

[neodymiumcuilz]

HELP KHETAM AND HER FAMILY ESCAPE GAZA - URGENT CALL TO ACTION.

Hello, THE INTERNET IS BEING CUT OFF IN GAZA, and people are finding it more and more different to connect with the world. Khetam and her family need more people to keep sharing what's happening, keep sharing their story, keep donations flowing and keep supporting her, we need to continue to amplify Gazan voices, we need the world to hear these crimes against humanity as the internet is being cut. Don't let this news go unheard or unseen.

In Gaza, people are being deliberately and systematically starved to death, the little aid that is getting in is dangers to recieve, as these "GHF aid centres" have mass casualty events every single day, killing many starving Palestinians, this is not how you deliver aid.

Food is a basic human right, everyone should have the right to live and to live in saftey and security, not with the threat of bombing and starvation hanging over their heads each day. A loaf of bread should be in every kitchen, and people should not have to worry about dying to get aid, and basic supplies should not be a daily battle.

" Hello, my name is Khetam and I am a young woman from Gaza that was displaced to Mawasi Khan Yunis along with my family. We are currently living in a tent among other people have been displaced as a result of ongoing bombardment and daily raids. Every day becomes more difficult as family and friends are being martyred, children have nothing to eat, and more people are getting sick without treatment.

There is currently no safe place for us in Gaza. People are being displaced daily and we are severely lacking in basic needs like water, food, and medicine. Our homes and our livelihood were destroyed after October 7th. Your support for me and my family is incredibly important. We have lost everything and hope that your donation can help us restore our livelihood. " - Words from Khetam, please try put yourself in her shoes, try and imagine.

Any donations can go a long way and are appreciated, I cannot believe it has come to people in need relying on fundraisers (which aren't even a good source of income) to survive, but here we are. THE LAST DONATION WAS 21 DAYS AGO. 21 DAYS WITHOUT DONATIONS, in Gaza, people have no sources of income, and the price of food and cost of living in general has skyrocketed, beyond the means of most. Please don't let her go more days without donations, please also share if you can.

Please follow @familykhetam3 to support her, please let her voice reach the world, thank you.

tagging for reach:

@thejasontoddarchives @anarchafemme @sweet-honey-bunnies @lesbiansforglados @dxppercxdxver @sheepory @elb4ckfl1po @millenniumidol @heart-forge @infectiouspiss @baweiii @butchfeygela @fox-guardian @oars @wolfythewitch @technofeudalism @pizzat-i @theomenroom @unearthprisonpanopticon @sealsdaily @ashwantsafreepalestine @ubernegro @bugmatics @kingoftheironcity @checkadii @wolf-tail @thi4f @mt-travaii @redbuddi @plasticduck @risoria @mollysunder @sister-lucifer @punkeropercyjackson @immediatebreakfast @khizuo @nevert-the-guy @ahaura @chanafehs @yourpersonaltimebomb @wolstinien @neechees @ankle-beez @webdings4 @silicacid @schroedingers-mooneater @lonniemachin @dykesbat @charlott2n @watermotif @yeetsintovoid @momorikoz @determinate-negation @girlinafairytale @yugiohz @rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world @painfully-unoriginal

[nando161mando]

Both female and male Israeli soldiers raped Palestinian women from Gaza and the West Bank, according to testimonies presented during the UN Commission of Inquiry's public hearing on March 11, 2025.

Kifaya Khraim, International Advocacy Officer at the Women's Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling, and Witness 3, a Palestinian woman human rights defender, provided detailed accounts of sexual, reproductive, and other forms of gender-based violence committed by Israeli security forces and settlers. This was part of the Commission's third round of hearings to document violations against Palestinians, with a focus on crimes targeting women's bodies.

[ashwantsafreepalestine]

Israelis are raping Palestinian women.

"Both female and male Israeli "soldiers" raped Palestinian women from Gaza and the West Bank, according to testimonies presented during the UN Commission of Inquiry’s public hearing on March 11, 2025.

Kifaya Khraim, International Advocacy Officer at the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling, and Witness #3, a Palestinian woman human rights defender, provided detailed accounts of sexual, reproductive, and other forms of gender-based violence committed by Israeli "soldiers" and settlers.

This was part of the Commission's third round of hearings to document violations against Palestinians, with a focus on crimes targeting women’s bodies."

I am absolutely sickened. Zionists are the scum of the earth.

(source)

[vyorei]

Multiple rights groups call on the UNSC to urgently adopt the Jordanian ceasefire resolution being presented tomorrow, Friday the 27th of October 2023

[leftistfeminista]

Israel tied a Palestinian coed into a banana position during her menstrual period while denying her underwear or tampons

In a long corridor, Israeli intelligence operatives were standing and clapping sarcastically as jailers were taking handcuffed Mays Abu Ghosh to a military interrogation cell.

“They were mocking me, saying I'd die in the interrogation,” Mays told Anadolu Agency.

Amid her menstrual cycle, Mays was tied to the chair by her hands and ankles and stretched her body into a banana shape for hours, making it impossible to sleep.

“I wasn’t able to walk, the jailers were holding me to the cell,” Mays added.

May's hands were constantly bleeding due to the shackles. She refused to be subjected to another military interrogation session, so the intelligence officer grabbed Mays and slammed her against the wall.

Mays continued: "They didn't provide me with any tampons or undergarments I needed in this delicate period for any woman in the world."

33 days of torture

Gosh, 24, of the Qalandiya refugee camp, is a journalism and media student at Birzeit University who was arrested on Aug. 29, 2019, and then subjected to horrific torture in solitary confinement for 33 days at Al-Maskobya Interrogation Center.

During her confinement at the notorious facility, she lost 12 kilograms (26.5 pounds).

“The officers were constantly trying to convince me that I had gone insane and was trying to kill myself, so they brought social workers, but they were actually other officers,” Mays recounted.

When those officers were in the cell with Mays, she showed them the wounds and bruises she suffered as a result of the abuse she had been subjected to and asked them: "Who wants to kill another person? I'm a student, and you're detaining me."

Mays frequently asked for painkillers to alleviate the pains in her head and muscles, but she was usually denied.

During the interrogation sessions, the officers deliberately forced Mays to hear the screams of detainees subjected to physical torture in military interrogation, while also threatening her that what would happen with her would be even more horrible.

“They threatened me that I'd be out here either dead or paralyzed, and they threatened to rape me too,” she said.

Mays was not allowed to wear a hair scrunchie because the officers were constantly beating, punching, kicking, smacking, and pulling her hair.

“I was tearing the plastic bag they put breakfast food in and using its strips to tie down my hair, but they were taking it from me,” Mays recounted.

Mays was kept in one of the cells for several days with a bug rat that lurked in the sewers and attacked her while she was sleeping, indicating a high risk of infection transmission to Mays.

She was completely isolated for 33 days, unable to communicate with any lawyers or human rights groups. She lived in terrible conditions due to the constant torture she was subjected to, as well as the filthy cell where sewage overflowed, soaking her thin sleeping mattress.

Horrific tales of Palestinian girls in Israeli jails

PALESTINIAN journalism student Mays Abu Ghosh has been tortured in an Israeli jail, her family alleged today as human rights groups warn of systemic abuse of prisoners by authorities.

Her mother said Ms Abu Ghosh’s face was “full of bruises” and barely recognisable after 30 days of interrogation at the notorious Moscovia detention centre in Jerusalem.

“I could not hug her due to the pain hurting all of her body,” she explained.

Ms Abu Ghosh, who is studying at Bir Zeit University, has been held in prison since August 28 when she was detained along with five other young Palestinians.

She has been campaigning against the torture and treatment of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

According to Addameer, Ms Abu Ghosh was forced into a number of stress positions during her interrogation, including the so-called “banana.”

[tieflingkisser]

Opioid pills discovered in US-backed food aid, Gaza authorities say

from the article:

The Gaza government media office on Friday condemned the discovery of oxycodone pills reportedly discovered in flour bags distributed by “American-Israeli” aid centres.

“We have so far documented four testimonies from citizens who found these pills inside the flour bags,” it said in a statement, warning of the “possibility that some of these narcotic substances were deliberately ground or dissolved in the flour itself”.

Oxycodone is an opioid meant to treat severe and long-term pain, often prescribed to cancer patients.

The drug is highly addictive and can have life-threatening effects, including breathing complications and hallucinations. 

The media office’s statement comes after several social media posts shared images of pills purportedly discovered in flour bags in Gaza.

Palestinian pharmacist Omar Hamad described the discovery of the pills as “the most despicable form of genocide”.

[...]

On Wednesday, 15 human rights and legal groups called for the suspension of GHF for its role in undermining international humanitarian organisations and fostering the “forced displacement” of Palestinians in Gaza, amounting to what could be complicity in “crimes under international law, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide”.

Gaza’s health authorities have reported that at least 516 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces near aid sites in the past month of GHF’s operations. 

On Friday, Haaretz reported Israeli soldiers admitting to directly shooting and killing unarmed Palestinians at GHF-operated aid collection sites.

[sayruq]

The Israeli army is likely to carry out a fresh massacre in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahia, initiating a new round of forced evacuation orders against its estimated 50,000 citizens who remained in the area. The UN and other international parties need to take immediate action to protect Palestinian civilians. After declaring the town of Beit Lahia to be a "dangerous combat zone" and threatening to "act with extreme force," the Israeli army started to launch heavy air and artillery attacks on the town, followed by fresh evacuation orders. The Israeli army set up shelters for the town of Beit Lahia's residents to evacuate towards known shelters in blocks number 1770, 1766, but these were originally destroyed areas that are unfit for any form of life and lack water supply as well as functioning sewage systems. The two designated evacuation points are unsafe areas and, like all areas of the town of Beit Lahia in particular, and the northern Gaza Strip in general, have previously been subjected to widespread destruction, including shelter centres and public facilities, as a result of the ongoing Israeli military attack since October 7. In light of the ongoing crimes of genocide and forced displacement policy in the Gaza Strip, every area designated by the Israeli army as a military operation area is completely destroyed, subjected to a strict and oppressive siege, and horrifically massacred, as the remaining residents have nowhere safe to flee. In the absence of strong international accountability mechanisms and any swift international action to put an end to these crimes, which have been going on for six months, the military operation that the Israeli army launched in the town of Beit Lahia will result in more serious crimes and violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law. The town of Beit Lahia was the scene of multiple large-scale military operations by the Israeli army during the previous seven months of its military assault on the Gaza Strip. One such operation occurred at the end of December last year, which resulted in extensive damage to homes, infrastructure, and civil and service facilities, with the town's buildings and infrastructure being destroyed to the tune of approximately 90%. The Israeli army's Beit Lahia military operation is taking place on the 200th day of the massive military assault on the Gaza Strip, which has had horrific consequences due to its direct and deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians amid the shameful international inaction to oblige Israel to abide by international humanitarian law and the orders of the International Court of Justice to stop its genocide crime.

[jewishvitya]

Hi, I stumbled upon your political posts (and then Yuri, you might get me to watch it now) and I find your perspective fascinating. Maybe it's because I grew up with rather a lot of exposure to Palestinians and various peace movements, but your experience is alien to me, and I am really thankful to be able to read it.

I would like to ask, what do you define as Zionism? As the last month taught me that no two people define this term the same. For me it is the ability for the Jewish people to control our own life in a land that we are bound to, and that has no contradiction with the Palestinian doing the same on this land, that they are bound to it as well. No pressure to answer, just pure curiosity.

And if I may offer some hope for our future? On the fourth day of the war, someone who helps in one of the donation centres for the displaced Israelis ask in the group chat if there is a way to pass the extra clothing and equipment to the people of Gaza. In the past two month I got invites for over a dozes or meeting between Israelis and Palestinians, meetings were both sides shared their sorrows and hopes. When an acquaintance was raising money to help a Bedouin family whose house was hit by a rocket, he has to tell people to stop donating. People in my surrounding have been talking about the day after, building plans so they could help build a better place for both people. A long-fought battle in the courts was won, and a group of settlers were ordered to evacuate Palestinian land. Activists have been going to assist in the olive harvests in the West Bank, despite it all.

There is hope for us here.

Hi! Thank you! If you do watch YOI I hope you enjoy it lol.

I know my experience is not very common. Even other Israelis get shocked by the depth of the hatred and the indoctrination sometimes. I try to emphasize that it comes from the most extremist community we have, because I have no idea what the schooling looks like in other areas.

And sure, I'll try to explain, and maybe also why I choose to label myself as anti-zionist.

I don't know that I can give you a dictionary definition, because I define zionism mainly by what it did in practice - the colonizing of Palestine. And when I say colonizing, I'm not making claims about indigeniety or lack of it. I'm defining it through our tactics and our actions. Especially because early in the movement they openly used colonialist frameworks.

Some of the softer definitions of zionism, things like our right to self determination, our right to seek safety - these aren't things I'm against. And I understand that within zionism there were other proposed ideas that weren't necessarily meant to end up with an ethnostate, resulting in ethnic cleansing. So I know zionism is more complicated than what we see in Israel. But what we see now is the reality people are living as the outcome.

If we came here and said "we've been longing to go back here for such a long time, we suffered so much abuse, we want to live alongside you in our shared homeland, can we find a way to ensure our safety and yours" - this would have been a different conversation. Still complicated, because mass immigration is complicated, but different.

In reality, we destroyed communities to manufacture an ethnic majority. Tore a whole society apart and shattered it, spread it all over the world. We killed and expelled and traumatized. I called it the cycle of abuse on the scale of nations - taking horrors we suffered and inflicting them on others. So given the practical results of the zionist movement, I can't treat those softer definitions as the "true" definitions that people should go by.

I keep thinking about Jewish refugees being given the homes of Palestinians with meals still on the table. Because of course we have a right to food and shelter, but not at their expense. And I know you agree with me on this.

When I say I oppose zionism, that's generally because I'm talking about the reality, the impact the movement had on human lives, not an idealized version we might imagine or a philosophy someone wrote about that never came to be.

For me, if I want to talk about our safety in our ancestral homeland and detach it from the horrors committed by Israel, zionism isn't the right framework. And after all the destruction we caused the land to conquer and colonize it, if I want to talk about our connection to it, I think zionism shouldn't be the word I'm using.

There's also an aspect of, by insisting on defining zionism through a nicer idea rather than harm done to real people, I see it as taking away a language that oppressed people are using to talk about their oppression.

I hope that makes sense.

I really want us to find a different way to work towards safety, without it being at the expense of another group of people.

And thank you for that last paragraph. I definitely have hope. It's hard, seeing videos of our soldiers being so gleeful about the destruction. I lost a friend of over ten years because of the callous and cruel things he said over the past couple of months, and I can't bring myself to repeat them. But I know that better things are possible, and I'm glad we're building towards them. I'm terrified that our government won't let us move in that direction, but we're going to push there anyway.

[colinbrooklyn]

Support Palestinian organizations during Project for Awesome 2024 #P4A2024 🇵🇸

You can vote today, tomorrow, and on Sunday before 12 PM EST 🗳️

Vote for Palestinian Centre for Human Rights

Vote for Palestinian Youth Movement

Vote for Palestinian American Community Center

[neodymiumcuilz]

ONLY $150 NEEDED TO HELP SAVE A MAN FROM GAZA - HELP AHMED MAZEN & HIS FAMILY

" I am Ahmed, I live with my father, but life has become very painful between hunger, thirst and other things. I went to the aid south of Rafah, where the Americans hold the aid, and I went to get food, but they opened fire on us and my leg was shot, and now I am disabled. They put iron in my leg so it wouldn't be amputated. If I don't take the necessary treatment that the doctors prescribed for me, my life will deteriorate and they will amputate my leg. But they performed a very dangerous surgery on me, and after several attempts, the operation was successful. They threatened me that if I didn't take care of myself, my leg would be amputated. I had a simple life, a warm home, and my mother died. She used to fill our lives with light. But the war took everything from us... Our homes were destroyed, our dreams were burned, and all that remained was pain and fear. "

Imagine living that life, imagine living in Gaza, where people are killed every single day while trying to get a box of food, and where health care is dangerous due to the lack of supplies.

Can you imagine while trying to get food, you get injured, and your leg becomes damaged. Imagine while trying to get food, the most basic of human rights. The most important of human rights. Imagine the humiliation of living in degrading conditions and being forced to enter a death trap for even a morsel of food.

Imagine living the most painful life, imagine going through what the world watches through a screen, and cannot even comprehend.

Ahmed ( @mazen-fmaily ) tells me he only needs $150 dollars to save him and his father's life.

Ahmed cannot afford to go out to that "aid distribution centre" and risk his life again. He could have his foot amputated if he dosent take care.

He needs donations for food, so he doesn't have to resort to going to that "aid distribution centre" again and risk being killed or having his foot further damaged.

THE LAST DONATION WAS 18 HOURS AGO, IT WAS $5 - CAN YOU MATCH/TOP THAT AMOUNT??

tagging for reach:

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