#palestinian victimhood

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by David Litman

CNN has a shaky relationship with polling data, as CAMERA has documented previously. In a previous, admittedly more egregious case, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour appears to have entirely fabricated the existence of polling data that fit her preferred narrative. On July 14, however, CNN’s Abeer Salman took a slightly different track by using existing polling data, but only some of it.

In an article titled “Palestinian leader calls on world to ‘protect us,’ and his people respond with bitter laughter,” Salman reports on the declining popularity of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. To her credit, this is a story that needs to be told.

But Salman, who has a history of slanted coverage (and even uncritically publishing an antisemitic cartoon), doesn’t end there. She portrays the story as one in which Palestinians are frustrated that Abbas is not “protecting” them from “increasing Israeli settler violence and frequent, deadly Israeli military incursions…”

In doing so, Salman shifts the story from one of growing Palestinian extremism and violence into one of Palestinian victimhood. The narrative portrays the situation as one in which Palestinians are mocking Abbas’ “calls for peaceful resistance” (a dubious claim itself) not because they are increasingly supportive of violence against Israelis, but because they are victims of Israeli violence.

But the data, including the polling data from Salman’s own source, works against her narrative.

The CNN reporter cites a Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) poll, pointing out that “71% were dissatisfied” with Abbas as president and “74% demanded that he resign.”

However, Salman leaves out the other side of the story from those PCPSR polls. As Abbas’ popularity has declined, two other indicators have taken notable and contemporaneous turns: (1) support for the two-state solution has declined; and (2) support for “armed confrontations and intifada” has risen.

Tracking all three questions since March 2015, we see the following trend:

Source: Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research

Shortly after satisfaction with Abbas began dramatically declining (from 37% in 2020 to 32% in 2021, 23% in 2022, and 19% in 2023), support for armed confrontations and intifada” began sharply increasing (from 43% in 2021 to 52% in 2022 and 58% in 2023). Equally important to note is that support for a two-state solution has simultaneously declined in a similarly dramatic fashion (from 40% in 2022 to 27% in 2023).

That is, the story isn’t just one of declining popularity for Abbas. It’s one of greater support for violence and for rejection of living peacefully, side by side with Israel.

While one must always be cautious of reading too much into polling data, as a recent CAMERA study showed, around the same time that polling data began showing these trends, the level of Palestinian violence dramatically surged, jumping from 1,248 attacks in 2020 to 2,063 in 2021 and 2,674 in 2022. And while UN data suggests violence by Israeli settlers has also increased, the data shows quite clearly that settler violence grew more slowly and remains at levels dramatically lower than Palestinian violence, with 358 incidents in 2020, 496 incidents in 2021, and 849 incidents in 2022.

This preempts the suggestion that the growth in support for violence among Palestinians was a response to growing Israeli violence, given that the data shows the surge in violence has been overwhelmingly driven by the Palestinian side.

One other polling point left out: what Palestinians prefer over “peaceful resistance.” While Salman states that many Palestinians mock calls for “peaceful resistance,” she leaves out what the polls show they prefer: “armed struggle.” While the polling question has not been consistently asked over the same period by PCPSR, the March 2023 poll showed Palestinians chose “armed struggle” (54%) over “popular resistance” (21%) as the “most effective” method to end the conflict and achieve statehood (only 18% chose “negotiations”).

This information exposes Salman’s narrative as rather superficial and misleading in its portrayal of the larger context. While she is correct in noting Abbas’ decline in popularity, a story which deserves far more attention than it has gotten in Western media, her misleading narrative leaves works to distort the other highly relevant trends shaping Palestinian societal views.

[sscarletvenus]

please stop scrolling for a moment and read.

this happened on wednesday in occupied jerusalem, supposedly the "only democracy in middle east."

israeli police raided the anti-zionist jewish neighborhood, to attack any symbol of jewish solidarity with Palestine, took down the Palestinian flag, brutally assaulted anti-zionist jews by knocking them down on the road, hitting them, and punching them in the face.

zionism is a violent and fascist ideology that doesn't even spare the very people it is supposed to protect. anyone who disagrees with its racist mandate, even jews, are targeted by the entity that falsely claims to represent jewish people.

if they can do this to their own, can you even bear to imagine how they have treated, and continue to treat, Palestinians? except you don't really have to - idf soldiers have, on multiple occasions, documented their own war crimes and violations of the very nature of being human. they have gloated over their own capacity to commit undeniable evil too many times on camera.

does amy schumer care about these people standing up against genocide and getting persecuted for doing so? what does noah schnapp have to say?

what do well-off white jews in the west who record tiktoks with a face full of makeup, impeccably manicured nails, curated fits and ring lights, who have monopolized claims to antisemitism and grief and victimhood while black and other non-white jewish people have been rendered almost entirely invisible from public memory, have to say about this?

israel was never about judaism.

[mariacallous]

“Did they really decapitate babies?” my 14-year-old daughter asked me yesterday. She was pointing to a text message on her phone from a friend. “They’re saying they found Jewish babies killed, some burnt, some decapitated.” And I froze. Not because I didn’t know what to say—though in truth I didn’t know what to say—but because for a moment I forgot what century I was in. All of the assumptions I had made as a Jewish father, even one who had grown up, as I did, with the Holocaust just a few decades past, were suddenly no longer relevant. Had I adequately prepared her for the reality of Jewish death, what every shtetl child for centuries would have known intimately? Later in the day, she asked if, for safety’s sake, she should take off the necklace she loves that her grandparents had given her and that has her name written out in Hebrew script.

The attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians last Saturday broke something in me. I had always resisted victimhood. It felt abhorrent, self-pitying to me in a world that seemed far away from the Inquisition and Babi Yar—especially in the United States, where I live and where polls repeatedly tell me that Jews are more beloved than any other religious group. I wasn’t blind to anti-Semitism and the ways it had recently become deadlier, or to the existential dread that my family in Israel felt every time terrorists blew up a bus or café—it’s a story whose sorrows have punctuated my entire life. But I refused to embrace that ironically comforting mantra, “They will always want to kill us.” I hated what this tacitly expressed, that if they always want to kill us, then we owe them, the world, nothing. I deplore the occupation for both the misery it has inflicted on generations of Palestinians and the way it corrodes Israeli society; when settlers in the West Bank have been attacked, it has pained me, but I have also felt anger that they are even there. In short, I wasn’t locked into the worldview of my survivor grandparents and I felt superior for it.

But something in me did break. As I was driving on Tuesday, I heard a long interview on the BBC with Shir Golan, a 22-year-old woman who had survived the attack at the music festival where more than 250 people were killed, her voice sounding just like one of my young Israeli cousins. She described, barely able to catch her breath, how the shooting had started and how she’d begun to run. She’d found a wooded area and tried to hide. “I got really into the ground,” she said. “I put the bushes on me.” Covered with dirt and leaves, she’d waited. A group of terrorists had shown up and called for anyone hiding to come out. From her spot under the earth, she’d seen three young people, whom she called “children,” emerge. “I didn’t go out because I was scared. But there were three children next to me who got out. And then they shot them. One after one after one. And they fell down, and that I saw. I saw the children fall down. And all that I did was pray. I prayed to my god to save me.”

I pulled my car over because my own hands were shaking as I listened. She then described waiting, hidden in the dirt under bushes for hours, until she saw the terrorists begin to light the forest on fire. “I didn’t know what to do. Because if I’m staying there, I’m just burnt to death. But if I go out they are going to kill me.” She crawled over to where she saw dead bodies and lay on top of them, but the heat soon approached, so she found more bushes to hide in until she could run again. Burnt bodies were everywhere, and Shir looked for her friends but couldn’t find them, couldn’t even see the faces of those killed because they were so badly burned. “I felt like I was in hell.” She finally escaped in a car.

Her story flung me back to my grandparents’ stories. My grandmother hid in a hole for a year in the Polish countryside, also under dirt, also scared. My grandfather spent months in Majdanek, a death camp, and saw bodies pile up in exactly this way. Stories are still emerging of families burnt alive, of children forced to watch their parents killed before their eyes, of bodies desecrated. How was this taking place last Saturday?

But these stories aren’t what broke me. What did was the distance between what was happening in my head and what was happening outside of it. The people on “my side” are supposed to care about human suffering, whether it’s in the detention camps of Xinjiang or in Darfur. They are supposed to recognize the common humanity of people in need, that a child in distress is first a child in distress regardless of country or background. But I quickly saw that many of those on the left who I thought shared these values with me could see what had happened only through established categories of colonized and colonizer, evil Israeli and righteous Palestinian—templates made of concrete. The break was caused by this enormous disconnect. I was in a world of Jewish suffering that they couldn’t see because Jewish suffering simply didn’t fit anywhere for them.

The callousness was expressed in so many ways. There were those tweets that did not hide their disregard for Jewish life—“what did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? Losers”—or the one that described the rampage as a “glorious thing to wake up to.” There was the statement by more than two dozen Harvard student groups asserting, in those first hours in which we saw children and women and old people massacred, that “the Israeli regime” was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” And then there were the less explicit posts that nevertheless made clear through pseudo-intellectual word salads that Israel got what it deserved: “a near-century’s pulverized overtures toward ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude—these things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia.” I hate to extrapolate from social media—it is a place that twists every utterance into a performance for others. But I also felt this callousness in the real world, in a Times Square celebratory protest promoted by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, at which one speaker talked of supporting Palestinians using “any means necessary” to retake the land “from the river to the sea,” as a number of placards declared. There were silences as well. Institutions that had rushed to condemn the murder of George Floyd or Russia for attacking Ukraine were apparently confounded. I watched my phone to see whether friends would write to find out if my family was okay—and a few did, with genuine and thoughtful concern, but many did not.

I’m still trying to understand this feeling of abandonment. Is my own naivete to blame? Did I tip too far over into the side of universalism and forget the particularistic concerns to which I should have been attuned—the precarious state of my own tribe? Even as I write this, I don’t really want to believe that that’s true. If I can fault myself clearly for something, though, it’s not recognizing that the same ideological hardening I’d seen on the right in the past few years, the blind allegiances and contorted narratives even when reality was staring people in the face, has also happened, to a greater degree than I’d imagined, on the left, among the people whom I think of as my own. They couldn’t recognize a moral abomination when it was staring them in the face. They were so set in their categories that they couldn’t make a distinction between the Palestinian people and a genocidal cult that claimed to speak in that people’s name. And they couldn’t acknowledge hundreds and hundreds of senseless deaths because the people who were killed were Israelis and therefore the enemy.

As the days go on, the horrific details of what happened—those babies—seem to be registering more fully, if not on the ideological left, then at least among sensible liberals. But somehow I can’t shake the feeling of aloneness. Does it take murdered babies for you to recognize our humanity? I find myself thinking—a thought that feels alien to my own mind but also like the truth. Perhaps this is the Jewish condition, bracketed off for many decades and finally pulling me in.

When news broke of the Kishinev pogrom in 1903 that took 49 lives (compare that with the 1,200 we now know were killed on Saturday), it caused a sensation throughout the world. “Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob,” The New York Times reported. “The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.” In response to that massacre, the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews to the United States began in earnest; the call of Zionism as a solution also sounded clearly and widely for the first time.

In his famous poem about the massacre, “In the City of Slaughter,” the Hebrew writer Haim Naḥman Bialik lamented, even more than the death, the sense of helplessness (“The open mouths of such wounds, that no mending / Shall ever mend, nor healing ever heal”), the men who watched in terror from their hiding places while women were raped and blood was spilled. I can’t say I know what will happen now that this helplessness has returned—if I’m honest, I also fear that Israel’s retaliation will go too far, that acting out of a place of victimhood, as right as it may feel, will cause the country to lose its mind. Innocent lives in Gaza have been and will be destroyed as a result, and competing victimhood is obviously not the way out of the conflict; it’s the reason that it is hopelessly stuck. But in this moment, before the destruction of Gaza grabs my attention and concern alongside fear for my relatives who have been called up to the army, I don’t want to forget how alone I felt as a Jew these past few days. I have a persistent, uncomfortable need now to have my people’s suffering be felt and seen. Otherwise, history is just an endless repetition. And that’s an additional tragedy that seems too much to bear.

[yuri-alexseygaybitch]

People treating the WCK workers getting killed like it's some unprecedented flashpoint that's going to finally get israel condemned by the International Community™️, lol seriously grow tf up. 30,000+ Palestinians are dead along with hundreds of UN workers, journalists, and foreign aid workers you haven't heard about at all. 7 mostly white NGO workers getting killed by the zionist entity isn't "unprecedented" or uniquely awful unless you think these their deaths and victimhood matter more than all of the faceless dead brown people who have already died in droves. If Rachel Corrie getting flattened by the IOF wasn't enough to make the US put the breaks on unconditional support for their genocidal settler colony no amount of proximity to whiteness or the NGO industrial complex is going to matter. Stop looking for ideal victims and support the ongoing, armed resistance to the occupation.

[apollos-olives]

you have absolutely no right to judge, condemn, or claim anything at all over how an oppressed people act or speak against their oppressors. you have absolutely NO right to claim that "they should have done it peacefully" or that if you were in the same situation, you would "not act the same way" they did. you have absolutely no damn idea how you would act. no one can predict how they would act in the face of brutal and horrifying situations.

what, so you didn't like how that little palestinian boy used the wrong term when talking about zionists?? have you considered shutting the fuck up?

what, so you didn't like that rebellion naturally became violent against the oppressors, even if the oppressors were "civilians"??? have you considered shutting the fuck up?

what, so you didn't like how the palestinians are fighting back because it ruined your view of perfect victimhood???? have you considered shutting the fuck up?

you have absolutely no right. no fucking right. you have no right to condemn an oppressed people over how, why, where, and what they are fighting back against. you have no goddamn right. just because it got violent doesn't mean anyone- ANYONE- deserves genocide. honestly fuck you. if you are gonna police the way an oppressed people act against their oppressors i genuinely hope you rot in hell. fuck you. fuck you fuck you fuck you. free palestine

[elder-millennial-of-zion]

It’s so insufferable the way non-Palestinian goyim act like this is about them more than it is about Jews. If Jews try to be like “hey, you are being antisemitic,” they lash out like they’re the ones personally injured, in this tone of “how dare you speak to me about an issue that’s so personal for me!” When I’m the one affected by their Jew hatred. As a Jew. But they act like they’re the ones personally affected and I’m the one who has no right to speak over their lived experience of……deciding this is their pet issue.

Like when I left that Facebook comment for the person posting all that antisemitism, saying it was cruel and terrifying. Some friend of theirs who I don’t know responded, “::deep breath:: why is it cruel?” It’s the “deep breath” that pisses me off. Like it’s so taxing for him to confront a total stranger on facebook who just said they’re upset because they’re Jewish. Like he really doesn’t want to challenge the Jew he doesn’t even know who was just expressing her feelings, but he simply must take up that burden. Fuck you.

They don’t act like allies to the Palestinians but rather proxies for them, stand-ins for them, in a way that’s really gross and weird and exploitative. Like these outraged posts that say “don’t you dare lecture Palestinians about antisemitism!” I wasn’t. I was addressing you, a completely uninvolved non-Palestinian. If what you really want to say is “don’t lecture me about my antisemitism,” then just fucking say it.

They act like they’re the ones buried under rubble in Gaza. It’s one thing to empathize with victims, it’s another thing to claim ownership of victimhood.

[aronarchy]

A copy of the reading list, if you dislike clicking on Google docs links:

The Popular University of the Palestinian Youth Movement Presents Our History of Popular Resistance: Palestine Reading List 

As Palestinians, we are bearers of a rich and beautiful history. Our history is not defined by Zionism, but by our people’s steadfast popular resistance to Zionist colonization and imperialism. For over 75 years, our people have faced Zionist ethnic cleansing and for over 75 years we have risen in struggle against it. Even prior to the 1948 Nakba, Palestinians consistently rose up against British imperialism and the Zionist movement, as exemplified in the 1936-9 Arab Revolt. Our history and struggle, therefore, cannot be defined by victimhood. Instead, they are defined by a relentless persistence toward liberation, even under the most brutal colonial conditions.

Today is no exception. In a moment when the word is rising up for Palestinian freedom, we must emphasize that popular uprisings across Palestine are deeply and firmly rooted in our history. For this reason, our recommended reading list offers historical context on Palestine through the prism of popular resistance, which continues to be our main resource in the fight for land, return, and liberation. We include sources in English and Arabic on popular resistance ranging from political histories, interviews, memoirs, poetry, films, and primary documents. By popular resistance we refer to all forms of resistance taken up by Palestinians: in the form of economic resistance, women’s organizations, unions and labor organizing, and military/armed resistance.

As the Popular University, a committee of the Palestinian Youth Movement, we believe that education must be wielded in service of struggle. Our viewpoint finds inspiration and guidance from the Popular University in Palestine, of which the martyred Basel al-Araj was a part. In our meeting with an educator in this project, Khaled Odeitallah, he emphasized how the political role of pedagogical strategies inspired the objective and vision of the Popular University. He asked: “What is the political role that knowledge production must play?” From this perspective we seek to motivate, engage and facilitate a robust engagement on the history and present of our struggle. Study and struggle are intimately tied to one another.  We do not learn and produce knowledge on Palestinian history for academic or careerist pursuits; we produce knowledge in service of our political struggle for Palestinian liberation.

We encourage you to use this reading list to educate yourself on the history of Palestine beyond the objective facts of colonial domination. This is a political responsibility for anyone concerned with Palestine’s liberation. Through engagement with our history of resistance, we may join the struggle armed with knowledge and a continued commitment not to our suffering, but to our collective strength.

Note: We included a number of texts in Arabic that offer analysis and context for this battle that is rarely offered in the English media outlets. Even if you do not read Arabic, we recommend copy pasting the texts in Arabic into Google Translate or another translation service. The translation, while imperfect, will provide you with an overall sense of the arguments and main points being made.

Introductory and Archival Materials

Decolonize Palestine 

(مكتبة سبيل (الصفحة العربية 

Sabil Library (English Site) 

Learn the Revolution

باب الواد - الجامعة الشعبية 

Revolution and Rebellion under the British Occupation:

The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine: Background, Details, and Analysis, Ghassan Kanafani

(ثورة 1936- 1939: خلفيات وتفاصيل وتحليل.“ غسان كنفاني (1972”

Memories of Revolt: The 1936-1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past, Ted Swedenburg (1995)

أبو جلدة والعرميط Abu Jilda & Al ‘Armit

“Abu Jilda, Anti-Imperial Hero: Banditry and Popular Rebellion in Palestine,” Alex Winder (2015)

“A century of Palestinian resistance: the legacy of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam,” The East is a Podcast (2021)

Palestine: A Modern History, Abdul-Wahhab Kayyali (1978) 

Palestinian Resistance 1948 - 1993

Palestinian history doesn’t start with the Nakba by PYM (May, 2023)

Armed Struggle and the Search for a State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1948 - 1993, Yezid Sayigh (1997)

(معنى النكبة“ قنسطنطين زريق (1948”

Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries, Rosemary Sayegh (1979)

(2006) “من التحرير إلى الدولة: تاريخ الحركة الوطنية الفلسطينية، 1948-1988” هيلغا بوبغارتن

Green March Black September: The Story of the Palestinian Arabs, John Cooley (1973)

“Interview with Fr. Shehadeh Shehadeh on the First Land Day Protest,” Sharif Hamadeh (2005)

Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement, Julie Peteet (1991)

“What the Uprising Means,” Salim Tamari (1988)

“The Stone and the Pen: Palestinian Education During the 1987 Intifada,” Yamila Hussein (2005)

Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment, Mazin Qumsiyeh (2011)

(وقع الانتفاضات الشعبية الديمقراطية - تاريخ المنظمة و الحر كات“ جميل هلال (2011”

“Fighting on Two Fronts: Conversations with Palestinian Women” Soraya Antonius (1979)

“100 Years of Palestinian Popular Resistance” by Nasreen Abd Elal (May, 2023)

Contemporary Palestinian Resistance 

Zionism in crisis: Palestinian resistance forges a new horizon (April, 2023)

“The Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist,” Louis Allday (2021)

“No Choice but to Break Free: An Interview with Ahmed Abu Artema,” Ahmed Abu Artema and Lara Sheehi (2019) 

Interview with Ahmad Saadat, Leading from Prison, Ending Negotiations, and Rebuilding the Resistance (2013) 

“Palestinian Resistance and Sheikh Jarrah,” Devyn Springer, Mohammed el-Kurd, and Abu Shuwarib, Groundings Podcast (2021)

Notes from the Great March of Return w/ Tareq Loubani, The East is a Podcast (2022)

(هبّة باب العامود: نصر جديد وتحدٍّ جديد 2“ خالد عودة الله (2021”

(حراك «طالعات» الفلسطيني: لا وجود لوطن حرّ إلّا بنساء حرّة“ حلا مرشود (2019”

Operation Sword Edge [2018] - Sayaret Matkal’s Covert Operation, Silah Report (2021)

Battle of Shujaiya - The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

The Evolution of the Palestinian Resistance and Its New Strategy (October, 2022)

On the Joint Operations Room

Palestinian Institutions and Political Parties

PLO: History of a Revolution - Six-part documentary series about history of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (2009)

The PLO: The Struggle Within, Alain Gresh (1985)

“The Joy of Flying 1967-73” in The Palestinian Liberation Organization: People, Power, and Politics, Helena Cobban (1984)  

“The Palestinian National Covenant,” published in Basic Political Documents of the Armed Palestinian Resistance Movement, Leila Kadi (ed.) (1969)

“PLO Institutions: The Challenge Ahead,” Jamil Hilal (1993)

“A New Hamas Through Its New Documents,” Khaled Hroub (2006)

Worker Mobilization, Labor Movements, and Economic Resistance 

“When pickles become a weapon: Economy of the first Intifada,” Palestinian Journeys

(أداء المؤسسات الاقتصادية في المناطق المحتلة قبل الانتفاضة وخلالها“ عادل سمارة (1990”

“Developing a Palestinian Resistance Economy through Agricultural Labor,” Rayya El-Zein (2017)

Resistance in Zionist Prisons

(2021) كلام الأسرى.. عيون الكلام 

Video: Steadfastness and Resistance — the Palestinian prisoner’s movement and the case of Ahmad Sa’adat

“One Man as a Whole Generation: The Unfinished War of Zakaria Zubeidi,” Ramzy Baroud (2021)

“Liberating a Palestinian Novel from Israeli Prison,” Danya Al-Saleh and Samar Al-Saleh (2023)

“The Prisoner Walid Daqqah: a stubborn conscience that cannot be seared,” Wisam Rafeedie (2023)

“Freedom or Martyrdom: Walid Daqqah’s fate is in our hands,” PYM (2023)

“Resistance and Revolutionary Will: Soha Bechara and Nawal Baidoun’s Testimonies of Khiam Prison,” Mary Turfah (2023)

Role of Palestinian Women in the Resistance

Interview with Samira Salah (2013)

Behind the intifada: Labor and Women’s Movements in the Occupied Territories, Joost R. Hiltermann (1991)

Palestinian Women and the Intifada, Rana Khoury (1995)

“The Palestinian women’s autonomous movement: Emergency, dynamics and challenges,” Rabab Abdulhadi (1998)

“Women of the Intifada: gender, class and national liberation,” Nahla Abdo (1991)

Women, War, and Peace: Reflections from the Intifada, Nahla Abdo (2002)

Palestinian Women’s Activism, Islah Jad (2018)

Memoirs and Personal Profiles 

“Committed to Liberation: Remembering Soha Bechara’s Clandestine Mission” (includes chapter 7 of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon by Soha Bechara) 

My People Shall Live, Leila Khaled (1971)

Liberation, Wonder, and the “Magic of the World”: Basel al-Araj’s I Have Found My Answers, Hazem Jamjoum (2021)

(وجدت أجوبتي: هكذا تكلم الشهيد باسل الأعرج“ باسل الأعرج (2018”

(مذكرات نجاتي صدقي“ ،تقديم وإعداد حنّا أبو حنّا، (2001”

“I Went to Defend Jerusalem in Cordoba: Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist in the Spanish International Brigades,” Najati Sidqqi (2015)

“Two Portraits in Resistance - Abu ‘Umar and Mahjub ‘Umar,” Jehan Helou and Elias Khoury (2012)

My Life in the PLO: The Inside Story of the Palestinian Struggle, Shafiq al-Hout and Jean Said Makdisi (2019)

Lightning through the Clouds: ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Mark Sanagan (2020)

جيفارا غزة - القصة الكاملة لبطل فلسطيني حارب الاحتلال ببسالة

جيفارا غزة - وثائقي الميادين 

Historical fiction, literature, and poetry 

The Trinity of Fundamentals, Wisam Rafeedie

“Live Like a Porcupine, Fight Like a Flea,” A Translation of an Article by Basel Al-Araj

“Here We Will Stay,” Tawfiq Zayyad (1966)

Poetry of Resistance in Occupied Palestine, translated by Sulafa Hijjawi (Baghdad, Ministry of Culture and Guidance, 1968)

Returning to Haifa, Ghassan Kanafani (1969)

الأدب الفلسطيني المقاوم تحت الإحتلال 1948ـ1968“ ,غسان كنفاني”

“Resist, My People, Resist Them,” Dareen Tatour (2015) 

(نظرية اللعبة“ خالد عودة الله (2018”

Rifqa, Mohammed El-Kurd (2021)

“A Place Without a Door” and “Uncle Give me a Cigarette”—Two Essays by Palestinian Political Prisoner, Walid Daqqah (2023)

On Zionist Literature, Ghassan Kanafani (1967 original, 2022 English translation)

Films

Fedayin: Georges Abdallah’s Fight (2021)

Naila and the Uprising (2017)

Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory (2015)

When I Saw You, Lamma Shoftak (2012)

Slingshot Hip Hop (2008)

Leila Khaled: Hijacker (2005)

Jenin Jenin (2002)

Naji al Ali An Artist With a Vision (1999)

Tell Your Tale Little Bird (1993)

Everything and Nothing (1991)

They Do Not Exist (1974)

Palestine Books Library

To search for the book you’d like:

[probablyasocialecologist]

Since the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip started, I have been reviewing British media and its everyday items, such as the newspaper, phone, posters, and TV channels that seep into the public’s consciousness. Without the critical tools and education to puncture through their framing, we become complicit and easily intimidated. Some media outlets have gone as far as spreading misinformation, which surely would have been considered a hate crime in other contexts. Both the Daily Telegraph and The Times chose this misinformation as the headline for their October 11th issues. Although some (not all!) of those newspapers have already retracted their original false claims, the damage has already been done.   The Guardian chose to adorn its main headline for October 12th with the words ‘Israelis suspended between fear, grief and foreboding.’ The Daily Mail selected ‘The King Calls Them Terrorists, Why Can’t the BBC?’ Marching to the same beat, the Daily Telegraph opted to plaster the Royals’ condemnation of Hamas on its front pages. Survey the pages of the newspapers, and the stories eliciting support and empathy for Israel abound, making it clear who the perpetrators are and that vengeance against them is justified. Meanwhile, the Palestinians are only evoked through the register of terrorism and violence. Even those headlines, which are shy in their coverage of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, intentionally omit the perpetrators: the Israeli army and state. They are designed to neglect the root and cause of the violence: Israeli settler colonialism. By settler colonialism, we mean the gradual transfer of European Jews to the land of Palestine, the coercive displacement and dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian population, and the imposition of a coordinated and sustainable system that turns this displacement into a continuous process.  Western media relies on racial, gendered, and colonial tropes to describe the atrocities in Palestine. It instrumentalizes white female faces to elicit support for Israel. Such a tactic simultaneously serves racism, patriarchy, and colonialism. It relies on notions of white female ‘innocence’ and ‘victimhood’ to justify the continuous erasure of Palestine. In a headline by the Daily Telegraph about a British IDF female soldier, below, we are shown a smiling white female soldier wearing military attire and a keffiyeh on her head. Neither the photograph nor the article questions why a British citizen is justified in enlisting in a settler army elsewhere, let alone the same army that is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip. To the contrary, the article frames such enlisting as voluntary and dignified. These strategies bring to mind 9/11, Laura Bush, and the weaponization of white feminism in the service of imperialist and colonial expansion. Black and Brown feminist scholars and activists, including Lila Abu Lughod, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde amongst others, have long debunked and punctured through such strategies. It is this same white feminism that has been utilized by the media and governments to justify the intensification of Israeli brutality against the Palestinian residents of Gaza. 

[philosophicalconservatism]

You’re thoughts on what’s taking place on college campuses and the anti semitism being blatantly displayed

There has been a major shift in the culture. In years past, whenever the Palestinian/Israeli conflict flared up, anti-Israeli sentiment in America was limited to the fringe of the Left; with both the political Right, and the mainstream political Left standing behind the only liberal democracy in the region, and both sides recognizing the cynical, self destructive tactics of Israel's extremist enemies which stalemate the situation (Hamas, The PLO and the PIJ).

But Gen Z goes into the evaluation of this long enduring conflict with a completely different mentality. That is because it has been significantly shaped by a radical cultural ideology according to which virtue comes from victimhood and suffering rather than from proper conduct. Individuals are entirely a product of their social circumstances (says Critical Theory) and the conduct of the oppressed is an expression of their desperation and suffering at the hands of powerful systems. Those systems are themselves the only truly “unethical” force that is in play, and they must be reformed in order to reform the individual. In the 2020 riots, violence (including against the livelihood of civilians) was justified by the cause: the alleviation of alleged suffering and oppression at the hands of law enforcement.

The Palestinian Israeli conflict plays into this Oppresser/Oppressed (stronger/weaker) narrative where there is no “morality” there is only “justice” (which means “equity”). It leads to a justification of a “By Any Means Necessary” ideology , just as long as the means is not sufficient enough to turn the stronger party into the weaker party. Israel is the powerful more militarily dominant liberal democratic nation so it must be to blame in this clash between itself and a poorer, chaotic struggling society. The advocate of traditional Western morality however judges each party whether small or great according to the morality of its intentional actions. According to that calculus Israel is, for the most part, a free nation attempting to defend its citizens, Hamas, The PLO and The PIJ are obscenely immoral terrorist organizations that intentionally target the innocent, and the Palestinian people are victims caught in the middle.

The truly unfortunate thing is that this debate is spilling over in the form of anti-semitic language and behavior toward normal American citizens who happen to be Jewish. And of course the rhetoric of this classical anti-Semitism uses the exact same language of the oppressor/oppressed, "the Jews run the world, they own and control everything and we are their hapless victims." This was of course the rhetoric of the Nazis.

And as with the other paradigms of oppressor v.s. oppressed it doesn't actually matter if it's accurate or not.

[decolonize-the-left]

Ok, you seem to basically be saying project 2025 is inevitable so don’t vote because Joe Biden is evil. So then, how do we survive when contraception is made basically illegal, lgbt people are outlawed and possibly murdered, etc? Or are we supposed to just lie down and die?

These are two extremely specific scenarios that heavily play into self victimhood and narratives of powerlessness and frankly, I don't have the energy to pretend it's something else when there are a handful of rebels with literal fucking sticks fighting against a genocide being carried out by the world's richest powers.

You are neither a rebel nor are you fighting the world's richest powers with makeshift weapons or your bare hands. You are stressing about which box to check off in November, so my genuine advice is take your head out of your privileged asshole and consider that you have way more options than "vote" or "die" and lying to yourself about those being your only options is only gonna help you sleep for so long.

There are people like you and me literally fucking fighting for their right to live and exist, for their homes, for crumbs of food, dying for water, etc.

And you with your little American ballot in your hand have the audacity to say "should I just lay down and die" cuz I don't think you should check the Genocide Joe box???????????? And then you ask ME what IM going to do about it if cops possibly murder you when Trump is elected?

And you ask like that isn't ALREADY a daily reality for anyone living under Biden in the USA!!!!! We had protests for a whole fucking summer about police brutality cuz cops won't stop killing Black people! And they haven't stopped, you know.

So what was your answer when they asked us for our intersectional solidarity to save their lives? How much effort did you put in? Did you learn about mutual aid or direct action or how to protest? How to organize or draft demands so you can effectively make change year-round?

Cuz I remember how often those posts were going around. I know you saw some of them at least.

Did you make the effort to save someone besides yourself? Or did you think it was all unnecessary because you were fortunate to be wrapped in privilege?

You know, I didn't see one viral post from any white queer ppl saying "WE NEED TO (x) YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT!" about defunding police departments or masking 🤧

What did you expect Black people to do when you didn't care enough to listen? When BLM stopped trending? What about Palestinians? Did you expect them to lay over and die? Did you think about what would happen if you abandoned them? Did you care?

But it matters now that you're on the other end, don't it?

ANY singular marginalized, oppressed group on earth can tell you letting them kill you has never been an option.

Stonewall didn't happen in a voting booth. Neither did the civil rights movement. Nor did our treaties. Even suffragettes committed arson and bombing campaigns.

We have never just laid down and let them kill our community or treat us like we are lesser. We have always taken what was ours because the nature of oppression is that you will never be given what you deserve, even if you vote for it.

"do we just lay down and die"

Liberation doesn't have a manual so I can't give you the step by step. But I assure that we will not find it through a bureaucracy and government built to silence, erase, and oppress us. And it sure as hell won't be found in a boomer that sleeps peacefully at night after killing children and denying genocide.

And the only fucking people that use others as stepping stones for their own comfort and well being are oppressors and fascists.

So additionally if you're sitting there upset because my morals don't bend for the privileged and you're thinking about how awful I am cuz I can't be convinced to justify killing people from Sudan and the DRC and Palestine instead of queer Americans then get fucked. Cuz you would be the EXACT type of person I loathe.

We are all in this together or you are with the oppressors. No more in between. We don't have the luxury of having the time to pretend there's any good reason to be a fascist apologist.

At this point, you're either fighting for progress and human rights or against it.

"are we supposed to just lay over and die"

If I die it'll be a warriors death and I think every single person on earth who has asked me "so what are we supposed to do?!" should work on having the same answer.

[girlactionfigure]

Know Thine enemy

I am not a Jew and I’m not a citizen of Israel. I haven’t even visited Israel. I don’t trace my religion back to a holy site in Jerusalem and I don’t have a problem with Arabs or Muslims or Christians. I’ve read about Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon; the Umayyads, the Abbasids and the Ottomans; I know about the British, the Balfour declaration, Ben Gurion and Golda Meir. I know a bit about the Six-Day War and the Intifada. I might not have any personal stake in the Holy Land, but humanity certainly does - and I’m a human being.

The women, men, children, elderly people and soldiers who were kidnapped, tortured, raped, humiliated and murdered on Saturday by Hamas in sovereign Israel were human beings too.

Those who did it to them are not.

Imagine what kind of rational and ethical gymnastics you have to do to justify the cold-blooded murder of teenagers at a music festival; or watching a child, perhaps 5 years old, being prodded with a stick and made to cry for his mother in Hebrew while children of a similar age laugh and mock him? We don’t know that child’s fate and for all we know what followed may have been much worse. It’s depraved. To even enter a conversation about these disgraceful facts with a rehearsed retort about territory or Gaza being an “open-air prison” reeks of moral bankruptcy.

If you wail and scream about your land, dignity, rights, oppression and poverty but are willing to murder, rape, kidnap, torture or humiliate children; then I don’t have to listen to your reasons. When the video footage, photographs and stories of Saturday’s carnage come not from "Israeli propaganda” but from the Hamas terrorists themselves, then how am I to read anything else into it but that you want credit for these atrocities? You want me to know you did it. You want me to know you are proud of it. You want me to see you for who you are. Well, I do.

So, if you swarmed the Israeli Embassy in London, waving Palestinian flags and calling for genocide; if you went down to Times Square to celebrate a victory for decolonisation against “apartheid Israel”; if you sang along to “gas the Jews” chants at the Sydney Opera House or hung a “one settler, one bullet” Palestinian flag over Grayston bridge in Johannesburg then you’re telling me who you are. Well, I see you - and you’re my enemy.

I’m one of those people who believe civilisation is a real thing, and I’ve resisted the poison of moral relativists in the humanities departments of universities across the west who think that being nuanced about the idea of civilisation versus barbarism is a signal of intellectual prowess or critical self-reflection. Upon even a cursory investigation of these people or their positions, you will find every sign of pedestrian intelligence and self-absorbed navel-gazing, combined with a fetishisation of victimhood and always concomitant humourlessness. They too, are my enemies.

It is always interesting to note that only western liberal democracies tolerate and give succour to the most heinous arguments and positions in public protests. You couldn’t picket on the side of quite laudable things like education for girls in Taliban Afghanistan, gay rights in Syria, or against the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. The Ayatollahs of Iran wouldn’t allow women to protest the hijab there under threats of violence. But London, New York, Sydney and even Johannesburg will embrace marches where people actively call for genocide. This is not how allies behave.

Perhaps when the dust has settled we can examine the insidious links between Anglo-American leftism and antisemitism, between Europe never reckoning with what happened in the holocaust and their growing Muslim populations, and between ignorant regimes like mine in South Africa and their determination to stand alongside the worst human-rights abusers in the Middle East.

For now, it’s no big mystery that this has nothing to do with the existence of the State of Israel and everything to do with Jew-hatred - that great, festering wound in the side of humanity from which all prejudice flows. It has been there for thousands of years and every time we think it has healed, some monstrous collective claws it open again.

Hamas aren’t hiding the ball. Their leader, Ismail Haniyeh, safely skulking in Qatar, made this clear. He celebrated dead Jews, not territory won, nor Gazan lives saved.

I’m afraid there are only two sides in a war - your allies and your enemies. On September 11th, 2001, I knew whose side I was on. I feel the same today.

Gareth

Gareth Cliff

[hero-israel]

Seeing that idiotic NYT article quote someone complaining on how Jewish people shouldn’t be fixated on their genocide when other genocides have happened is yet another stupid double standard applied to Israel & Jews- they do realize that mass displacement and forced relocation were also quite common in the 20th century, probably more so than full genocides, but they truly behave like the Nakba was a catastrophe with no parallel. We know millions were displaced around the same time with the partition of India and Pakistan, that Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews were forcibly uprooted by the other Arab states but they cling to exceptional victimhood & suffering for Palestinians the way they accuse Jews of doing with the Shoah.

The issue to them isn’t monopolized trauma it’s recognizing trauma belonging specifically to Jews, I’ve seen so many of those people in particular dismiss Mizrahi & Sephardi Jews having their displacement recognized as being a distraction or hindrance to Palestinian suffering and I get really tired of it. Jews aren’t the only people who have suffered in the past or present but neither are Palestinians

.

[khalidistan]

THE BOY THEY CALLED WOLF: THE RACIAL-GENDERING OF BROWN MEN

We are witnessing the horrific genocide of Palestinians in real-time, with watchdog groups around the world denouncing Israel’s siege and urging for ceasefire and humanitarian aid. But notably absent from the discussions around relief are Palestinian and more broadly Arab and brown men and boys.

Brown womenandchildren are subject to a default perfect victimhood, whereas the brown man is already dangerous, killed for his “yet-to-be-committed errors.” The “womenandchildren” framing assumes that brown men are less worthy of life, that it is not also a horror to slaughter our brothers and fathers and husbands.

This event outlines the myriad ways in which brown men are subjected to Orientalist depictions such as hypersexual, savage, and brutish, and examines how these caricatures serve to dehumanize brown men and justify their maiming and extinction. We will also explore brown men in relation to brown women and marginalized genders, and what constitutes the “perfect victim” in the eyes of the colonizer.

Friday, January 19, 6-8PM EST The People's Forum 320 W. 37th St., New York, NY 10018

RSVP here!

This event has a hybrid option for those unable to attend in-person.

[eretzyisrael]

A firm called WPA Intelligence did a survey of American voters asking various questions about whether they want a ceasefire in Gaza and other things.

But one question say volumes about how little liberal - and supposedly educated - Americans know about the conflict they are so eager to opine about.

67% of Democrats agreed with the statement that “a sovereign Arab country named Palestine used to exist where Israel is presently located.” 

Two out of three Democrats don't know this basic fact. For Republicans, 55% thought the statement was false. For all American voters, the results were about 50/50, which is disheartening on its own. 

Older respondents tended to answer the question correctly, while 68% of those ages 18-34 got it wrong.

But the percentage of people altogether who believe the lie is not at all correlated to education. 57% of those with a high school or lower education, 58% of those with some college education, 54% of those with a bachelor's degree and 56% of those with a postgraduate degree believed this fiction of an independent Palestinian state.

This is a damning indictment of the US educational system. 

Another survey question is relevant. When asked, without context, whether they supported a ceasefire in Gaza. 70% said they do.

Then the survey told them that this means that a ceasefire would mean that the hostages would not be released. Suddenly, 20% of those who supported the ceasefire switched sides. (But 70% of Democrats still support a ceasefire without Hamas being defeated and without the hostages being returned.)

Now, imagine if the people surveyed knew about Hamas' promise that October 7 was just the beginning, and the terror group intended to mount much deadlier attacks "again and again" until Israel is destroyed - a story that did not get nearly as much publicity as the daily reports of civilian deaths in Gaza. There would be another large shift against a ceasefire when people get an inkling of what the conflict is really about and how depraved Hamas is. 

The 70% who say they support a ceasefire are the same 70% who know nothing about the history, the facts, the context. 

The people who are the most informed tend to side with Israel.  

The corollary to this is that the people who hate Israel will do everything they can to misrepresent the facts and lie about the conflict in order to get people on their side. 

People learn about the conflict not from school but from social media, from TikTok and YouTube, from loud and obnoxious anti-Israel activists who are committed to lie and misrepresent the issues.  And it shows. 

The media isn't helping matters because most journalists are at least passively anti-Israel and their coverage will minimize real facts, history and context and emphasize Palestinian victimhood. 

If you think that Israel replaced a Palestinian state, of course you would be anti-Israel. This is exactly why so many social media posts represent British Mandate currency as if it was from a nation named "Palestine" and people named "Palestinian."  The coin suggests a story, the reality shows the opposite, and a lot of people don't want the people to know the reality.

[neechees]

I saw a Korean tiktoker point out that Isra/eli zion*sts will use the Holocaust as justification for the oppression against Palestinians in a similar way that Japan & Japanese nationalists/imperialists will use the atomic bombs for victimhood regarding any mention of the oppression of Koreans & other Asian countries & I find that an interesting point

[antisemitism-eu]

Hey there. I followed you some years ago as i found your posts helpful while i was writing about antisemitism in the media and academic spaces.

That is no longer the case. As a Jew, i am asking you to look more critically at what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people. To civilians. It is not antisemitic to say that Israel is wrong; that the military is committing genocide; any criticism.

It's painful to watch Jews defend the actions of Israel because of a feeling of obligation. I imagine that's what is driving you? It seems to be what drives my father's hatred of Palestinians and his belief that Israelis can do no wrong.

I am named after one of the founders of Israel. A terrorist by definition and action. He bombed facilities and killed civilians to make Israel what it is today; that was evil then and it is evil now.

I turned my back on my faith a long time ago; and it hurts to feel i need to turn my back on my culture as well, but it is becoming a culture of hatred and victimhood. We are a people like any other, we are not infallible, we are only chosen in that we received the torah; nothing more.

I'm sorry to hear that you care about antisemitism only when it fits your preconceived notions

I have always written about all types of antisemitism.  If you care about antisemitism only when it's from the opposite side of the  political aisle, then you don't really care about antisemitism.

You can be critical of Israeli policies and actions.  Almost all Israelis are.

But when you accuse Israel of genocide that is antisemitic.  It's not simply “criticism” but rather believing the claims of the antisemites who murdered and raped Jews.

In the US White supremacists claim that Jews are committing genocide.

Do you:

Demand that American Jews stop the genocide 

Call this antisemitic drivel for what it is

I suppose you'll go for B.

And yet, you believe Hamas.  Every word they say.

If White Supremacists in the US would declare war on Jews, invade a Jewish neighborhood and for hours murder, rape and torture.  Then pull back with hundreds of enslaved Jews in tow.

What would you demand from the US forces?  

Would you really protest against genocide?

Do you remember the genocide of Waco?  How could you stand by and watch it again?  28 children were murdered.

And here we're talking about hundreds of murderers, living in a white supremacist community of thousands of supporters.  Hospitals, churches, schools!

Do you know how many innocent lives will be lost if the US moves against them?  How many women and children will die?

Can you imagine the protests across US campuses if that happens?

I suppose that you would demand that the White Supremacists should continue living their lives as usual, though they threaten to do it again ( and probably will)

Surveys show that 40% of young Americans support Hamas.

Not Palestinians.  Not peace.  

They support the murder, rape and torture of Jews.

That's not “criticism of Israel”.  That's antisemitism.

If you wonder what's driving me, its numbers like these, and the fear that in a decade or two this would be the face of America 

You believe anything Hamas says unreservedly.

You blame Israelis when Gazan rockets hit Palestinians instead of Israelis, because you believe Hamas.  And you don't care when the rockets hit Israelis, because your criticism is aimed only at Israel.

You don't care when Hamas turns hospitals, mosques, schools, and refugee centers into military bases.   You don't even care when Hamas uses hospitals to torture Gazans (see Amnesty report on the topic)

You don't care when they use those places to fire rockets at Israelis

If Hamas says Israel killed innocent doctors or journalists - you trust them. You don't care about pictures of those same innocent Gazans armed in military uniform. 

You don't care when Hamas murders Gazans who try to leave when the Israeli army warns them to do so.

You don't care when Hamas take over human aid and kill Gazans who want food.

You didn't even care a few days ago when they attacked Gazan children who used an Israeli border crossing to leave Gaza and get medical help.

You might think that it's pro-Palestinian, but it's really antisemitism.  

I don't hate Palestinians.  I'm sad for them.  

Because of people like you that encouraged them to develop a toxic antisemitic society - at least two generations have been brainwashed with the aim of committing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Jews.

I am very pessimistic about this changing, because people like you prefer to blame Israel and give the Palestinians hope for Israel's future destruction, instead of encouraging real peace.

Palestinian society today:

Overwhelmingly supports the October 7th massacre and think it's the greatest day of Palestinian history

Overwhelmingly supports Hamas (In case you wondered why the Palestinian Authority hasn't held elections for the past 18 years)

Overwhelmingly supports the destruction of Israel and its Jews (In case you wondered why no Palestinian leader in his right mind would ever accept a peace agreement with Israel that would end hostilities)

Names almost every mosque, school, hospital and square after heroic Jew murderers 

Celebrates and honors the murder of Jews

Teaches children to murder Jews

Gives sermons every Friday about murdering Jews

Broadcasts shows encouraging people to murder Jews

Pays people to attack and murder jews 

This is toxic antisemitism.

You worry that Israel is commiting genocide, but you don't care about the plans to carry out another October 7th.

In the areas of Jenin and Tulkarm especially.  In the past few months - Palestinians shot at Israeli villages, Palestinians set off explosives next to Israeli villages, Palestinians flew a drone into Israel, Palestinians invaded Israel.  And Israeli residents along the border say they can hear digging of tunnels at night.

It's really just a matter of time.

People like you think that if you force Israel to stop attacking Hamas, and if you give Palestinians a state of their own - that in itself would ensure that the toxically antisemitic Palestinian society would magically become a peaceful neighbor of Israel

That is not “criticism”.  That is way past being naive.   

You are risking the lives of millions of Jews.

What would you say when the inevitable happens?  “Sorry”?  

Or that Jews should have  gone to Poland? (I really wish I was making this up.  Since you only care about the right kind of antisemitism, you might not realize or care how many people believe that)

Israel was quite happy to delude itself until now, but got its wake-up call on October 7th.

I hope you will at some point.  Maybe you will, most probably you won't.

In any case, Israel will not wait for you.  My life and that of the millions of other Jews (and non-Jews) in Israel is too important.

And if/when American Jews are attacked, you can be sure your brothers in Israel will defend you.  No matter what the antisemites say, or what “criticism of Israel” they come up with.

(That's actually already the case.)