The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Most Israelis think these are ‘wild' figs or ‘wild' almonds, as they see them in full bloom, towards the end of the winter, heralding the beauty of spring. But these fruit trees were planted and nurtured by human hands. Wherever almond and fig trees, olive groves or clusters of cactuses are found, there once stood a Palestinian village: still blossoming afresh each year, these trees are all that remain.

Ilan Pappe on the genocide in Gaza:

‘Even the Nakba, which was an unimaginable catastrophe, does not compare to what we are seeing now – and what we are going to see in the next few months.

We are, in my mind, in the first three months of a period of two years that will witness the worst kind of horrors that Israel can inflict on the Palestinians...

‘We are witnessing the end of the Zionist project, there's no doubt about it.

‘This historical project has come to an end and it is a violent end. Such projects usually collapse violently. And thus it is a very dangerous moment for the victims of this project – and the victims are always the Palestinians along with Jews, because Jews are also victims of the Zionism. Thus, the process of collapse is not just a moment of hope, it is also the dawn that will break after the darkness...

‘Collapse like this, however, produces a void. The void appears suddenly; it is a like a wall that is slowly eroded by cracks in it but then it collapses in one short moment. And one has to be ready for such collapses, for the disappearance of a state or a disintegration of a settler colonial project. We saw what happened in the Arab world, when the chaos of the void was not filled by any constructive and alternative project. In such a case, the chaos continues.

‘One thing is clear: whoever thinks about the alternative to the Zionist state should not look [to] Europe or the West for models that would replace the collapsing state. There are much better models which are local and are legacies from the recent and more distant pasts of the Mashraq (the eastern Mediterranean) and the Arab world as a whole. The long Ottoman period has such models and legacies that can help us taking ideas from the past to look into the future.

‘These models can help us build a very different kind of society that respects collective identities as well as individual rights, and is built from scratch as a new kind of model that benefits from learning from the mistakes of decolonialisation in many parts of the world, including in the Arab world and Africa. This hopefully will create a different kind of political entity that would have a huge and positive impact on the Arab world as a whole.'

From https://www.ihrc.org.uk/it-is-dark-before-the-dawn-but-israeli-settler-colonialism-is-at-an-end/