This is a speech by Ilan Pappé recorded at Bint Jebail Cultural Center in Dearborn, Michigan, USA, mid-May in 2024. The speech is available via Alternative Radioas Gaza in Context. Ilan Pappé is one of the foremost scholars on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

From Alternative Radio and their radio broadcast:

Gaza’s 2 million plus Palestinians are jam-packed in a small narrow enclave bordered by the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt and Israel. Since 2007 it has been ruled by Hamas. Hamas is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement. Israel immediately imposed a blockade. Since then, Gaza has routinely been called the world’s largest open-air prison. Its air, land and sea routes are controlled by Israel. On October 7th, Hamas attacked Israel resulting in over 1,100 Israelis dead and the taking of several hundred hostages. Israel, with one of the world’s most advanced militaries, responded. Today, Gaza is in ruins. Palestinians have been killed and wounded in the tens of thousands. It has become, the UN says, “a graveyard.” How did this catastrophic situation develop? How did Gaza become Gaza?

Ilan Pappé has been called “Israel’s bravest historian.” He taught at the University of Haifa and was chair of the Touma Institute for Palestinian and Israeli Studies in Haifa. Today, he is a professor of history at the University of Exeter in England. He is the author of many books including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, On Palestine with Noam Chomsky, and Ten Myths About Israel.

The talk

When the Secretary General of the United Nations reacted to the events of the 7th of October by saying that we should remember that there is an historical context for what happens on the 7th of October. Whether you condemn everything that was done or partly was done or you don't condemn it doesn't matter. He said you have to understand that this attack by the Hamas was not done out of context. [...]

Immediately he was condemned as being an anti-Semite by the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and the government of Israel demanded that he would be dismissed as a Secretary General of the United Nations. And then followed an incredible reaction by university management in some places in Europe, some places in the United States, as well almost forbidding people to use the word context as if this was equivalent to a slogan killing the Jews or something similar.

The fear of being taught about the context is very indicative in the way the West and especially the United States has dealt over the years with the question of Palestine. So this kind of reaction by usually quite intelligent and educated people who forbid their students, their colleagues, their communities to talk about the history of Palestine, to talk about the context of Palestine when referring to the events of the 7th of October where understood in Israel as a carved lunch to do whatever they want and exploit the events of the 7th of October to perpetrate the genocide that it still goes on today. And in many ways try and complete some of the project of elimination that they were unable to complete in 1948 and ever since 1948. So I think it is important to talk about the context and I think it is important to demand space and time to explain the context.

One of the things we don't do and we shouldn't do is tell people give me a minute or two and in one sound bite or two sound bites I'll explain to you why anti-Semitism is not anti-Zionism. Why the Palestinians resistance is not terrorism. Why Israel is an apartheid state and why it should be treated as an apartheid state. You cannot be content with saying these slogans if you don't have the ability to explain why these statements are valid. So you have to learn the history.

You have to know the history because what these kinds of statements represent is something that too many people's ears sound like heresy, like something that I've never heard before and contradicts everything that I have been hearing about Israel and Palestine from the mainstream media, from their politicians, from the university professors and from the public discourse about Israel and Palestine in general. So this is very, very crucial. This is a point where our understanding of history stops being a pursuit of intellectual interest that has to do with some people who like to write about history and therefore they chose the career of historians or like to teach history.

Everything in the case of Palestine is a crucial key for understanding what goes on today and what should happen in the future. And therefore it is not only a matter for experts to deal with it, but everyone who is part of Palestine, feels about Palestine, wants to do something for Palestine, has to know that history, because it is such an important way of explaining to others why we are doing what we are doing for the sake of the liberation of Palestine. And that history goes back more than 120 years from today. It doesn't start in 1948 and you have to be aware of the kind of intellectual, theological, ideological world in which Zionism was born to understand what's going on in Palestine today and should happen in the future.

Many people do not remember or know that Zionism to begin with was an evangelical Christian project. Long before any Jew was thinking about Zionism, leading Christian, what we would call today Christian Zionists. In those days we would call them evangelical Christians of certain denominations on both sides of the Atlantic were advocating the establishment of a Jewish state knowing very well that there were other people living there but thought that the creation of the Jewish state would precipitate the second coming of the Messiah would bring the end of time. And eventually in the mid-19th century convinced the most important empire in the Middle East Britain that this was not just a theological good idea but also strategically Britain should benefit if it will make Palestine first British and Jewish. And again, this deliberation about the future of Palestine, in the mid-19th century, were done when people knew very well that Palestinians were already there. Not only that there were already there but that they had a thriving society, an urban elite, a pastoral rural society, an organic human body, that if you were talking about removing it or replacing it with a European Jewish state, you could only do it by force and you could only lead to the demise of the people living there, if this is your either religious idea or your strategic idea.

And then it was towards the end of the First World War that these two impulses also influenced the Jewish communities especially in Eastern Europe that were suffering from anti-Semitism and were looking for ways of dealing with a world that did not accept them as equals. And they were convinced that maybe the best way of dealing with that kind of persecution was to build a Jewish state in Palestine. This was not a majority opinion of most of the Jews. It was a minority opinion. The religious Jews felt that this was contrary to the Jewish religion to have a Jewish state before the end of time. Other Jews believed that the only way of dealing with anti-Semitism was to have a more liberal democratic world. Socialist Jews believed that the socialist revolution would make everyone equal.

A small minority believed that you have to redefine Judaism as nationalism in order to solve the problem of anti-Semitism and also in order to modernize the Jewish people. A very important landmark in this transformation happened in the United States. In 1918, in Pennsylvania, the American Jewish community that until then looked very suspiciously at the whole idea of Zionism. A very small minority of American Jews until 1918 thought that the idea of building a Jewish state in Palestine would solve the problem of anti-Semitism.

But in 1918, under the influence of the British Zionist lobby, a new body was created: the American Jewish Congress. And that Congress adopted the idea that the British have put forward through the infamous Balfour Declaration that said that actually the West, including the United States, sees the establishment of a Jewish state as fitting the values of Western civilization. Yes, they added a condition that it would not undermine or damage the interest of what they call non-Jewish minorities as if the Jews were the majority in Palestine in 1918. There were only 10% of the population but they said the non-Jewish minorities, namely the indigenous native people of Palestine that their interests would not be affected. But of course they knew that this was the only way of establishing a Jewish state, was by undermining the life and future of the indigenous people of Palestine.

This meant that with this kind of alliance that developed from the beginning of the 19th century and culminated at the end of the First World War, the alliance that faced the people of Palestine, which I'm sure most of them had no idea that such an alliance was formed. How could they know that this was happening? But by 1918 already a very powerful coalition of forces was determined to turn Palestine into a Jewish state while most of the Jews didn't want to come to Palestine and fully understanding the implication of such a project for the people of Palestine.

This was a coalition of British policy makers, American policy makers, leaders of evangelical Christianity and other interested strategic allies. So Palestinians from the very beginning were facing a problem that had nothing to do with them. That Europe and the United States decided should be solved at their expense, knowing pretty well that this could lead to the destruction of Palestine and the Palestinians. How could they treat the Palestinians in such a way? Well, we owe a lot to the way our dear and old and deceased late friend Edward Said, who helped us to understand Orientalism, the way that Europe perceived Arab people, Muslim people, Christian Arabs, even Jewish Arabs, preceding them as less equal than the Western European or American person.

So that kind of Orientalism helped to dehumanize the Palestinian to the extent that when you were discussing the project of building a Jewish state in Palestine, you didn't care at all about the position, the aspiration of the people themselves. I'm not saying that everyone in the United States or everyone in Britain or in Europe disregarded the Palestinians. There were voices that from the very beginning warned the policymakers that such a project would have disastrous consequences, not only for the people of Palestine, but for the whole relationship between the United States and Europe with the Arab world. One of them was the American Council in Jerusalem, [name of person, indistinguishable], who warned the State Department that such a project would not only bring disaster to Palestine, but would turn the United States into the enemy of the Arab world and the Muslim world. And he was by the prophet in that prediction.

The moment this coalition enabled Zionist project to begin building a Jewish state once Britain occupied Palestine in 1918, the moment this became effect and established back there was an inevitable building or process that led to the 1948 Nakba.

The way the British mandatory authorities, as you know, Britain and Palestine between 1918 and 1948 for 30 years, the way they treated the Palestinians was like they treated any colony in the Empire, but they didn't treat the Jewish settlers in the same way. They allowed the Jewish settlers to build military power, economic power, political power. So Britain was very much complicit in the project, not only of building a Jewish state, but building a Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians, first of all at the expense of their aspirations, but as we learn also at the expense of their existence.

And today when we expanded our scholarly interest in similar situations in the world, we found the similarities between the way Europeans said this treated indigenous native people, including in this country, dehumanizing them, believing they had the right to eliminate them in order to make way for creating new political entities. And the elimination of the Palestinians was motivated by the same ideologies that led to the eliminations of the Native Americans, the First Nations in Canada, the First Nations in Australia, in New Zealand, and to the way the Africans were treated by the settlers who came to South Africa.

This is still a sentence that in so many places you cannot say and this is absurd because it's so valid logically, morally, and historically and academically, but you cannot say that easily everywhere, you know the Zionist movement is a settler colonial movement, and hence all its action in Palestine were motivated by what scholars of settler colonialism called the logic of the elimination of the Native.

And I remember when I suggested my book, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine to my publisher, he said I cannot publish a book with such a title, you cannot accuse Jewish people of committing ethnic cleansing. And I said to him, but if we don't put it in the title, the whole book is not worth it, because that's exactly my contribution. I'm not contributing to the facts Palestinians know exactly what happened to them, and people who don't know what happened to the Palestinians, who knows who my book and others, but I said to him far more important for me for telling what happened is to analyze what happened, to frame what happened, to explain that this is a crime, and we know who the criminals are, and we know that they were not brought to justice, and we know that the crime continues. I wrote it in 2006, I didn't know that the crime would reach such levels of brutality as it does today. I thought that 48 was the peak of Israeli brutality, who could have known that they would outdo their brutality in 2023, 2024.

So it is, it sounds like a very logical sentence, but I want to say that outside this hall, this is still something we are fighting for, for telling the truth about Palestine, and telling the truth about Palestine is not just telling what exactly happened, but also using the right language to describe what happened.

So, if you're talking about ethnic cleansing, you're talking about politics of elimination, and if you're talking about politics of elimination, you understand that the people who decide to eliminate another people do not treat the other people as human beings. It's dehumanization, and we had all kinds of chapters of dehumanizations in human history, including against the Jews in Europe, but it's unthinkable that in the name of what happened to the Jews in Europe, we are not allowed to talk about the inhumanity inflicted on the Palestinian by an ideological Jewish movement. We should not be afraid of doing it. I know it's not easy because we immediately would be accused of anti-Semitism, but as long as we know the facts, as long as nobody could refute our both academic work and our logical work and moral work on Palestine, we should not be afraid to use the right language and not subject ourselves to the language that the American media is using to explain what's happening in Palestine.

So that kind of ideology that was supported by the United States, supported by Europe, supported by evangelical Christianity, and by Jewish communities around the world, created this political and military system that waited for the right historical moment to translate the logic of eliminating the Palestinian into an actual ethnic cleansing operation. And this is where the Gaza Strip comes into our story. Gaza until 1948 was a town, not a strip. The villages and towns around Gaza were not part of a strip. They were part of a district. They were not a huge refugee camp. In fact, until 1929, there was a Jewish community as well in Gaza.

In 1905, the Rabbi of this Jewish community, Rabbi Azulai, and the Imam of Gaza, wrote together a letter to the Turkish government complaining about Zionists and Christian missionaries that tried to deteriorate the relationship between Jews and Muslims who lived together in Gaza for centuries without any kind of animosity, discrimination, or racism. This was the kind of Gaza that existed until 1948.

Israel created the Gaza Strip in 1948. And this is an important fact because when Israel started, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian ended with the expulsion of the three quarter of a million Palestinians and the destruction of more than 500 Palestinian villages in most of the Palestinian towns, it was able to push Palestinians to the north, to Lebanon and Syria, and to push Palestinians to the east, to the west bank and Jordan.

But they were not able to push the Palestinians in the south to Egypt. Egypt refused to allow Palestinians to enter the Sinai Peninsula. So what could Israel do? He didn't want the Palestinians. So the leader of Israel, Ben-Gurion, decided: we can give up a small part of Palestine in order to push hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into a strip, and he could look at the border of the strip. It's like a ruler. It's a rectangular. It's an artificial rectangular that Israel created at first 650 square kilometers, then the Israeli thought they were giving too much space to the refugees, and they cut it into 350 square kilometers, making it one of the densest refugee communities in the world.

But the whole idea was to create, intentionally, a huge refugee camp so that demographically the Palestinians south of Jaffa, south of Halim, would not be included in the Jewish state. And this was unfortunately done with the agreement of the Egyptian government at the time, the royal Egyptian government, because it was part of the Armistice agreement between Israel and Egypt that was signed in January 1949. What is very relevant to what happens on the 7th of October is the last group of people who were pushed into the new refugee camp that Israel created in 1948 called the Gaza Strip. These were the people who lived very near the Strip, but were not inside the Strip.

On the ruins of their villages, Israel built the very settlements that were attacked by the Hamas on the 7th of October. These were the people who were dwellers of villages that have been wiped out in the months of November, December 1948. And I have found in the Israeli archive an order called Order Number 40 from the 25th of November 1948 and that order enlist the names of these Palestinian villages that are gone. And the order says very clearly like so many other orders during the Nakhba: occupy the villages, burn the houses and expel the people to Gaza.

So this is the first generation of the people of Gaza. Yes, of course, the young people who came into the operation Al-Aqsa flood were third generation of refugees, but they were very much aware of the history of their grandparents and their parents. So this is the main historical context we should tell people about. But this doesn't end there.

After 1948, and especially after 1967, the fate of the people who lived in that huge refugee strip that Israel created is closely associated with the fate of another geopolitical unit that was created in 1948. That did not exist. People did not exist before 1948.

The West Bank is not a term that anybody knew about before 1948. There was no West Bank. Jainin and Haifa were organically connected. Nablus and Jaffa were organically connected. Jerusalem, the Hinterland of Jerusalem, were what we call today the West Bank. It was all organically one country, one society. Family connection, tradition, aspirations were all part of it. Now after 1967, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip shared a similar fate being under a brutal Israeli occupation. Ruled by a military administration that was replaced in 1981 with a civil administration which was as brutal as the military administration, violating every law we know in the international law, violating every basic rights of Palestinians who lived both in the West Bank in Jerusalem and in the Gaza Strip. So whatever happened in those years since 1967, whether it happened inside the Strip or it happened in the West Bank, was a shared experience by the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

And this experience, I don't have to tell you, I'm sure you're familiar with [...] military rule. It includes imprisoning people without trial. One of every four Palestinian has gone through this experience of being imprisoned without trial at least for six months.

The demolition of houses, the burning of fields, the uprooting of trees, the expulsion of people, the killing of people, the wounding of people, a daily occurrence in the life of people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This is also a context for a decision whether we totally appreciate it, where we criticize some of it or we don't criticize it, but we understand what has erupted in any kind of an anti-occupation anti-colonialization struggle.

How much can people bear to be treated in such an inhuman and barbaric way? And so the seven years of occupation are also part of the context. And then we come to the last context.

I cannot even imagine what it means to live in the Gaza Strip since 2007, where not only you already live since 1994, by the way, with the fence. Israel built a fence all around the Gaza Strip in 1994 already. Ironically, as part of the peace, the peace with the Palestinians led to encircling the whole of the Gaza Strip with barbed wire with an electric fence. This is not from 2007. This is since 1994. Israel created Gaza not only as the biggest refugee camp, but as the biggest mega prison in the world. In 1994, under the conditions of peace.

So you can understand what people in Gaza would feel when people tell them that they have missed an opportunity for peace by refusing to live like animals in the barbed wire that surrounded them. But then came the decision of the people in Gaza to give a chance to a different leadership, to end the occupation. Because the old leadership failed them, failed to deliver. It signed the Oslo Report, which continued the occupation by other means, fragmented the Palestinian people. The oppression continued. So they gave a democratic vote. They gave a chance for a different political leadership. Israel punished them for their decision by imposing the siege in 2007. Now a siege is not just not allowing people to come in and come out. The siege also allowed Israel to decide what kind of food the people would get. What kind of medical infrastructure will be available for the people? This was really the whole, I would say, mentality of a prison board that they were using towards Gaza. If we think that you are misbehaving, we will affect the number of calories that you will be able to consume. This will affect the kind of medicine that you will be able to get into the Gaza Strip. And this was going on for 17 years.

And every time when Hamas reacted by launching its rockets into Israel, or by retaliating to the way its own members were arrested or killed in the West Bank, Israel used it to bombard the Gaza Strip from the land, the air, and the sea. Now I only once was in Janine when an F-16 dropped a 1000 kiloton bomb, and this was 5 kilometers away from where I was. I still don't sleep at night remembering that bomb.

Now I'm thinking about the children of Gaza, 50% of the people in Gaza are children. Four times being bombardment by American, by the way, aircrafts, F-16, F-35 recently.

You have to understand what a bomb does, not only in terms of killing people, destroying the homes, but the trauma that remains with young people for all the life. Not to mention the fact that part of the siege is not allowing the people in Gaza to build a proper psychological infrastructure to deal with these kind of traumatic experiences. If you think about these last 17 years and the forest salts, so you say to yourself the third generation of Palestinian refugees in Gaza.

By the way, 70% of the people in Gaza are refugees from 1948 or their second or third generation. If you think about this, say it's not only the load that the young people are taking from the parents and grandparents, it's their own experience, which is not comparable to any other experience of a young person who was born, let's say, in 2000. Who else in the world who was born in 2000 knows only this kind of reality as a young girl, a young boy, and then a young man or a young girl? Who else knows this living in a maximum security prison that is being bombardment four times with the most lethal cutting edge ammunition that America provided to Israel and not only America, if we want to be honest here, it's also Britain, Benjamin, Germany in particular, who provide Israel with these bombs that are particularly built in order to inflict as much damage on the human body and psyche as possible.

The most absurd thing is for Israel to claim that it's clinical in its attacks on the Gaza there's nothing clinical in dropping on a civilian space that kind of ammunition. And it's really a moment where you ask yourself how did people have the resilience to continue and still believe and still resist and still continue.

But let me finish by a more hopeful note. This historical context, and of course I was trying to squeeze in one lecture, a course I'm giving for a whole year in the university. So this is really missing a lot of important pieces of the puzzle. Thank you for being patient with a history lesson, but as I say, it's important one. But this history also tells me one important thing, which makes me hopeful. I have to be honest, not for next year and not for the year after next. No, that history teaches me that the next year would be worse than this year and the year after would be worse than the year after the next year. And the next Palestinian group that would be targeted is the other people of the West Bank. So I'm really afraid of what's going on, will go on in the West Bank in the next two or three years.

Gaza is already ruined and destroyed, but they have enough energy and hate in them to continue their barbaric journey into the West Bank as well.

So, where does the hope come in? What do I see the end of the tunnel or the dawn that I think will break after this long night that we are experiencing? It is very clear after 120 years that this coalition that decided to dehumanize the Palestinians to the extent that they could be forgotten, removed, denied in order supposedly to solve the Western anti-Semitic attitude towards Judaism with which the Palestinians have nothing to do. This project is crumbling, it's collapsing, it's not working.

One of the reason it's so brutal today is because it's not working.

If you look at the last years of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the most brutal actions of the regime of South Africa against the Africans was in the last years of the apartheid. They are brutal because they feel that they cannot justify even to themselves the whole project of Zionism. The religious Jews and the settler Jews found out in the last two years since the election of the government in November 2022, they have nothing in common apart from hatred of the Palestinians. They also found out that the only thing they could promise their children is another 50 years of bloodshed, conflict, international isolation and God knows how much economic survival they can maintain in such a conditions. So it's collapsing from this in.

There is an implosion that already takes place in the Israeli society and a lot of Israeli Jews who have the right passport, who have the right profession are already leaving. They see no sense in staying in a place, not for their own sake, but definitely for the sake of their children and their grandchildren. Jews around the world began to understand that Zionism is not a panacea for anti-Semitism. It actually is another cause for anti-Semitism.

And they begin to jettison Zionism to distance themselves from Zionism. Yes, it's not a major trend yet, but it's growing by the day. That's why we have the Jewish voice for peace and so many Jewish students take place in the protests in the universe. So these are processes that each one of them by themselves will not bring an end to the Zionist project in Palestine. But there are discrete processes and we know from history they can fuse together to be a very powerful force that would end this project which was wrong, morally, strategically, and humanly from the very beginning. I can understand some of the impulse. My parents were saved in a way by being able to come to Palestine in 1933. Otherwise, they would have been exterminated with the rest of my family in Germany. And they were welcomed by the Palestinians when they came. They were not welcomed as invaders, as ethnic cleansers, as occupiers. They were welcomed as refugees who were looking for a safe place. And they betrayed like everyone else in the Zionist community. They betrayed the Palestinian hosts. We are abusing your hospitality and we're using it in order to approach you and to get rid of the situation. And that's why so many Palestinians were surprised at what happened in Fortier. They had no inkling of what this group of people was blaming for them and will do to them in due course. So this kind of project is not working. It's not working for a younger generation of people around the world who believe that morality and politics should go together. It doesn't work for a group who are now marching who may be policymakers in the future as a project that brings peace because it just makes the Middle East a far more area of conflict than an area of peace. And it's very clear that this collapse will create a vacuum.

And if the Palestinian national movement has its own agency to be prepared for that moment, because if it would be as it is now this united, fragmented, it would not be able to seize the historical moment that is awaiting for them in the near future, they would not be able to take advantage of the collapse of this project.

And this is not just about Palestine. This would lead, I believe, but I think that there's a far even greater process in the making here than Palestine. And this is rethinking about the political system, that the colonialist powers, Britain and France, imposed on the Mushreq in 1916 to 1918, creating the nation-states of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Israel. They were built on a European model, which is called the Westphalian nation-state model. This model totally ignored people's aspiration, organic connections, normal existence, and especially coexistence that was really characteristic of this part of the world.

And we will have to bring back some of this structure back at the expense of the nation-state. And it won't be that difficult because Syria, that Syrian nation-state has already collapsed. Iraq is also hardly holding on as a nation-state. Lebanon has its own problem. So I'm coming back to this world, which I believe we will be able to give. The world where our friends, Father, Johnny Mansoor, from Anman Surah, a small village that Israel is destroyed, would go every Sunday in the morning, walking to bring the newspapers to the village, because that was the nearest place where you could get newspapers when you lived in the Galilee.

This is the kind of world that the colonialist Europe has destroyed, and the one we will have to bring back. But I do think the first station is to get rid of Zionism and to offer equality for everyone.

And despite the Congress decision, I'm calling here for all the people from the river to the sea to be free. In fact, anywhere in the world where people live between the river and the sea, they should be free. As I explained to the FBI agent who stopped me in the airport, investigating me nearly for two hours, and he asked me, do you believe that Palestine should be free from the river to the sea? And I said, yes. And I said, and if you know that any other place, when there is the river and the sea, we will make sure that these people would free as well. Thank you.

Very difficult to understand, you know, it's on our screens, our small screens on the phones, our big screens on TV. We cannot ignore it. Nobody can ignore it. You expect at least compassion, even if you don't expect everyone to agree with your solution to the problem, at least compassion, and you don't expect people to say, oh, now that it's 10,000 people dead in Gaza, like the American Secretary of State, I think it's too many when it comes to 10,000. 9,000 is not too many people killed. I can explain it only by saying, and is that when you have in this country, for more than 100 years, a very oil effective lobbying, which is not just APOC. It's long before APOC. And even after APOC, it's not just APOC. If you have 100 years of lobbying, most of what is happening 50 years later is by inertia.

Nobody has to call President Biden to say, I'm a Zionist president. He doesn't need a call from APOC to say this. This is part of the DNA of American politics, and he would blind them to the suffering of the Palestinians. So all we have to hope is that a new generation of American politicians, American policymakers, mainstream media journalists, would be liberated from that kind of imposition and use their humanity and moral values to understand that this is one of the worst places where inhumanity is being hailed as democratic, civilized, and as a contribution to a civilization.

I'm hopeful this kind of lobbying, as powerful as it is, and it still is very powerful. Like the project it supports, I can see the cracks in the building, but we should help to widen these cracks and make it fall as soon as possible. You know, rogue regimes that have support of their own societies are not changing easily just because they wake up one day and say we were wrong. You need to pressure them. You need to sanction them. You need to send the messages that they are immoral, that what they do is not accepted, and that there is a price tag to their behavior. This is not going to happen just from within, not dynamics of change. We have to look at history, societies that we thought would never change have changed. I remember going to South Africa in 2014, every white person I met told me that he or she were against apartheid, I said whether you all were against apartheid, why did it take so long to bring it down? But I don't mind at all for people in 20 years from now would say I was never a Zionist, which is fine. So I think that we should analyze it correctly.

If people say to us, let's wait for a peace camp in Israel to bring an end to the violence, we should say no, there's no way that this peace camp will ever be a factor. So let's go for the BDS. Let's go for the boycott. Let's go for the divestment. Let's go for something. The important thing is really the United States. Up to the end of the Kennedy administration, there were still reasonable voices, not all of them pro-Palestinianists, but people who understood they are a world better. And you had a feeling that there are alternatives at least discussed by the Americans. This ended with Johnson. And from that moment onwards, America became the main diplomatic, military and financial shield of Israel. But the good question is, you know, for the Americans, do they know what they are supporting? Do they know what they are financing? And hopefully, we are hearing and we're very encouraged by the young Americans who seem to know what it's being funded and seem to know what they should do against this kind of funding.

And they're using every democratic means at their disposal to show courageously what they think about that policy and which of the largest sections of the American society would follow them. You know, one thing about these processes that are happening is that nobody should consider themselves as observers of these processes. We're not just onlookers. We are part of these processes. But it depends on us, wherever we are and whoever we are in this great struggle for justice. The only thing I can say is that this is a long struggle. It's not a new struggle. And the really genuine anti-Zionist left in Israel is very small. But it exists. And I suppose that if other processes we've described will continue and intensify, hopefully their message will become a little bit more attractive to others.

They have a role to play. Everybody has a role to play. I don't think you play a role according to the outcome of what you do. You play a role according to the effort and risk you are willing to take. And I think that's very important. The importance is not so much that they're going to change the Israeli political opinion. But it's important for history to know that there were, you know, our friends from Gaza asked about how can you live with people who commit a genocide. It's good to know that at least a small number did not share this mentality and this ideology. It will be important for the reconciliation. It will be important. People would remember that there are also other voices as insignificant and small as they are today.

Again, I come to the Palestinians, minority in Israel. They are probably the only Palestinians who know some of the Israelis who are not settlers and not soldiers as well. I think this will be important because, you know, Franz Fanon taught us that decolonization that is built only on violence and revenge doesn't create a better regime.