Abolition with Rawan Masri and Fathi Nimer

Abolition with Rawan Masri and Fathi Nimer

YULIA: Welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I am Yulia Gilich, your host and a member of the founding collective of ICSZ, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Today I am joined by founders of DecolonizePalestine.com Rawan Masri and Fathi Nimer to discuss abolition as a keyword in Critical Zionism Studies. In June 2023, Rawan and Fathi published an article titled “Imprisoning Palestine: Zionist Colonialism through an Abolitionist Lens” in the Scalawag magazine. This piece, which is linked in the episode notes, connects abolition and decolonization by highlighting the centrality of carceral and punitive systems and structures to how Zionist settler colonialism operates.  

We recorded this conversation in September 2024, but it may be even more pressing now, since two weeks ago, on October 15th, 2024, the United States and Canada sanctioned and blacklisted the Palestinian prisoner support network Samidoun. Only last year, in November 2023, Germany also banned Samidoun, and these sanctions were preceded by Israel itself naming Samidoun a quote unquote terrorist organization in 2021. In that wave of sanctions, Samidoun was targeted alongside six other groups and organizations, among them Addameer, a Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, based in Ramallah. The abolitionist lens that Rawan and Fathi offer us in their piece demonstrates that these attacks on and repression of organizations dedicated to Palestinian prisoner support are not isolated incidents, but a very obvious extension of those carceral and punitive systems that Zionism requires to function. 

With that, let me welcome my guests. Rawan, Fathi, thanks so much for being here. First, I want to ask you to define abolition and place it in your context, in the context of Palestine and the Palestinian liberation struggle. 

RAWAN: I think for me, it’s being critical of the state and state structures that say that people need to be punished and people need to be punished in these ways that include limiting their freedom because I think a lot of what we face and I would say in some ways it’s maybe worse in the U.S. than here. Here there’s more of a sense of they’re not a bad person if you went to prison, pretty much every family has had someone who went to prison, it’s just part of living under occupation. Versus the US where I feel like there’s more of a social stigma of seeing that well you must have been doing something terrible to go to prison and that was very awful of you and you deserve it and we’re going to throw the book at you. So, for abolition, we need to change societal thinking, and that will be reflected in getting rid of Prisons and punitive thinking that sees human beings as really disposable and really relishes cruelty and suffering. 

FATHI: Yeah, I think for us, especially in Palestine, the logic of carcerality and colonialism go hand in hand, they’re tied, they can’t be separated really. Because for a lot of people, they see law and morality as kind of one and the same. Like, if you break the law, you’re a bad person. And if you follow the law, you’re a good person – and that’s a ridiculous statement anywhere in the world. But if you think about it also in a colonial kind of context, where these laws were designed to keep you oppressed and designed to keep your lands taken and designed to keep your family hostages in prisons, it takes on a completely different meaning or a more serious meaning and this is what we try and try to struggle against that these laws are unjust.

I mean, if you want to talk about laws, I mean, apartheid was legal, slavery was legal. Who’s going to argue today that these things were justified because they were legal. So, trying to uncouple the idea that law is morality and that you deserve what happened to you because of certain things, because like Rawan mentioned, it goes into also your psyche, and you’re raised on that since you’re a child. Like, you become to internalize these things that people in jails are bad. But for Palestine, and tying this to, like, the political struggle, going to jail, Israeli jail, is a sign of pride, that you are resisting occupation. It’s not seen as stigmatized as in other places, perhaps. So yeah, trying to fight against these things that try to make us domesticated that try to make us into more obedient colonial subjects.

These are things that we have to resist and a prime tool that is used to control us is the threat of carcerality, the threat of jail. And this doesn’t have to only look like four walls and bars. It can look as different things. The Gaza Strip, for example, people have been locked in there for decades and not allowed to leave. So these things are all their own forms of carceral control, even if it isn’t exactly inside four locked walls. But there’s also that. 

YULIA: In your Scalawag article, you connect carcerality and colonialism with the process of dehumanization. You gesture towards the abolitionist argument that prisons require the dehumanization of the incarcerated – that is the precondition for the existence of prisons. And you also write that “to understand dehumanization is to understand colonization.” Can you explain how dehumanization of the Indigenous people lays the groundwork for colonialism? 

FATHI: Yeah. I mean, we don’t even have to look at Palestine for this. It is kind of a global phenomenon about colonialism. If we look at Australia, for example the first time the settlers arrived or quote unquote discovered as they like to say. They knew that there were people there. They were natives, they were Indigenous people, but what did they declare the land? They called it terra nullius or rather like empty land or because they saw this land as empty. They knew it wasn’t physically, literally empty, but they just said it’s empty basically of people who matter, people like them.

So the dehumanization of the Indigenous population became part of the legal system that legitimized seizing their land, ethnically cleansing them, murdering them, because they’re not real humans. They’re not like us. They don’t matter. They don’t deserve the same rights that we have. And this is a core founding principle of the colonization of the quote unquote “new world.”

And this not only happened in Australia, it’s also in Canada, so-called United States, Turtle Island, South America. This is all connected because you need to justify why you’re doing these things and to try to justify it to your population that likes to view itself as, you know, enlightened or what have you. They need to say why, for example, these quote unquote “savages” don’t have souls. They’re not Christian. They don’t have a market system. These kinds of things were used to try to frame these people as undeserving of rights, and they can justify their enslavement. They can justify wiping them out. They can justify putting them in reservations. As soon as you dehumanize somebody, then it’s easy to treat them like animals. And that’s unfortunately what happened over the last hundreds of years. That’s what’s happening in Gaza today also. 

RAWAN: To build off that, the specific ways that Palestinians are dehumanized. There’s this recurring idea that unlike everybody else, quote unquote, normal people, the people that you would know around you in the U.S., they don’t miss their families, they just worship death, they hate Israelis or really, it’s framed as they hate Jews so much that they don’t even care about getting killed or it doesn’t matter to them if they go to jail, doesn’t matter to them if they’re tortured. And it uses where we have been, you know, steadfast, resilient against these things by accepting sacrifice or trying to sacrifice for the sake of others, for the sake of liberation, and it turns it against us in an ugly way. As if it doesn’t matter that, for example, the amount of people who are getting administrative detention, which administrative detention is no charges needed, seeing that as acceptable. And to say nothing of the Sde Teiman detention center, the really horrific testimonies of sexual assault and torture and all these really awful practices these awful things that are being committed against the Palestinians there. I can’t think of other contexts in which it would be this accepted that we would have on-video proof, we would have multiple cases of testimony where we would have all these lawyers coming in to say this, where it would be so blatant that the Red Cross is really failing in its supposed role of protecting ot figuring out what’s going on, or even having the names of these people for their families and having it be accepted. It’s something that, you know, Addameer or other prisoner rights organizations here have called the forced disappearance where families will find out months and months later that actually they were killed under or during interrogation, so severe was torture. And all of this is something that feels either accepted or negotiated with by so many in the West, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people who have been brutalized in the worst way possible. And it’s treated like a fact of life or just something that happens in the Middle East or just something that goes on over there.

FATHI: Yeah. Like, I mean, even in the previous wars on Gaza, when pictures of murdered and mutilated civilians come out, one time Netanyahu said, “Well, these are the Palestinians, they want to die in telegenic ways to make Israel look bad.” As if we don’t have our own dreams or our own futures, as if our life is so meaningless that we are just throwing our kids away because we want to make Israel look bad – the Pallywood smear – as if we have no other function in life otherwise, if we are programmed animals just to hate Israel because you know, it’s such a wonderful, lovely place and we’re just hating for no reason.

YULIA: On your website, DecolonizePalestine.com, you have a page dedicated to the debunking of the myth that Palestinians fake Israeli atrocities, or what you referred to as the Pallywood smear and we’ll link that page in the episode notes. And the fact is that Israel and Zionists can somehow convince themselves of this truly horrifically racist idea that Palestinians produce fake media of their own suffering to demonize Israel, while there is a trove of videos of Israeli soldiers themselves gleefully documenting these atrocities. And this brings me to the question of contradictions, which you say are inherent to the Israeli national myth. So, in your piece, you’ve identified some historical and foundational internal contradictions of the Zionist project and I wonder if you can talk us through those and also maybe point to new contradictions that you see emerge since the genocide in Gaza began last year?

FATHI: I think that the right-wing Zionists are much more honest about everything that they’re doing. They’re like, might is right. We’re here. This is our land. We kick you out. And that’s it. I think the more contradictions that happen is among the liberal Zionists, let’s say, or liberal Zionism.

YULIA: To me, liberal Zionism is itself a contradiction in terms. 

FATHI: Well, I think if it’s more like it’s on a spectrum almost like you’d be a liberal Zionist, you’re still a Zionist. It’s ethnic nationalism. It’s a right-wing ideology to begin with. You can’t separate that. 

YULIA: Yeah, totally.

FATHI: But yeah, let’s call it the less, like, I don’t want to call it less extreme. It’s all extreme. But let’s say it’s the ones that cry while they ethnically cleanse you, or at least pretend to act like it’s bad uh, when they ethnically cleanse you. And when you really boil it down, there’s very little difference between right-wing and left-wing Israelis. At the end of the day, they are invested in the Zionist project, but the liberal Zionists kind of want to be like, okay, well, you can have this little Bantustan while the right wingers are like, no, you don’t even deserve that Bantustan. And that’s really the most significant difference between them.

But when we were seeing these quote unquote “pro-democracy protests” that happened before the war, what they wanted was to save the status quo, their life. They wanted to save the Supreme Court, which is the same Supreme Court that okays the demolition of Palestinian houses, that okays seizing Palestinian lands, that okays all of these apartheid laws in Israel that makes a Jewish life more important than a non-Jewish life. So like, it is not like being against Netanyahu means that they’re going to be for anything that’s going to benefit Palestinians. No, it’s about maintaining the status quo. It’s about ethnic cleansing, but according to the rules, according to the bureaucratic rules of the IDF, to take over land legally and not to let the settlers just take it over because settlers make them look bad, but when the army does it, it does it according to the rules. Which brings us back to the question of legality and the carceral logic of the legal colonial system. Because they’re like, oh well, we destroyed this house because there was no permit. But like, why are you giving me a permit to begin with? Why are you giving me a permit to expand my house? They don’t think about those deeper questions, they think about in the now, they decontextualize everything and treat everything happening in a vacuum, which is exactly what happened with October the 7th. Because they can understand the reaction to October 7th, but they can’t fathom that October 7th might be a reaction to something else.

YULIA: I was really struck by the story about the Citadel of Akka that you write about in the piece, and how that is an embodiment of those Zionist contradictions. So the Citadel, and I’m borrowing this history from your article, is a site that once held and viciously tortured Palestinian political prisoners, and their struggle and executions are memorialized in the popular Palestinian folk song. And now, the Citadel is an Israeli tourist attraction. It houses an Israeli Museum of Heroism, and the heroes that it celebrates were members of the Stern Gang and the Irgun, who are guilty of committing massacres against Palestinian villages like Deir Yassin. Can you tell us more about that citadel and the contradictions that it embodies? I’m really curious, like, how they emerge and how they are reconciled by Zionists. 

RAWAN: Right, yes. So the same place where the British mandate had been imprisoning Palestinians and where these three Palestinians were executed as told in a poem that was turned into a song ‘“From the Acre Prison.” The same place the Zionists basically made murals depicting it as in they had to fight both the British and the Arabs for their independence you know, cartoonishly depicting the Palestinians as savages that were just randomly going after Jews and not that, you know, Zionist came with this political aim of wanting to expel, of wanting to take over the land, of wanting to be in charge and colluding with the British accordingly, is also the thing.

But I think a myth that really needs to be written is specifically the idea of independence from the British, because it really obscures the kind of storied history of how these Zionist settlers along with the British were really cracking down on Palestinians, conducting these terrifying night raids, helping to arrest. I think something I even mentioned, that was from Ghassan Kanafani’s really important study of the 1936 revolution, is how there was such a discrepancy in the laws and how they were treated, where it was supposed to be, oh you both don’t get weapons, but really Palestinians were the ones being prosecuted if you had a stick versus the Zionists who were able to, you know, bomb hotels and buildings and to do all these kind of things.

FATHI: I mean, house demolitions is a thing that’s going on until this day. It started as a British policy to kind of punish Palestinians for resistance. And they were training Zionist militias to do that. They went out with them to train them on how to destroy houses. And then the Israelis are like, oh, look, we fought against the British.

YULIA: Right, it’s interesting how the Citadel that really serves as evidence of Zionism being the heir of british imperialism, right, being assisted and sponsored by the British in establishing the settler colonial zionist state in Palestine, and yet now Zionists twist it into somehow being a testament to their valiant anti-colonial struggle against the British? 

RAWAN: They didn’t used to have to bother to do that. They used to just straight up be like, we are civilizationally closer to you. White Christian Europeans. And because we are closer to you than these backwards you know, Muslim savages… 

FATHI: The orientals. 

RAWAN: The orientals, that we deserve this. And now it’s become more of just we suffered under the British too. The British were so annoying. The British didn’t do this. And it’s like, they, you were helped every step of the way. There would not have been a state of Israel if it wasn’t for the British. The way that the British conducted the mandate and gave them all these you know, logistical, you know, legs up and… 

FATHI: Logistic, economic, and all that. Like, what was your problem with the British? They were also your sponsors. They gave you all the weapons. They gave you everything. So at the end of the day, this whole mythology was created about resisting the British and they co-opted the history of the Citadel in Akka, that was the place where mostly Palestinians were imprisoned and tortured and executed. It was rare for Zionists to actually be in prison, relatively speaking, numbers-wise. And they turned it into this shrine of resistance to the British as if they were the ones who were there resisting the British. And this is like how they commemorate their heroes of resistance, not mentioning that the British literally left and left them all the weapons and left them and the British would not intervene when the ethnic cleansing began before the end of the mandate. That’s when the ethnic cleansing began. The British did not intervene in a single place to stop the Zionists from kicking out Palestinians. And I remind you, like almost half of the people in the Nakba were ethnically cleansed before the war of 48 even began, which a lot of people don’t mention. They try to act like, “Oh, that happened as a by-product of the war, when the Arabs invaded,” but that happened before any war was declared. 

So it really brings down all of this mythology, we have to deal with so many myths that are still so persistent today. And it’s at this point, it’s really willful ignorance. People just want to believe what they believe because there’s mountains of evidence. There’s mountains of scholarly consensus. There’s this consensus even from Israeli archives. Like it’s this, at this point, the evidence is overwhelming. And if you don’t want to look at the evidence that you’re just fooling yourself, just say, just be honest, like the right-wing Zionists. But don’t pretend that it’s nuanced and complicated and difficult and we need to look at both sides, blah, blah, blah, just own it. Don’t try to kind of apply nuance to shield your own complicity in what’s going on. 

YULIA: As you were talking about the Zionist movement inheriting and adopting the British colonial tactics and infrastructure, I was also thinking about Israel, immediately after the Nakba, placing the remaining Palestinian communities in 48 under military law, surrounding them with barbed wire, right, immediately recreating the concentration camp. So this reproduction of the literal infrastructure of ethnic cleansing and genocide that they claim they came to Palestine to seek protection from, I think is really revealing about the true genocidal nature of Zionism. So I wanted to ask you to give us a bit of a historic overview of what you call in your piece “regimes of domination” and how they vary across time and regions of historic Palestine.

FATHI: The thing you brought up about the concentration camps, there are declassified documents from the Red cross that said that there are actually labor camps full of Palestinians, especially in the South, on the Egyptian front. And they were used as labor and a lot of them were executed after, like they’d be asked to make their own graves and lie in them and get executed there. Like there’s horrific evidence of these things. And we have to remember that within 48 itself, after the Zionists took over the land and declared their state, all non-Jewish communities, chiefly the Palestinian ones, were put under military law and this military law basically put barbed wire around their villages to the point where there was discussion in the Knesset after the war, which literally described them as concentration camps. And this is not hyperbole, this is literally what the Israelis called it in government at the time. So we see the reproduction, yeah, it’s not a question. Because there’s this misconception that after the Holocaust, the world felt bad for the Zionists, and they were just trying to escape the war, and they wanted to have their own country. But for reality, the Zionist colonization of Palestine began way before the First World War even. We’re talking about the 1800s, when Herzl wrote about his state, and we’re talking about the proto-Zionist movements that moved in 1860s into Palestine to try and have their own state. Like Chaim Weizmann who had these diaries, and they were very open about everything that they thought about us as barbarians and as, like, backwards people that they couldn’t possibly understand the European mind, his words, not mine. So like Rawan said, this kind of pivot towards, you know, “Zionism is the most you know successful decolonization movement in history,” which is a new talking point, is absolutely ridiculous when you have the original Zionist founders’ words so clear and so obvious. They had the colonization department, that’s not something that you can just whitewash away.

But to talk about the different regimes of domination very, very briefly. Yeah, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, so-called East Jerusalem and Palestine 48, which is inside the Green Line, which is the borders of the state of Israel, internationally recognized, quote unquote “recognized,” because they haven’t really declared their borders fully until this day. Each one has their own context. Each one has their own little regime of domination. 

In the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, they’re both occupied, so is East Jerusalem. But in the Gaza Strip, we have it more from a distance, basically. It’s more bombardment, it’s more sniping, it’s more wars than we see today. In the West Bank, there’s a more active literal police force, or like a military. Basically an army, it’s not a police force, but their task is to be physically present on the land and to police Palestinians and to assassinate Palestinians. In East Jerusalem, it was illegally annexed in the eighties and they consider it part of Israel, but also not part of Israel. Like, yeah, it’s a unified Jerusalem, but also you’re not Israeli citizens, your residents. So you have different rights. And if you move out of Jerusalem for a few years, you’re not allowed to come back. Because you have to prove that Jerusalem is your center of life. And obviously this does not apply to Jewish Israelis, only to Palestinians.

We have inside 48 itself, which is a whole different tiered situation because Israel as a state distinguishes between nationality and between citizenship. So it could be a citizen, but a different national. So it could be an Arab national or Muslim national or Jewish national, but an Israeli citizen. And most of your rights come from your ethnic nationality, not from your citizenship rights. So that’s how they kind of work a loophole around, “Oh, well, they’re an equal citizen.” Yes, but there are 60 laws that discriminate because you’re the wrong ethnicity or national origin. And based on this, they can also discriminate on who gets to live where, because most of the land is owned either by the government or the Jewish National Fund, which says outright that we only develop for the Jewish people. So if you’re Arab, you can’t lease land that is owned by the Jewish National Fund or overseen by the Jewish National Fund. If you’re going to want to move into a city or a settlement they have these so-called commissions of entry, which say, “Well, we’re not rejecting you ’cause you’re Arab, just ’cause you culturally don’t fit in with the rest of us.” In practice, this has basically meant segregation. It’s very rare inside of Israel actually to have mixed cities. They’re only the mixed cities that weren’t completely ethnically cleansed. That’s why they’re mixed, not because people wanna live together, ’cause the majority of Israeli towns and cities and villages are exclusively Jewish. Or they’re exclusively Palestinian. And that’s like, it’s very, very brief because we could talk about this for an hour, all these different systems of domination.

RAWAN: Fathi did a good job of going into the big overview of these systemic big picture things. I think I want to talk just a little bit about the kind of smaller things that they do. There’s also the idea of the people being too afraid to leave their city because they don’t even want to deal with the checkpoints. You know, this idea of delete everything on your phone, even if it feels innocuous. You feel so constrained all the time and it’s just constant question of like, “How are the checkpoints like today? Are they closed? Are they not? Are we going to go see?” Even if there’s like a wedding, we probably are not even going to do it. And this preceded the war. You think of all these kind of smaller ways that occupation is supposed to psychologically wear you down over time how you know, frustrating that could feel, how suffocating.

FATHI: And it all pours into the same goal that was from the 1800s to this day, there’s still the driving factor. They want as much Palestinian land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible. And they will do everything from direct violence to the indirect violence, to lawfare, to all these kinds of ways to make life so difficult, so inconvenient that Palestinians will just kind of huddle up in large urban areas rather than, you know, live on the periphery and be attacked by settlers every day or be arrested for not having permits to just build another room for their house because they had another child, the audacity. Things like that they just want to make life as difficult as possible so that Palestinians leave these, you know, periphery areas the West Bank and go back into the big urban centers and they can take over the land now, but with the pretext that it’s abandoned land or fallow fields or what have you. And they’ll be the reason why the land is abandoned or the fields are fallow because you’re not allowed to dig for water or you’re not allowed to build a fence to stave off wild animals from eating your crops. Meanwhile, you can see a settler literally a minute away in the distance, having all this infrastructure subsidized by the state and an army that harasses you on the day so that these settlers can expand their lands at your expense. 

RAWAN: Your water’s running out so that you can’t really shower, but you know they have swimming pools.

YULIA: Something I learnt about from your piece is the cemetery of numbers, which is a horrifically cruel practice that Israel uses to inter the bodies of Palestinians accused of “terrorism.” The bodies are buried in numbered graves, without ritual or dignity. Last year, before the genocide began, over 250 bodies layed in these cemeteries. And since then, we see all of these regimes of control tightened, their violence escalated to the max. And so I want to ask you about gaza and how the lessons from your piece apply there and what does the abolitionist lens offer us in the context of genocide?

RAWAN: So it’s kind of underscored a lot. It’s made it feel more urgent, but I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like it doesn’t apply anymore, but it does feel like we are. The worst possible conclusion of what that piece was talking about and hinting towards for the future. Something I think about a lot about that just is really infuriating to me is you think of, you know, a lot of these other war zones, you could at least leave. You know, all of Gaza, it was already blockaded, it was already besieged for all these years, there was already all this control into what goes in and out, and that, you know, why we’re even hearing today about how rapidly I think the deterioration happened is because they were already malnourished, there was already not enough of these hygienic goods and then you put it in the situation where we can’t even leave and it’s very difficult to bring in. And it’s become something you see is someone in Gaza celebrating all day that soap reached the area where my tent is or, you know, shampoo or having shoes that we didn’t have to make out of wood.

So it’s felt more horrific than anything we’ve seen before. It’s I would say worse than the Nakba in the sense of how much more advanced the weaponry is now and the surveillance and the quadcopters and the strange, you know, the testimony of these quadcopters that are shooting people, emitting noises that are supposed to sound like babies crying or a woman calling for help or doing all these things. Like this all feels a lot more dystopian. I think the surveillance technology is like, you know, as we have hinted at or talked about, and as so many others have a lot of these technologies that are being tested out in Gaza is not even turning it just into this prison or killing cage, but also this like weapons testing laboratory, where a lot of these really awful technologies that are going to be sold and marketed around the world to oppress and suppress. And so the piece I think gives a good introduction or foundation. I don’t know if it’s changed so much as I guess we would add so much more about Gaza specifically, because of the closing, because of the weapons being used, because of the surveillance. So I think there’s so much more of that to delve into. 

FATHI: Yeah, I think it’s basically everything we wrote about in that article was turned up to a thousand with the beginning of the genocide. At the end of the day, all of these, you know hollow institutions, they really are hollow, from international law to academic freedom, to freedom of journalism – all of this, all of these so called Western values that they’ve been hammering into our heads for the last 50 years about Western enlightenment, it’s all been bare naked in front of the world. It’s all fake. It’s all nonsensical. And unfortunately, the world likes to pretend we moved on from World War II or a situation that was World War II, how it was. But no, naked power still rules. State interests still rule. And Israel could slaughter another million people if it gives them more stability as, you know, a settler colony or as a base for Western imperialism in the Middle East.

YULIA: I’m gonna switch gears because before we wrap up and ask you about the project that both of you co-founded and that’s the website DecolonizePalestine.com. Tell us what it is, who it is for and why you decided to create it.

RAWAN: Yeah, so DecolonizePalestine.com is a collection of resources that has included Palestine 101 stuff, myths, the washing section that is about the different ways we talked about the whole idea of Israel’s, you know, new branding as being progressive, anti-colonial even, human rights, its kind of new civilizational discourse. Before it used to be trendy to say that you’re a colonist. Now it’s trendy to talk about a pride parade. We have that section of greenwashing about the environment or pinkwashing about LGBTQ rights. All these articles and the myth section specifically was because it just felt like we were just seeing such constant lies and obfuscations and it felt needed to be able to go into detail. We wanted it to be the source that we wish had existed when we were in university and talking to people about Zionism who didn’t really think about it before, or didn’t know much about it, people who were learning about it for the first time. And it felt nice to be able to collect these statistics and things in one place, across these different categories, you know, the Nakba, the nationalist myths Israel, these different categories. We hope to add to it more. There’s so much from the war, it just felt like we could barely catch our breath in terms of wanting to enact these emergency measures. But as difficult emotionally and physically as this time has been and trying to support our people in Gaza, it’s needed to have more of these resources of, you know, calling out the lies, the idea of, oh, there was a ceasefire on October 6th. Or you know, all these other kind of absurd things you’re seeing coming out, the way Hamas is being blamed for the lack of a ceasefire deal when really America just won’t stop giving them, you know, Israel the fire no matter what they do while also pretending that their hands are tied when it’s not and how much that has been able to, to muddy the waters. So we felt like clarity is important because it’s important to have people be angry about this and willing to do something about it and also to have your anger be in the right place. 

FATHI: Yeah, it’s definitely more of a kind of a quick reference for a lot of things because each of those myths could by themselves be a book basically, but we wanted it to be accessible. We want it to be not very jargony, want for people to be able to understand it no matter what their,  you know, academic levels were. And if you want to read deeper about something, there’s always a further reading section. We have a reading list and we have an FAQ. So we tried to make it as accessible as possible so people can just debunk a lot of things. Because we’ve been debunking these things for a long time and it felt like it’s becoming redundant. So we just wanted to put it in one place where we can just, we have a quick reference to link people to. 

Now about their contradictions In our Scalawag piece on abolition, we talked about how all of these different myths don’t even gel with each other at a certain point. Like, for example, the myth that the land was empty, but then they’re like, oh, well, the inhabitants of Palestine have wanted to wipe us out from day one. So which one was it? Was it empty or not? Or that Israel is the only hope for a safe Jewish population, but at the same time has the highest mortality rate of Jewish people because it’s not a normal country. It’s a settler colony, a war zone all the time. 

These are all these kinds of contradictions. They want to pretend to be Middle Eastern, even though even inside of it there’s a clear hierarchy in access to resources between even the Jewish populations themselves, between Ashkenazi and Sephardi and Mizrahi and so forth. So there’s, it’s just like, ethnic nationalism in general is not coherent as an ideology.

It’s full of contradictions. And fascism, as well, is full of contradictions. But the thing is, they’re not here to be convinced by these contradictions. You can’t point out the hypocrisy or the double-sidedness of their arguments, because that’s not the point of the propaganda. It doesn’t matter. It just needs to spread your worldview. It doesn’t matter how incoherent it is. It’s just enough to shed doubt on anything for it to be held on. Like, example of the horrible, you know, sexual assault videos from the Sde Teiman that came out. It’s enough to say, oh, those were just Hamas and that’s enough. That’s enough. That’s the end of the conversation. You don’t need to even go any deeper into it. You don’t need to unpack it. You don’t need to go to the history. It doesn’t matter. And for their side, Israelis in general, and Zionists in general, in the world, Christian or Jewish, doesn’t matter, they don’t need to actually go into this history. You don’t need to actually understand who Herzl was or what this means because they never had to, you know, kind of unpack the legacy of their ideology because they’re living on the benefits of it. Why would they go poking at that? Why would they rock the boat? It’s Palestinians who have to go digging into that, unfortunately, and the people on the side of Palestinians that we’ve become experts at a certain point. We know Israeli history better than Israelis because we have to, because it’s a survival mechanism. It’s not because we just love to learn random history. It’s because you need to know the history and how things are going. And this is a thing, a luxury, that colonized peoples all around the globe don’t have to just ignore the society they’re living in and just like go with the flow. 

You see the same thing in the United States, the Black population or the Indigenous populations, they have a much more sober and clear understanding of the founding of the United States. And a lot of these people will think, oh, it was founded on liberty and justice for all. Like, yeah, that’s lovely, but that’s not what happened. Or, you know, trying to reframe Zionism as just, oh, it’s just self-determination for Jewish people. And that’s it. That’s their definition as if that happened in a vacuum and there was no ethnic cleansing. It’s like exactly the same way that people say, manifest destiny was just pilgrims seeking a better life for themselves. Like really? Like, that’s it? That’s the whole story? There’s no more information about manifest destiny other than people trying to improve their lives? There’s nothing you’re leaving out? That’s the exact same thing with Zionism. So we try to kind of unpack all of these things in a way that’s accessible to people. 

YULIA: You know, especially in the past year, I found your website to be an invaluable resource. Especially in the organizing spaces, for a lot of ppl who are kind of new and have genuine questions, it’s been so helpful to have this one place that is accessible that we can send ppl to for a quick reference or lesson or I can quickly look something up. So I feel like for ppl who want to learn in good faith, it’s really an excellent primer.

FATHI: We always encourage people to go look for the original, especially when it comes to reports that are open source, like, you know, British Mandate reports or UN reports and stuff like that. We encourage everybody to double check us, fact check us. We’re completely open to that. We have nothing to hide because we don’t want to twist it. It’s not a propaganda manual. It’s not something to teach people how to argue. It’s to explain things to people. And I think that’s a big difference between Decolonized Palestine and hasbara or, you know, Israeli propaganda, because we link actually to a hasbara manual, which is a public relations manual that was leaked of how to argue for Zionism and Israel in different countries and different contexts. And they teach them what words to focus on based on the history of the country they’re trying to lobby in. Like, what to focus on in Germany, what to focus on in the U.S. Talk about shared values. If you’re talking to a Christian population, talk about Christian Zionism that way. Like, you know, it’s a propaganda manual that teaches you how to argue. It doesn’t teach you the content. It doesn’t teach you any substance. And that’s the complete opposite of our approach.

It’s very easy to teach you how to have a few buzzwords together. That’s much less work than for us, actually, if we did that, but that’s not what we want to do because we want to actually inform people because sun is the best disinfectant. And yeah, Palestinians, obviously throughout our history have, we’re not a monolith, a lot of disagreements about a lot of steps that Palestinians have done throughout history. But at the end of the day, we do believe that history will absolve us. And we do believe that having an accurate and complete view of history is definitely a pro-Palestinian at the end of the day. Because you can’t, you can’t keep hiding these things. You can’t try to, to twist them around or decontextualize things in a way to where you make things like ethnic cleansing sound like, oh, just an accident of war, when we have literal plans called Plan Dalet that literally says that we want to get rid of these populations in these places. And it happened within a few months. Like it’s not something you just explain away like that. So I feel like this is a crucial difference. Like we don’t look at it as this kind of propaganda tool. We try to be as factual as possible and we ask anybody to really fact check us if they feel like anything we posted is inaccurate, because we do believe accuracy is important.

YULIA: Rawan, Fathi, thank you so much for this conversation, your scalawag piece, your work on DecolonizePalestine and everything else that you do. Listeners, all of the texts we’ve discussed are linked in the episode notes where you can also find the link to our website, criticalzionismstudies.org. Until next time, solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.