2019 Keynote: Israel: More Than Apartheid

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2019, pp. 38-45, 70

Susan Abulhawa

Delinda Hanley: I hope you’ll find your seats. You are in for a real treat now. I’m going to introduce our keynote speaker. Susan Abulhawa is a highly regarded Palestinian author who has written internationally acclaimed bestsellers. In fact, when we announced that she would give this keynote address, Philip Farah—I know you’re here—said his wife’s reading group agreed Abulhawa’s book is the best they’d ever read. He said, “I really put her up there with Charles Dickens.”

Her debut novel, Mornings in Jenin, was translated into 28 languages. Her second novel, The Blue Between Sky and Water, has likewise been translated into 26 languages. Abulhawa’s first poetry collection, My Voice Sought the Wind, was published by Just World Books. All those books are for sale at the Middle East Books and More booth and on our website. Her third novel will be published soon, in 2019.

She’s the daughter of refugees from the 1967 Six-Day War, when her family’s land was seized and Israel captured what remained of Palestine, including Jerusalem. She was born in Kuwait and raised between there and Jerusalem, then in the Carolinas, where she completed high school, university and graduate school, majoring in neuroscience. She enjoyed a successful career in biomedical science before becoming a full-time writer.

I first heard her poetry years ago, at an ADC [American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee] convention. As a child who also grew up here and there, always searching for my own homeland, I listened to her poetry and wept. She currently lives in Pennsylvania with her daughter, their cats and dogs. In 2001, Susan founded Playgrounds for Palestine, a children’s organization dedicated to upholding the right to play for Palestinian children. To help raise funds to build more playgrounds, she has launched AIDA, a private label olive oil from Palestine. You’ll find her bottles and books in the Ideas Fair.

Abulhawa is often invited to international poetry or literary festivals. Audiences in every country in the world can listen to her voice—except in her own homeland. In November 2018, Israeli authorities barred her entry into Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport and prevented her from participating in panel discussions at a literature festival in Ramallah and Jerusalem. She was detained for 32 hours, many of them spent in an Israeli jail cell, as she appealed their decision. An Israeli court upheld her deportation. Please welcome a powerful voice for Palestine.

Susan Abulhawa: Thank you. Thank you so much for that generous introduction. It’s really great to be back at the Washington Report. This is an institution that was one of the main sources, or first sources, we had for independent media, and it’s an honor to be the keynote.

I want in this talk to try and examine the nature of Israel in the world. To do that, I’m going to try and present a survey of Israel from multiple angles that are going to seem disparate and unrelated. They include democracy, nature, global weapons, friendship and archaeology.

Most of us in this room understand the colonial and apartheid underpinnings of Israel, which manifest in the unrelenting daily horrors and indignities for Palestinians. On the other hand, some folks see Israel as a benevolent place trying to exist with Palestinians. But I would like to look beyond this kind of contained binary framework relative only to Palestinians, because Israel is so much more.

Every country in the world, of course, has good and bad elements, but I do think it’s possible to pinpoint a kind of general imprint for societies—the way they exist in the world and also, more importantly, how they impact the rest of the world. To do this, I found that national spending data are useful. When we look at Israeli spending, we find that it is second only to Saudi Arabia—that other bastion of human rights—in arms spending per capita in the world, exceeding the United States military spending per capita, as well as exceeding U.S. military spending as a percent of GDP.

I’m going to talk about what all of this means in real life, but first, I want to touch on the prevailing perception of Israel, which has been cultivated through sustained multi-tiered, multi-pronged public relations campaigns that present Israel as an unfairly maligned modern democracy, one that is advanced, socially enlightened and endlessly innovative, from such absurd claims as having invented falafel to the equally absurd claim of being less than one year away from curing cancer. It’s actually a real thing.

What is promulgated through popular international media is typically not merely an exaggeration of reality, or even just spin, but it’s often precisely the opposite of reality. A case in point is this article in Scientific American, a respected magazine that translates scientific information for lay persons. The article touted Israel’s desalination plants as “unprecedented ingenuity in the region,” using language that comports with the old proposition that Israel is a miracle that made the desert bloom. The reality could not be further from that.

Two implicit lies in the title and subtitle alone: First, Arab nations in the Gulf have been using desalination technology for the past 50 years. But more important is the little known fact that Ramallah’s annual rainfall actually exceeds London’s annual rainfall. And Jerusalem’s rainfall is nearly on par with London’s—plus it’s way sunnier. The point is that Palestine isn’t and never was dry, desert or barren.

This is the cover of a detailed book [Pollution in the Promised Land] of all the ways that Israel has profoundly and detrimentally altered the natural biomes, landscape, hydraulic potential and ecological balance of Palestine. It is a monumentally depressing read. I don’t have time to go into the terrible details but, keeping with the example at hand, I’m briefly going to touch on water.

The article described Israel as a “galvanized civilization that created water from nothingness, where a few miles away water disappeared and civilizations crumbled.” In fact, in its first years of establishment, Israel began water diversion projects and overpumping from rivers and tributaries to serve Zionist settlements with unsustainable European standards, which were utterly in conflict with the local terrain and which set the stage for a multitude of environmental disasters all across Palestine.

One example, among many, of Israel’s destruction of Palestine’s natural water systems is the Al-Auja River, which Israel renamed as the Yarkon. It was a vigorous coastal river described in an 1891 travel guide as “a roaring river that zigzags until falling into the sea. Its power turns mills and small fish can be caught in it.”

In a mere decade of Israeli management of Palestine’s water, this life-giving river was reduced to a trickle of sewage, its water siphoned and replaced with the toxic sludge of industrial and domestic pollutants—which, in 1997, ate through the lungs and vital organs of athletes competing in the Maccabiah Games when a bridge fell, and they fell into the river.

One of Israel’s first water projects when it conquered the rest of Palestine was to divert as much water as possible from the Jordan River once it gained access. This spurred Syria and Jordan to follow suit, to preserve their own share of regional waters. Decades later, water levels are so low that the Jordan River can no longer replenish the Dead Sea. The declining water levels, coupled with Israel’s evaporation ponds to extract minerals and other industrial activities, have created an environmental disaster never before seen in Palestine. It has become cliché to say that the Dead Sea is dying.

In the 1950s, Israel drained Palestine’s Hula wetlands, a regional biodiversity treasure, in order to establish Jewish settlements. Hundreds of such colonial projects have greatly denigrated the rich biological and geographical diversity that once thrived in that terrain where three continents meet. Some of the fish and birds that were destroyed by this project were found nowhere else in the world, and have since gone extinct.

This is to say nothing of the way that the land has been scarred and disfigured. Hilltops decapitated for rapacious settlements, millions of imported fast-growing trees planted to conceal destroyed Palestinian villages—only for these non-native trees to be rejected by the land in massive forest fires, leaving a scorched earth on hundreds of thousands of acres. And it is to say nothing of the systematic ways in which Israel uproots olive trees and other fruit-bearing trees that sustain Palestinian families.

There are countless such examples and systematic ways in which Israel has devastated nature, sometimes in ways that cannot be undone. Although Israel’s role as a destroyer of Palestinian society overshadows their environmental record, Israel should nonetheless be counted among the world’s polluters, decimators of trees, and spoilers of nature.

I want to turn now to Israeli innovations and exports. Because Israel leads the world in several niche death, surveillance and suppression technologies and tactics. It is well known, and admitted by Israeli weapons manufacturers, that they test their weapons on Palestinians, and Gaza is their biggest laboratory. According to Darryl Li of the University of Chicago, Gaza is a, “space where Israel tests and refines various techniques of management, continuously experimenting in search of an optimal balance between maximum control over territory and minimum responsibility for its non-Jewish population.”

I told you earlier that Israel is right there with Saudi Arabia leading the world in military spending per capita. Other countries like the United States, Russia and China aren’t far behind. But where an extraordinary difference emerges is with military exports. Studies and international databases will show that Israel is anywhere from the fourth to the eighth largest exporter of arms, and this depends on the year and the currency examined.

I should point out, however, that these data are likely gross underestimations, because Israel doesn’t actually report its arms deals—many of which occur through covert deals via independent arms hustlers, often retired Israeli military generals. Given that Israel is listed among exporters of arms with far bigger populations and far bigger economies, I looked for data to show exports per capita, and I came up mostly empty-handed, to my surprise. I’m sure that data must be out there somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. So I put on my old scientist and statistician hat and did the calculations myself.

I used two databases. The first was of the top arms exporters in U.S. dollars for years 2010 to 2018 from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI, which compiles data on arms transfers and conflicts around the world. Then, using Excel functions, I matched those data up with a world population database for corresponding years from the World Bank. Then, using simple arithmetic functions, I calculated and graphed arms sales normalized to the size of the population to determine arms exports per capita for all the countries in the SIPRI database. What I found is that Israel leads the entire world in arms exports, often by a huge margin, every single year between 2010 and 2018, with the exception of 2011, in which Sweden, strangely, was neck and neck with them. Again, these data do not include the vast covert arms transfers, military training and surveillance technology.

One of Israel’s biggest military hardware niches is drones. Over 60 percent of global drone exports come from Israel. The United States is in second place, with just less than 24 percent. The attractiveness of Israeli arms is that they boast of being combat tested. A case in point is Israel’s Hermes 900, which was still in the testing phase when it was used against civilians in Gaza in 2014.

A mere three weeks after that onslaught in Gaza that murdered 2,200 people and maimed tens of thousands more, Israel held a drone trade show called “Israel Unmanned Systems 2014,” in which that Hermes 900 was all the rage for its so-called performance in Gaza. In that assault in 2014, Israel used drones to kill at least 840 people. In the current assault on Gaza protesters, Israel is using a series of new drones called the Cyclone riot control drone system. It’s being used to spray aerosol and gas substances from the sky. They appear to be used for the first time against the Great March of Return. The company that makes the Cyclone claims on their website to be a leading supplier for police in the United States, and they boast that their product claims are based on practical field experience. This is what it looks like: [Video clip showing the drone firing on civilians in Gaza.]

So what happens after these death and suppression technologies are developed and tested on the bodies, psyches and spirits of Palestinians? Throughout its short history, Israel has been one of the most dependable suppliers of weapons to pariah regimes, especially in situations where weapon embargoes were put in place due to severe human rights abuses. The ones I’m going to show you were revealed due to leaks, revelations, or specific investigations, especially those by two Israeli human rights activists—Eitay Mack and Yair Oron.

In South Sudan’s civil war, Israel continued to supply the South Sudanese regime with weapons, despite an ongoing civil war that had left half a million people dead and four million displaced in the past five years. Israel’s arms sales to South Sudan continued despite a U.N. report that documented extensive and grave human rights violations, including the drafting of child soldiers, burning of villages, systematic rape, indiscriminate killing, pillaging and destruction of infrastructure. And they continue to supply weapons to them, despite a U.S. arms embargo, followed by a U.N. arms embargo, against South Sudan. In fact, just a few months ago, the former head of the Israeli army’s operation was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department as an agent who sold over $150 million worth of weapons under the cover of an agricultural company that was supposed to be building affordable housing in South Sudan.

In the Bosnian massacres, Israel sold weapons to Serbian forces during the Bosnian war in the early ’90s, long after the U.N. embargo was declared in ’91. In ’92, when Slobodan Milosevic was the president of Serbia—he was described at that time as the new Hitler of Europe, I think most of us in this room are old enough to remember him—at that time Israel opened an embassy in Serbia, and simultaneously Serbian forces were creating concentration camps and committing massacres against Bosnian Muslims that led to the murder of an estimated 250,000 people.

Eitay Mack, who I mentioned earlier, gathered evidence that Israelis in the highest offices were involved in both arming and training Serbian forces. Mack and Oron then petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court with concrete evidence of this, including the diary of Ratko Mladic, who’s on trial at the ICC for war crimes. They had his diary, in which he catalogued all the training and weapons that were transferred to them. Israel’s high court rejected the petition, arguing that declassifying documents exposing Israel’s role in the Bos­nian genocide would harm Israeli interests. Adding insult to injury, Israel is now engaged in revising the history of this genocide. So Israel supplied weapons to Serbia while it was known that they were committing genocide and while there was a U.N. arms embargo in place, and Israel’s high court covered it all up.

In Myanmar, we know that Israel continued to transfer weapons to the Burmese army long after they were accused of committing war crimes, including murder, rape, torture and the burning of villages that left thousands dead and at least 700,000 displaced from the Rohingya minority. Israel was selling arms to Myanmar well after the European Union and the United States imposed an arms embargo on the country. Mack and Oron petitioned the Israeli high court to stop these weapons sales, but the ruling was kept classified. But we know that Israel continued to supply armored land and water vehicles and artillery to the Burmese military. So, once again, Israel supplied arms to Myanmar while it was known that they were committing ethnic cleansing and while there was a U.N. embargo in place, and Israel’s high court helped to cover it up and enable it.

In Rwanda, going back again to the 1990s, to another horrific genocide, an estimated one million men, women and children were massacred in Rwanda in the space of 100 days. It is said to be the fastest pace of genocide in human history. Israel provided the rifles, ammunition and grenades that made it all possible. Eitay Mack, again in petitioning the Israel high court to declassify the arms transfers, quoted the Israeli arms dealer who in Rwanda said, “I’m actually a doctor,” expressing pride for supplying those weapons because, he said, he helped the victims die quickly.

Israel’s high court ruled that the details of those arms deals will remain a secret, again claiming that it would harm Israeli interests to reveal the extent of those arms transfers. So again, Israel supplied Rwanda with weapons while it was known that a genocide was taking place and while a U.N. arms embargo was in place, and Israel’s high court helped to cover it up. Adding insult to injury again, Israel later backed a move at the U.N. by Rwanda to rewrite history of this particular genocide as a larger quid pro quo, with Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda, to take in asylum seekers deported from Israel.

Now, going even further back to apartheid South Africa, this is the cover of an explosive book [The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa] when it was published in 2010 by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, detailing the never before known extent of cooperation between Israel and the apartheid government of South Africa. Israel was South Africa’s closest ally, its most important arms supplier, and eventually its only friend in a world that could no longer look the other way from the crimes of apartheid. The coordination between the two countries was unprecedented. Their respective intelligence chiefs held regular meetings, sharing information in training and surveillance. They gave unfettered access to each other’s military tactics, missions and intelligence.

The relationship was actually deeper than mere trade and coordination. Israel had a spiritual and moral affinity for the apartheid government in South Africa which was articulated in the 1980s by Israeli Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, who said, referring to blacks in South Africa, that they “want to gain control over the white minority just like the Arabs here want to gain control over us, and we too, like the white minority in South Africa, must act to prevent them from taking over us.”

In 1976, just two months after Israel rolled out the red carpet for the South African president, schoolchildren in Soweto took to the streets to demonstrate against an imposed racist curriculum. The white South African police mowed them down with weapons that had been supplied by Israel. What shocked the world further from this book was to finally learn that Israel had offered to provide the apartheid government with nuclear arms as far back as 1975. Israel tried to prevent the declassification of the post-apartheid government documents but they were unsuccessful, and it became clear that Israel did indeed lead to the nuclear armament of the apartheid regime, which luckily disarmed voluntarily following the fall of apartheid.

One more thing that’s worth noting here. In 2007, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned that his country could one day “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.”

There are so many more examples of such violent Israeli subterfuge in the world. I’m going to quickly rattle through a few of these examples without going into detail for the sake of time, but just know that every one of these instances—and this is not a complete list of sub rosa arms sales—occurred to bolster repressive brutal regimes at different times and as well as training of mercenaries to facilitate corporate plunder.

Israel continued supplying arms to the former repressive white colonial regime in Rhodesia, or modern day Zimbabwe, after U.N. sanctions were imposed in 1967. Israel armed and supported Portugal against national liberation movements in the former colonies of Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Bissau. Israel funded and trained the military oppression of anti-colonial uprisings and/or dictatorships in Ivory Coast, Central African Republic, Benin, Togo, Cameroon, Senegal, Uganda, Nigeria and Somalia. Israel armed all sides of the Angola civil war at different times over 40 years. They used this colonial tactic in other places to fuel and arm wars to divide and re-conquer Africa. Israel armed and trained elite units in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, bolstering the brutal rule of Mobutu Sese Seko following the assassination of pan-Africanist Patrice Lumumba. They sold arms to Sri Lanka to suppress the Tamils.

Israel provided nearly all arms sold to the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua that terrorized its people for over 12 years. Following the democratic election of the Sandinistas, Israel funneled arms to the brutal Nicaraguan Contras and was embroiled in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair. They likewise sold arms to Guatemalan death squads, as well as death squads in El Salvador and Honduras; to Chile during Pinochet’s horrific dictatorship; to Rafael Trujillo during his dictatorship of the Dominican Republic; to the terrorist Argentinian junta in the 1970s. In many of these places, Israel also sold surveillance technology to monitor phones and track political activists. They did the same thing in the Philippines during the Ferdinand Marcos era, and in Indonesia under the repressive Suharto. They’re also now supplying weapons to the accused war criminal leader of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte.

In Cameroon, Israeli generals provide training and arms to protect dictator Paul Biya, who has been crushing political dissidents—disappearing, assassinating and torturing activists. They’re doing the same thing in the oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, colluding with Obiang Nguema and ExxonMobil to suppress political dissent and facilitate the siphoning of that nation’s resources to enrich its rulers, and U.S. and Israeli corporations, while its people languish in abject poverty.

Israel also provides countries and corporations with wares and training for domestic policing and suppression of dissent. In places like Brazil, Israel plays a huge role in the domestic surveillance, prisons, militarized borders, internal policing and suppression. In the United States, there is widespread training of U.S. police departments. The export of Israel’s brutal tactics to the United States has been so alarming that Jewish Voice for Peace launched a dedicated campaign called Deadly Exchange to fight against it and bring awareness.

Over 200 police and security agencies across the United States have gone on training junkets to Israel. I think these are just the ones that are funded by one domestic Zionist agency, where they’re both brainwashed about Israel and instructed in ruthless military tactics. The impact of this cooperation between U.S. domestic police departments and the Israeli occupation military came to light after the Ferguson uprising, in which robocop police showed up in military gear to suppress unarmed peaceful protesters. It turned out that the Ferguson Police Department had gone on one of these training junkets in Israel.

Also of note is the incident of police shooting in 2016 in Dallas, Texas, in which Police Chief David Brown sent in a robot packed with explosives to kill the suspect. It was a kind of robot suicide bomber, if you will. It was apparently the first known time that police dispatched a robot to kill a suspect on U.S. soil, rather than attempting apprehension or negotiating surrender. As it turned out, that police chief had been on a 10-day so-called anti-terrorism training in Israel.

Lastly, on this point—and this is something that Ali Abunimah touched on earlier—is the recent revelation that Israeli intelligence companies have been spying on U.S. citizens, not to mention the role that these Israeli intelligence companies have had in tampering with the U.S. presidential election in 2016, as the Mueller investigation has revealed.

Now I want to move on to friendships and alliances. Despite claiming to be the guardians and protectors of Jews everywhere, Israel actually has courted some of the world’s most notorious anti-Semites, as long as they support Israel’s occupation and buy their arms. John Vorster, the apartheid South African prime minister that I mentioned earlier, was a Nazi sympathizer who was imprisoned by the British for his ties to the gray shirts fascist militia. In 1976, Yitzhak Rabin heaped praise on him and gave him the red carpet welcome when he visited Israel.

Israel has cozied up and is supporting ultranationalist, ultra-right, anti-minority, racist homophobe Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who said, “refugees are the scum of the earth.” He told a female colleague she was too ugly to rape. He threatened to destroy or imprison his political opponents. He spoke favorably of torture. He lamented that the Brazilian cavalry was not as efficient as Americans who exterminated the Indians. He said that he’d rather see his son die in a car crash than hear he was gay.

Israel has also developed ties and has been arming and training neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Israel likewise opened its doors to anti-Semitic Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orban, who praised his country’s World War II-era leadership that presided over the mass murder of Jews, and he employed terrible age-old anti-Semitic tropes to demonize George Soros. In December, Netanyahu even met with him to negotiate the opening of a revisionist Holocaust museum in Budapest which basically exonerates Hungary’s role in Europe’s Holocaust.

Netanyahu signed a joint declaration with the right-wing Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, which likewise wipes clean Poland’s record in Europe’s Holocaust and rewrote history to state that the Poles were actually helping Jews escape Nazis. Of course, there is this card-carrying anti-Semite [Donald Trump] that Israel loves and embraces.

Netanyahu went so far as to make excuses for Hitler, claiming in 2015 that Hitler wasn’t the monster we all thought he was. Rather, that it was a Palestinian leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who convinced him to actually kill European Jews. Luckily, Netanyahu crossed the line with that one, and European leaders and historians rose together to give him a foul card.

The last bit I want to touch on briefly has to do with the way that Israel’s rewriting of history is robbing the world of archaeological treasures and important history that belongs not only to Palestinians but to all of humanity, because Palestine is an extraordinarily special place. While it already has an indigenous population that formed there over millennia, Palestine holds a history that belongs to all people of monotheistic faiths. Since its inception, Israel has worked tirelessly to erase the footprints of the many civilizations, religions and peoples who existed in that land before, during and after Jewish presence in the land.

The existence of so many churches and mosques are particular irritants to Israel. It has worked in earnest to destroy, desecrate or control them from the beginning of their control over the land. Immediately after the Nakba, Israel began a campaign of destroying the Palestinian villages it had just depopulated, including tearing down mosques and churches, some of which were centuries old and of great religious and historic significance, like the Sheikh Eid Mosque in Jerusalem that was built by one of Saladin’s sons. In places where new Jewish inhabitants took over Palestinian towns, non-Jewish places of worship have been turned into nightclubs, animal pens, restaurants, brothels and the like. Other mosques were made inaccessible or declared closed military zones, leaving them derelict.

When the Islamic Movement once helped a group of internal refugees from the former village of Sarafand restore their mosque in 2000, it was bulldozed overnight in still unexplained circumstances. Increasingly, Jewish militias are vandalizing and burning churches and mosques, without any consequence to the perpetrators. In 2010 a U.S. State Department report stated that “non-Jewish holy sites in Israel do not enjoy legal protection because the government does not recognize them as officially holy sites.”

After Jewish settlers torched a mosque in 2012, a former military chief of staff admitted in a radio interview that there was no interest in catching the culprits. He said, “If we wanted, we could catch them, and when we want to, we will.”

Part and parcel of Israel’s erasure of history, they have also targeted non-Jewish cemeteries. The ancient Muslim cemetery of Ma’man Allah, which includes graveyards of prominent Muslim scholars, generals and companions of the Prophet Muhammad—peace be upon him—was destroyed to build a museum by the California-based Wiesenthal Center. In 2008, over 100 skeletons were unearthed and tossed aside during excavations for the construction work. Throughout Palestine, in places where Israel has developed Jewish cities, Muslim and Christian cemeteries were simply dug up and built over. For example, Tel Aviv University, which was built over the Palestinian village of Sheikh Muwanis, desecrated a graveyard and built a dormitory over it.

Lastly, I want to briefly touch on the ways that Israel has weaponized archaeology. On the pretense of digging for history, it has confiscated and demolished whole Palestinian neighborhoods. Silwan in East Jerusalem is the best known example of this, where Israel has confiscated at least six dunams of land belonging to one family, the Siam family, and they’ve evicted over 6,000 Palestinians. The purpose of the dig was never about archaeology, because we know that they’re planning to build a so-called Jewish national park in the area, a kind of Jewish Disneyland, as it’s being referred to.

We also know that the Israel Antiquities Authority has destroyed several ancient archeological sites and antiquities as a result of this dig, including a cemetery dating back to the Abbasid Caliphate and relics dating back to the Canaanite era in the second millennium BC. It is not for the love of archeology or history. In fact, Israel routinely destroys ancient cities unearthed by archeologists so long as they have nothing to do with Jewish history. The first thing they did when they conquered Palestine, the rest of Palestine, in 1967 was to demolish the entire Moroccan neighborhood [in the Old City of Jerusalem] that was over 800 years old, displacing hundreds of Palestinians. Israel has engaged in such massive destruction of antiquities consistently and systematically.

Another example [referring to a slide] is a recent find of a 1,200-year-old mixed village of well-off Muslims and Christians who lived together. Archaeologists got a chance to take photos and record some of the relics, but the site is set to be bulldozed for development. Again, these are all just surface surveys of hidden realities.

The depredations of Israel are much more vast, deeper and far-reaching. But my hope is that what I have presented here today will expand the view from Israel as an apartheid nation suppressing the indigenous Palestinian population to a deeper understanding of Israel as a global force of violence, plunder, paranoia, surveillance, greed, war, suppression, ecological destruction, erasure of history, the forceful transfer of wealth from the weak to the powerful, and the entrenchment of supremacist ideologies that set human hierarchies in caste.

No matter how many gay pride marches they hold or how many Eurovisions they host, no matter how good their national orchestra makes you feel when they tour the world, or how Palestinian citizens are given a symbolic vote, no matter how much greenwashing, pinkwashing or whitewashing hasbara there is in mainstream media, the way that Israel exists in the world is ultimately antithetical to life and to liberty—not just for Palestinians, but for all people who struggle against tyranny, oppression, white supremacy and ecological destruction.

The situation is dire and desperate for our families in Palestine. The grim reality of our compatriots’ daily lives and the dimming of our future in our homeland is portended by Israel’s push now to ban the athan [call to prayer] over Jerusalem for the first time since the dawn of Islam. Israel is moving forcefully against Al-Aqsa, perhaps the final frontier in Palestine.

But I do not want to end on such a hopeless note—because, despite everything, there is so much to celebrate, so much to encourage our continued struggle, and much to inspire hope. In fact, I believe that Israel’s current escalation of their ongoing ethnic cleansing is in many ways a desperate, though counter-productive, response to the growing international repudiation of them, including by young Jews whose moral compass is not guided by Zionism. The conversation is changing here and around the world.

Palestine is the single issue splitting leftist movements and parties globally. The Democratic Party here in the U.S., the Women’s March, the Labour Party in the UK—increasingly, we are not alone. Points of intersection with liberation movements around the world are being filled with reciprocal solidarity. More importantly, our people on the frontlines have not given up, and they continue every day to fight and insist on life. In the bigger picture afforded by historical examples, Palestine actually follows time-tested trajectories of liberation. Difficult and bloody as these paths always are, I believe that, ultimately, restoration to our homeland, to liberty and dignity is our only collective destiny.

Thank you. [Standing Ovation]

Questions & Answers

Delinda Hanley: We have a lot of questions. What role has Israel played in the war in Syria?

Susan Abulhawa: Actually, there’s more than one U.N. report detailing Israeli arms transfers to the so-called rebels, who are a hodgepodge of a multitude of folks. Most of them aren’t even Syrian. They do include militias from al-Qaeda. We also know that these anti-Assad fighters have been getting medical treatment in Israel in addition to the arms. So they’ve definitely been bolstering and supporting the civil war from day one, I think.

Delinda Hanley: What is the relationship between ISIS and Israel in the destruction of antiquities?

Susan Abulhawa: Well, they both destroy antiquities. I mean I don’t think they’re colluding, necessarily, in the destruction of antiquities, but they’re both anti-culture. [ISIS bulldozed the ancient Assyrian gateway lion sculpture in Raqqa, Syria, and blew up the Temple of Bel in Palmyra, Syria], and Israel has been systematically erasing the presence of many civilizations, especially an Islamic presence in the land.

Delinda Hanley: Isn’t an Israeli company involved in building our wall [at the U.S.-Mexico border] and using Israeli materials?

Susan Abulhawa: I have read that, actually. I think a simple Google search will show that there are several Israeli companies—and Donald Trump has publicly praised Israel’s wall. I know that they did put in bids, so I don’t know if they are involved in actually building it. I also read that they are possibly involved in the surveillance and providing some of the surveillance equipment for the wall.

Delinda Hanley: Any idea what percentage of police in the USA shooting blacks were trained by Israel here or there?

Susan Abulhawa: That’s a good question. It’s actually one that I’ve been trying to get information on, especially in our city, in Philadelphia. But I’m not the expert on that. I think the most reliable place at this point is the Jewish Voice for Peace Deadly Exchange program that I mentioned earlier. They have been sending or filing FOIA applications in many cities. Actually, it’s a bit stunning how many people, how many police departments—it’s not just police departments, it’s also places like university security—all these major universities have been sending their security departments to Israel, which is really scary, because campus is where a lot of activism takes place.

Delinda Hanley: You could pronounce these villages better than I.

Susan Abulhawa: [Reads question] “In ’67 Israelis uprooted about 10,000 and demolished three villages—Imwas, Yalo and Bayt Nuba. Bayt Nuba became a settler colony named Mevo Horon. The other two became a park called Canada Park. Do you have any info on these villages?” I don’t. I’m sorry.

Delinda Hanley: Can you talk about Israeli agribusiness and destruction of Palestinian heritage—agricultural heritage?

Susan Abulhawa: Actually, this is very relevant to the first bit that I talked about, regarding the destruction of Palestine’s water system. Israel, in its early propaganda campaigns, was sort of trying to create the “New Jew,” who was going to be an agrarian person farming the land and so forth. It was very much built into the Zionist ideology of tilling the land and so forth. They siphoned an extraordinary amount of water to sort of have this appearance of agricultural success, even though agriculture was a very tiny portion of their GDP. So there is the environmental destruction aspect of it.

The other part is that the Israeli agricultural sector employs its laborers from Palestinians, Palestinian farmers whose land has been confiscated, and so they’re forced to become day laborers—very low-wage day laborers. And they also employ children. There were reports last year of child labor and a lot of illnesses happening to children from the pesticides that are used. Then the other end of that is the toxic waste from Israel, not just from the agricultural sector, but from all sectors, industrial sectors and domestic usage. Waste gets dumped into Palestinian towns. Because Israel’s environmental standards don’t apply to the ’67 territories, all these industries take their toxic waste and dump it in Palestinian towns. They give desperate people who are living in poverty a few shekels and end up completely decimating the area and causing a lot of illnesses among local inhabitants.

Settlements also dump their untreated sewage into Palestinian towns. This is a huge problem. It’s destroying the water table, too. It’s all tied together. Israel is trying in so many ways to uproot Palestinians, and making their towns into garbage dumps is just one of a multitude of ways. And the agricultural business is part and parcel of that.

Delinda Hanley: Does AIPAC place interns in congressional offices? Is there a way to get Arab-American interns into the offices?

Susan Abulhawa: I don’t have specific data on that. But common sense would tell me that, yeah, I think they probably do. And I’m sure that there are Arab-American interns. I mean, there has to be, there are interns from all walks of life in all districts.

Delinda Hanley: Can you tell us how you started Playgrounds for Palestine, and what made you do it?

Susan Abulhawa: Thank you for asking that, whoever asked that question. So about 19 years ago, my daughter was a toddler, and playgrounds were a huge part of our lives. I went back to Palestine after about an 18-year absence, and the lack of playgrounds was hugely visible to me because it was such a big part of our lives, as I said. When I came back I decided that we needed to build playgrounds.

As I often do with a lot of things in my life, I don’t really think, I just—I’m not a planner, and I just sort of jump into things headlong. Usually it results in disaster, but this time it turned out to be a wonderful project. We got our first playground donated. With the help of ANERA, we got the playground into Palestine and we built it. And then a lot of my amazing and wonderful friends joined the board. We are an all-volunteer group of mostly women, with the exception of one man. We’re all volunteers. This is a labor of love for us. We raise money throughout the year. Whatever we have, we use it to build playgrounds. We also support summer camps and educational programs, skate camps and other sorts of recreational activities.

Also, if you guys haven’t seen the olive oil—I need to plug this, or our board is going to kill me. We’re selling olive oil. We finally have our own private-label olive oil. It’s called AIDA—which is the feminine form of “return,” by the way. The olive oil is delicious. It’s organic, fair trade, and all the proceeds go to the playgrounds project.

Delinda Hanley: Thank you very much.

Susan Abulhawa: Thank you. Thanks for having me.