Summary
Author of Chapter 1, “In this moment”, of From the River to the Sea — a speech delivered on 1 November 2023 at “But We Must Speak: On Palestine and the Mandates of Conscience”, staged by the Palestine Festival of Literature at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, arguing that Israel remains an Occupying Power in Gaza, that the campaign is a genocidal attempt to complete the Nakba, and that solidarity, not charity, is what Palestinians ask for (From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, lines 258-300).
Details
- Gaza’s history as she gives it: before 1948 the Gaza district contained almost ninety towns and villages and was thirty-eight times larger than the current 140 square-mile strip; a truncated Gaza absorbed nearly 25 percent of Palestinian refugees, its population rising from 80,000 to 280,000 and to 2.2 million today, predominantly refugees and children dependent on food aid (lines 271-273).
- From 1993 Israel circumscribed Gaza in “a process of de-development, isolation, containment of Gaza with the intent to make it a Palestinian statelet and to instead focus on annexing the West Bank” (line 275).
- “Israel has no right to self-defense against a territory that it occupies” (line 279); Palestinians have a right to use armed force regulated by the laws of war, and Israel has promised to disavow distinction and proportionality (line 281).
- For two decades Israel “has changed international law to make its grotesque violence permissible” (line 283).
- The campaign is “a genocidal campaign intended to complete the Nakba, to fulfill the Zionist fantasy of a land without a people” (line 287).
- Repression in the United States: Palestine Legal recorded over 400 complaints in three weeks, against an average of 2-300 a year; she appeals for support for Palestine Legal, which does its work with six staff attorneys (lines 293-295).
Related pages
From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, Gaza, Nakba, Genocide, Palestine Legal