Susan Abulhawa’s blistering speech at the Oxford Union was the most ferocious indictment of Israel in the last decade. Author Abulhawa—who is a long-term human rights activist—summarized the iniquitous history of the Jewish state in a few succinct paragraphs while shedding light on the obscene toxic ideology that has permeated the nation’s doctrine from the very beginning. Abulhawa ignored the fictitious claim that Israel was created to provide safety and security for the Jewish people and, instead, showed that the country’s founders were maniacally focused on seizing land while expelling or exterminating the indigenous population. Ethnic cleansing and land theft are not an unavoidable response to sporatic Palestinian violence, but the cornerstones of the pernicious dogma that animates the Zionist state. Needless to say, Abulhawa’s presentation was met with riotous applause that lasted for more than three minutes as the audience expressed their appreciation for her heartfelt testimony. Here’s part of what she said:
When I was in Gaza, I saw a little boy no more than 9 years whose hands and part of his face, had been blown off from a booby trapped can of food that soldiers had left behind for Gaza’s starving children. I later learned that they had also left poisoned food for people in Shujaiyya, and in the 1980s and 90s, Israeli soldiers had left booby trapped toys in southern Lebanon that exploded when excited children picked them up.The harm they do is diabolical, and yet, they expect you to believe they are the victims. Invoking Europe’s holocaust and screaming antisemitism, they expect you to suspend fundamental human reason to believe that the daily sniping of children with so called “kill shots” and the bombing of entire neighborhoods that bury families alive and wipe out whole bloodlines is self-defense.
They want you to believe that a man who had not eaten a thing in over 72 hours, who kept fighting even when all he had was one functioning arm, that this man was motivated by some innate savagery and irrational hatred or jealousy of Jews, rather than the indominable yearning to see his people free in their own homeland. Susan Abulhawa, Oxford Union Debate, Jewish Voice for Labor
Has there ever been a clearer example ‘good vs evil’ than what we are seeing play out now in Gaza today? Israeli soldiers have produced a myriad of videos they have put on social media gleefully parading their sadistic behavior for all to see; mugging for the camera while they blow up hospitals, universities or residential buildings; smiling smugly while they brandish their weapons over the heads of naked prisoners bound and gagged, squatting helplessly on the ground; or dancing fiendishly while blocking trucks filled with food and medical supplies earmarked for starving women and children scraping by in threadbare tent cities. Who are these people? Where do they come from? What type of twisted environment and psychotic upbringing produced these monsters that revel in the unspeakable suffering of others?
And how is it that not even one of these TikTok celebrities has been reprimanded or faced court-martial for their heinous breach of military discipline? Or do the IDF honchos tacitly approve of this outrageous and odious behavior? Here’s more from Abulhawa:
….if the roles were reversed—if Palestinians had spent the last eight decade stealing Jewish homes, expelling, oppressing, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, raping and killing them; if Palestinians had killed an estimated 300,000 Jews in one year, targeted their journalists, their thinkers, their healthcare workers, their athletes, their artists, bombed every Israeli hospital, university, library, museum, cultural center, synagogue, and simultaneously set up an observation platform where people came watch their slaughter as if a tourist attraction;if Palestinians had corralled them by the hundreds of thousands into flimsy tents, bombed them in so called safe zones, burned them alive, cut off their food, water, and medicine….
if Palestinians made Jewish children wander barefoot with empty pots; made them gather the flesh of their parents into plastic bags; made them bury their siblings, cousins and friends; made them sneak out from their tents in the middle of the night to sleep on their parents’ graves; made them pray for death just to join their families and not be alone in this terrible world anymore, and terrorized them so utterly that their children lose their hair, lose their memory, lose their minds, and made those as young as 4 and 5 year old were die of heart attacks;
if we mercilessly forced their NICU babies to die, alone in hospital beds, crying until they could cry no more, died and decomposed in the same spot;
if Palestinians used wheat flour aid trucks to lure starving jews, then opened fire on them when they gathered to collect a day’s bread; if Palestinians finally allowed a food delivery into a shelter with hungry Jews, then set fire to the entire shelter and aid truck before anyone could taste the food;
if a Palestinian sniper bragged about blowing out 42 Jewish kneecaps in one day as one Israeli soldier did in 2019; if a Palestinian admitted to CNN that he ran over hundreds of Jews with his tank, their squished flesh lingering in the tank treads;
if Palestinians were systematically raping Jewish doctors, patients, and other captives with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks, and fire extinguishers, sometimes raping to death, as happened with Dr Adnan alBursh and others;
if Jewish women were forced to give birth in filth, get C-sections or leg amputations without anesthesia; if we destroyed their children then decorated our tanks with their toys; if we killed or displaced their women then posed with their lingerie…
if the world were watching the livestreamed systematic annihilation of Jews in real time, there would be no debating whether that constituted terrorism or genocide.
And yet two Palestinians—myself and Mohammad el-Kurd— showed up here to do just that, enduring the indignity of debating those who think our only life choices should be to leave our homeland, submit to their supremacy, or die politely and quietly. Susan Abulhawa, Oxford Union Debate, Jewish Voice for Labor
In a recent interview with journalist Gideon Levy, the author tried to explain the extraordinary changes that have taken place in Israel since October 7, the most profound of which is that
“Israel lost its humanity…. Totally lost its humanity…That’s the first and most dramatic change…. after the seventh of October…. We can do whatever we want…. and nobody will tell us how far we can go. We can go as far as we want.”
And this, of course, is exactly what we’ve seen. We’ve seen a government and its military acting with complete impunity as if no laws, no restrictions, and no rules of conduct applied to them at all. Whoever is killed by their reckless and ruthless actions, deserved it because any act of brutality perpetrated by Israel naturally falls under the rubric of “self-defense.” This also explains the callous disdain for the suffering of others, which is a noxious mind-virus that has infected the great majority of people living in Israel today. According to Levy, empathy—the most venerable and elevated of all human feelings—is not merely banned in Israel, it’s actually become illegal. Check it out:
You know that today, if you pay some empathy to the suffering of the children of Gaza — you might lose your job, you might be fired, you might be called for interrogation, and you might even go to jail. And all those things happened without any resistance in Israeli society. Now it’s focused on Israeli-Palestinians and Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, but there were also some Jewish teachers and headmasters who were called for interrogation for expressing empathy with the children of Gaza, with the victims of Gaza. Even this is not legitimate anymore in Israeli society 2024…. Chris Hedges Report: Interview with Gideon Levy, Consortium News
What does this mean? Does it mean that it is no longer acceptable to be a human being in Israel? Does it mean that “good Israelis” must follow the injunction of Yitzhak Rabin to “break their bones” or Aaron Sofer’s advice “to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.” Or does it simply mean that Israelis must deaden their hearts to the suffering of anyone outside their clan whose mere existence may be perceived as a potential threat to the further settling of the land and the extermination of its people? After 14 months of relentless bloodletting and unspeakable savagery, everyone should be able to answer these questions. Here’s Abulhawa one last time:
I also came to speak directly to Zionists here and everywhere.We let you into our homes when your own countries tried to murder you and everyone else turned you away. We fed and clothed you, gave you shelter, and we shared the bounty of our land with you, and when the time was ripe, you kicked us out of our own homes and homeland, then you killed and robbed and burned and looted our lives.
You carved out our hearts because it is clear you do not know how to live in the world without dominating others.
You have crossed all lines and nurtured the most vile of human impulses, but the world is finally glimpsing the terror we have endured at your hands for so long, and they are seeing the reality of who you are, who you’ve always been. They watch in utter astonishment the sadism, the glee, the joy, and pleasure with which you conduct, watch, and cheer the daily details of breaking our bodies, our minds, our future, our past.But no matter what happens from here, no matter what fairytales you tell yourself and tell the world, you will never truly belong to that land. You will never understand the sacredness of the olives trees, which you’ve been cutting down and burning for decades just to spite us and to break our hearts a little more. No one native to that land would dare do such a thing to the olives. No one who belongs to that region would ever bomb or destroy such ancient heritage as Baalbak or Bittir, or destroy ancient cemeteries as you destroy ours, like the Anglican cemetery in Jerusalem or the resting place of ancient Muslim scholars and warriors in Maamanillah. Those who come from that land do not desecrate the dead; that’s why my family for centuries were the caretakers of the Jewish cemetery in the mount of olives, as labors of faith and care for what we know is part of our ancestry and story.
Your ancestors will always be buried in your actual homelands of Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere around the world from whence you came. The mythos and folklore of the land will always be alien to you.
….The ancient photos and paintings of the land will never contain you.
You will never know how it feels to be loved and supported by those who have nothing to gain from you, and in fact, everything to lose. You will never know the feeling of masses all over the world pouring into the streets and stadiums to chant and sing for your freedom; and it is not because you are Jewish, as you try to make the world believe, but because you are depraved violent colonizers who think your Jewishness entitles you to the home my grandfather and his brothers built with their own hands on lands that had been in our family for centuries. It is because Zionism is a blight onto Judaism and indeed onto humanity……
You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill and kill and kill, all day every day. We are not the rocks Chaim Weizmann thought you could clear from the land. We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories, because all of that was nurtured by our bodies and our lives over millennia of continuous, uninterrupted habitation of that patch of earth between the Jordan and Mediterranean waters, from our Canaanite, our Hebrew, our Philistine, and our Phoenician ancestors, to every conqueror or pilgrim who came and went, who married or raped, loved, enslaved, converted between religions, settled or prayed in our land, leaving pieces of themselves in our bodies and our heritage.
The fabled, tumultuous stories of that land are quite literally in our DNA. You cannot kill or propagandize that away, no matter what death technology you use or what Hollywood and corporate media arsenals you deploy.
Someday, your impunity and arrogance will end. Palestine will be free; she will be restored to her multi-religious, multi-ethnic pluralistic glory; we will restore and expand the trains that run from Cairo to Gaza to Jerusalem, Haifa, Tripoli, Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Kuwait, Sanaa, and so on; we will put an end to the zionist American war machine of domination, expansion, extraction, pollution, and looting.
..and you will either leave, or you will finally learn to live with others as equals. Susan Abulhawa, Oxford Union Debate, Jewish Voice for Labor
Perfectly stated. As human rights attorney Craig Mokhiber said:
Absolutely essential reading. If this does not fill every cell in your being with a screaming ache for justice, then you have no soul. Let it be a rallying cry for all with the courage to challenge the dark evil that has descended over our era. None are free until Palestine is… https://t.co/wyEI74c5zO
— Craig Mokhiber (@CraigMokhiber) November 30, 2024
Note—The outcome of the debate: “The Oxford Union, one of the world’s most prestigious debating societies, voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to declare Israel an “apartheid state responsible for genocide,” with 278 votes in favour and 59 against.” TRT World
