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Israel was established, with the help of the British, through the colonisation and brutalisation of Palestinian people and their land. It was established through the Nekba, the Palestinian word for ethnic cleansing, which began in 1947. In early 1948, zionist soldiers terrorised the Palestinian people, massacring them, launching an intense intimidation campaign, decimating villages and forcing Palestinians to flee the land they are indigenous to. Against international law, zionists destroyed, and continue to destroy, Palestinians homes, and built homes for Israelis from the bricks, helping ensure Palestinians were unable to return. Since Israel's official creation in 1948, it has remained steadfast in it's commitment to ethnically cleanse the land of the Palestinian people, continuing to displace Palestinians from their homes, illegally occupying the West Bank from 1967, creating racist and discriminatory laws against Palestinians living within it's borders, massacring Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982, launching attack after attack on the Palestinian people in Gaza. In 2018, Palestinians in Gaza started holding protests along at border with Israel, calling for the right of return for refugees, who have been kept out of Palestine by Israel against international law, and an end to the blockade. By the end of 2019, Israel had killed 214 civilians, including 46 children. Also in 2018, apartheid against Palestinians was enforced by a constitutional law which claimed Israel exclusively as the 'nation state of the Jewish People', despite the 2 million Palestinians living within it internationally recognised borders, not to mention > 2.15 million Palestinians living under it's illegal occupation of the West Bank.

You don't have to be an expert in world politics to understand that what Israel is doing is wrong. The entire concept of Israel is built on apartheid, on creating a Jewish dominated state in a land where, before the immigration of zionists to Palestine began at the beginning of the 20th century, majority of the people living there were muslim. Where the majority of the people living there were indigenous Palestinian Arabs. You may call me antisemitic for criticising Israel, but I feel very confident in calling you islamophobic and violently racist against Palestinian Arabs if you side against the Palestinian people. I'm not criticising Israelis for being Jewish, I'm criticising Israelis for being colonisers. I'm criticising Zionists for immigrating to Palestine, not with the intention of living peacefully alongside the indigenous people, but with the intention of stealing their land and calling it their own. If you don't believe me, I ask you to read the words of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Russian man who's version of Zionism was the precursor to Likud, the party of Benjamin Netanyahu: https://en.jabotinsky.org/media/9747/the-iron-wall.pdf

It doesn't seem to matter to Zionists that Jewish people always stand amongst the crowds of people around the world protesting Israels genocide, that holocaust survivors and children of holocaust survivors stand shoulder to shoulder with Palestinian activists. Criticism against Israel is simply antisemitic, such is the loophole of creating your very own ethnostate. If any Jewish person stands against the might of Israel, Israel will just call them a self-hating Jew. How is that not antisemitic? 

Beyond the history of Israels conception and creation (the history that only began in the last 100 years mind you), I know what I see today. And I know that I'm tired of Israel, the British government and the media lying to us, covering up the truth, telling us what we see and hear and know to be true isn't true at all. Telling us that the genocide being carried out by Israel, backed again by the British government, isn't genocide at all, that we can't believe Palestinians, that we can't believe our own eyes.

They may continue to try and terrorise us in to complicity, in to silence, but I know a picture of a dead baby when I see one. And I have seen many. I have seen hundreds, thousands of pictures and videos of dead and injured Palestinians, people pulled from under the rubble of Gaza, so mutilated you'd barely recognise them as people anymore; human beings reduced to lumps of flesh; a young girl with her head caved in and the rest of her body missing from the torso down; a man carrying the remains of his children in shopping bags; a boy carrying the remains of his brother in a backpack, dripping blood; a young man trying to carry his deceased father on a bike; a grandfather (Khaled Nabhan) trying to look into his beloved dead granddaughter Reem’s eyes one last time; the recording of little Hind Rajab, only 6-years old, begging for help before her life was extinguished by an Israeli war tank. The ambulance, carrying two paramedics sent to her aid, bombed-out shortly after. Video after video of injured and disfigured innocents. Horror story after horror story from doctors and nurses desperately trying to do their job, working within the wreckage of the Gazan healthcare system, operating with no anaesthetic. Accounts of people lying on the ground defenceless and injured after surviving a bombing, only to be shot by an Israeli quadcopter. Blameless civilians targeted, injured and murdered in their homes, in hospitals, in refugee camps, on the streets, at aid distribution centres. Palestinians mourning their children, parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, grandparents. Entire families wiped from the civil registry. Widespread starvation, people diminished to skeletons, literally skin and bones. Palestinians targeted, harassed and attacked by illegal settlers in the West Bank, settlers who are supported and protected by Israeli soldiers and police. A criminal justice system with an almost 100% conviction rate for Palestinians. Palestinian children held as prisoners by the Israeli government. At least over 60,000 slaughtered in Gaza since 2023. The list of atrocities feels endless and this barely scratches the surface, Palestinian people have suffered more than I imagine anyone can comprehend at the hands of the Israeli occupation. 

I've also been exposed to a number of videos of Israeli citizens and influencers, such as Eve Cohen, mocking the suffering of the Palestinian people, as well as videos of IDF soldiers comparing Palestinians to animals, bragging about the amount of Palestinian civilians they've murdered. Footage of Israelis rallying together on hillsides to watch the bombs fall on Gaza, cheering as though watching a fireworks display, the first time I’ve heard the phrase genocide tourism. I have heard the worlds of Israeli government officials calling Palestinians animals, calling for a new Nekba. Of Benjamin Netenyahu's plans to continue to forcibly expel Palestinians from Gaza, his plans with Trump for the future of the Gaza Strip.

The world is waking up to what is happening in Palestine to the Palestinian people. We know what we see is apartheid. We know what we see is genocide. And genocide, and the subsequent fight against it, should not be a subject of debate, it is always black and white. Genocide, against any peoples, is never justified, and opposing genocide is always just. Political dissent against a government, or governments, carrying out or supporting genocide is a moral duty.