"Iâm personally a Holocaust survivor as an infant, I barely survived.
My grandparents were killed in Aushwitz and most of my extended family were killed.
I became a Zionist; this dream of the Jewish people resurrected in their historical homeland and the barbed wire of Aushwitz being replaced by the boundaries of a Jewish state with a powerful armyâŚand then I found out that it wasnât exactly like that, that in order to make this Jewish dream a reality we had to visit a nightmare on the local population.
Thereâs no way you could have ever created a Jewish state without oppressing and expelling the local population. Jewish Israeli historians have shown without a doubt that the expulsion of Palestinians was persistent, pervasive, cruel, murderous and with deliberate intent - thatâs whatâs called the 'Nakba' in Arabic; the 'disaster' or the 'catastrophe'.
Thereâs a law that you cannot deny the Holocaust, but in Israel youâre not allowed to mention the Nakba, even though itâs at the very basis of the foundation of Israel.
I visited the Occupied Territories (West Bank) during the first intifada. I cried every day for two weeks at what I saw; the brutality of the occupation, the petty harassment, the murderousness of it, the cutting down of Palestinian olive groves, the denial of water rights, the humiliations...and this went on, and now itâs much worse than it was then. Itâs the longest ethnic cleansing operation in the 20th and 21st century.
I could land in Tel Aviv tomorrow and demand citizenship but my Palestinian friend in Vancouver, who was born in Jerusalem, canât even visit! So then you have these miserable people packed into this, horribleâŚpeople call it an 'outdoor prison', which is what it is. You donât have to support Hamas policies to stand up for Palestinian rights, thatâs a complete falsity.
You think the worse thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians.
And 'anybody who criticises Israel is an anti-Semite' is simply an egregious attempt to intimidate good non-Jews who are willing to stand up for what is true."
