My name is _____. I am a Palestinian.
I live in the village of ____ in the ___ part of Palestine now called Israel.
It is funny that I say I live there. Actually, my family, my relatives, my friends – all the people of the village were driven out by the Israelis about fifteen years ago. So I don’t reside there anymore. But I live there, if you know what I mean?
My family are just ordinary people. They worked hard all their lives, worked the land. They understand the land because much experience has been handed down over the last several thousand years, much wisdom from generation to generation. So, while we may work in a simple way, we do very well with what we have.
During the war in 1967, the Israelis swept through our village and killed some people. They didn’t single out anyone for killing. It didn’t really matter to them who they cut down. The idea was simply to terrorize. They drove us from the village and we wound up in a refugee camp. Many still live in the camp fifteen years later.
The Zionists say the Jews are a chosen people and have the right to come to Palestine and make it their homeland. I personally have no opinion as to whether the Jews are God’s chosen people. But if they are, I am sure they must have been chosen to do something else. Because if He chose them to take over Palestine, then it means the Palestinians were chosen by God to be driven off the land, to be ruled over with an iron fist, to be scattered to the winds, to be massacred. And I cannot believe that God chose the Palestinians for such a fate. By the way, most of the Jews in Israel today are from Arab countries. They are Arab Jews, called Sephardim. But I guess according to the Zionists they are only half-chosen people, because they are discriminated against by the European Jews in Israel, are looked down upon, and are generally kept in the poorest class. So it is really as Europeans that the Zionists consider themselves chosen, chosen to rule over the Arab world.
We Arabs are supposed to be uncivilized. Yet it was not so long ago that the Arabs were the teachers of Europe, that it was the Arabs who brought the world great knowledge of science and mathematics. And we know that in Africa, too, at one time was far ahead of Europe in its civilization.
The Zionists and their friends call us terrorists. But did we drive the Jews off the land as they have done to a million and a half of our people? Did we destroy their villages as they have destroyed hundreds of ours? Did we dynamite their homes, cut off their water, seize their groves of oranges and olives? Was it we who imposed curfews on them at gunpoint? Who terrorizes whom with their tanks, their artillery and all the endless number of weapons of mass destruction? Were they the victims of massacres in the refugee camps? Have their school girls just been poisoned?
Just what is it that we Palestinians want that the American Government finds so unreasonable and which they have spent so many billions of dollars to prevent? Incidentally, isn’t it interesting that while American schools are being closed down for lack of money, teachers laid off, classrooms overcrowded, the United States Government sends money to the Israelis who use it to close down Arab schools?
The Zionists accuse those who are against them of being anti-Semitic. And then they talk about the Holocaust. So they try to make it seem like that if you are against Zionism and Israel, you are for what the Nazis did to the Jews. (Archivist’s note: In 2024 the US Senate passed a bill codifying Anti-Zionism as Antisemitism.) That’s usually the way the discussion goes. I would not be honest if I did not admit that there is antisemitism among some Arab peoples who see the overwhelming Jewish support in Israel and the West for the Zionist cause and do not draw a distinction between the Zionist and the Jew. But we do draw such a distinction. The non-Zionist Jew defines himself by his religion or culture and history, and we have no feelings against such Jewish people. In fact, we admire their contribution to world culture.
But the Zionist Jew immediately defines himself in relation to the Palestinian. The Zionist Jew defines the Jew as someone who automatically has the right to steal Palestinian and other Arab land, destroy Palestinian and other Arab cultures, kill Palestinian and other Arab peoples.
And as far as the Nazis are concerned, it is sad but true as we can testify from first-hand experience that the Zionists today are in many ways imitating the Nazis. But if I went into that, I would be speaking for a long, long time.
So what do we want? Very simple. Only what is ours. Nothing more. We want a sunset to be something of beauty to us again and not a reminder that if we are not soon off the roads, Israeli troops will shoot us on sight. We want to be free to pay respect to our elders and not have to bow down before an 18-year-old with an automatic weapon. We want to feel our soil between our fingers, want to bring life out of it as we have done for a thousand harvests. We want to go back to the land that for the past several thousand years has been irrigated by the tears of our suffering and of our joy. We want to build great cities on our land.
We want to be able to tell our children, “This is how it will be, and this is how it will be.” We want our homeland. And a homeland with a voice on how it will be, that is called a state. And this, we will have.
