“Do your research!”

Okay, I will

The following is a transcript of a speech I was invited to give at the #FreePalestine rally in Naarm/Melbourne on Nov 12. I’m sharing it here because I think it offers some useful information for anyone whose pro-humanity advocacy for Palestine is being met with demands to “do your research”. Please note, if you were at the rally, there is additional information in the transcript below because I had to cut some for brevity.

This is in no way, shape or form a complete overview of Israel’s 75 year campaign of abuse and apartheid against the Palestinian people, but it gives some insight for laypeople like me into how violent the regime is and has been. There is no justification for the genocide Israel is enacting against the people of Gaza, and no world in which the imprisonment of two million people (who have already been subjected to almost twenty years of blockades, following a “withdrawal” of Israel’s military that was deliberately designed to freeze any possibility of peace or the establishment of a Palestinian state) is defensible.

I am not interested in debating this with people. Unlike Israel, I don’t pretend that my page is a democracy. Netanyahu doesn’t care about Israeli hostages, as evidenced by the fact he’s rejected numerous offers of an exchange and continues to carpet bomb the Gaza Strip and wreak total devastation on the people and infrastructure there. What is needed immediately is a CEASEFIRE, and then an end to Israel’s illegal occupation, settlements and apartheid of Palestine and her people. Netanyahu must be tried for the numerous war crimes Israel has perpetrated in the last month alone, and held accountable for the violations of international law - including the bombing of hospitals, schools and refugee camps, and the forced displacement of people.

If you plan to chastise me for this stance or accuse me of being antisemitic, don’t bother - I won’t be intimidated into agreeing with an unconscionable genocide in which almost half of those being collectively punished are children. Nor do I accept the propaganda that states advocating for a people to LIVE is the equivalent of wanting another people to die. This is an illogical and inhumane argument for people to make, and those making it should be ashamed.

Anyway, here’s the transcript:

****

I post a video of a child in shock, shaking on the ground of a hospital running out of fuel and hope, and I am told:

You need to do your research.

And I wonder what it is they think I’ll find that will change my mind, what possible justification there is to uncover that would make, could make, SHOULD make any one of us decide that yes, in this instance, it is okay to bomb children.

But I like facts. I like information. So I take her up on the direction, and I do my research. And in the end, I’m glad I did. Because while I already knew the broad strokes of the “situation” - that for 75 years, since the Nakba of 1948, Israel has been oppressing Palestinian people, using the brute strength of the US funded IOF to terrorise the population, installing an apartheid system, forcing Palestinians from their homes and land to make way for illegal settlements and detaining Palestinians in Israeli prisons without charge, I didn’t know some of the finer details.

I didn’t know about the massacre of Deir Yassin [1], one of many Palestinian villages targeted by Zionist militias in 1948, in a process of ethnic cleansing that would clear the land and pave the way for the formation of the Israeli state. I didn’t know that, despite having signed a peace pact, Zionist militia broke it by invading Deir Yassin, slaughtering over 100 Palestinians - children, women, men, the elderly - in the most barbaric of ways. I didn’t know that the spreading news of what was done to the people of Deir Yassin and the fear it prompted was a key factor in more than 700,000 Palestinians being forced from their home in what we know as the Nakba. And I didn’t know that it wasn’t until this year, 2023, that the United Nations acknowledged this in any large scale way. [2]

I didn’t know that since 1967, when Israel illegally occupied the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, that it has arrested more than one million Palestinians [3]. I didn’t know that four in ten Palestinisn men will be detained in Israeli prisons, and two in every five have been arrested. I didn’t that that there are currently over 1200 Palestinisn “administrative detainees” who are being held in Israeli prisons indefinitely without charge - and that Israeli law allows for this. I didn’t know that since 2000, there have been more than 1000 complaints of abuse of Palestinian prison hostages at the hands of Israeli prison officers - and not a single one has been investigated.

I didn’t know that, since 2000, more than 12,000 CHILDREN have been detained by Israeli forces. I didn’t know that more than 700 children living under Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank ars prosecuted through the Israeli court system every year. That the most common charge is “throwing stones” and that the maximum penalty for this is a prison term of 20 years. It didn’t surprise me to learn that Palestinian children held hostage by this carceral terrorism are frequently subjected to psychological, physical and sexual abuse - and that as of October this year, there are 170 children behind Israeli prison bars.

I didn’t know that for a period of 50 days in 2014, IOF soldiers staged more than 6000 raids into Gaza, destroying over 8000 homes and making 11000 families homekess. I didn’t know that these raids killed more than 1500 people, over 500 of them children. [4]

And I didn’t know that for these crimes, ZERO Israeli politicians, soldiers or military generals were held accountable.

I didn’t know that in 2004, Dov Weissglas, a top adviser to late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and one of the principle architects behind the so-called “withdrawal” of Israel from Gaza, admitted the intention was to ensure the “freezing of the peace process.” Weissglas told Haaretz newspaper, “When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem.”

He added: “Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a (US) presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.” [5]

I didn’t know that in 2022, Israeli authorities sanctioned the destruction of 851 Palestinian owned homes and buildings in the West Bank, displacing 966 people. Israel’s justification for this was the supposed lack of building permits - an administrative permission slip that Israel makes it nearly impossible for Palestinians to be granted. I also didn’t know that in May of that year, the Israeli High Court approved the demolition of the homes of more than 1000 Palestinians in the southern West Bank, because they were “located in a firing zone for the Israeli army”. In the court’s ruling, it affirmed the “rights” of the military to declare closed zones, and said this right superseded international law.

I didn’t know that the severe limitation of movement Israel inflicts on Gazans includes those seeking urgent medical treatment, or that because of this 839 Palestinians died between 2008 and 2021 while waiting for Israeli authorities to issue travel permits. [6]

I didn’t know that, according to a Save The Children report in 2022, four out of every five children in Gaza reported having depression, fear and a sense of hopelessness as a result of what was then fifteen years of Israeli blockades. [7]

I didn’t know until this week that Israeli bombs are killing one child EVERY TEN MINUTES. [8]

I could go on and on. And on. And on and on. Because the truth is, “doing your research” into the Israeli state and its brutal 75 year oppression of Palestinian people will yield a never ending list of horrors, abuses and incomprehensible injustices.

And still, our pathetic, gutless “leaders” tell us that Israel has a right to defend itself. At time of sharing this, more than 11,000 people have been murdered by Israeli bombs (80% of which are sold to Israel by the United States) and over 5000 of them are children.

We have all seen relentless footage of Palestinians, many of them children, dying. Terror. Fear. Destruction. We have seen the brazen war crimes committed by Israel and we have seen so called leaders look the other way and deny this is a genocide.

We have seen the cost of human life and who decides which lives count.

But we have also seen footage of the incredible bravery and heroism of healthcare workers who refuse to leave their posts, even as Israel drops bombs on hospitals in which children are being treated for cancer. We’ve seen relentlessly courageous Palestinian men pulling children out from beneath rubble, holding them, singing to them, loving them in either their final moments or when they have become what we now also have the horror to understand as an acronym in use, WCNSF - wounded child no surviving family. We’ve seen mothers mourning their babies, being asked to bear what no one - mother or otherwise - should ever be asked to endorse: that the murder of children can continue without remorse, because a military superpower has the right to defend itself from them. We have seen young adults barely out of adolescence donning press vests to make sure the world can see what’s being done to them. These people are all heroes - HEROES - in the face of depraved, soulless evil and totalitarianism.

Our governments and the mainstream media want to pretend that this collective action, this global resistance movement is not happening. They have always silenced the voices of Palestinian liberation, believing that if we could not hear them, then it meant they didn’t exist. To those leaders, to Anthony Albanese, Penny Wong and the federal members of the Australian Labor Party government who are determined to protect their power at all costs, know this: we will not forget Palestine and we won’t forget how much you tried to bury her. Every week, we see more people joining in a massive global chorus - a first protest for many of them - to let Palestine know we are here. We will fight for her and we will fight WITH her people.

They cannot erase Palestine as long as we keep saying her name.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

****

Sources:

[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2017-07-16/ty-article-magazine/testimonies-from-the-censored-massacre-at-deir-yassin/0000017f-e364-d38f-a57f-e77689930000

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2023/4/9/the-deir-yassin-massacre-why-it-still-matters-75-years-later

[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2023/10/8/why-are-so-many-palestinian-prisoners-in-israeli-jails

[4] https://visualizingpalestine.org/#visuals

[5] https://www.arabnews.com/node/2392261/amp

[6] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023/country-chapters/israel-and-palestine

[7] https://www.savethechildren.net/news/after-15-years-blockade-four-out-five-children-gaza-say-they-are-living-depression-grief-and

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2023/nov/11/one-child-killed-in-gaza-every-10-minutes-on-average-says-who-chief-video?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other