When I left Palestine one and a half weeks ago I had mentally prepared myself for the dreaded lines and the harsh questions I knew awaited me at the Ben Gurion airport. I braced myself with patience as I approached the line for the first security check – it seemed to go on for miles and miles. My flight was early on a Friday morning, which means I arrived at the airport around midnight Thursday night. I took a deep breath and got in line, thinking about what I should do to pass the time. I looked around me and realized that my fellow travellers were not all what I had expected. In addition to the traditional tourists, the backpackers, the business people, the Jews, the Israelis and the large Arab Palestinian families, there somehow seemed to be more glitz and glam than usual. A woman in front of me was wearing a denim jacket with the face of a woman pictured on it in imitation diamonds, sparkling in the bright airport lights. The people relaxing or sleeping in the waiting areas seemed to be more dressed up than usual. Then two men came to the line and stood behind me. They were both on their IPhones, comparing pictures: “Oh, look at this one, look at this one.” “What time did the show start? I am just emailing Michael to let him know how amazing it was.” And so they kept going, about lights and costumes and crowds and music until I realized what was going on: Madonna had played a concert in Tel Aviv the same night and all of these people, glamming up at the airport were Madonna fans who were on their way back after her concert.

As they kept talking it was obvious that they did not know about the thorough security checks and long lines awaiting them. I considered turning around to explain the system to them but as we approached the first of many security guards I kept to myself and did my best to look innocent and non-threatening.

I am not going to complain about the treatment I got at the airport this time. Yes, the lines were long and the questions intrusive, but it is really all about the people you meet and how you approach them. I chitchatted with the girl who was going through my luggage, joked with the two girls at the security check and smiled at the guy in the passport control who let me through easily with a “God bless you”. It was a far cry from the last time I travelled through this airport. I couldn’t believe my luck.

As I waited in line after line I had the opportunity to observe how everyone else coped with the situation. The Madonna-fans were still high on the experience of the concert and floated through on that feeling. Many of the elderly tourists got a little overwhelmed by all the intrusive checks, while the backpackers just sat on the ground and waited patiently. I smiled as several German people complained of the lack of system and order; how could the guards let anyone in front of them in line and why did it all take so long? And then there were the Americans who pretended like they owned it all and had the right to do and say whatever they wanted. The Israelis and the Jews had their own lines and a minimum of checks while the Arabs and Palestinians were checked the most thoroughly.

As a foreigner you never really know how smoothly everything is going to be but if you look Arabic or have an Arabic-sounding name, you will have to brace yourself with even more patience than the American Madonna-fans and the German business people. Because of the Israeli apartheid system most of the Palestinians are not even allowed to move freely in their own country, let alone travel from the Israeli airport. This is what I tell myself when I go though the airport, and what I wanted to explain to my fellow travellers who kept complaining: this is nothing compared to what the Palestinians go through. We might have our luggage and bodies search, and have to wait in line, but the Palestinians have their houses demolished and their land stolen and they have to wait weeks, months or even years just to get a permit to go to Jerusalem. As a foreigner at the airport you never know what you get, but as a Palestinian, it’s business as usual, despite the glitz and glam of some of their more fortunate fellow travellers.

Julie Holm is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at [email protected].

Whenever people ask me “How do you like it here” or “What do you think of this place”, that is usually my answer to them. Culture shock. Coming from America, my ideas and views of the world are incredibly deluded and sheltered. It is strange to say sheltered, since America is known for its “freedoms” and mobility, but in retrospect, sheltered is the only way I can describe my experience with other cultures especially those of the Middle East. Hearing English-speaking, American based news and sources that only sparsely cover aspects of events in Israel and Palestine and having access to the internet, where credibility is fleeting, one can only speculate as to what life is actually like on the other side of the world. In order to seek the truth, I decided that I have to see the land with my own eyes and draw conclusions for myself, without the radical influences of either side.

Talk about a reality check.

I’m used to living on the side of the winners, the Americans, the powerhouse, the rich and feared who support the Israeli occupation. I’m used to the media depicting our opposition—i.e. anybody who we deem as “terrorists”—as inhumane, bigoted, and intolerant. I’m used to living an easy, predictable life, while still complaining about mundane every day “first world problems”. However, what I’m not used to is living on the other side. I have gotten a chance to do so, and experiencing truth is much different than our own conjectures of the situation. Getting an actual first-hand understanding is quite possibly the most revealing thing I could undertake.

The truth hurts.

It is incredibly difficult to explain to people that haven’t experienced it, what a checkpoint really is. To my American counterparts, the best way to explain is to find some way for them to relate. Imagine being black—or a minority—in the southern United States. Then imagine getting pulled over by the police, and their only purpose is to make your life difficult. Then imagine having to go through this every day just to get to work, or just to go see friends and family. That is the reality of the situation here. These checkpoints make a normally 10-minute commute turn into an hour and a half journey. Coupled with the fact that these Israeli soldiers are thoroughly searching cars, interrogating people, and carrying large assault rifles, it all adds up for an incredibly tense and stressful situation. Even as an American, with no Arab blood, just the fact that I was in a Palestinian neighborhood raised eyebrows and warranted me harsh stares from the military guards at the Qalandiya checkpoint. I was pounded by relentless questions asking why I would leave the “haven” of Jerusalem to be around Palestinians. They could not accept the simple answer that I wanted to eat at a restaurant in the area. I could not tell if the soldiers honestly could not fathom my reasoning, or if they were just trying to make life a little bit more confusing and stressful. Granted, because I am American, I received much nicer treatment than my Arab counterparts around me. However, a harassing inconvenience of an interrogation was hardly worth the delectable kanafeh I had on the other side. Having to deal with this persecution—to a larger extent—every day seems insurmountable. The whole operation has a shockingly prison-like feel.

Prisoners in their own homes.

Ironically, the United States supports this occupation, and pours billions of dollars into this war effort. I know that if any American citizen were subject to the sort of treatment that Palestinians deal with on a daily basis, then there would be instantaneous international attention, and action would be taken immediately. My question is, what’s the difference? Or is it a question of: do people really understand the truth of what is going on? Are they only going by the media? The checkpoints are only a fraction of the injustices and hardships the Palestinians face daily, and third parties simply turn a blind eye to the reality. This may seem obvious, but in order to remove the blinders and see the actuality of it all, one must see it with their own eyes. It’s hard to understand a condition without truly experiencing it.

Kevin William is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). He can be contacted at [email protected].

That is, until now. Israel has gone so far over the edge, even the dullest of minds can see how discriminatory and frankly, insane, Israel's politics really are.

Boycotting Israel, politically, economically, culturally and intellectually has been a means of resistance for years, albeit with ebbs and tides in terms of its effectiveness. Palestinians boycotted Israeli products during the first Intifada in the last 1980s and the early 90s and international groups have been intellectually and culturally boycotting Israel for years, something which took on particular force after the creation of the Boycott and Divestment and Sanctions movement, which went global in 2005. Naturally, Israel was far from happy about those who dared to challenge Israel's image of democracy and freedom. Palestinian and international activists have been imprisoned or barred from entering the country after being pegged as somehow posing a "security threat" to the state of Israel.

However, Israel's hostility towards the boycott took on an even sharper vengeance after the Palestinian government launched a campaign at the beginning of the year to boycott illegal Jewish settlements and their products. As it turns out, the campaign has proven effective, not only here in Palestine but abroad. In May, two Italian supermarket chains announced they would no longer sell products produced in West Bank settlements. The European Union has made it clear that settlement products are not eligible for preferential treatment in accordance with tax-exempt trade agreements. And Palestinians have stopped buying or even seeing settlement products on their shelves, thanks to the customs authority, which blocks any wayward shipments of settlement goods into Palestinian areas.

Israel has reacted badly, its officials calling the boycott "economic terrorism" and a breach of trade agreements. Earlier this month, 25 Knesset members introduced a bill in the parliament calling for the criminalization of the boycott. Basically, the bill says that if Israeli citizens (in this case, Palestinian-Israelis who have voiced their support for the settlement boycott and Israeli leftist professors who support an academic boycott) are found to be involved in any sort of boycott of Israel, they would be made to pay a fine so as to compensate those companies hurt by the boycott. For non-Israeli citizens (that is, all those people of conscience who come to support the Palestinians), if found guilty of "boycotting" they could be banned entry into the country for 10 years.

On that note, let's not forget the "cultural terrorism" Israel accuses the boycott movement of perpetrating by urging musicians to cancel their concerts in Israel. Earlier this week, the American rock group The Pixies canceled their June 9 concert following the Israeli attack on the Freedom flotilla, which resulted in the deaths of nine Turks. Last month, Elvis Costello also cancelled his concert in Israel, saying his decision was "a matter of instinct and conscience".

The instances of boycotts against Israel have begun to grow more frequent, thanks to Israel's equally growing acts of violence against Palestinians and others. Following the flotilla atrocity, Israeli members of the gay community were curtly uninvited to attend the gay pride celebrations in Madrid, with the organizers saying they feared the group would be met by angry pro-Palestinian groups if they came.

Swedish dock workers launched a weeklong blockade of Israeli goods and ships between June 15–June 24, citing the reason for the blockade as "the unprecedented criminal attack on the peaceful ship convoy." And the largest British trade union, Unite, voted on June 4 for a complete boycott of Israel and its services, "similar to the boycott of South African goods during the era of apartheid."

Boycotting has always been a peaceful and legitimate way of protesting, be it apartheid South Africa or racist America. However, Israel, the country which is to blame for so much discrimination and racism, and hence the boycott of it, has now tried to turn the tables on the world and portray itself as the victim. In Israel, a number of supermarket chains have begun to start a boycott of their own of Turkish products. Turkish, that's right, the country of which the nine dead peace activists are citizens (save for the Turkish-American teen killed on the Mavi Marmara).

Israel's audacity is outrageous, no doubt. One of the chains that announced its boycott of Turkish pastas and flour is the infamous Rami Levy, the settlement supermarket chain in the West Bank, which itself is a major target of the Palestinian boycott campaign. "For reasons of ideology and conscience, it would be unacceptable for us to do nothing when the Turkish people behave this way," said Levy himself, the owner of the chain. "This is the minimum that we can do."

Just to get things straight –Rami Levy supermarkets are all built on land in the West Bank, Palestinian land, which international law deems as occupied. Settlements themselves are illegal, which means the supermarkets are equally as illegitimate. Still, Rami Levy is presumptuous enough to say his chain will boycott Turkish products as a matter of "ideology and conscience?" The Turkish people's "behavior" in question was boarding a ship full of humanitarian aid to a besieged and oppressed people, armed with nothing but the chairs onboard. In contrast, Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship, beat and opened fire on the activists, killing nine and injuring 40.

It seems unimaginable that anyone could possibly follow this argument and still consider themselves a credible critic. Now that boycotting is being proposed in the Knesset as a criminal offense, will Israeli supermarket chains such as Rami Levy and Mega also be punished for their "behavior?" Or are such laws retained exclusively for those who feel compassion with the Palestinians and who have a nagging conscience that compels them to defend justice regardless of the stakes? Unfortunately, we all know the answer to this one.

Gaza has cracked the world wide open. The masks have fallen from just about everyone and when all this is said and done, the Palestinians will take inventory on both friend and foe.

This horrendous assault on the Gaza Strip has laid bare some very uncomfortable truths. For one, the grossly unbalanced world order has not changed, even as the bombs fall mercilessly on Gaza. While our guts already knew this, it was still shocking to witness how the slaughter peeled back the layers of falsehoods, concealing the ugly truth. The world is still a binary equation of colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed and white vs black and brown, and there is no question under which category the Palestinians fall.

The colonialist past is playing out in real time today in Gaza and we, as Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” so succinctly described, are “the brutes”. We are the indigenous brown people, the sub-humans who are inherently violent and who are responsible for our own deaths.

This is also why the international and human rights organizations we erroneously banked on to do us justice, have fallen so sorely short. Now, over a month into this war on Gaza, not one country, not one international institution, including the mighty UN, has been able to force Israel’s hand. The result of course, has been devastating for Gaza. Not only have close to 12,000 innocent lives been lost in Israel’s “scorched earth” onslaught, but not one liter of fuel has been allowed into the beleaguered Strip, shutting off electricity, hospital generators, desalination plants and sewage systems. Babies have been taken out of incubators and Gazans are scrambling to find ways to desalinate seawater and building clay ovens to bake thin loaves of bread with dwindling supplies of flour.

And still, even in the bleakest of hours, we have found hope and solace in the millions who have raised their voices for us. The throngs of people marching in solidarity with Palestine in the streets of London, New York, Amsterdam, Jakarta, Sydney, and so many other cities, has been like a soothing balm for our broken hearts. We have seen journalists, celebrities and artists threatened, vilified and dehumanized in our name but who have pushed back against the intimidation and continued to speak up.

The world has split down the middle and the deep gash created by this genocide will take generations to mend. We have seen both ugly and beautiful from this world and, be assured, we will remember both.

Whatever you do, do not believe them. Push back against the insidious language and the dangerous narrative Israel is employing to justify the unjustifiable: a horrendous genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Do not believe them when they say they ordered people living in the northern Gaza Strip to “evacuate” for their own safety and to move south. This is no evacuation. The people of northern Gaza are not vacating their homes because of a fire or flood. No, this part of a much deeper, much more sinister plan hatched by Israel’s leaders, not today even, but many years ago. Today, as the bombs rain down on Gaza, slaughtering everything and everyone in their path, we must be very careful to use the right words to describe this nightmare.

Make no mistake, this is a genocide. When multiple Israeli leaders, military and political, actively call for the leveling of Gaza, dismiss the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians and even go as far as saying that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza is “an option”, their intentions become very clear. Hasn’t the Zionist movement always pedaled the phrase “a land without a people”?

The carpet bombing of the entire Strip is of course, the most immediate and visible manifestation of this objective. How better to get rid of an entire population than to kill them en masse? In any case, with the green light from nearly the entire western world, with the US at the helm, this has been both easily “said and done.”

However, this is not the only instrument of terror being employed against our people in Gaza. The term “evacuation” so casually being used by Israel and wholeheartedly regurgitated by the West is in fact “forced displacement”. This has nothing to do with the safety of Palestinian residents in the north, because frankly, there is nowhere safe in Gaza. Every region has been on the receiving end of the colossal bombs dropped on residential blocks, schools, mosques, churches, hospitals and shelters. Even those who still believed they could escape the bombardment were not safe as Israel bombed the displaced as they traveled on the southbound coastal road in search of refuge. Remember, Rafah and Khan Younis are in the south, both of which have been heavily bombed, killing thousands of civilians and burying hundreds of others under the rubble.

No, this Israeli scheme, being cloaked in the uncontroversial word “evacuation” is just a continuation of what the Zionist project began in 1948, which is to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its indigenous peoples. Why else would the Sinai even be on the table? And why would anyone even lend an ear to this dangerous proposal?

The reason this is still even a debatable option is because the United States and much of the western world, namely those countries with a shameful colonialist past themselves, are actively complicit in Israel’s plans. They know that whoever is pushed across the border into the Sinai, will never be allowed to return. It was not that long ago when close to a million Palestinians were forced out of their homes to escape the terror of Zionist massacres in 1948, keys in hand, which would never be used again. There are still living survivors of the Nakba, it was that recent, and yet here we are again, watching in horror as the world facilitates for a fresh, new Palestinian catastrophe.

So beware when you hear words like “evacuation” or ‘temporary refuge.” These are outright lies. Remember that 70 percent of Gazans are already refugees, expelled from their homes in 1948 during Israel’s first attempt to annihilate the Palestinians. Since they could not finish the job then, they are back now with the cruelest of intent. Israel has already surrounded and divided northern Gaza from its center and south and we have all heard Israeli voices, both official and civilian, making floor plans for ‘amusement parks and beaches’ after the Palestinians are ethnically cleansed from Gaza.

The fact is, even if the approximately one million Gazans who fled from north to south to somehow try and escape the bombs, are able to go back to their cities and camps, they will be returning to a wasteland. Their homes are probably gone, all of their belongings and memories vanished, buried deep beneath the rubble. If they are “lucky”, their memories will be the only things buried. More likely than not, members of their family are still missing, also buried under layers and layers of gray, unyielding cement.

The Palestinians have seen this horror movie before. They will not be forced out of Palestine again, even if their displacement is candy-coated with terms like ‘evacuation.” Don’t believe Israel. Don’t believe the United States. Believe us.

When Palestinians insist that nothing will be resolved until the root cause of their predicament is addressed, Jenin is exactly what they are talking about. The atrocities over this past week perpetrated in the city of Jenin and its adjacent refugee camp are the manifestation of Israel’s settler-colonial project in Palestine and the reason why its apartheid regime and decades-long occupation must be dismantled. If this oppressive system continues unabated, Palestinians will continue to suffer time and time again at the hands of Israel’s brutal military machine, commandeered by the ever-increasingly extremist and right-wing Israeli governments that pull the strings.

For two days straight, the Israeli occupation army and air force pummeled the Jenin refugee camp with airstrikes, artillery fire and ground forces. In 48 hours, Israel killed 12 Palestinians and injured hundreds of others. This number is likely to climb, given that even ambulances were prohibited from reaching the wounded, undoubtedly exacerbating the status of the injured. Harrowing videos showed young men, boys even, wounded and incapacitated on the street, bleeding because ambulances were not able to reach them.

This is not the first time Jenin has been under fire, and if Israel is not stopped in its tracks, it will not be the last. In April 2002, Israeli occupation forces and fighter jets invaded the Jenin refugee camp, backed by armored tanks and bulldozers. The “battle for Jenin” lasted for 10 days, at the end of which at least 52 Palestinians, civilians and fighters were killed. The bulldozers deliberately razed over 400 homes and damaged several hundreds of others.

Cut to July 2023 and the situation is painfully reminiscent. On July 3, Israeli occupation forces proceeded to tear up the roads in the camp, severing water pipes and cutting the power. Hospitals, severely overcrowded and overwhelmed by the mass influx of casualties and people seeking shelter from the bombing, also suffered water cuts and electricity outages with scenes outside the hospital looking like a full-blown warzone.

However, this is no war. This is an occupied, civilian-populated area, whose residents have already been displaced at least once, in 1948 and perhaps again in 1967. Most of the residents are young, having only lived under Israel’s military occupation, which began in the West Bank in 1967. Their parents and grandparents will recall even more heinous atrocities and massacres from the Nakba of 1948, when they were forced out of their original homes inside what is now Israel.

This is why, when thousands of Jenin camp residents were seen fleeing the gunfire, the explosions, destruction and home raids, men and women carrying their terrified children in their arms out of the camp, the whole of Palestine was reminded of this generational trauma. The Nakba is still etched deep in the collective memory of Palestinians, its trauma not ‘post’ but ongoing, the wound reopened over and over again.

There is no doubt that Jenin and its refugee camp will survive and rebuild, just as they did before because that's how Palestinians operate. The scars created by this trauma will always run deep. It is not only unfair that they remain under occupation and apartheid, it is cruel and it is inhumane. The world cannot continue to look on as Palestinian cities, villages and refugee camps are decimated and still consider itself moral and civilized. The longer Israel is allowed to brutalize the Palestinians under its occupation, commit war crimes and violations with impunity, while still being welcomed among so-called civilized nations, the more the international community’s own moral standing will continue to erode.

This is not a story about numbers. Granted, numbers are very relevant, but not today. This is about role-play, about imagining yourself in another’s position and then, once realized, demanding justice, accountability and compensation for the unbelievable atrocity that must no longer be ignored.

This is about the Nakba, but this time, it is yours. Imagine that in a matter of days, sometimes hours, your entire world is turned upside down. You no longer have a home, belongings or money, except for whatever you could manage to hastily stuff in your pockets before running for your life. Zionist militias, armed and ready, invade your city or burn down your village and you have nowhere to go, so you flee. You have heard that in neighboring villages and towns, these militias have slaughtered hundreds of people, pillaged their homes and claimed the land as their own. Deir Yassin, where over 100 innocent people were killed, is just one of these documented massacres. This terrifies you to the bone, so you flee, children, house keys, maybe some pictures or personal documents, in tow. You join the leagues of other terrified people who are walking to an unknown future, hoping beyond hope that this nightmare will end in a few short days. Not in your wildest dreams did you imagine that you would never see your home again; that it does not matter if you left your front door unlocked or the clothes still hanging on the clothesline. Someone else, a stranger, will soon have taken your place.

This is just temporary, you convince yourself; this situation is not sustainable, you say, because nobody has the right to take away your home and your property, much less your homeland. If anyone dared, there was a world that believes in justice, rights and humanity that would not allow it. At least that is what you believed then.

But this is not your story and you should be very grateful for that. This is the story of the Palestinian Nakba and it is as real as it gets. According to official UN estimates, at least 750,000 women, men and children, or 75% of the Palestinian population of historical Palestine, were displaced, expelled and ethnically cleansed over the course of a few months, never to return to their homes. Their false hopes of return eventually turned into shattered dreams and a lifetime of exile in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jordan, or for those exiled closer to the northern border of Palestine, to squalid refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon.

Even the United Nations, upon realizing the magnitude of the Nakba or “catastrophe’ that had occurred, did not believe it would last for 75 years and counting. It created UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, to cope with the fallout of Israel’s creation over the wreckage of what was once Palestine. The agency was meant to provide emergency assistance to Palestinians displaced by the war until a permanent solution could be found. Its mandate has been renewed repeatedly since then for obvious reasons.

For those who were exiled, it is hard to tell when it finally dawned on them that they would never go home. Hope is a double-edged sword because it motivates people to continue to strive for their goals, in this case, the legitimate demand to return to their rightful homes. However, the flip side is the disappointment and desperation that takes over when year after year, this demand is ignored, maligned and pushed back by the powers that be, first and foremost by Israel, the perpetrator and maintainer of the atrocity and secondly, by its powerful global allies, the United States in particular.

The result is that these people, who had productive and meaningful lives just like anyone else, were so cruelly uprooted and dispossessed by no fault of their own and demand nothing more than their legitimate right of return. This is a right enshrined in international law and in particular, UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which clearly states: “Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date...”

These are nice words, ones that by any standard, should be binding. However, for anyone who has languished in the Biqa’a camp in Jordan, the Shati’ camp in the Gaza Strip or the Yarmouk camp in Syria, this resolution is nothing but useless ink on paper. The Palestinians have and never will relinquish their inalienable right of return to their original homes; time has proven that. Still, this is only part of the equation. It falls on the international community to uphold the standards, which it espouses. It has an ethical, legal and moral obligation to ensure that justice is realized for Palestine refugees and that Israel, the creator of this catastrophe, is held accountable for its dark past and crimes against the indigenous people of this land.

Now, think of this story, not from the lens of the Palestinians, a foreign people you may not know much about. Think of this story as if it were your own: it was your house that was stolen, your land that was given to another people, your relatives massacred and displaced and you whose identity and cause have been systematically denied for almost a century. Can you see it?