 I'm Mark Hage. Welcome to Salam Shalom Report on Palestine Israel. This program is sponsored by Vermonters for Justice in Palestine. Please visit our extensive website at vtjp.org. Our webmaster is Ian Stokes. Among the many projects we undertake annually, we are leading an international campaign calling on Ben and Jerry's to stop selling its peace and love ice cream in illegal Jewish-only settlements in occupied Palestine. You can find a lot about that campaign and how to support it on our website. Most of our program tonight will be devoted to a presentation by the Palestinian novelist Susan Abu-Hawa, who remarks came on March 22 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The occasion was the sixth Israeli lobby in American policy conference. Her address was entitled Israel beyond apartheid. It examines the nature of Israel's presence in the world beginning with its claim to being the only democracy in the Middle East versus its reality as an apartheid nation. And she asked us to consider the roles Israel has assumed beyond colonizing Palestine in terms of its relationship to other countries, to the natural world, and to history. Now, you can hear Susan Abu-Hawa read from her work or discuss literature or other topics, virtually any country in the world, except her homeland, Palestine. She traveled there in November in 2018, but she was barred entry into the country at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport. She was ordered deported. She then spent 32 hours in an Israeli jail cell, appealing that deportation order, which she lost. And while she was in that jail cell, she penned this note to those who had hoped to see her in Jerusalem and Ramallah, where she was to attend events at a literature festival. She wrote to them, It pains me that we cannot meet anywhere in the world, excuse me, it pains me that we can meet anywhere in the world, except Palestine. The place to which we belong, from whence our stories emerge and where all turns eventually lead. We cannot meet on soil that has been fertilized for millennia by the bodies of our ancestors and watered by the tears and blood of Palestine's sons and daughters who daily fight for her. I want to leave you with one more thought that I had in that jail cell. Israel is spiritually, emotionally, and culturally small, despite the large guns they pointed us, or perhaps precisely because of them. It is to their own detriment that they cannot accept our presence in our homeland because our humanity remains intact and our art is beautiful and life affirming and we aren't going anywhere but home. Now, before we turn to Ms. Abul Hawa's comments tonight, we'd like to share a brief video clip of the senators of Ireland last July debating support for a bill that would bar Israeli goods manufactured in illegal Jewish settlements from being sold in Ireland. That bill eventually passed on a vote of 25 to 20. The bill also passed Ireland's lower parliament in December by a vote of 78 to 45. Here are the speeches we hope one day to hear in the U.S. Congress. I've seen the results of the bombing of hospitals, of schools, of sewage treatment plants. It is appalling. And if you want to know what the people of Palestine, you'd say that you're speaking on behalf of the people of Palestine. If you want to know what the people of Palestine want, ask the Palestinian farmers. So we've seen the most desperate and brutal violations of people's right to protest against injustice, against occupation, against the taking of the very ground from under people. Israel is an apartheid state. And if it has been there, know that. Once you know that, it changes you. Though these settlements are repeatedly condemned as illegal by the EU, UN and Irish government, they continue to extract valuable natural resources and agricultural produce. These goods are then exported and sold on shelves around the world, including in Ireland, to pay for occupation. There is a clear hypocrisy here. How can we condemn the settlements as illegal, as theft of land and resources, but then happily buy the proceeds of this crime? We must be clear on this. Israeli settlements in the West Bank are war crimes. This is what we're dealing with. And I'm amazed at how relaxed people can be about it. As if trading in the proceeds of war crimes is not a big deal. I witnessed with my own eyes the crushing indignity of a Palestinian community cut off from their water supply so that it could be diverted instead to support an Israeli chicken farm. That is horrendous. And the injustice of it would stay with me forever. That commercial settlement built on stolen land beyond international recognised borders is a war crime. And I know I'm repeating myself today. And I'm asking my colleagues across the House today, is the moral response to simply condemn this as illegal, but then ask, how much for the eggs? Is there not a deep hypocrisy in that position? For a country that prides itself on upholding humanitarian principles and international law, this is unacceptable. And I believe it's time we stood clearly against this injustice. We are doing commerce with people who are committing war crimes. I believe that this bill from Senator Francis Black is where we get a chance to break the consensus that has utterly failed the Palestinian people. The case for this bill has become even more compelling, if I may say so, because we've seen appalling atrocities, killing of Palestinian civilians. I raised 55,000 euros to put in solar energy and water treatment plans. And I saw them being demolished, bombed by the Israelis. That's what happens. There is something rotten in the way democracy is defined and lived, and most importantly, denied. The relentless expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory is unjust, provocative, and undermines the credibility of Israeli's commitment to a peaceful solution to a conflict to which we all want an end. Nazem Mandela came to a joint sitting of these houses in the early 1990s. And he said, what made the practical difference on behalf of the Aries people was definitive action from the people. It was a boycott, it was solidarity, and that can make the difference here. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu has to get a message. And I believe the message has to be a very simple one, and that is respect the rule of international law. Generous introduction. It's really great to be back at the Washington Report This is an institution that was one of the main sources, the first sources we had for independent media, and it's an honor to be the keynote. I'm too short to see that. I hope my clicks will work. I want in this talk to try and examine the nature of Israel in the world. And to do that, is it working? Can we get this working? You know, we just ran through this. There we go. Okay. I'm going to try and present a survey of Israel from multiple angles that are going to seem disparate and unrelated. They include democracy, nature, global weapons, friendship, and archaeology. Most of us in this room understand the colonial and apartheid underpinnings of Israel, which manifest in the unrelenting daily horrors and indignities for Palestinians. On the other hand, some folks see Israel as a benevolent place trying to exist with Palestinians. But I would like to look beyond this kind of contained binary framework relative only to Palestinians, because Israel is so much more. Every country in the world, of course, has good and bad elements. But I do think it's possible to pinpoint a kind of general imprint for societies, the way they exist in the world, and also, more importantly, how they impact the rest of the world. And to do this, I found that national spending data are useful. When we look at Israeli spending, we find that it is second only to Saudi Arabia, that other bastion of human rights, in spending, arms spending per capita in the world, exceeding the United States military spending per capita, as well as exceeding US military spending as a percent of GDP. I'm going to talk about what all of this means in real life. But first, I want to touch on the prevailing perception of Israel, which has been cultivated through sustained, multi-tiered, multi-pronged public relations campaigns that present Israel as an unfairly maligned modern democracy, one that is advanced, socially enlightened, and endlessly innovative, from such absurd claims as having invented falafel, to the equally absurd claim of being less than one year away from carrying cancer. It's actually a real thing. What is promulgated through popular international media is typically not merely an exaggeration of reality, or even just spin. But it's often precisely the opposite of reality. A case in point is this article in Scientific American, a respected magazine that translates scientific information for laypersons. The article touted Israel's desalination plans as unprecedented ingenuity in the region, using language that comports with the old proposition that Israel was a miracle that made the desert bloom. The reality could not be further from that. Two implicit lies in the title and subtitle alone. First, Arab nations in the Gulf have been using desalination technology for the past 50 years. But more important is the little known fact that Ramallah's annual rainfall actually exceeds London's annual rainfall, and Jerusalem's rainfall is nearly on par with London's, plus its way sunnier. The point is that Palestine isn't and never was dry desert or barren. This is the cover of a detailed audit book of all the ways that Israel has profoundly and detrimentally altered the natural biomes, landscape, hydraulic potential, and ecological balance of Palestine. It is a monumentally depressing read, but I don't have time to go into the terrible details. But keeping with example at hand, I'm briefly going to touch on water. The article described Israel as a quote, galvanized civilization that created water from nothingness, where a few miles away, water disappeared and civilizations crumbled. In fact, in its first years of establishment, Israel began water diversion projects and over pumping from rivers and tributaries to serve Zionist settlements with unsustainable European standards, which were utterly in conflict with the local terrain and which set the stage for a multitude of environmental disasters all across Palestine. One example among many of Israel's destruction of Palestine's natural water systems is the Al-Araja River, which Israel renamed as the Yarkon. It was a vigorous coastal river described in an 1891 travel guide as quote, a roaring river that zigzags until falling into the sea. Its power turns mills and small fish can be caught in it. In a mere decade of Israeli management of Palestine's water, this life-giving river was reduced to a trickle of sewage. Its water siphoned and replaced with a toxic sludge of industrial and domestic pollutants, which in 1997 ate through the lungs and vital organs of athletes competing in the Maccabeea Games when a bridge fell and they fell into the river. One of Israel's first water projects when it conquered the rest of Palestine was to divert as much water as possible from the Jordan River once it gained access. This spurred Syria and Jordan to follow suit to preserve their own share of regional waters. And decades later, water levels are so low that the Jordan River can no longer replenish the dead sea. The declining water levels coupled with Israel's evaporation ponds to extract minerals and other industrial activities have created an environmental disaster never before seen in Palestine. It has become cliche to say that the dead sea is dying. In the 1950s, Israel drained Palestine's hula wetlands, a regional biodiversity treasure in order to establish Jewish settlements. Hundreds of such colonial projects have greatly denigrated the rich biological and geographical diversity that once thrived in that terrain where three continents meet. Some of the fish and birds that were destroyed by this project were found nowhere else in the world and have since gone extinct. This is to say nothing of the way that the land has been scarred and disfigured. Hill tops decapitated for rapacious settlements, millions of imported, vast growing trees planted to conceal destroyed Palestinian villages only for these non-native trees to be rejected by the land in massive forest fires leaving a scorched earth on hundreds of thousands of acres. And it is to say nothing of the systematic ways in which Israel uproots olive trees and other fruit-bearing trees that sustain Palestinian families. There are countless such examples and systematic ways in which Israel has devastated nature, sometimes in ways that cannot be undone. And although Israel's role as a destroyer of Palestinian society overshadows their environmental record, Israel should nonetheless be counted among the world's polluters, decimators of trees and spoilers of nature. I want to turn now to Israeli innovations and exports because Israel leads the world in several niche death surveillance and suppression technologies and tactics. It is well known and admitted by Israeli weapons manufacturers that they test their weapons on Palestinians. And Gaza is their biggest laboratory. According to Darrell Lee of the University of Chicago, Gaza is a quote, space where Israel tests and refines various techniques of management continuously experimenting in search of an optimal balance between maximum control over territory and minimum responsibility for its non-Jewish population. I told you earlier that Israel is right there with Saudi Arabia leading the world in military spending per capita. Other countries like the United States, Russia and China aren't far behind but where an extraordinary difference emerges is with military exports. Studies and international databases will show that Israel is anywhere from the fourth to the eighth largest exporter of arms and this depends on the year and the currency examined. I should point out however that these data are likely gross under estimations because Israel doesn't actually report its arms deals many of which occur through covert deals via independent arms hustlers often retired Israeli military generals. Given that Israel is listed among exporters of arms with far bigger populations and far bigger economies, I looked for data to show exports per capita and I came up mostly empty-handed to my surprise. I'm sure that data must be out there somewhere but I couldn't find it so I put on my old scientist and statistician hat and did the calculations myself. I used two databases the first was of the top arms exporters in US dollars for years 2010 to 2018 from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute or CIPRI which compiles data on arms transfers and conflicts around the world. Then using Excel functions I matched those data up with a world population database for corresponding years from the World Bank. Then using simple arithmetic functions I calculated and graphed arms sales normalized to the size of the population to determine arms export per capita for all the countries in the CIPRI database. And what I found is that Israel leads the entire world in arms exports often by a huge margin every single year between 2010 and 2018 with the exception of 2011 in which Sweden strangely was neck and neck with them. Again these data do not include the vast covert arms transfers military training and surveillance technology. One of Israel's biggest military hardware niches is drones. Over 60 percent of global drones export exports come from Israel. In the United States is just in second place with just less than 24 percent. The attractiveness of Israeli arms is that they boast of being combat tested. A case in point is Israel's Hermes 900 which was still in the testing phase when it was used against civilians in Gaza in 2014. A mere three weeks after that onslaught in Gaza that murdered 2,200 people and maimed tens of thousands more Israel held a drone trade show called Israel Unmanned Systems 2014 in which that Hermes 900 was all the rage for its so-called performance in Gaza. In that assault in 2014 Israel used drones to kill at least 840 people. In the current assault on Gaza protesters Israel is using a series of new drones called the Cyclone Riot Control Drone System. It's being used to spray aerosol and gas substances from the sky. They appear to be used for the first time against the Great March of Return. The company that makes the Cyclone claims on their website to be a leading supplier for police in the United States and they boast that their product claims are based on practical field experience. This is what it looks like. Happens after these death and suppression technologies are developed and tested on the bodies, psyches and spirits of Palestinians. Throughout its short history Israel has been one of the most dependable suppliers of weapons to pariah regimes especially in situations where weapons embargoes were put in place due to severe human rights abuses. The ones I'm going to show you were revealed due to leaks, revolutions or specific investigations especially those by two Israeli human rights activists Itaim Mack and Yair Auron. In South Sudan's civil war Israel continued to supply the South Sudanese regime with weapons despite an ongoing civil war that had left half a million people dead and four million displaced in the past five years. Israel's arms sales to South Sudan continued despite a UN report that documented extensive and grave human rights violations including the drafting of child soldiers, burning of villages, systematic rape, indiscriminate killing, pillaging and destruction of infrastructure. And they continued to supply weapons to them despite a U.S. arms embargo followed by a UN arms embargo against South Sudan. In fact just a few months ago the former head of the Israeli army's operation sanctioned was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department as an agent who sold over $150 million worth of weapons under the cover of an agricultural company that was supposed to be building affordable housing in South Sudan. And the Bosnian massacres Israel sold weapons to Serbian forces during the Bosnian war in the early 90s long after the UN embargo was declared in 91. In 92 when Slobodan Milosevic was on trial the president of Serbia at the time he was described at the time as the new Hitler of Europe. I think most of us in this room are old enough to remember him. At that time Israel opened an embassy in Serbia and simultaneously Serbian forces were creating concentration camps and committing massacres against Bosnian Muslims that led to the murder of an estimated 250,000 people. Ite Mac whom I mentioned earlier gathered evidence that Israelis in the highest offices were involved in both arming and training Serbian forces. Mac and Oran then petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court with concrete evidence of this including the diary of Ratkom Lavik who's on trial at the ICC for war crimes. They had his diary in which he catalogued all the training and weapons that were transferred to them. Israel's high court rejected the petition arguing that declassifying documents exposing Israel's role in the Bosnian genocide would harm Israeli interests. Adding insult to injury Israel is now engaged in revising the history of this genocide. So Israel supplied weapons to Serbia while it was known that they were committing genocide and while there was a UN arms embargo in place and Israel's high court covered it all up. In Myanmar we know that Israel continued to transfer weapons to the Burmese army long after they were accused of committing war crimes including murder, rape, torture and the burning of villages that left thousands dead and at least 700,000 displaced from the Rohingya minority. Israel was selling arms to Myanmar well after the European Union and the United States imposed an arms embargo on the country. Mac and Oran petitioned the Israeli high court to stop these weapons sales but the the ruling was kept classified and but we know that Israel continued to supply armored land and water vehicles and artillery to the Burmese military. So once again Israel supplied arms to Myanmar while it was known that they were committing ethnic cleansing and while there was a UN embargo in place and Israel's high court helped to cover it up and enable it. In in Rwanda going back again to the 1990s to another horrific genocide an estimated one million men women and children were massacred in Rwanda in the space of 100 days. It is said to be the fastest pace of genocide in human history. Israel provided the rifles ammunition and grenades that made it all possible. Ita Mac again impetitioning the Israeli high court to declassify the arms transfers quoted the Israeli arms dealer who in Rwanda said quote I'm actually a doctor on quote expressing pride for supplying those weapons because he said he helped the victims die quickly. Israel's high court ruled that the details of those arms deals will remain a secret again claiming that it would harm Israeli interests to reveal the extent of those arms transfers. So again Israel supplied Rwanda with weapons while it was known that a genocide was taking place and while a UN arms embargo was in place and Israel's high court helped to cover it up. Adding insult to injury again Israel later backed a move at the UN by Rwanda to rewrite history of this particular genocide as a larger quid pro quo with Paul Kagame president of Rwanda to take in asylum seekers deported from Israel. Now going even further back to apartheid South Africa this is the cover of an explosive book when it was published in 2010 by Sasha Polakow-Syranski detailing the never before known extent of cooperation between Israel and the apartheid government of South Africa. Israel was South Africa's closest ally its most important arms supplier and eventually its only friend in a world that could no longer look the other way from the crimes of apartheid. The coordination between the two countries was unprecedented. Their respective intelligence chiefs held regular meetings sharing information and training and surveillance. They gave unfettered access to each other's military tactics missions and intelligence. Their relationship was actually deeper than mere trade and coordination. Israel had a spiritual and moral affinity for the apartheid government in South Africa which was articulated in the 1980s by Israeli chief of staff Rafael Itan who said referring to blacks in South Africa that they quote want to gain control over the white minority just like the Arabs here want to gain control over us and we too like the white minority in South Africa must act to prevent them from taking over us. In 1976 just two months after Israel rolled out the red carpet for the South African president school children in Soweto took to the streets to demonstrate against an imposed racist curriculum. The white South African police mowed them down with weapons that had been supplied by Israel. What shocked the world further from this book was to finally learn that Israel had offered to provide the apartheid government with nuclear arms as far back as 1975. Israel tried to prevent the declassification of the post apartheid government documents but they were unsuccessful and it became clear that Israel did indeed lead to the nuclear armament of the apartheid regime which luckily disarmed voluntarily following the fall of apartheid. One more thing that's worth noting here in 2007 former Israeli Prime Minister Huud Olmert warned that his country could one day quote face a South African style struggle for equal voting rights and as soon as that happens the state of Israel is finished. There are so many more examples of such violent Israeli subterfuge in the world and I'm going to quickly rattle through a few of these examples without going into detail for the sake of time but just know that every one of these instances and this is not a complete list of subarosa arms sales occurred to bolster repressive brutal regimes at different times and as well as training of mercenaries to facilitate corporate plunder. Israel continued supplying arms to the former repressive white colonial regime in Rhodesia or modern days in Babwe after UN sanctions were imposed in 1967. Israel armed and supported Portugal against national liberation movements in the former colonies of Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau. Israel funded and trained the military oppression of anti-colonial uprisings and or dictatorships in the Ivory Coast, Central African Republic, Benin, Togo, Cameroon, Senegal, Uganda, Nigeria and Somalia. Israel armed all sides of the Angola civil war at different times over 40 years. They used this colonial tactic in other places to fuel and arm wars to divide and reconquer Africa. Israel armed and trained elite units in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, bolstering the brutal rule of Mabutu Ceciseco following the assassination of Pan-Africanist Patrice Lumumba. They sold arms to Sri Lanka to suppress the Tamils. Israel provided nearly all arms sold to the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua that terrorized its people for over 12 years. Following the Democratic election of the Sandinistas, Israel funneled arms to the brutal Nicaraguan Contras and was embroiled in what became known as the Iran Contra affair. They likewise sold arms to Guatemalan death squads as well as death squads in El Salvador and Honduras to Chile during Pinochet's horrific dictatorship to Rafael Trujillo during his dictatorship of the Dominican Republic to the terrorist Argentinian junta in the 1970s. In many of these places, Israel also sold surveillance technology to monitor phones and track political activists. They did the same thing in the Philippines during the Ferdinand Marcos era and in Indonesia under the repressive Suharto. They're also now supplying weapons to the accused war criminal of leader of Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte. In Cameroon, Israeli generals provide training and arms to protect dictator Paul Bia who has been crushing political dissidents, disappearing, assassinating and torturing activists. They're doing the same thing in the oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, colluding with Obeang and Guema and ExxonMobil to suppress political dissent and facilitate the siphoning of that nation's resources to enrich its rulers and U.S. and Israeli corporations while its people languish and abject poverty. Israel also provides countries and corporations with wares and training for domestic policing and suppression of dissent. In places like Brazil, Israel plays a huge role in the domestic surveillance, prisons, militarized borders and internal policing and suppression. In the United States, there is widespread training of U.S. police departments. The export of Israel's brutal tactics to the United States has been so alarming that Jewish Voice for Peace launched a dedicated campaign called Deadly Exchange to fight against it and bring awareness. Over 200 police and security agencies across the United States have gone on training junkets to Israel, and I think these are just the ones that are funded by one Zionist, domestic Zionist, agency where they are both brainwashed about Israel and instructed in ruthless military tactics. The impact of this cooperation between U.S. domestic police departments and the Israeli occupation military came to light after the Ferguson uprising, in which Robocop police showed up in military gear to suppress unarmed peaceful protesters. It turned out that the Ferguson police department had gone on one of these training junkets in Israel. Also of note is the incident of police shooting in 2016 in Dallas, Texas, in which police chief David Brown sent in a robot packed with explosives to kill the suspect. It was a kind of robot suicide bomber, if you will. It was apparently the first known time that police dispatched a robot to kill a suspect on U.S. soil rather than attempting apprehension or negotiating surrender. As it turned out, that police chief had been on a 10-day so-called anti-terrorism training in Israel. Lastly, on this point, and this is something that Ali Obonama touched on earlier, is the recent revelation that Israeli intelligence companies have been spying on U.S. citizens, not to mention the role that these Israeli intelligence companies have had in tampering with U.S. presidential election in 2016, as the Mueller investigation has revealed. Now, I want to move on to friendships and alliances. Despite claiming to be the guardians and protectors of Jews everywhere, Israel actually has courted some of the world's most notorious anti-Semites, as long as they support Israel's occupation and by their arms. John Worcester, the apartheid South African Prime Minister that I mentioned earlier, was a Nazi sympathizer who was imprisoned by the British for his ties to the gray shirt's fascist militia. In 1976, Yitzhak Rabin heaped praise on him and gave him the red carpet welcome when he visited Israel. Israel has cozied up and is supporting ultra-nationalist, ultra-right, anti-minority, racist, homophone, Bolsonaro and Brazil, who said, quote, refugees are the scum of the earth. He told a female colleague she was too ugly to rape. He threatened to destroy or imprison his political opponents. He spoke favorably of torture. He lamented that the Brazilian cavalry wasn't as efficient as Americans who exterminated the Indians. And he said that he'd rather see his son die in a car crash than hear he was gay. Israel has also developed ties and has been arming and training neo-Nazis in the Ukraine. Israel likewise opened its doors to anti-Semitic Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, who praised his country's World War II era leadership that presided over the mass murder of Jews. And he employed terrible age-old anti-Semitic tropes to demonize George Soros. In December, Netanyahu even met with him to negotiate the opening of a revisionist Holocaust museum in Budapest, which basically exonerates Hungary's role in Europe's Holocaust. Netanyahu signed a joint declaration with the right-wing Polish Prime Minister Matusz Morawiecki, which likewise wipes clean Poland's record in Europe's Holocaust and rewrote history to state that the Poles were actually helping Jews escape Nazis. Of course, there's this card-carrying anti-Semite that Israel loves and embraces. Netanyahu went so far as to make excuses for Hitler, claiming in 2015 that Hitler wasn't the monster we all thought he was, rather that it was a Palestinian leader, Haj Amin al-Hosani, who convinced him to actually kill European Jews. Luckily, Netanyahu crossed a line with that one, and European leaders and historians rose together to give them a foul card. The last bit I want to touch on briefly has to do with the way that Israel's rewriting of history is robbing the world of archaeological treasures and important history that belongs not only to Palestinians, but to all of humanity, because Palestine is an extraordinarily special place. While it already has an indigenous population that formed there over millennia, Palestine holds a history that belongs to all people of monotheistic faiths. Since its inception, Israel has worked tirelessly to erase the footprints of the many civilizations, religions, and peoples who existed in that land before, during, and after Jewish presence in the land. The existence of so many churches and mosques are particular irritants to Israel, and it has worked in earnest to destroy, desecrate, or control them from the beginning of their control over the land. Immediately after the Nakba, Israel began a campaign of destroying the Palestinian villages it had just depopulated, including tearing down mosques and churches, some of which were centuries old and of great religious and historic significance, like the Sheikh Haid Mosque in Jerusalem that was built by one of Salahuddin's sons. In places where new Jewish inhabitants took over Palestinian towns, new Jewish places of worship have been turned into nightclubs, animal pens, restaurants, brothels, and the like. Other mosques were made inaccessible, declared closed military zones, leaving them derelict. When the Islamic movement once helped a group of internal refugees from the former village of Sadafund restore their mosque in 2000, it was bulldozed overnight and still unexplained circumstances. Increasingly Jewish militias are vandalizing and burning churches and mosques without any consequence perpetrators. In 2010, a U.S. State Department report stated that, quote, non-Jewish holy sites in Israel do not enjoy legal protection, because the government does not recognize them as officially holy sites. After Jewish settlers torched a mosque in 2012, former military chief of staff admitted in a radio interview that there was no interest in catching the culprits. He said, quote, if we wanted, we could catch them, and when we want to, we will, unquote. Part and parcel of Israel's erasure of history, they have also targeted non-Jewish cemeteries. The ancient Muslim cemetery of Mahmoudullah, which includes graveyards by prominent Muslim scholars, generals, and companions of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, was destroyed to build a museum by the California-based Wysenthal Center. In 2008, over 100 skeletons were unearthed and tossed aside during excavations for the construction work. Throughout Palestine, in places where Israel has developed Jewish cities, Muslim and Christian cemeteries were simply dug up and built over. For example, Tel Aviv University, which was built over the Palestinian village of Sheikh Muniz, desecrated a graveyard and built a dormitory over it. Lastly, I want to briefly touch on the ways that Israel has weaponized archaeology. On the pretense of digging for history, it has confiscated and demolished whole Palestinian neighborhoods. Silwan in East Jerusalem is the best known example of this, where Israel has confiscated at least six dunams of land belonging to one family, the Siam family, and they've evicted over 6,000 Palestinians. The purpose of the dig was never about archaeology because we know that they're planning to build a so-called Jewish national park in the area, a kind of Jewish Disneyland as it's being referred to. We also know that the Israel Antiquities Authority has destroyed several ancient archaeological sites and antiquities as a result of this dig, including a cemetery dating back to the Abbasid Caliphate, and relics dating back to the Canaanite era and the second millennium BC. It is not for love of archaeology or history. In fact, Israel routinely destroys ancient cities unearthed by archaeologists, so long as they have nothing to do with Jewish history. The first thing they did when they conquered Palestine, the rest of Palestine in 1967, was to demolish the entire Moroccan neighborhood that was over 800 years old, displacing hundreds of Palestinians. Israel has engaged in such massive destruction of antiquities consistently and systematically. Another example shown here is a recent find of a 1200-year-old mixed village of well-off Muslims and Christians who live together. Archaeologists got a chance to take photos and record some of the relics, but the site is set to be bulldozed for development. Again, these are all just surface surveys of hidden realities. The depredations of Israel are much more vast, deeper, and far-reaching. But my hope is that what I have presented here today will expand the view from Israel as an apartheid nation suppressing the indigenous Palestinian population to a deeper understanding of Israel as a global force of violence, plunder, paranoia, surveillance, greed, war, suppression, ecological destruction, erasure of history, the forceful transfer of wealth from the weak to the powerful, and the entrenchment of supremacist ideologies that set human hierarchies and castes. No matter how many gay pride marches they hold or how many Eurovisions they host, no matter how good their national orchestra makes you feel when they tour the world, or how Palestinian citizens are given a symbolic vote, no matter how much greenwashing, pinkwashing, or whitewashing has but other is in mainstream media. The way that Israel exists in the world is ultimately antithetical to life and to liberty, not just for Palestinians, but for all people who struggle against tyranny, oppression, white supremacy, and ecological destruction. The situation is dire and desperate for our families in Palestine. The grim reality of our compatriots' daily lives and the dimming of our future in our homeland is portended by Israel's push now to ban the Adan over Jerusalem for the first time since the dawn of Islam, and Israel is moving forcefully against Al-Aqsa, perhaps the final frontier in Palestine. But I do not want to end on such a hopeless note, because despite everything, there is so much to celebrate, so much to encourage our continued struggle, and much to inspire hope. In fact, I believe that Israel's current escalation of their ongoing ethnic cleansing is in many ways a desperate though counterproductive response to the growing international repudiation of them, including by young Jews whose moral compass is not guided by Zionism. The conversation is changing here and around the world. Palestine is the single issue splitting leftist movements and parties globally. The Democratic Party here in the U.S., the Women's March, the Labor Party in the U.K. Increasingly, we are not alone. Points of intersection with liberation movements around the world are being filled with reciprocal solidarity. And more importantly, our people on the front lines have not given up, and they continue every day to fight and insist on life. And in the bigger picture afforded by historical examples, Palestine actually follows time-tested trajectories of liberation. Difficult and bloody as these paths always are. I believe that ultimately restoration to our homeland, to liberty and dignity, is our only collective destiny. Thank you. As always, thank you for being with us. I'm Mark Hage, and on behalf of our Monarchs for Justice in Palestine, until our next program, Salam Shalom.