(November 1, 2023)

To focus, as we do here, on the actions of the Israeli state and the unflagging support it receives from the US and its allies, is neither to celebrate violence, nor to equivocate on the value of innocent lives. Civilian deaths, regardless of nationality, are tragic and unacceptable. Yet to act as though the history of violence began with Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023 is to display a reckless indifference to history as well as to both Palestinian and Israeli lives. In order for violence to stop, the conditions that produce violence must stop.

The blockade of Gaza has lasted 16 years; the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has lasted 56 years; the dispossession of Palestinians of their lands and homes across historic Palestine has lasted three-quarters of a century, since the 1948 establishment of Israel as an ethno-supremacist state. It is not without reason that observers—including both international and Israeli human rights groups—now characterize Israel’s control over the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea as a system of apartheid.