By Ali Bin Omer

Mar/Apr 2024

On a chilly Saturday afternoon in January, 400,000 resilient individuals gathered at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., united in support of our brothers and sisters in Palestine. We gathered to demand that the U.S call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, cease unconditional funding of military actions by Israel, hold its leaders accountable for war crimes and continuous violations of international law and ultimately work toward the liberation of Palestinians. 

As part of a Global Day of Action, busloads of protestors arrived from Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio and other states, resulting in the largest pro-Palestine protest in this country’s history. It was endorsed by the American Muslim Task Force for Palestine which includes American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), CAIR and ICNA along with hundreds of additional organizations nationwide.

After 100+ days of intense carpet bombing and a high number of innocent civilians murdered, the march was timely, as this collective movement was feeling the weight of the brutality we continue to witness daily via our smartphones in the palm of our hands.

Palestinians are currently experiencing the greatest threat to their existence. Nearly 2 million of them in the Gaza Strip have been displaced and are now threatened with famine … not to mention the rise in aggression and the siege on Palestinians in Jenin, Ramallah, Al Quds, Hebron and other cities in Palestine.

A sea of black, green, red and white flags flooded the streets of D.C., with hundreds of thousands of voices for the voiceless chanting “Free, Free Palestine” and “End Genocide Now.”

Religious Leaders and Activists Take to the Stage

“South Africa is keeping alive the legacy of Nelson Mandela and suing Israel in the International Court of Justice, the highest court in the world, and they are charging the country with genocide,” proclaimed Yasir Qadhi (dean, Islamic Seminary of America). “We need to call a spade a spade. This is not antisemitism; it is speaking the truth. The Palestinian people are live tweeting their own genocide. They’re uploading images of their own massacre.”

 “We have been walking the halls of Congress every day for the last three months,” stated Medea Benjamin (co-founder, CODE PINK). “We need them to know that we will not stand by as they continue the genocide.”

“We are here to represent the 36,000 people that have either been martyred or are under the rubble,” said Shaykh Omar Suleiman (founder and president, Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research). “If we were to take to the streets for every casualty and every person under the rubble, it would take us 100 years to honor each and every single one of them.”

Wael al-Dahdouh (correspondent, Al Jazeera), whose wife, daughter, two sons and a grandchild were recently killed in Gaza, delivered a powerful statement via video call. “Gaza is going through a period of great hardship. The people here are paying a truly exorbitant price and are living a disastrous life. People do not have sustenance, food, or drink, a place to sleep, a bathroom and what is necessary for life — not for a decent life, [but] rather what is basically necessary to maintain life.” 

Alana Hadid, the oldest daughter of Mohammad Hadid (real estate mogul and survivor of the 1948 Nakba), passionately professed that “Collective freedom is what Palestinians have taught the world. Bravery and perseverance is what Palestinians have shown us day after day, not just for 100 days but 75 years, and we must continue the struggle for them.” 

Rally Attendees from All Walks of Life 

Outside of the inspirational speakers, many of us found value and warmth in the opportunity to connect with the greater pro-Palestine community. Many are showing their support in a silo through online activism on social media, calling our representatives (who once again prove to be useless) and attending protests as our circle of friends, coworkers, acquaintances and the like remain silent. It was a crucial step in a long battle to be among like-minded people who support humanity and justice for all. 

Two young women from St. Louis, one Palestinian-American and the other Caucasian-American, braved the long ride to D.C. They spoke about how the genocide had deeply impacted them and felt it was their duty to attend in person. 

A family of four from Alexandria, Va., also attended the march in solidarity, as it was personal for the family’s matriarch. Her great-grandfather immigrated from Palestine to Bolivia to escape apartheid. She has been horrified by the events of the past 3 months and considered it imperative to attend, along with her Irish American husband and twin daughters.

People from all walks of life traveled to be there. “I’m here because of the children being slaughtered,” said one Catholic attendee from Maryland. “Our president had said he would not go to war.”

“I understand that at times wars are needed, but there are rules that must be followed. Civilians cannot be killed for no reason,” said a Muslim attendee from New York. 

We came together, listened, shared stories, shed tears, shared laughter, marched, resisted and stood united for Palestine. We must fight, we must resist, and we must preserve until “from the river to the sea, Palestine is free” and every human being in this world is free.

Ali Bin Omer is a freelance writer.

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By Kiran Ansari

Mar/Apr 2024

These days, Muslims worldwide wake up and check their phones to see if a ceasefire has been declared in Gaza. At press time, Palestinians have been killed, injured and displaced for 100+ days. Trying to absorb information from all over social media and a few media outlets that provide some balanced coverage, parents wonder how they can explain the situation to their young children? 

“I can shield my children from graphic images of the wounded and killed, but I do not want to shield them from the truth,” said Nida Khan of Fresno, Calif. “We are witnessing a genocide. I owe it to my children to tell them the story of the Palestinian cause in an age-appropriate manner, and one of the best ways to do it is through books. This is even more important for Muslim kids who do not have a Palestinian family member to share stories firsthand.”

Islamic Horizons asked MuslimMemories.com about which children’s books on Palestine have been popular lately. We then set out to interview those authors and learn about their journey to inspire more authors to share, because our children deserve to read authentic stories. 

You Are The Color

“I had always wanted to write a book about the Nakba, one of the seminal events in Palestinian history that must be understood in order to understand what is still happening in Palestine today,” said Rifk Ebeid, a Palestinian author who self-published “You Are The Color” and “Baba, What Does My Name Mean?” 

“I researched Nakba survivor testimonies and oral history. I delved into what life was like in Palestine before, during and after the Nakba. This took some time due to the heavy nature of the topic and my capacity to process it all.”

After developing the idea, Ebeid worked with Hajera Khaja, a wonderful writing coach, to help bring the story to life. What really helped flesh it out was the process of free writing, seeing where the pen was taking her and what plot sequence felt like it captured what she wanted to convey. The result is an impactful and authentic story of one Palestinian family that encompasses many of the real experiences during the Nakba. 

Ebeid believes that for Palestinians, as they resist the erasure of their culture and existence, sharing stories is crucial to documenting their experiences. “Every action we take individually will have a ripple effect collectively. You never know who is listening, who is learning from you and what they will do in the future with that knowledge they have gained,” she stated.

“Sitti’s Key”

“I never understood the history of my homeland until I visited Palestine and learned about its rich history,” said Sahar Khader, author of “Sitti’s Key.” She continued, “When I had my first child, I was always looking for books that shared Palestine’s history in a simple way, but I never found them. So I took matters into my own hands and decided that I should publish a children’s book about the collective memory of the key.” In 2023, this proud Palestinian did just that. 

In light of the current genocide in Gaza, the book presents the repetition of history. Readers find flashbacks about what happened in 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes. Unfortunately, what is happening now in Gaza is even worse — more than 1.2 million Palestinians have had to leave their homes. This book teaches the younger generation that what is going on today in Gaza has been happening for 75 years. 

“My Garden Over Gaza” 

Sarah Musa started writing “My Garden Over Gaza” in May 2021 when Israel was bombing Gaza. As a Palestinian-American living in Jordan, she had watched this happen for years. “My father left the Al-Quds region when he was 15, and he was never allowed back,” she said. “It is painful to watch how history repeats itself again and again.”

As she started getting vocal on Instagram and getting to know activists, one of her writer friends encouraged her to write a book. That was her lightbulb moment. “Palestine is a part of who I am, so why haven’t I done it yet?” Musa wondered. “I have had a rooftop garden like they have in Gaza. It’s one way for them to produce their own food because of sieges and the aerial spraying of herbicides on agricultural crops.”

Types of Publishing

Although there have been a handful of children’s books about Palestine from traditional publishing houses, Muslim authors aren’t happy about the representation. Many Palestinian authors fear that their story will be diluted, sanitized or edited. Even though Ebeid has heard from some author friends that they have more control over the narrative, it’s still an uphill battle. Muslims have seen silence and censorship from the book community during this genocide. 

“The topic of self-publishing vs. traditional publishing is multi-layered. I hate to distinguish when it comes to Palestine, in particular, because of how Palestinian voices have been censored for decades,” she said. “Although I understand the aspect of wanting to hold mainstream publishers accountable for being more inclusive of diverse voices, I find the distinction between the two routes to be divisive at a time where we need all hands on deck and should all support each other’s efforts.”

Khader began the publishing process with a mainstream company, but her passion for “Sitti’s Key” was so high that she felt they didn’t understand it, especially when it came to illustration. That led her to cancel her contract with them. 

Her book was then published by Little Hibba, a children’s publishing company that empowers Muslim authors to share meaningful messages with the next generation. “They worked closely with me and understood my passion,” Khader related. “I also had the pleasure of working with the illustrator, Noor Alshalabi, who paid attention to certain details and brought my vision to life.”

Musa’s experience with mainstream publishing wasn’t great — not because anything bad happened, but because nothing really happened. She tried to get published for 15 years, but never heard back. She believes many mainstream publishing houses aren’t really interested in unapologetic Muslim stories. 

“They want to show they care, but it’s only superficial. They want to just add a Muslim twist to an American story. They have no interest in real Palestinian stories. They want to minimize that kind of stuff,” she asserted. 

She wanted to get “A Garden Over Gaza” out quickly. Her sister told her about Ruqaya’s Bookshelf, a Muslim publishing company in Canada. What started out as an eBook flowered into a manuscript.

“I had never written a book about a Muslim protagonist — it was colonized out of my mind,” Musa recollects. “I dove into it 100% and submitted my manuscript in a week. Publisher Asmaa Hussein got back to me promptly, and I signed my first book deal.”

Muslim authors don’t want publishing companies that just pretend to care. They believe that if Muslims want authentic and unapologetic stories, the community needs to support small Muslim publishers. Mainstream publishing companies have huge advertising budgets. The sprouting Muslim publishers don’t have the resources yet, so we, as the umma, have to do that. 

“Growing up, I felt like an odd phenomenon with a Palestinian father and Hispanic mother,” Musa said. “As a child, I would have been over the moon to have a book that truly represented me. Now as a parent, rather than always reading about Stephanie and Jake, I want my kids to feel heard and seen. It can boost their self-confidence. So we need to support Muslim authors and publishers. Let’s be their microphones so more people become aware.” 

Readers can purchase these and many other titles at www.muslimmemories.com and support Muslim book stores. 

Kiran Ansari is the assistant editor of Islamic Horizons. She hopes to visit a free Palestine one day.

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By Tayyaba Syed

Jan/Feb 2024

Eight-year-old Etaf Saleh was playing outside with her siblings, while their baby sister slept peacefully inside the house. Suddenly they heard jets overhead and loud booms. “It’s war! It’s war!” Saleh’s mother began screaming and ushering them quickly to safety.

“We’d never witnessed anything like it,” recalls Saleh, now in her sixties, of her experience living through the 1967 Six-Day War in Silwad, a West Bank town next to Ramallah. “Bombs were coming down everywhere, and we started to escape toward the center of the town. My mom then remembered she had forgotten my sleeping baby sister and ran back home as we waited for her.”

The families were instructed to head up the mountains into designated caves. They hid there for seven days. That one week changed the trajectory of their lives forever. 

“I don’t know how we had food or anything, but every day there was bombing,” shares Saleh, who now lives with her family in Willowbrook, Ill. After seven days, they were instructed by the Israeli forces to return home even though the bombing continued. Frightened and weary, families held up white cloths and flags and headed back down the mountains. “Last year, my mom passed away at the age of 92. Yet she never stopped talking about what we endured and said that for years we [children] would wake up screaming at night from the trauma.”

The fear of being bombed, being killed, being separated from or losing your family, having to abandon your home and hide in a cave, surviving on little food, not being able to just be a kid and play and laugh and learn…what can that do to one’s psyche? 

On the eighth day, Saleh rode along with her mother and siblings in boarded trucks to escape to Jordan. Their father, who had been working in Kuwait, was waiting for them across the river. 

“My older brother was probably in eighth or ninth grade, so we had to cover him and other young [adolescent] men [so they would not] be taken away,” Saleh says. “In those few hours, we saw people lying dead in the streets. I remember asking why this was happening and was told, ‘They are killing us.’ How can I sleep as a child after this? I would hear the sound of bombs even after we had escaped and couldn’t unsee all those dead bodies I had seen with my own little eyes.”

After staying in Jordan for a few days, the Saleh family began heading to Kuwait. Her brother decided he wanted to remain in Jordan for high school. Saleh states how difficult it was to leave him and be apart from him; however, she admits, he became very resilient from the experience. Once Saleh herself was old enough, she insisted on pursuing her undergraduate studies abroad. 

“I got accepted into schools in Egypt, Jordan and Iraq,” she remarks. “However, my father wouldn’t let me go on my own. He told me I could go study in America instead and live with my oldest brother, who had come here in 1974, five years before me. The application and paperwork were never-ending, but we made it happen somehow. 

“My whole family was crying at the airport — all except me. I was just so happy to finally get out and be on my own, even though this was my very first time flying in an airplane at age 19. Before leaving Kuwait, my father taught me how to drive, I learned how to type and I took English classes. I was ready. You can’t let anything overpower you. If you don’t have iman (faith), you don’t have anything. That’s the most important thing.”

Made Her Stronger

Even though Saleh feels she had to grow up faster after experiencing the trauma of war, she still believes it only made her stronger. The current Israel-Gaza war brings back horrific memories, though. She cries every day and worries how the people, especially the children, will recover from it. 

According to Dr. Fahad Khan (licensed clinical psychologist and deputy director, Khalil Center, Lombard, Ill.) traumatized children can skip a stage of childhood.

“Trauma can affect how they respond to stress, affect their thinking and emotional abilities and even hinder natural tendencies such as creativity and fantasy,” says Khan, who has won awards from the American Psychological Association for his work and dedication. “Meta-analysis studies show signs of aging in traumatized kids and physical changes in the brain that can be measured. Someone who is older and is traumatized can accelerate [in aging] with post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] in adult life.” 

Khan states PTSD symptoms can linger long after the trauma ends and can be triggered at any moment: socially, emotionally and even within relationships. “The way our brains are structured and emotions are stored is different from where complicated thinking happens (in the frontal cortex),” he says. “When we are traumatized, high-level thinking leaves, and you can’t think rationally or logically in that emotional state of mind. What we want to see [more of] is more post-traumatic growth in people.”

Post-traumatic growth is the positive psychological change that some individuals experience after a life crisis or a traumatic event, according to Psychology Today (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/post-traumatic-growth), which also states that post-traumatic growth doesn’t deny deep distress. Rather, it posits that adversity can unintentionally yield changes in understanding oneself, others and the world. 

Trauma Beyond War

Trauma isn’t just limited to war. Fareeha Aziz of Houston also saw this in her oldest child, who was only eight when she was divorced. Suddenly she was a single mother of her newborn, two toddlers, and eight-year-old son. How does a child process such drastic changes?

“My kids had to grow up so quickly when everything happened,” Aziz recalls, who spent eleven years on her own before remarrying. “My eldest for sure was traumatized by it all, reckoning with reality and trying to process everything. My kids had to take care of themselves to help me. When children are around unpredictable situations and people, they start to understand adult subjects sooner than necessary.”

Despite the difficulty Aziz, 42, has endured, has done her best to keep a positive mindset about life and has full trust in God. Instead of focusing on the past or future, she is determined to make the most of whatever time she has left on Earth. “Ask Allah for help for whatever you’re going through and then really believe in [that help].”

Another example of trauma can be when your health is tested. Mother of four Nafeesah Zabadneh of Lombard, Ill., was diagnosed with Lupus in 2020. Lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease that causes your immune system, which usually fights infections, to attack healthy tissue instead. It can cause inflammation and pain in any part of your body.

“I am 41, but I feel like I am much older and weaker,” states Zabadneh. “If you see how I walk, you can tell something’s wrong. I’m on the smaller side but feel so heavy. Lupus affects your organs and your breathing. Sometimes I’m so fatigued that I can’t even take care of my kids properly. I feel so guilty at times and just try to push through my debilitating health. I can’t even braid my youngest’s hair due to cysts on my joints and stiffness. I took things for granted when I was healthy, but I don’t want to be a burden on anyone.”

Many times, Zabadneh feels like she’s fighting against her own body. She describes it as “watching the world go by” while she stands still. She wonders if this is how it will always be or if it will get better, knowing that right now there is no cure. Major life changes, trauma and difficult circumstances can cause kids to grow up faster than normal, to age out of innocence much sooner. Zabadneh is seeing this with her eldest child. 

“I’m praying that I can still be there for my family and community somehow through all this,” she says. “I’m grateful for a supportive husband, and if it wasn’t for my 15-year-old I wouldn’t be able to take care of my toddler. She is like a second mother to her siblings.”

Tayyaba Syed is a multiple award-winning author, journalist and Islamic studies teacher. She conducts literary and faith-based presentations for all ages and is an elected member of her local school district’s board of education in Illinois, where she lives with her husband and three children. Learn more at www.tayyabasyed.com.

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By Feryal Aboshama

Jan/Feb 2024

In 2021, I would scroll through social media and watch my people be hurt and bleed for simply existing and standing up for what they believe. Every night tears uncontrollably slipped down my face as I thought about the Palestinians. I would cry silently, feeling helpless and guilty, and constantly wake feeling guilty for being blessed with another chance to wake up, while millions of Palestinians either didn’t or, if they did, woke up orphaned and alone. All I could do was watch the people protecting our Holy Land die gruesome, inhumane deaths that traumatized the children and made them fear for the future they won’t have. 

I constantly questioned myself and wondered what I could do, because a simple social media post that only took a second to upload didn’t satisfy me. And so I turned to doing the only thing I could do at that moment: making protest posters with different sayings, like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “75 years is enough,” “Free my people” and plenty of other sayings, all painted in Palestinian colors. I then went on to paint a canvas to donate or sell for the Palestinian cause — but I kept the first one. 

Every Stroke

That painting depicted a tattered Palestinian flag in the background. On top, in bright white, it said “Free My People” with the shape of Palestine as the period. Every stroke of red reminded me of the unnecessary bloodshed. Every stroke of black reminded me of the smoke filling the air and the lungs of innocent Palestinian adults and children. Every stroke of green reminded me of the olive trees that used to stand as strong as the people fighting for their rights. Every stroke of white reminded me of every kafan (the cloth used to wrap the deceased) wrapped around an innocent life that departed too soon. Every stroke filled me with rage and sadness — rage because that isn’t what these colors represent, and sadness because that is what I am now constantly reminded of. 

While I still found myself feeling guilty, I turned to art, and day by day continued channeling that pain and sorrow in my art pieces, converting those emotions into hope … a hope that every Palestinian holds with pride, knowing that one day, with God’s Will, they will be freed.

Now, every day I turn on my phone and go straight to Instagram for real-time information. I would never have done this before, but here I am. Opening the app, I go through different Palestinian journalists’ accounts from Bisan to Motaz to Plestia and so many others who’ve become household names. Constantly praying and making dua for them, I hope that next account won’t be about another 1,000 quickly dismissed deaths.

One quote has stayed with me: “Even if the world was against me, I would still fight for what I stand for, until death.” I’ve always stood with Palestine, and will to the day I die. When I was younger, my parents taught me about Palestine. They told me when I fight for what I believe in to fight like a Palestinian, to have patience like a Palestinian, to smile like a Palestinian and leave it to God. Even back then I knew I had to fight for Palestine because, although I’m not Palestinian, they are my people — not just because I’m Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern, but especially because I’m a human being who cares for all of humanity. This means that when my brother or sister gets hurt, I feel their pain. 

Today, I live in a constant state of awareness, gratefulness and dua. I’m aware of everything going on in Palestine, as well as everything I’ve taken for granted while innocent people don’t have an ounce of what I do. I’m grateful for every day I get to wake up and be with my family. I make dua that everyone in Palestine continues to fight with the strength provided by God. I pray for the day I get to see Palestine free. 

Feryal Aboshama, the second place prize winner of the Islamic Horizons essay contest, attends Eman Schools in Fishers, Ind. She will soon be going to university to study neuroscience and psychology, with a minor in Arabic.

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By Sundus Abrar 

Jan/Feb 2024

Protests calling for a ceasefire in Palestine are drawing increasing and diverse attendees. As Israeli attacks on Gaza continue with complete disregard for civilians and international law, Palestinians remain committed to broadcasting the atrocities inflicted upon them on social media. For Palestinian journalists, this task of accurately documenting the genocide takes precedence over their own personal safety.

According to The Washington Post (Nov. 14), “At least 42 members of the media have been killed in the Israel-Gaza war since Oct. 7, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, making this past month the deadliest for journalists since it started gathering data in 1992.”

Despite social media censorship and the mainstream media’s blatant efforts to suppress and discredit the content coming out of Gaza, the images and videos of the violence being inflicted upon Palestinians are circulating pervasively. A harrowing narrative is emerging, and the dire conditions are difficult to process. 

Some parents, out of concern for their young children’s emotional well-being, may decide not to share everything about these events. However, Fatmah Muhammad, a Palestinian-American residing in California, strongly encourages parents to involve and inform older children about advocating for the oppressed. “They think they are protecting their children, but who are these children going to be as grown adults? How is the ummah going to change if we are raising our youth to be complicit?” she asks. 

Muhammad grew up learning about Palestine through her parents, who were born and raised there. She participated in protests against Israel’s illegal occupation, but didn’t fully realize the extent of the occupation. When she first visited Palestine, aged 12, she came to an alarming awareness of the extreme restrictions they endure while living under constant surveillance and policing. Her children had a similar experience during their first trip in the summer of 2023. 

Her 10-year-old daughter Kareemah was distraught when their car was stopped at a checkpoint while driving to Ramallah. Israeli soldiers pointed guns at them as they searched the car, before letting them go upon realizing that they were American citizens. “We told our cousins about what happened, and they told us this is the norm. We were so terrified,” shares Kareemah. 

Muhammad’s children feel a sense of privilege compared to their family in Palestine. “When I go there, I get treated nice. I feel that I don’t deserve to go there. I can move around and go places. We can leave checkpoints, but Palestinians who live there can’t go everywhere,” shares 12-year-old Zakariyah. Some people born in Palestine are even prevented from visiting the al-Aqsa Mosque. This imbalance is what propels Muhammad’s children to actively advocate for Palestinians. 

Non-Palestinian Activists

“I don’t care if they become doctors, engineers or whatever they want to become. That’s secondary to me,” said Syed Rahman, an artist and parent of two in Chicago. “My primary concern is that I want them to be leaders in the ummah.”

Rahman, whose family originates from Hyderabad, India, is also profoundly aware of his privilege. Living as expats in Saudi Arabia, his parents couldn’t discuss politics openly or protest. Rahman is grateful for his parents’ efforts to immigrate to the U.S. “They struggled so I don’t have to.” 

A dedicated philanthropist, Rahman is also founder of the popular small business @ModernWallArt, which sells unique Islamic art. Having garnered a significant audience on the business’s social media account, he utilizes his reach to raise awareness and fundraise. Through the contributions from his online and immediate community, he has raised over $1 million for Human Concern International (HCI) for aid in Gaza. 

In collaboration with Jannah Circle, a Muslim women’s nonprofit, on Nov. 4 Rahman hosted an impromptu charity bazaar in his warehouse space in Skokie, Ill. Participating vendors donated all or at least part of their proceeds. Though the event coincided with the largest protest in Washington, D.C., it still drew over 500 attendees and raised $20,000. 

Rahman and his wife Mehreen Bukhari are keen on educating their daughter Ilyana, 6, about Palestine. Bukhari is forthcoming in her unwavering efforts to advocate for Palestinians, “I boycotted Starbucks before and then stopped. I would go to protests, but then when the ceasefire was announced I’d stop following up.” These fluctuations fuel her urgency in involving youth in activism. “I didn’t learn about it growing up. It’s only now that I am in my 30s that I am more aware and able to advocate for oppressed people. We can’t delay any change the next generation can bring.” She believes that their charity bazaar provided an opportunity for young kids to also learn about the situation in Palestine. 

Diversified Activism

In addition, Muhammad has diversified her activism while continuing to participate in protests. She has an immense following on her social media @KnafehQueens, where she markets her business that sells knafeh, a famous Palestinian dessert. On her Instagram account, she has sought to inform her followers and engage those who are new to the cause.

“I am trying to bring up the cause to people at different levels of awareness. Not everyone can talk politics,” says Muhammad. “By taking a public stance, I have lost some customers, but I trust in Allah.” She has encountered abuse and threats online, but remains firm in doing all that she can to raise awareness. “People have told me you should be careful. But this is my duty.” 

Her daughter Rheyanah, 17, is also engaging the community by organizing protests, fundraisers and qiyams. Muhammad cautions her daughter to find a balance between her academics, but is also immensely reassured by her children’s dedication. “It gives me hope. Israelis have said over and over that the kids will forget about Palestine, but Allah wants it in our hearts because there is so much beautiful history [there]. It’s a blessed land, and I hope to see that my kids are in it till the end.”

Like many others, she too draws her motivation from the Palestinians who, while living under the grueling conditions of oppression, continue to be resilient and retain their spirit of hospitality and kindness. She shares the welcome her family received during their trip to Palestine. “How they lead their lives every day is beautiful. The ones who have the least will give you the most,” she said. 

More people are gaining awareness of the severe oppression Palestinians have been living under for the past 75 years. The diversity at protests and the increased conversations online are a reassuring indicator of this. Every parent knows how much to share with each child, but there has to be some level of awareness in all Muslim children. Several parenting blogs and authors like Noor Kids have shared simple ways of explaining the occupation to young children. They don’t need to see graphic, violent images, but they do need to be aware. As parents living comfortable lives thousands of miles away, this is the least we can do.

Sundus Abrar, an undergraduate degree in professional writing, aspires to generate dialog around current concerns within the Muslim community.

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By the ISNA Green Initiative Team

Jan/Feb 2024

Today we are witnessing unjust wars, the degradation and exploitation caused by the Zionist apartheid state, of not only a group of people and their economy, but also the violation of the rights of voiceless nature. This is causing the exponential rise of unsustainable practices, environmental degradation, and biodiversity decline. Further choking the existence of the occupied people and their land is the added layer of climate change. High temperatures, increased rainfall, sea levels rising, and increasing toxic wastes in the land have become unmanageable. 

The dehumanizing and oppression of people deprived of human rights and the right of self-determination; illegal settler colonialism; restrictions on movement; the destruction of farmlands and the native biodiversity of fauna, flora and its pollinators — to the dismantling of renewable energy infrastructure and an agricultural economy — is a direct result of an apartheid state, resulting in an ecocide. Ironically, under the facade of the victim, today the apartheid state is the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Part of the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of agriculture and civilization, Palestine is located at the intersection of continents and has five phytogeographical areas. Since 1948, those Palestinians surrounded by Israel have been living under its brutal occupation, where uprooting olive trees, demolishing homes (Rebuilding Alliance.org) and marauding Israeli settlers are being used to constrict the Palestinians’ economy and limit their access to food, clean water, hygiene, and natural resources. Uprooting olive trees and choking off the water are tools for the ever-expanding boundaries of the Zionist state, not a “Jewish state,” as stated by Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, spokesperson of Neturei Karta. 

This is not dissimilar to other stories of land acquisition, in particular apartheid in South Africa, European colonialism, or slavery in the Americas, and the same realities in the Ottoman and Arab empires. Archbishop Tutu said he saw “the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.” 

Zoughbi Alzoughbi (founder and director, Wi’am: The Palestinian Conflict Transformation Center), who once visited a Native American reservation, said, “I found a historical map showing the stages of land dispossession of the First Nation people … To the staff and supporters of Wi’am the message was obvious; both Native Americans and Palestinians were Native to their lands, colonized by another people, told there was a way to live peacefully together, then violently removed from their own land, then forced onto small reservations of land, then slowly had even that land taken away by home demolitions and new settler colonies, only to end up treated by the colonizers as obstacles to peace and not as people.”

The Importance of Olive Trees

Olive trees are a primary source of income — about $12.3 million lost — for over 80,000 Palestinian families who rely on the olive harvest. According to UN figures, approximately 48% of the West Bank’s agricultural land is planted with olive trees. These trees account for 70% of Palestine’s fruit production and contribute approximately 14% to its economy. In addition, 93% of the harvest is used for olive oil production and the remaining 7% for local consumption. Olives, olive oil, and olive wood are used to produce soaps, table olives, and pickles 

Since 1967, 800,000 olive trees and 2.5 million trees have been uprooted — supposedly for security reasons. Since 1995, 60% of Palestinians have lost farmland to Israeli settlements, walls, military zones, by-pass roads and other closures (MIFTAH and VisualizingPalestine.org). Israeli agricultural export companies such as Mehadrin and Hadiklaim are among the primary beneficiaries of the destruction of Palestinian agriculture — they export produce from illegal settlements using stolen Palestinian land and water, as well as profit from the siege on Gaza.

Since October 2007 Palestinians have been unable to access their farmland (BDS & AlJazeera Nov 6. 2023). Israel has denied Palestinians access to their natural resources, including shared water resources, an estimated 1.5 billion barrels of oil reserves in the West Bank and more than $2.5 billion worth of natural gas off Gaza’s coast (UNPress, Oct. 17, 2022).

As the Israeli government cuts off fuel supplies, Palestinians living in Gaza use rooftop solar panels to help access electricity. However, since the Oct. 7 attack Israeli forces have ordered a complete siege of Gaza, which has cut off electricity and fuel supplies and targets hospitals via the solar panels on the AlShifa Hospital (ClimateHomeNews). 

Writing in The Guardian [UK] on July 9, 2019, Miriam Berger reported that Israel sprays the buffer zone to allegedly deprive potential “terror elements” of cover; however, farmers in Gaza say doing so damages crops and livelihoods. Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, stated that over the last five years Israeli planes have sprayed herbicide more than 30 times on the Israeli side of the buffer zone with Gaza. Even private rooftop home gardens are not spared.

Israeli water construction is another way to strangle Palestinian agriculture so that Israel can acquire more land. Tel Aviv builds water pipelines through Palestinian lands that help destroy the land, a practice that constricts the Palestinians’ water use and causes the destruction of olive trees and ends a generational livelihood (Corradin, Camilla. Israel: Water as a tool to dominate Palestinians. AlJazeera News. 2016).

Only an estimated 1% of solid waste is currently being recycled. The Israeli occupation has transformed the occupied Palestinian lands into a landfill for hazardous and toxic wastes and sewage since 1967. In fact, 60% of Israeli waste ends up in the occupied areas. This reality chokes the life of Palestinians while destroying the soil, and poisoning and polluting the groundwater. Israel’s disposal of its wastes is a clear violation of international laws related to environmental protection (MiddleEast Monitor, 2018).

A Solution 

The Olive Tree is a symbol of peace in all Abrahamic faiths. The Torah says, “Even if you are at war with a city … you must not destroy its trees” (Deut 20:19-20).  In Gen. 8:11-12, a dove returned an olive branch to Noah on the Ark, signaling the Flood’s end. Quran 24:35 proclaims, “The parable of His light is as if there were a niche within it a lamp: the lamp enclosed in glass: the glass as it were a brilliant star: lit from a blessed tree, an olive neither of the East nor of the West, whose oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire scarce touch it.” 

The Quran explains that humanity holds a privileged position among God’s creations — vicegerent (khalifa) — and that each person is entrusted with caring for God’s creation. And yet it repeatedly warns Muslims against hubris by asserting that they are no better than any other creature. The Prophet (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) acknowledges that God’s knowledge and power covers everything. Therefore, abusing one of His creations, whether it is a living being or a natural resource, is a grave sin. 

Prophet Muhammad was a steadfast advocate of environmental justice, its preservation and conservation and environmental rights. He constantly sought to maintain a harmonious balance between all members of humanity and nature. He was a strong proponent of sustainable practices and equal access by all users of the environment. His words about the environment can be related to contemporary environmental issues.

In closing, the solution lies in the cry of the olive trees. This cry denotes a non-diverse, colonialist worldview, the exact opposite of the Abrahamic traditions. Muslims, as followers of the middle way — as God’s khalifah — are obliged to safeguard the trust gifted by God. Killing innocent women and children is murder, which God abhors. Indiscriminate killing cannot be validated as self-defense by any side. 

May God bless the slaughtered humans– and the destroyed environment. “O humanity! Indeed, We created you from a male and a female, and made you into peoples and tribes so that you may ˹get to˺ know one another. Surely the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous among you. Allah is truly All-Knowing, All-Aware” (49:13).

The ISNA Green Initiative Team comprises Huda Alkaff; Saffet Catovic; Nana Firman; Uzma Mirza; S. Masroor Shah (Chair).

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By Muhammad Hadi

Jan/Feb 2024

The death of a single person casts a shadow over a community, drawing people together in shared grief. When a family is lost, the community’s fabric is torn, left with a wound that struggles to heal. Yet, what happens when whole generations are systematically wiped from existence? The pain and loss are magnified, yet the response from those powerful enough to make a difference is often muted, hidden behind justifications and political tapestries. Innocent children, whose only understanding of the night sky was the stars, are now acquainted with the darkness of man’s inhumanity. Their laughter and dreams, once so vibrant, now lay buried under the weight of rubble and indifference. The world, it seems, looks away, unable to face its reflection in the tragedy.

These images and stories haunted me, a relentless stream of what seemed like distant problems. And yet they were all too real for those living them. “We can’t do anything,” becomes a convenient curtain to hide behind. But I saw through it every time I closed my eyes and every time I heard the news. It was a lie told to soothe the world’s disquieted conscience, a shield against the harsh truth that we are all, in some way, connected to these distant tragedies.

As a student in the Bay Area, already immersed in Islamic multimedia and juggling academic pressures, I felt the pull of these global issues. They demanded more than my attention; they demanded my voice and my action. I realized that my daily struggles, exams and projects paled in comparison to the plight of those who had lost everything. The idea of starting a clothing brand had once been a flicker of inspiration for me, a way to express my creativity and individuality. But as I grew more attuned to the cries for help echoing from lands I’d never walked, that flicker transformed into a blaze of determination.

Hobby to Platform

What started as a cool hobby began to morph into a brand in my mind. It was no longer just about fashion or trends; it became a potential platform, a way to merge my creative impulses with my deepening desire to effect change. Between classes, I sketched designs, each line drawn being a silent pledge to the cause I was slowly, but surely, embracing. I found myself staying up late, my mind racing with ideas of how to use this platform for something bigger, something meaningful.

As the months unfolded, LUMOS started to really come into its own. The name, meaning “light,” became symbolic of my aspirations. I wanted LUMOS to be a source of light in the darkness, a spark of hope against despair. It wasn’t just a label; it was a statement, a commitment to shed light on the harsh realities that seemed to be shrouded in the shadows of the world’s attention. The brand began to represent a beacon of awareness, illuminating the stories that were otherwise overlooked.

Infusing garments with stories that matter became my mission. Using the language of design to speak truths that words alone couldn’t capture, each piece from LUMOS was more than just part of someone’s wardrobe. They were conversation pieces, quiet yet powerful advocates for those whose voices were being drowned out. I wanted each design to be impactful, to resonate with the wearer and the observer, to start conversations and challenge perceptions.

LUMOS was set to be a line of clothing that did more than just look good. It was about clothing that felt good — not just in texture, but in the conscience. Every sale, every thread, every color choice was intentional, designed to capture attention, to spark dialogue, to make people stop and think and, hopefully, to act. It was fashion with heart, style with soul, and threads with a cause. The intersection where aesthetics met ethics, where every item carried the potential to light up not just an outfit, but also a path to change.

The rallies — the outpouring of support for the world’s oppressed — were a turning point. It was a global call to action, and it spurred me into motion. LUMOS was no longer just an idea; it had become a necessity. I rallied my friends, classmates and community members. Together, we poured our collective passion into making it a reality. I was inspired to see fellow students, previously uninvolved, dedicating hours to support this cause. They went out of their way to promote our first event, ensuring that our community was aware and engaged.

Our first event was more than just a sale; it was a statement. The community’s response was overwhelming. They didn’t just buy clothes; they bought into an idea, a movement. We nearly sold out what was merely a preview of our brand, and the proceeds — more than $400 — went straight to emergency humanitarian aid. This event was proof that even as students, our actions could resonate. It was a testament to the power of collective action and a beacon of hope for the future.

As we prepare for our official launch, I stand ready to weave our message into the broader tapestry of social consciousness. With designs that champion unity and echo the moral imperatives of our faith, we seek to dress the world not just in clothes, but in hope, solidarity and action. Our upcoming collections will continue to fundraise, educate and rally a community of believers in the power of change. Through LUMOS, we’re not just creating fashion; we’re creating a movement. We’re changing the narrative, proving that even the smallest of voices can make the loudest of echoes. 

The world may whisper, “We can’t do anything,” but through LUMOS, I shout back, “Watch us.”

Muhammad Hadi, first prize winner in the Islamic Horizons “Palestine on my mind” writing contest, is a multimedia content creator based in Bay Area, Calif. For the last six years, he has started and grown projects for youth, including a podcast interviewing Muslims in tech, medicine, animation, education, and more. He is currently a senior in high school, and working as a growth engineer at a Y Combinator-backed startup. His Palestine-themed clothing line is available at https://lumoswear.com/.

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By Monia Mazigh

Jan/Feb 2024

Following the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush waged a war on Afghanistan. To build and strengthen his military coalition, Bush convinced his allies that his “war on terror” was “also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” as his wife Laura Bush explicitly mentioned in a radio address to the nation (The Washington Post, eMediaMillWorks, Nov. 17, 2001). It didn’t take long until his administration released report after report describing the Afghan women’s fate under the Taliban. Issues ranging from women’s access to health care to girls denied education to the restriction of women’s freedom of movement were all denounced and explained at length as valid reasons to go for war and destroy a land and its inhabitants.

Many feminists’ voices joined the chorus cheering for this “legitimate” war. A war that liberated Muslimas from their men, described in the media as savage and barbaric. The voices of Afghan women were dismissed. After all, what do they know about their rights and feminism? Can we really give a voice to women living among barbaric and savage men? Can the words of these women suffering from “Stockholm Syndrome” be taken seriously?

I remember vividly awkward conversations with progressive feminist friends who wanted to believe that this unjust war was going to liberate women. My religious affiliation, the same one shared by many Afghan women, made me de facto a delegitimize voice on the issue, a person brainwashed by my faith. I believed the fate of Afghan women would be better if left alone with no war. No matter how many times I repeated that those women are smarter than we think and don’t need others to save them, I felt ignored.

But I wasn’t the only one. Professor Lila Abu-Lughod famously asked in her article, turned into a book, “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” (Harvard University Press: 2013).

The role of some feminists in amplifying the call for war, thereby lending it legitimacy and support, was very problematic. When it came to Muslima women, everyone became a feminist and wanted to prove their moral superiority by demanding that Afghan women be saved even when many were killed during military operations; even when their fathers, husbands and relatives were killed by drones: even when bombs, malnourishment and disease killed their children. 

For many of these feminists, the cost of the war was worth the liberation of Afghan women. Afghan women mattered to them only as a way to justify the war by serving, reluctantly, as pawns to advance white feminist theories and enhance the careers of politicians caught up in their visions of geopolitical domination and hegemony.

The Plight of Palestinian Women

As the violent war between Israel and Hamas — which should be reframed as a long struggle of the Palestinian people to stay on their land confiscated by Israeli colonizers and settlers — escalates, the fate of Palestinian women, who, with their children, bear most of the cost and damages, is completely not part of the radar of many feminists.

Despite some strong feminist voices who aren’t intimidated, like the American philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler, who stated that a “genocide is taking place” with indiscriminate bombing, killing and starvation, many other intellectuals and feminists are silent (George Yancy, truthout.org, Oct. 31). What is worse is sometimes they are justifying the on-going massacre, as if the fate of 52,000 pregnant Palestinians in Gaza doesn’t matter (“Pregnant Women Suffer Gaza War” CNN, Oct. 17), as if the statistic of 1 child killed every 10 minutes is meaningless (“Israel Strikes Gaza, Children Victims,” Washington Post, Nov. 2).

Ironically, on its website the Government of Canada states the following: “Canada is a member of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Group for Every Woman Every Child. We support the roll out of the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health. This will ensure that all women, children and adolescents can survive, thrive, and reach their full potential” (https://www.international.gc.ca/)

How can these commitments and policies be coherent with Canada’s failure to demand, at the very least, a ceasefire? How about the $Can 3.5 billion the country spent between 2015-20 to improve the health and rights of women and children worldwide (“Canada’s 10-Year Commitment to Global Health and Rights,” https://www.international.gc.ca/)? 

Are Gaza’s women concerned by these funds or because of their mere existence in a territory of 2.2 million people that, within 28 days has lived through the equivalence of a nuclear bomb (“Israel Hit Gaza Strip with the Equivalent of Two Nuclear Bombs,” https://euromedmonitor.org) make them a legitimate target excluded from the feminist policy about which Canada boasts?

Or are we feminist only when the Other is oppressed by their fellow Muslims? But when Israel, a nuclear power, wages a war against Hamas, our feminist policy becomes invisible, inaudible and non-existent and the fate of Palestinian women is left to their God.

Did we forget that in 2014, Ottawa made reducing maternal, newborn and child mortality as the centerpiece of its international development policy? At that time, an international summit called “Saving Every Woman, Every Child Within Arm’s Reach,” attracted specialists and public figures, including then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon; Margaret Chan, then director-general of WHO; and Melinda Gates, co-chair of the then-Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (https: www.canada.ca, April 2014).

But the country quickly forgot its previous commitments to Palestinian women, leaving them to have c-sections without anesthesia and under cellphone lights (https://jezebel.com/). Stories of them taking pills to delay their period for lack of privacy, lack of access to clean water and sanitary products are as common as they are worrisome for their health side effects (“No Privacy No Water Gaza Women Use Period Delaying Pills Amid War”, Oct. 31, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com).

As for their children’s education, the enthusiasm and tremendous support shown by some of our intellectuals and politicians when it came to calling for war against the Taliban to allow girls to attend school is non-existent today, when we learn that 4,000+ children have been killed so far in Gaza by Israeli bombardment and that most of the schools run by UNRWA have become shelters for families who either have lost or are afraid to stay in their homes. Needless to say, Gaza’s children are receiving no education because bombs continue to kill them or be dropped on their heads.

Why such selective enthusiasm and feminism and girls’ rights? Why such hypocrisy in defending our principles? A few weeks ago, Adania Shibli, a Palestinian author who shares her time between Berlin and Jerusalem and was about to be receive the Frankfurt book fair’s LiBeraturpreis 2023 award for her “Minor Detail,” was “shut-off” (“Palestinian Voices Shut Down at Frankfurt Book Fair Say Authors,” Oct. 15, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com). As if Israel and its allies, including Canada, are punishing all Palestinian women for speaking out and raising men who would one day be potentially recruited by Hamas. As if Palestinian women aren’t women. As if Palestinian children do not deserve to live.

Monia Mazigh, PhD, an academic, author, and human rights activist, is an adjunct professor at Carleton University (Ontario). She has published “Hope and Despair: My Struggle to Free My Husband, Maher Arar” (2008) and three novels, “Mirrors and Mirages” (2015), “Hope Has Two Daughters” (2017) and “Farida” (2020), which won the 2021 Ottawa Book Award prize for French-language fiction. She has recently published an essay/memoir “Gendered Islamophobia: My Journey with a Scar(f)” nominated for the Governor General Literary Non-fiction Award.

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By Emin Poljarević

Jan/Feb 2024

More than a month into the genocide in Gaza, many readers now have access to countless narratives and stories from amateur journalists, social media influencers, survivors, refugees, medical staff, UN personnel and news anchors detailing the atrocities and mayhem of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the latter’s unyielding military assault. All of this is supported by thousands of firsthand accounts and statements from the Gazan authorities about the ensuing dreadful collective punishment and suffering of their people. One such witness was Dr. Hammam al-Louh, a medical doctor at Gaza City’s battered, besieged and breached Shifaa Hospital, who was tragically killed at the age of 36 on Nov. 13 while striving to save lives of sick and wounded Gaza residents. 

Representatives from international organizations such as UNWRA (The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), the Red Crescent, Amnesty International, UNICEF, and Doctors Without Borders have provided additional information, insights and commentaries, all corroborating the numerous atrocities and war crimes committed by Israeli forces (www.truthaboutpalestine.com). 

Local and international media outlets such as Al-Jazeera are tirelessly reporting and recording the Gazans’ struggle for survival. Al-Jazeera analysts such as Marwan Bishara repeatedly contextualized the economic and political logic driving the ongoing massacre of innocent civilians by Israel and, by proxy, American war machines.

We can see how millions of morally outraged citizens worldwide demonstrate to push their various governments to stop the unyielding assault and blockade on what Jimmy Carter called the world’s largest “open-air prison.” We might think that these popular cries had some effect on the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) vote on the resolution to call for “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities.” In sum, 120 states voted in favor of it, 14 states (including the U.S.) opposed it and 44 abstained (https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/10/1142847). 

It all makes sense, and yet, at the same time, it doesn’t! It’s a mystery.

It makes no sense to hear how Ursula von der Leyen (president, European Commission) and Anthony Blinken (secretary of state, U.S.), together with other senior Euro-American officials justify, condone and support Israel’s unrestrained blockade, bombardment and assault of the densely populated Gaza Strip. It especially makes no sense to see and hear the different set of standards employed by the same leaders and media outlets in relation to the year-long Russian occupation of eastern Ukraine and the 75-year-long settler colonialism and apartheid in the Palestinian territories (www.btselem.org). Some other leaders, among them Gustavo Petro (president, Colombia) and Richard Boyd Barrett (Irish MP) simply call this apparent double-standard hypocrisy. 

It also makes no sense that Euro-American right- and some left-wing pundits, commentators and mainstream media outlets overwhelmingly view any criticism of Zionism and its political project as antisemitism; or that chants such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” are interpreted as calls for another holocaust; or that the BDS campaign has inherent antisemitic undertones (https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/is-anti-zionism-anti-semitism). These assumptions are as senseless as they are mysterious.

Why mysterious? 

There are numerous plausible and less plausible ways to answer this question. One way is to unpack how economic interests drive the ethnic cleansing and total annihilation of northern Gaza due to the discovery of energy deposits in Gaza’s waters, as posted by Victor Kattan (https://al-shabaka.org/; April 24, 2012); or that, according to Ari Rabinovitch and Nidal Al-Mughrabi (www.reuters.com/; Feb. 3, 2021), there are plans to build a long-distance pipeline close to northern Gaza border. 

Another way is to suggest the Zionist project has entered a new phase that demands driving out the remaining refugees to complete the original 1948 Nakba (The Catastrophe). Yet another way is to consider the Zionist argument of security concerns vis-à-vis Hamas-governed Gaza that require physical incursions to destroy any resistance infrastructure. Or a number of other ways. Or all of the above. 

Answering this question is of lesser importance in comparison to understanding some of this mystery’s key parts, namely, the evident Euro-American powers’ cynicism, moral disregard, double standards and indifference to the Arab and Muslim peoples’ immense suffering. 

One key part of this mystery is to probe the Euro-American supremacist mindset. Consider this: During his Oct. 13, 2022 speech, Josep Borrell (high representative for foreign affairs and security policy) informed the European Diplomatic Academy that “Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works […] Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden. The gardeners should take care of it, but they will not protect the garden by building walls. A nice small garden surrounded by high walls in order to prevent the jungle from coming in is not going to be a solution. Because the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden” (www.eeas.europa.eu; enter 14.10.2022). 

This revealing statement provides a glimpse into a version of Europe’s 21st-century colonial mindset — a mindset that translates into chauvinistic attitudes, policies and geopolitics. Perhaps, only perhaps, can our attempt to understand it explain some of this tangible Euro-American discrimination between conflict victims of European origin and those of Arab (or simply non-European) origin. The high level of Euro-American leaders’ moral outrage at the violence committed against Ukrainian and Israeli civilians versus the same leaders’ justification of civilian deaths on Gaza’s killing fields is astounding. After all, “Israel has the right to defend itself.” On what moral or material basis can anyone defend killing thousands upon thousands of children, women, and innocents? 

Moreover, consider the analogy of Israelis “mowing the lawn” used by some analysts to explain this latest attack, as recounted in Yousef Munayyer’s Oct. 10, 2023, article (www.slate.com). This dehumanizing analogy fits well with Borrell’s analogy of the European gardeners’ mission. In this case, these “gardeners” are Israeli Zionists. The major problem here is that this particular horticultural venture has evolved into what Craig Mokhiber (who resigned as director in the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights), calls “a textbook case of genocide” of Palestinians in Gaza. 

The current Zionist “gardening” mission started long before Oct. 7. It began slowly in 1917 (the Balfour Declaration), picking up pace during the waves of terrorist attacks in the 1920s and 1930s, until 1948, when the Zionists carved out the early borders of a version of Borrell’s “European garden.” Another event happened the same year. On Dec. 9, the UNGA adopted the Convention on Genocide, a term coined by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin just four years earlier. According to the Convention, “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Although this term was coined rather late in human history, it did exist much earlier. 

Some of the earliest calls for genocide can be found in the Old Testament, “Now go [King Saul], attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys” (1 Samuel 15:3). In this context, the reality of this verse’s fictionality is beside the point. The interesting part is that Netanyahu repeated its genocidal message, almost verbatim, in his televised address to the Israelis some 3,000 years later. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant made a similar call to his army — to mercilessly annihilate the “human animals” and “children of darkness” (i.e., the Palestinians). Several Israeli government officials have made similar statements.

At a minimum, such statements are declarations of genocidal intent, as noted by Nicole Narea and Sigal Samuel, in their Nov. 13 article “How to think through allegations of genocide in Gaza” (www.vox.com). And intent is the single most important criteria in legally establishing the case of genocide. This and other statements are at the center of three Palestinian organizations’ legal cases against Israel, submitted to the International Criminal Court on Nov. 8. The Palestinian human rights attorney and academic Noura Erekat is one of the experts involved (https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/10/icc_lawsuit).

It seems that Zionism, as an extension of the “European garden” in historic Palestine, enjoys unconditional support from its Euro-American allies. The ideology has seemingly reached its apex. This is perhaps more evident in relation to the surrounding lands, where the shackled and helpless Arab and Muslim populations watch in horror at how their fellow brothers and sisters are being destroyed in real time. The evident impotence and/or unwillingness of the Arab Muslim leaders to act makes the Zionist project appear even more robust. 

This helplessness and impotence has allowed the Zionist garden’s numerous drudges and its collaborators outside Israel to uproot, mow, cut, and prune the “jungle” and erase the “human animals” outside its walls in order to clear the “wilderness” and presumably steal even more territory from its indigenous populations. Zionists have publicly stated that ultimately and explicitly they want to expand into Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and even Egypt (Sinai). In the end, it seems meaningless to resolve the mystery of Euro-American leadership’s indifference and moral bankruptcy regarding the Palestinians’ right to be human (www.cjpme.org/fs_236/). The only meaningful act is to resist the Israeli apartheid system of oppression and domination, its dehumanizing colonial enterprise, and the continuous Zionist humiliation and annihilation of Palestinians (www.alhaq.org, Report: “Israeli Apartheid: Tool of Zionist Settler Colonialism”).

Emin Poljarević is an associate professor of Islamic studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam.

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By Peter Beinart

Sept/Oct 2023

When officials in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government explain why they’re so eager to weaken Israel’s Supreme Court, they often cite the limitations it places on their ability to punish Palestinians. “If I want to demolish terrorists’ houses, who is in my way?” thundered Likud Knesset member Tali Gottlieb at a March 27th pro-government rally. “Who’s stopping me from revoking the rights of terrorists’ families?” To each question, the crowd replied: “The Supreme Court.” When his turn came at the podium, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir initiated a similar call and response. “When we came to offer the law for the death penalty for terrorists, who stood against it?” “When we submitted a bill to give soldiers immunity, who stood against it?” The crowd screamed: “The Supreme Court.”

When Palestinians explain the current government’s agenda, however, many describe the policies advanced by Gottlieb and Ben-Gvir as part of a larger strategy: mass expulsion. In early March, Palestinian anti-occupation activist Fadi Quran told me he felt “like we are at the cusp of another Nakba”—the term that denotes the expulsion of roughly 750,000 Palestinians at Israel’s birth. Last December, when the pollster Khalil Shikaki asked Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to characterize Israel’s “long run aspiration,” 65% chose “extending the borders of the state of Israel to cover all the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and expelling its Arab citizens” (emphasis mine).

In mainstream American political discourse, such a prospect seems unthinkable. U.S. government officials don’t acknowledge Palestinian fears of another Nakba. They more often treat Palestinians as a people that would be on route to independence if only they avoided “unhelpful” actions—like demanding international pressure on Israel— that leave them “further away from a two-state solution.” But when Palestinians claim that Israel’s long-term goal is not Palestinian statehood but Palestinian expulsion, they aren’t hallucinating. Expulsion is deeply rooted in Zionist history, and the sentiment pervades Israel today, including among politicians and commentators generally viewed as centrists. Israel’s current defense minister, national security advisor, and agriculture minister—members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s center-right Likud party—have all alluded to removing Palestinians from the country. While the pace of Palestinian expulsion has waxed and waned in the 75 years since Israel’s war of independence, there is reason to worry that the radicalism of Israel’s current government, combined with rising violence in the West Bank, could turn the current trickle into a flood.

Another Nakba is possible. By pretending it isn’t, American officials conveniently avoid an uncomfortable but vital question: What would they do to try and stop it?

To understand how mainstream the idea of ethnically cleansing Palestinians is in contemporary Israeli society, it helps to understand how mainstream it has been in Zionist history. The Nakba of 1948 was not an accident forced upon the Zionist movement by Palestinian rejectionism and Arab invasion. It was the answer to a problem that had bedeviled political Zionists since the movement’s birth: how to create a Jewish state in a territory largely populated by Arabs. As early as 1895, Theodor Herzl confided to his diary, “We shall try to spirit the penniless [native] populations across the border by procuring employment for them in the transit countries.” In his influential book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, the Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that in the 1920s and 1930s, as it became clear that Arabs would resist Jewish sovereignty and the British would sooner or later restrict Jewish immigration, “a consensus or near-consensus formed among the Zionist leaders around the idea of transfer as the natural, efficient and even moral solution to the demographic dilemma.” In 1938, David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, declared, “I support compulsory transfer.” The following year his chief rival, revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, concurred that “the Arabs must make room for the Jews in Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs.”

When establishment American Jewish groups blame Arab and Palestinian leaders for having brought the Nakba on themselves by rejecting the United Nations’ 1947 partition proposal, they overlook the fact that because Arabs constituted roughly two-thirds of the population of mandatory Palestine, they would have comprised roughly half of the people inside even the territory allocated for a Jewish state. Ensuring a large Jewish majority required their expulsion—a process that began months before the Arab governments declared war. It is for this reason that even Morris, who unlike some other historians does not believe the Zionist leadership formulated a specific expulsion plan, admits that “Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst.”

This essential logic—a Jewish state should include as much territory and as few Palestinians as possible—did not end with Israel’s creation in 1948. In his book Israel’s Border Wars, Morris cites an Israeli Foreign Ministry estimate that the nascent Jewish state expelled roughly 17,000 Bedouins between 1949 and 1953, either because they were alleged to have attacked Israeli troops or because they were encroaching on land and water coveted by Jews. When Israel conquered the West Bank in 1967, it expelled several hundred thousand Palestinians to Jordan. As Al Quds University’s Munir Nusseibeh has detailed, Israel’s leaders were particularly intent on removing Palestinians from areas they considered strategically or politically significant: East Jerusalem, the Latrun salient (a sliver of land south of the Israeli city of Modi’in where the West Bank protrudes into Israel proper), and the Jordan Valley, which after the war formed Israel’s new border with Jordan. As Ariel Sharon, who commanded Israeli troops in 1967 before entering politics, later acknowledged, “For several years after the Six-Day War, assistance was given to Arabs who wished to emigrate from here.”

But despite these expulsions, Israel still controlled the lives of millions of Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Israel proper. And in the half-century since, prominent Israeli and diaspora Jews have repeatedly suggested that the Jewish state would be safer and more cohesive if they could be induced to leave. Although journalists often associate such calls with right-wing extremists like Rabbi Meir Kahane, many mainstream figures have endorsed the idea as well. As early as 1968, the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson reportedly advised confidants that “Israel should have told the Arabs [in the 1967 war] to leave and go across the border into Jordan.” In 2004, Benny Morris, the same historian who gained fame documenting Israel’s expulsions in 1948, announced that Israel might need to finish the job. “The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb,” he told journalist Ari Shavit. “In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then.” Two years later, Effi Eitam, a former brigadier general who served as minister of national infrastructure and then minister of housing and construction under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, was even more direct: “We’ll have to expel the overwhelming majority of West Bank Arabs from here and remove Israeli Arabs from the political system.” In 2009, Daniel Gordis, one of Israel’s most prominent English-language commentators, suggested in his book Saving Israel that “perhaps some accommodation could be made with the countries bordering Israel (Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and eventually Palestine) to take in Israel’s Arabs.” That same year, the politician Avigdor Lieberman ran for the Knesset on a platform of stripping Israel’s Palestinian citizens of their citizenship unless they pledged loyalty to a Jewish state. Lieberman, who is now widely considered a political moderate for his opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul plans, went on to become foreign and defense minister. These pundits and politicians are not ideological outliers. Their views enjoy widespread public support. In 2017, Shikaki asked Israeli Jews whether “Israeli Arabs and Palestinians in Judea and Samaria should be expelled or transferred from Israel.” Forty percent said yes. In three other polls, which asked similar questions between 2015 and 2016, expulsionist sentiment ranged between 32% and 58%.

Despite this, Israel has in recent decades carried out only smaller expulsions—nothing on the scale of 1948 or 1967. According to the Israeli human rights group HaMoked, between the start of the occupation in 1967 and the Oslo Accords in 1994, Israeli policies that prevented Palestinians who left the West Bank and Gaza Strip from returning forced roughly 9,000 Palestinians per year into permanent exile. Similar policies have continued since Oslo in East Jerusalem, where—according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem—Israel has revoked the residency of roughly 14,000 Palestinians since 1967.

But there are reasons to fear that these numbers could rise dramatically. Last month, Michael Barnett, a professor of international affairs and political science at George Washington University, observed that the United Nations lists a series of “risk factors” for genocide and “lesser” forms of organized violence in a given country. Among these risk factors are serious human rights violations, systematic discrimination against a vulnerable group, widespread attacks on civilians, and the motive and capacity to commit broader atrocities. “Israel ticks all the boxes,” he observed.

One key risk factor, Barnett noted, is “situations of armed conflict.” It is no coincidence that Israel’s two largest expulsions, in 1948 and 1967, occurred during war. Whether in Israel-Palestine, the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, or northern Ethiopia today, war enables ethnic cleansing. It provides an excuse for governments to deport civilians and deny access to journalists and international observers who might document what’s happening on the ground. War also radicalizes populations. As the scholars Ifat Maoz and Roy Eidelson have noted, Israeli Jewish support for expulsion spiked during the First Intifada of the late 1980s, declined after it ended, then rose again with the Second Intifada in the early 2000s.

The chances of a third intifada look greater today than they have in almost two decades. According to the United Nations, Israel killed more Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2022 than in any year since 2006, when the Second Intifada was winding down. This year, the number of Palestinian fatalities is on course to be even higher. After visiting Israel in February, CIA Director William Burns warned that another intifada could break out soon.

Israel has responded brutally to uprisings before. But no Israeli government in recent decades has included so many top officials who have publicly flirted with the idea of mass expulsion. For Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, who oversees civilian administration in the West Bank, Palestinian emigration is essential to solving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In 2017 he laid out what he called a “decisive plan” in which West Bank Palestinians would be offered a choice. Those who agreed to “forgo their national aspirations”—in other words, abandon the demand for either a Palestinian state or citizenship in Israel—would be permitted to stay in the West Bank as stateless non-citizens. Those who maintained such demands would “receive aid to emigrate.”

Although the plan covers only Palestinians in the West Bank, Smotrich has repeatedly suggested that Palestinian citizens of Israel who challenge Jewish supremacy should meet a similar fate. In April 2021, in a tweet addressed to Palestinian Knesset Member Ahmad Tibi, Smotrich declared that “a true Muslim must know that the Land of Israel belongs to the People of Israel, and over time Arabs like you who do not recognize this will not stay here.” That fall he told his Palestinian colleagues in the Knesset that they were “here by mistake—because Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and throw you out in 1948.”

It’s not hard to imagine Smotrich interpreting another Palestinian uprising as evidence that thousands if not millions of Palestinians actively retain “national aspirations,” and must therefore be offered assistance in leaving the country. As opposition leader Benny Gantz acknowledged in February, “Smotrich wants to cause another Palestinian Nakba—for him, escalation is a desirable thing.” It would presumably also be desirable for Ben-Gvir, who last year proposed creating a ministry to “promote immigration” among Palestinians “who want to eliminate the Jewish state.” And like Smotrich, Ben-Gvir does not restrict this vision to Palestinians in the West Bank. During the 2022 campaign, his campaign erected billboards that read “May our enemies be banished” below photos of Knesset members from Palestinian parties.

It would be comforting to believe that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are anomalies whose views enjoy little currency in a government led by members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s ostensibly more moderate Likud Party. But several of the government’s top Likud ministers have signaled their openness to mass expulsion as well. Avi Dichter, Israel’s current Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, is a pillar of the Israeli security establishment. Over the past two decades he has led the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, served as public security minister under centrist prime minister Ehud Olmert and completed a fellowship at Washington’s prestigious Brookings Institution. In 2007, in response to news that Palestinian citizens were boycotting Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations, he warned that, “Whoever cries of the Nakba year after year, shouldn’t be surprised if they actually have a Nakba eventually.”

Among Dichter’s Likud colleagues is Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel’s National Security Advisor. Like Dichter, Hanegbi has worked not only in right-wing coalitions but relatively centrist ones like Sharon’s, which dismantled Israeli settlements in Gaza. Unlike Smotrich, who Biden administration officials have refused to meet, Hanegbi is considered a respectable interlocutor in Washington; he met Secretary of State Antony Blinken last month. But Hanegbi has threatened mass expulsion as well. “This is how a ‘Nakba’ begins. Just like this. Remember ’48. Remember ’67,” he wrote on Facebook after Palestinians murdered three Israeli civilians in the West Bank in 2017. “When you want to stop it all it will already be gone. It will already be after the third ‘Nakba.’” Then there’s Yoav Gallant, who Benjamin Netanyahu recently fired then reinstated as defense minister. “Seventy-four years ago your leaders within the state of Israel dragged you into a war that resulted in a mass exodus from Israel,” he lectured Palestinians in a speech last year. He then warned that if they “cross the red line . . . the price will be high.”

It’s impossible to know how mass expulsion might occur. But one clue lies in the coalition agreements that lay out the current government’s agenda. The agreements call on the government to launch a process of land registration in the West Bank. While that sounds technical, its potential ramifications are immense. Because many West Bank Palestinians possess documents from the Jordanian, British Mandate, or even Ottoman eras — which do not meet Israel’s legal criteria — and because they lack access to the databases that could confirm their ownership, a land registration process would likely result in Israel declaring that many Palestinians do not own the land on which they live. Their land would then become the property of the Israeli state, which could dole it out to settlers. In a joint analysis of the coalition agreements, the progressive Israeli NGOs Yesh Din, Breaking the Silence, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, and Ofek concluded that land registration “is expected to dispossess Palestinians of property rights on a colossal scale.”

Once stripped of their property rights, many Palestinians would become like the villagers of Masafer Yatta and Khan al-Ahmar, who have been declared illegal squatters, their homes slated for demolition. When I asked the Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard how he thought such a process might play out, he suggested that Smotrich and his allies hope to impose enough pressure on Palestinians to convince many of them to leave. “The idea is to put in place coercive measures that would drive people out of the country,” he explained.

How would Israel react if Palestinians instead mounted large-scale resistance? Would it back down or resort to more coercive measures? It’s impossible to know. But there is one final factor that makes mass expulsion more likely: The Israeli government’s belief that it can get away with it. In 2001, Netanyahu boasted, in a secretly recorded conversation, that “America is a thing you can move very easily.” Nothing in subsequent decades has given him reason to reconsider. As prime minister, he has vowed never to remove another settlement, awarded top ministries to crude racists like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and overseen what former US ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer recently called “a pattern of Israel reneging on commitments to the United States,” which he deemed “extraordinary.” Despite all this, America continues to provide Israel essentially unconditional financial and diplomatic support. Presidents of both parties refuse to enforce laws barring US aid from being used to violate human rights, and relentlessly obstruct efforts to investigate and condemn Israeli abuses in international forums.

Nothing in Joe Biden’s record suggests he will change this. As a presidential candidate, he called imposing human rights conditions on aid to Israel “absolutely outrageous.” As recently as March 20th, just weeks after the pogrom against Palestinians in the West Bank town of Huwara, his spokesperson answered a question about conditioning aid by reiterating the administration’s “ironclad support for Israel’s security.” (Buttressing Biden’s stance are establishment American Jewish organizations like the Jewish Federations of North America, which recently called its support for Israel “unconditional and eternal.”) Given America’s record over the last 30 years, there’s little reason to believe there is anything Israel could do to Palestinians that would lead establishment Democrats, let alone Republicans, to oppose US aid to Israel, endorse resolutions against it at the United Nations, or support prosecuting its officials at the International Criminal Court.

In July 2015, several weeks after Donald Trump announced that he was running for president, then-Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison warned that Trump might win. “Anybody from the Democratic side of the fence who is terrified of the possibility of President Trump,” Ellison declared on ABC’s Sunday talk show, This Week, “better vote, better get active, better get involved, because this man has got some momentum.” The other panelists burst out laughing. “I know you don’t believe that,” chided host George Stephanopoulos. But Ellison—the show’s only Black guest—wasn’t joking. “Stranger things have happened,” he insisted.

When Ellison warned his fellow panelists that Americans who wanted to stop Trump needed to “get active,” he was drawing a connection between political imagination and political responsibility. Assuming that another Nakba is impossible allows U.S. officials to avoid asking themselves what they would do to try to prevent it. Which is convenient, because the answer to that question, based on current evidence, is: Not much at all.

Peter Beinart is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He’s also editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and author of the Beinart Notebook on Substack. This article was originally published in Jewish Currents and is being republished here with permission.

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