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Seventy-five years too long: today’s genocide in Palestine is the sole possible outcome of an expansionist state based on ethnic dispossession

Thomas Suárez is a London-based historical researcher as well as a professional Juilliard-trained violinist and composer. A former West Bank resident, his books include three on the history of cartography, and four on Palestine, most recently Palestine Hijacked – how Zionism forged an apartheid state from river to sea.


Event details

The Israeli state’s devotion to apartheid and ethnic cleansing could have led to no possible outcome other than the horror unfolding river to sea. Yet Israel’s violence against the region’s non-Jews is merely a means to a greater goal: the final excising of Palestinians from their own land to fulfill the Zionist dream of a racially “pure” Jewish [sic] state from the river to the sea. This goal — which easily fits the UN definition of genocide — can only be realised through violence against civilians — that is, through terrorism. Thus there is no “cycle of violence” in Israel-Palestine. Israel’s violence is linear: it continues no matter what the Palestinians do or don’t do, whereas Palestinian violence is a reaction to this linear terror. Nor is ethnic supremacy a condition of the Israeli state that can be corrected with tweaks to its laws; it is the very basis of the state. A just peace requires that Israel be replaced with an entirely new state — a secular, democratic state of all its people. Yet none of this matters unless we can crack Israel’s extraordinary impunity. I will argue that it achieves this primarily through its hijacking of Jewish identity, making Jews, as Jews (not as individuals) the doers of its crimes. This is the engine behind the antisemitism smear with which it silences critics, a Trojan horse hidden within the term “the Jewish state”. I will also address Israel’s and Zionism’s claim of existing for the benefit of Jews, and use the relevant historical record to shed light on the “narrative” upon which state and ideology rely.

Location:

Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies