How Israel Justifies Its Occupation
The Rhetoric of Empire
ESSAY
By Amal Alhomsi
“The very process by which one culture subordinates another begins in the act of naming and leaving unnamed”
- David Spurr (1).
“The most refined blood-shedders have almost all been the
most civilized.”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky.
This is a manual on how to identify a colonizer, as it has become increasingly difficult for Westerners to recognize a genocide when they see one. Consider, for example, this headline from CTV Montreal which states, “70 killed in Israel, 198 dead in Gaza” (2). The headline seems neutral, but this essay aims to reveal how language is the first tool utilized to normalize the genocide of a people. A careful reading of the headline will leave you with the question: why are Israelis “killed” and Palestinians “dead?” Do Palestinians, like mayflies, drop to the ground on their own after a while? The headline, with brilliant subtlety, enforces a narrative of perception, in which some deaths are deliberately unjust – others merely circumstantial.
The rhetoric of empire refers to the language a colonizing power uses to describe and justify its subjugation of other people. It is the language Europeans used when they “discovered” the ‘New World’ and arrived in Africa, the language which Americans used when they invaded Iraq, and, as shall be shown, it is the very same language that Israel uses to justify its occupation of Palestine. A comparative reading of the language of oppression helps us understand how different occupations express themselves in similar terms. There is no better way to understand a people than learning their language, and there is no better way to argue against colonialism than understanding the language of colonizers. The rhetoric of empire is marked by three distinct, sequential arguments:
1- The Argument of Destiny (That one group of people were distended by some divine power or due to a special ability in them to inherit or take over a land. Or, in modern terms, that a people can take care of a land more adequately than its indigenous population).
2- The Argument of Absence (That the land in question is barely inhabited by an indigenous population, or is empty).
3- The Argument of Civilization (That if an indigenous population was to exist, they exist in primitive conditions and are often compared to animals (especially ‘beasts of burdens’ or insects) which makes their death not a question of morality but a question of necessity).
It is important to note that the rhetoric of empire is never used to justify to the victim his own death, but rather to justify to the murderer his own killing, because that is the only way the oppressor can carry out gruesome acts of violence without having to question his own humanity. The arguments are also almost always used in the order mentioned above. First: The occupier is urged by a God or some righteous sense of obligation to go and “take care of a land.” The word ‘colonize’ shares with ‘culture’ its Latin root Colere: to cultivate, to inhabit, to take care of a place (3). In overtaking an inhabited land, occupiers perceive a pre-ordained right to resources, space and their organization, such that any crimes committed to fulfill this right are part of a divine mission to bring peace/democracy/abundance to a place unjustly abandoned. Second: The colonizers, rejected by the indigenous populations, fall into a state of denial, by conflating—to themselves and the world—the ability to subvert a land with the refusal to acknowledge the precedent claim of its inhabitants. For example, the Judeo-Christian notion that man was created “to toil the earth” convinced many of the early settlers of America that unfarmed land was no-man’s-land. Thirdly: Naturally, the colonizer discovers that the land is in fact populated by thousands, if not millions of indigenous groups, and is therefore met with an opposition. To deal with this opposition, the colonizer spreads propaganda that the indigenous groups are uncivilized/animals/savages/pests, and are therefore disposable. The colonizer dehumanizes his opponent to maintain his own humanity, because if he, even for a second, were to consider his victims to be people with dreams and lives and relations, how can he justify to his conscience that of which his hands are guilty?
Here is the Rhetoric of Empire in depth:
The Argument of Destiny and “The White Man’s Burden”
“Take up the White Man's burden- Send forth the best ye breed-
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild-
Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.”
- Rudyard Kipling
The painting above—John Gast’s Manifest Destiny—captured the spirit of the early settlers of America. “Manifest Destiny,” a phrase coined in 1845, “is the idea that the United States is destined—by God, its advocates believed—to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent.” (4). The phrase originated from a New York Herald article by John L. O'Sullivan who wrote: “It was the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” (5). The idea of Manifest Destiny, however, dates back to a much earlier time. In Christopher Columbus’s wildly ignored book, The Book of Prophecies, Columbus contextualizes his journey in biblical verses. He writes, “For the execution of the journey to the Indies I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps. It is simply the fulfillment of what Isaiah had prophesied” (6). Columbus understood his colonial ventures as a mission preordained from the time of Christ. He even understood his own name as a nomenclature for Saint Christopher, a giant Saint who was believed to carry Christ across a deep river; so was Columbus carrying Christianity across deep oceans. Similarly, the Israeli colonial enterprise views its entire existence as a fulfillment of a prophecy. When speaking of ‘The Promised Land,’ one must ask, promised by whom? Aish, a popular Jewish website, after being asked about the theft of Palestinian homes by Israeli forces, replied, “The Jewish people are not stealing anything. They were granted the Land of Israel by God, as is stated in Genesis 15:7 and 21:12.” The website continues, “In God's eyes the deal was considered set in stone, which is why He said “I have given this land” in the past tense, as if the thing were already done and impossible to undo” (7). The Palestinians' fate, just like the American Natives, was sealed thousands of years ago by a gospel in whom they don’t believe. In the painting of Manifest Destiny, the composition of light is purposeful; the settler, accompanied by Destiny herself, is rising with the sun, erasing darkness as he walks with the light, while the native, along with the bisons, bears, and beasts of burden, is in the shadows, at the margins, crouching in fear of the dawning light. Similarly, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently tweeted, “This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle” (8). When God himself promises you a land, those who inhabit it become creatures of darkness, savages without any right to exist in the land. The Minister of National Security of Israel stated, “My right, my wife's, my children's, to roam the roads of Judea and Samaria are more important than the right of movement of the Arabs” (9). The Israeli right is a God-given one, and those who go against it, as Israeli defense minister Avigdor Lieberman encouraged, “Those who are against us, there’s nothing to be done - we need to pick up an axe and cut off his head” (10). John Quincy Adams, the 6th U.S. President, echoed the sentiments of his age in a letter to his father, “The whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs” (11). To early Americans, diversity was out of the question. The land belonged to the people of God only, and natives were seen as invaders in their own homeland. Such notions were firmly believed and practiced upon. In the above-quoted poem by the novelist Rudyard Kipling, the verses urge “white men” to go into other people’s lands to “veil the threat of terror” and “call too loud on Freedom.”These words ring a bell of President Bush’s more neoteric rhetoric of destruction during the Iraq war: “To all the men and women of the United States Armed Forces now in the Middle East, the peace of a troubled world and the hopes of an oppressed people now depend on you” (12). To both Kipling and Bush, the White Man’s Burden is to give freedom to a people who do not know how to free themselves, and save people from a terror they themselves do not know how to avoid. In doing so, the “White Man” becomes both the oppressor and terrorizer of those people, a thing he will never admit or precieve. According to the State of Israel— its recent firing of missiles in Gaza was a sober tactic of defense, as a means to protect Gazans from their own “terrorist groups.” Such logic is as old as Kipling’s poem, as verse 17 paradoxically claims that “the White Man's burden” is “The savage wars of peace.” When white men wage war, their objective is, ostensibly, always peace. Israel’s policy flies in the face of its own objective, calling its war on Lebanon, “the War for the Peace of Galilee,” a statement as confusing as calling a McDonald’s meal “an Unhealthy Burger for the Wellness of your Body.” But when God promises you a land, the act of killing the people of that land becomes a necessary justice, the act of stealing the land becomes a desired deed, and the act of destroying the land becomes a means of building it. That is why Abba Eban, the former Education Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, affirmed that “Israeli self-determination should take moral and historical precedence over Palestinian self-determination” (13). Palestinians are marginal, second-class citizens with no rights to equality because they were born on a land that God promised to someone else. However, a lot of Israelis would actually disagree with the statement, because they do not believe Palestianians exist in the first place. As Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich declared in Paris: There is “no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as the Palestinian people.” (14).
*If there is a confusion to why Israel and “White Man” are synonymous, please read the articles here, here, and here.
The Argument of Absence and Terra Nullius
In the 1400s, when a Portuguese captain named Diogo Cão landed on the shores of the Congo, the first thing he did, before even asking where he was, was to erect a limestone pillar topped with an iron cross and declare: “In the year 6681 of the World and in that of 1482 since the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, the most serene, the most excellent and potent prince, King Joâo II of Portugal did order this land to be discovered” (15). The land which Cão discovered was inhabited by millions of indigenous people, 10 million of whom would be killed under the brutal colonial rule of King Leopold II of Belgium. To Cão, of course, the people whom he encountered were not people at all; so the land he ‘discovered’ was completely uninhabited. Few decades after Cão, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley arrived on the same shore, to the same people, and had the exact same thought: “Stanley saw Africa as essentially empty” and called it an “unpeopled country.” He wrote in his journals, “What a settlement one could have in this valley! See, it is broad enough to support a large population. Fancy a church spire rising where that tamarind rears its dark crown of foliage, and think how well a score or two of pretty cottages would look instead of those thorn clumps and gum trees!” (16). The mentality of ‘vacant land’ stems from the colonial law of Terra Nullius, meaning ‘territory without an owner.’ Terra Nullius was used throughout the world by colonizing powers. The United Kingdom, for example, relied on this principle to claim possession of the Australian continent. It was deemed that, prior to the arrival of Europeans, Australia was “a tract of territory practically unoccupied, without settled inhabitants or settled law” (as the Privy Council put it in 1889) (17). Similarly, the earliest slogan of Israeli settlers was “A Land Without People, for A People Without a Land.” When Israeli settlers arrived in ships to the shores of Palestine, they believed that the land which Britain had promised them in the Balfour Declaration was vacant, uninhabited, or, as Stanley puts it, “unpeopled country.” The trouble, however, is that a majority of Israelis still hold this belief, despite the real and tangible presence of a Palestinian population. Golda Meir, Israel’s former prime minister of the Labor Party, told the London Sunday Times in June 1969 that “There were no such thing as Palestinians.” She clarified that “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist” (18). In 1984, American “journalist” Joan Peters published the book, From Time Immemorial, which argued “that Palestinians had, individually and en masse, fabricated their genealogies.” Peters claimed that “there is a ‘profusion of evidence’ that Palestine was ‘uninhabited’ on the eve of modern colonization,” and that the Palestinians who exist in Palestine arrived only after the Israeli immigrants (19). But the Rhetoric of Empire teaches that most colonialist theories are hardly original. In 1866, W. C. Holden pleaded the same argument about the entirety of South Africa, claiming in his book The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races that the Bantu tribes had entered South Africa at roughly the same time as the Europeans and that South Africa had mostly been an ‘empty land.’ To modern readers, the notion of an empty South Africa is laughable, if not insane. Why can we not say the same about Israel’s rhetoric? Peters’ book, despite its specious claims, was showered with cosmopolitan praise. Award-winning writer Walter Reich in the Atlantic review celebrated Peters’ book as “powerful”, “original”, and an “important human story.” Martin Peretz, assistant professor at Harvard University, affirmed that “there wasn’t a single factual error in the book.” Timothy Foote in the Washington Post declared the book as “a remarkable document.” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman declared the book as a “historical event in itself.” Pulitzer Prize and Nobel laureate winner Saul Bellow rejoiced that “Millions of people the world over, smothered by false history and propaganda, would be grateful for this clear account” (20). And so on. The chorus of praise came from every corner and every journal, until it was later discovered that the book “is among the most spectacular frauds ever published on the Arab-Israeli conflict.” And when critic Norman Finkelstein caught the scam and pointed out Peters fabrication of resources and scholarship, “Not a single national newspaper or columnist contacted found newsworthy that a best-selling, effusively praised study of the Middle East conflict was a threadbare hoax” (21). In fact, the current Israeli prime minister still holds to Peters’ claims by remarking, “Many of the Arabs immigrated into the land in response to the job opportunities and the better life afforded by the growing economy the Jews had created.” According to Israel’s narrative of territorial cultivation, it is no shock that its prime minister would hold such views. The shock, however, stems from the Western world’s collective, “intellectual” praise of a regressive colonial idea. How is it that a people’s lives who exist as flesh and bones can be argued as a fabrication and be applauded? Evenmore, the applause is not that of conspiracy theorists and charlatans, but from Harvard professors, prestigious historians, authoritative academics, and award winning authors. Imagine how scandalous it would be if someone as well regarded as a Nobel laureate winner was to suggest that a certain indigenous group never existed? Well, there is no need to imagine. Elie Wiesel was among the first to praise Peters’ book, yet he still won his Nobel prize for “speaking out against violence, repression, and racism.” When Wiesel was made aware of Peters’ scandal, he chose silence, a thing he discourages in his book Against Silence. On the other hand, when historian Barbara Tuchman was made aware of the sham, she ascribed the criticism of the book to a “growing anti-semitism.” A strange remark since Arabs are also semitic, and insisting that they do not exist is at the heart of anti-semitism. In 1985, From Time Immemorial was awarded the prestigious National Jewish Book Award. In all this controversy, no one thought of asking Palestinians the simple question “do you exist?,” as any kind of answer obviates the purpose of the question itself. The Rhetoric of Empire negates not only the existence of the oppressed, but also their opportunity to reclaim their voice. From old colonial powers to modern ‘democracies’, the subaltern was never included in the debate of his own existence.
The Argument of Civilization: Why Not All Humans are Human
When all attempts fail to erase the voices of a people, it becomes necessary to dehumanize their voices into animal noises. In 1539, philosopher Francisco di Vitoria argued that the indigenous populations of the Americas, due to their real presence in the continent, had both sovereignty and private ownership over their lands. Their killing, therefore, was a moral conundrum that the philosopher had to escape. He concluded that the Spanish still maintained a right to rule indigenous Americans because the latter “[was] unsuited to setting up or administering a commonwealth both legitimate and ordered in human and civil terms” (22). The argument of Civilizing the ‘uncivil’ had always been used as a justification for the crimes of Europe. Winston Churchill unapologetically remarked: “I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place” (23). In such language can Netanyahu’s designation of the Arabs as “children of darkness” with a “law of the jungle” be detected, or in Ben Shapiro’s tweet that “Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage” (24). The same Arabs who built The Alhambra palace, The Dome of The Rock, and inspired both Paris’s Notre-Dame and London’s Big Ben (25). Nonetheless, the achievements of the oppressed are irrelevant against the fanaticism of the oppressor. In 1838, for example, The Graham's Town Journal argued that the indigenous Xhosa population of South Africa had been “the usurpers of the whole of the territory between the Kye and the Fish River” and that the British had more of a right to the land than a people who “had gained a footing in it by treachery and violence” (26). How a native group as old as their neighboring trees can be usurpers of their own land is a logical impossibility only colonizers are able to mentally afford. After the late 1940s Israeli massacres in Palestine, Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, made the outrageous claim that “The Arabs abandoned cities with great ease after the first defeat… Indeed, it was revealed with overwhelming clarity which people is bound with strong bonds to this land” (27). In Gurion’s imagination, if a people cared about a land, they would not be terrorized into leaving it— a thought akin to Hitler’s remark after his Russian invasion, “The Russians have not that love of homeland which is characteristic of the German peasant… One must realize that they are nomadic. The wanderlust is inherent in them” (28). The Paradox of Israel is that it emerged as a push against Nazi ideology only for it to become a Nazi-like ideology. Israelis, fearful of being subjected to another Holocaust, started committing one themselves. Hans Kohn, an eminent authority on modern nationalism, after detecting German-like ideologies in Zionism, observes, “According to the German theory, people of common descent… should form one common state. Pan-Germanism was based on the idea that all persons who were of German race, blood or descent, wherever they lived or to whatever state they belonged, owed their primary loyalty to Germany and should become citizens of the German state, their true homeland. They, and even their fathers and forefathers, might have grown up under ‘foreign’ skies or in ‘alien’ environment, but their fundamental inner reality remained German” (29). If one were to reread Kohn’s quote by replacing the word Israel with Germany, a simple summary of Zionism would be revealed. The bizarre idea of Israel’s Birthright was a result of this rhetoric. Birthright allows Jewish people, whether born in Manhattan or Montreal or Kuala Lumpur to get a free trip to Palestine and have the right to settle there and have a home, a home that once belonged to a Palestinian family.
How could this be acceptable? Such can be answered with a narratively established understanding of injustice; How did the world allow the Jewish Holocaust to happen? The Atlantic Slave Trade? Hiroshima? The Congolese massacres? When those being killed are not humans, the killing becomes justified. Palestinian author Hala Alyan remarks that “A slaughter isn’t a slaughter if those being slaughtered are at fault, if they’ve been quietly and effectively dehumanized — in the media, through policy — for years. If nobody is a civilian, nobody can be a victim” (30). When Israel launched its recent attack on Gaza, Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly” (31). The dehumanization of the oppressed is the most telling characteristic of the Rhetoric of Empire. Afro-Caribbean philosopher Frantz Fanon noted that “When the colonists speak of the colonized he uses Zoological terms,” and that in colonial discourse “The native is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we say it, the enemy of values” (32). Cockroaches, snakes, monkeys, and devils; turning the oppressed into animals is one of the oldest tricks in the book of colonization, as it makes their subjugation more justifiable. This process of ‘animalization’ is prominent in European literature. The Count de Buffon, a French naturalist, noted that Indians were cold and weak creatures in whom no activity of the soul could be observed. In fact, most of the early “fathers” of Western thought were in unanimous agreement on this point. Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano writes, “Voltaire's Latin America was inhabited by Indians who were lazy and stupid, pigs with navels on their backs, and bold and cowardly lions. Bacon, De Maistre, Montesquieu, Hume, and Bodin declined to recognize the “degraded man” of the new world as fellow humans. Hagel spoke of Latin America's physical and spiritual impotence and said the Indians died when Europe merely breathed on them… In the 17th century father Gregorio Garcia detected semitic blood in the Indians because, like the Jews, “they are lazy, they do not believe in the miracles of Jesus Christ, and they are ungrateful to the Spaniards for all the good that they have done them” (33). Ernst Haeckel, the celebrated father of Zoology, was convinced that “non-Europeans are physiologically nearer to the mammals - apes and dogs - than to the Civilized Europeans. We must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives” (34). So the world today, as it did before with Africa and the Americas, assigns a different value to the lives of Palestinians. Their deaths are sponsored by Canada, the U.S., Australia, and even India!
When I was a child, it beguiled me how the world stood by as the Holocaust was taking place, today I know better. Germany and the Western World regarded Jews in the same light they view Palestinians today. Even Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist and was on the American Government’s watch list until 2008, 15 years after he received his Nobel Peace Prize. In the logic of the colonizer, for the oppressed to resist their oppression is an act of violence and terror. The only right the oppressed have is to die in the name of the “civilization” and “democracy” offered to them. That is why Israel’s finance minister Avigdor Lieberman, with a Nazi-like tone, addressed the Palestinians as a “kind of animals [who] must be dealt with unequivocally, and a death sentence must be passed” (35).
In all honesty, I find all the comparisons above to be unnecessary. I never understood why, as Arabs, there is always a need for us to liken our suffering to a tragedy that Europeans already are familiar with? “Why must Arabs audition for sympathy?” Alyan writes, “We are up at night, combing through the flickering light of our phones, trying to find the metaphor, the clip, the photograph to prove a child is a child. It is an unbearable task. We ask: Will this be the image that finally does it? This half-child on a rooftop? This video, reposted by Al Jazeera, of an inconsolable girl appearing to recognize her mother’s body among the dead, screaming out, “It’s her, it’s her. I swear it’s her. I know her from her hair”? (36).
The Palestinian question is often ignored because it is a “complex conflict.” The truth is, it is neither complex nor a conflict. It is simply the lauded systematic slaughter of one group of people by another. If you are still unsure whether what is happening in Palestine is a genocide, perhaps the applause you surround yourself with is deafening you from the truth. If you want to understand Israel and Palestine, there is no better way than to understand the language in which they use. Take the Rhetoric of Empire shown above and apply it on both sides for you to make your own opinion.
The CTV Montreal headline, if read differently, can perhaps be seen as a testimony to the spirit of the oppressed. Palestinians are not killed precisely because they cannot be killed. Oppressors maintain their individuality; they are a mother and a child and a grandfather, while the oppressed are grouped in collateral numbers, as “gangs” and “wild animals” and “terrorists.” Therefore, to kill the oppressed one must eradicate land, animals, history, justice, hope, and, of course, a large number of humans. A task that is as impossible as trying to shake light with a broom. And so as long as one Palestinian remains, Palestine will remain. Let us, not like our history proves, care about the dying before they die off rather than build museums for them after it is too late.
SOURCES:
1- David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Duke University Press Books, 1993).
2- https://twitter.com/ctvottawa/status/1710830048574349687
3- Spurr.
4- “Manifest Destiny - Definition, Facts & Significance,” HISTORY, November 15, 2019, https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/manifest-destiny.
5- An American Journalist Explains ‘Manifest Destiny’ · SHEC: Resources for Teachers,” accessed October 29, 2023, https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1939.
6- Christopher Columbus, Christopher Columbus’s Book of Prophecies: Reproduction of the Original Manuscript With English Translation, trans. Kay Brigham (Tself, 1991).
7- Tzvi, “Jewish Claim to the Land,” Aish.Com (blog), August 28, 2011, https://aish.com/jewish-claim-to-the-land/
8- “How Has the Narrative Shifted since the Gaza Hospital Explosion?,” accessed October 29, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/18/what-is-israels-narrative-on-the-gaza-hospital-explosion.
9- “US Condemns Israeli Minister Ben Gvir’s ‘inflammatory’ Palestinian Comments,” BBC News, August 25, 2023, sec. Middle East, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-66614459.
10- “Lieberman Says Israel Should Execute Arabs Who Carry out Deadly Attacks,” Reuters, March 11, 2015, sec. Emerging Markets, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-election-lieberman-idUSKBN0M71PN20150311.
11- admin, “The Impact of Manifest Destiny on American Foreign Policy,” International Journal of Liberal Arts And Social Science (blog), May 28, 2019, https://ijlass.org/the-impact-of-manifest-destiny-on-american-foreign-policy/.
12- “President Bush Addresses the Nation,” accessed October 29, 2023, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/iraq/news/20030319-17.html.
13- Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict, 2 edition (London: Verso, 2003).
14- Toi Staff, “Smotrich Says There’s No Palestinian People, Declares His Family ‘Real Palestinians,’” accessed October 29, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/far-right-lawmaker-bezalel-smotrich-declares-himself-his-family-real-palestinians/.
15- “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa: Hochschild, Adam: 9780618001903: Books - Amazon.Ca,” accessed October 29, 2023, https://www.amazon.ca/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905.
16- Ibid.
17- “Terra Nullius,” accessed October 29, 2023, https://homepages.gac.edu/~lwren/AmericanIdentititesArt%20folder/AmericanIdentititesArt/Terra%20Nullius.html.
18- “The Mixed Legacy of Golda Meir, Israel’s First Female PM | Conflict | Al Jazeera,” accessed October 29, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/3/18/the-mixed-legacy-of-golda-meir-israels-first-female-pm.
19- Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict.
20- Ibid.
21- Ibid.
22- Vollerthun, Ursula, and James L. Richardson. “Francisco De Vitoria.” Chapter. In The Idea of International Society: Erasmus, Vitoria, Gentili and Grotius, 70–105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. doi:10.1017/9781108264945.006.
23- “The Churchill You Didn’t Know,” The Guardian, November 28, 2002, sec. Global, https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2002/nov/28/features11.g21.
24- Dan MacGuill, “Did Ben Shapiro Tweet ‘Settlements Rock’ and ‘Arabs Like To Bomb Crap’?,” Snopes, May 16, 2021, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ben-shapiro-settlements-rock/.
25- Oliver Wainwright, “Looted Landmarks: How Notre-Dame, Big Ben and St Mark’s Were Stolen from the East,” The Guardian, August 13, 2020, sec. Art and design, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/aug/13/looted-landmarks-notre-dame-big-ben-st-marks-east-stealing-from-the-saracens.
26- “The Empty Land Myth | South African History Online,” accessed November 5, 2023, https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/empty-land-myth.
27- Finkelstein.
28- Ibid.
29- Ibid
30- Hala Alyan, “Opinion | The Palestine Double Standard,” The New York Times, October 25, 2023, sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/opinion/palestine-war-empathy.html.
31- Emanuel Fabian, “Defense Minister Announces ‘Complete Siege’ of Gaza: No Power, Food or Fuel,” accessed November 5, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-minister-announces-complete-siege-of-gaza-no-power-food-or-fuel/.
32- Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha, and Jean-Paul Sartre, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox, Reprint edition (New York: Grove Press, 2005).
33- Eduardo Galeano and Isabel Allende, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, Anniversary edition (Monthly Review Press, 1997).
34- David Bainbridge, How Zoologists Organize Things: The Art of Classification (Frances Lincoln, 2020).
35- “Lieberman Says Israel Should Execute Arabs Who Carry out Deadly Attacks.”
36- Alyan.