p1 - “we do not become activists; we simply forget that we are.”

p2 - “Our minds, our souls, have slowly been corrupted by materialistic nothingness that has been created for us”

p3 - “The written word, in my opinion, is therefore more effective and long lasting than the spoken one as a tool for change.”

p4 - “The past, as far as Palestine and Palestininians are concerned, is 1948, the Nakba, and the ethnic cleansing of two-thirds of the population … to make space for a new state, Israel.”

p5 - “What is actually meant, practically, by a ‘free Palestine’?”

p6 - “The Palestine question is emblematic of what is wrong with the world.”

p9 - “the past … understanding Zionism”

p10 - “The first paradox is the gap between the dramatic change in world public opinion on the issue in Palestine on the one hand, and the continued support from the political and economic elites in the West for the Jewish state on the other”

p16 - the “two-state solution” leans heavily toward favoring Israel.

p22 - Israeli claim of “complexity” comes from there struggle to continue to perform genocide in order to acquire the locations they desire while trying to remain favorable in public opinion.

p22 - part of the problem is that the West needs to be educated and more open to realizing that this is colonialism. But it’s hard for the West to realize this because these are the exact Western founding principles and are being pushed even more with the current administration.

p24 - Western understanding is going to come from educating the youth to realize that this is not okay. But this is part of the cycle. Youth are born so naive and “good” and as they mature and realize their insecurities, they “latch on” to these strong ideals that they may not even truly believe, but they haven’t even sat there and thought enough about whether or not these are their beliefs or just echoing the beliefs of the crowd.

I see this frequently in my conservative small town. People follow the majority because it’s easy. It’s easy to fit in and get encouragement. People become remarkably surprised when you tell them you aren’t aligned on values. Especially when you know that person respects you. You can see them really start to question themselves.

Admittedly, revolt becomes complex when you care about money because Israel is the clear economic choice. It’s a question of money versus human lives and empathy is really what the situation boils down to.

p26 - “leadership vacuum”

p27 - “The desire to turn the mixed ethnic Palestine into a pure ethnic space was and is at the heart of the conflict.”

p28 - “The found that if you cannot expel someone, the second-best option is not to allow him or her to move”

p37 - “This charade is still marketed successfully in the West”

p40 - “Deep racist layers like this are not removed easily and definitely do not disappear by themselves”

p40 - “counter education is a very long process”

p41 - “the West who are still providing Israel with immunity for its actions and policies.”

p49 - “More and more, people are asking the Palestinians to move on — to forget about the past … the past becomes an obstacle in the eyes of the so-called mediators, but the past is everything in the eyes of the occupied and the oppressed people.”

p56 - “Zionism as a settler-colonial movement. … Israel has had the problem that it’s a twentieth-century version of a seventeenth- through nineteenth-century colonialism.”

p59 - “all state formation is a process of extreme violence.”

p59 - “The idea of a Jewish [religious] state is an anomaly. … in the sixties … A group of Israelis wanted to have their papers identify them as Israelis, not as Jews. It went all the way to the high court, which rejected it. … It reflects this anomalous concept of a Jewish state, which has no counterpart in the contemporary international political system.”

p60 - “you are allowed to demonstrate against Israeli policies, but if you demonstrate against Israel, you demonstrate against the Jewish state, and therefore you demonstrate against Judaism.”

p61 - “When Netanyahu says, ‘You have to recognize us as a Jewish state,’ he is saying: ‘You have to recognize us as something that does not exist in the modern world.’”

p61 - “Christian Zionism is a very significant force. It goes back way before Jewish Zionism, It was an elite phenomenon. Lord Balfour, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman read the Bible every morning. It says there, ‘God promised the land to the Jews.’ … So my guess is that it would have happened without the Holocaust.”

p62 - “Truman is very much honored because he was trying to force the British to send Jews to Palestine. Nobody asks why Truman did not say, ‘Okay, let’s take a hundred thousand Jews here.’”

p63 - “Jews to settle in Palestine was motivated also by British, and Western, Islamaphobia.”

p66 - “There is a book in 1935 (by Joachim Prinz, Wir Juden). This is a humanist Zionist who said that Jews should recognize that they should be sympathetic to the Nazis because they have the same kind of ideology we do. Blood and land and so on.”

p67 - “unwind history is very difficult”

p67 - “There should not be any line there.”

p67 - “When they talk about a two-state solution, I do not think that this should be regarded as the end.”

p72 - “Israel prefers expansion over security. … they are going to be able to survive only as long as the US supports them. … By now, their sole support, virtually, is the US.”

p72 - “It’s inherent with a policy of expansion, disregard of international opinion, violations of international law, you can get away with it as long as you have the biggest thug on the block protecting you.”

p82 - “I think the South African ant-apartheid movement was a pretty good model. … as long as they had US support they did not care, like Israel right now.”

p83 - “That meant that a crucial part of activism had to be directed against the USA, and secondly Great Britian.”

p83 - “The USA supports Israel not out of benevolence, but because it’s useful for US policies.”

p86 - “mass popular activism”

p108 - “Israel and the United States do not want one state and will never accept it. … Two states is a rotten solution, but at least it has the merit of having overwhelming international support that has been blocked by the United States for thirty-five years now”

p110 - “if some kind of two-state settlement … is established, my guess is that the borders are going to erode, because if you know the country at all, there is no way to draw a line”

p112 - “I don’t think we can push the South Africa analogy too far because at this point there are too many differences like the huge internal Black activism inside South Africa, no possible counterpart to that in Israel, the military defeat of South Africa by Cuba, there is nothing like that…but some things are similar like US policy.”

p116 - “South Africa had to incorporate the Black population, they had no choice … it was a vast majority of the population and secondly, it was their workforce. They could not say, okay we will let you go rot somewhere and then they would disappear, but Israel can, that is the Greater Israel option.”

p121 - The internet is helping expose Israel to itself. “it is more difficult for the Israelis now to rely just on indoctrination although they are doing a good job.”

p121 - “the amount of cognitive dissonance as well when you’ve believed in something so strongly for all of your life, even though the facts show after a while that you are wrong, it is so hard to accept that you were wrong for, let’s say, thirty or forty years of your life.”

p125 - “a movement made by people who do not believe in God but God nonetheless promised them Palestine.“o

p127 - “you need to understand how certain phrases are being used like peace process … these languages are means of manipulating the knowledge”

p131 - ==“Universities are not the best place to teach people about the realities of life or can change their point of view. Universities are sites for careers now, not for knowledge and education."==

p134 - “the two-state solution has a logical ring to it. It’s a very Western idea… [The idea of partition] became a kind of religion to the extent that you do not question it anymore. … Five minutes on the ground shows you that one state is already there.”

p151 - when the kids start to die

p153 - “The only chance for a successful struggle against Zionism in Palestine is the one based on a human and civil rights agenda.”

p154 - “It does not really matter what the religious identity is of the people who commit the atrocities or in the name of which religion they purport to speak. Whether they call themselves jihadists, Judaists, or Zionists, they should be treated in the same way.”

p171 - “condemned all the people who lived in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to life imprisonment in the biggest ever human mega-prision witnessed in modern times.”

p193 - Noam Chomsky - “Many of the world’s problems are so intractable that it’s hard to think of ways even to take steps toward mitigating them. The Israel-Palestine conflict is not one of these.”

p195 - Hamas observes the ceasefire, as Israel officially recognizes, until some Israeli escalation elicits a Hamas response, which leads to another exercise of ‘mowing the lawn,’ in Israeli parlance, each episode more fierce and destructive than the last.”

It feels like siblings trying to instigate a situation, then back off and say, “I didn’t do anything to provoke this!”

p197 - “the November 2005 agreement lasted for a few weeks. In January 2006, a very important event took place: the first full, free election in the Arab world, carefully monitored, recognized to be free and fair. It had one flaw: it came out the wrong way. Hamas won the Parliament, control of the Parliament. The US and Israel didn’t want that. You may recall, at that period, the slogan on everyone’s lips was ‘democracy promotion.’ The highest US commitment in the world was democracy promotion. Here was a good test. Democracy: election came out the wrong way; the US instantly decided, along with Israel, to punish the Palestinians for the crime of voting the wrong way”