Zionist racism and Palestinian dehumanization are the foundations of Israel’s moral character

Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, envisioned a racist Jewish state as a “civilizing” outpost of Europe in Palestine —  implicitly superior to the “barbaric” indigenous population.  

  

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

From its earliest formulations in late‑19th‑century Europe, Zionism imagined a political order in historic Palestine built around the supremacy of one ethnonational group—Jews. Over the decades, that vision hardened into a state structure that one Israeli human rights organization—B’Tselem—has described as a “regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” Other groups like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and numerous scholars of genocide and settler colonialism have concluded that Israeli governance across all of historic Palestine constitutes apartheid, and in the eyes of some genocide scholars an unfolding genocidal process.

This is not a claim about Judaism or Jewish identity. It is a claim about state power, ideology, and structures of supremacy. And it is a claim increasingly made by courageous Israelis who defy the powerful interests of a state committing genocide.

Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard captured this internal reckoning with painful clarity when he said, “I look at these young people who are poisoned with racism and hatred, and at some of their elders, who are their spiritual mentors and implant in them toxic notions of Jewish supremacy… How did we produce from among us the replicas of our persecutors?”

Sfard’s question is not rhetorical. It is a diagnosis of a society shaped by decades of occupation, settlement, and ethnonational fear—one in which Jewish supremacy and dehumanization of Palestinians has become normalized, even valorized.

Zionism’s racialized and fascist foundations

Zionism emerged in the same intellectual climate that produced European colonialism, racial hierarchy, and the early currents of ethnonationalism that would later culminate in fascist movements. Theodor Herzl, the movement’s founder, envisioned a racist Jewish state in Palestine as a civilizing outpost of Europe. In Der Judenstaat and Altneuland, Herzl described the future Jewish society as modern, rational, and European—implicitly superior to the “backward” native population.

Herzl’s writings repeatedly framed Palestinians not as a people with political rights, but as an obstacle to be managed, displaced, or subordinated to the Zionist agenda. His admiration for European colonial models—particularly British rule in South Africa—reveals a worldview steeped in racial hierarchy.

Critics and scholars have argued that Herzl’s political imagination contained proto‑fascist elements, including: a belief in demographic engineering; a vision of a homogenous ethnonational state; a hierarchical worldview that placed European Jews at the apex; and a willingness to subordinate or remove indigenous populations.

These elements do not make Herzl a fascist. But they place him within the intellectual family of European racial nationalism, a genealogy that later fed into the fascist ideologies that dominated Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. If one removes the Jewish identity component, Herzl’s framework shares structural similarities with other European ethnonationalist movements of his era—movements that came to dominate politics in Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Portugal.

This is not an accusation of personal malevolence but a recognition that Herzl’s political imagination was shaped by the dominant ideologies of his time, namely settler colonialism, racialized progress, and ethnonational exclusivity. These ideas later crystallized into policies within the Zionist movement that promoted Jewish demographic dominance and territorial control over Palestinian rights.

The making of a supremacist regime

The Nakba of 1948—marked by mass displacement, village destruction, and the permanent exclusion of over 750,000 Palestinian refugees—was not an aberration but a foundational moment. Laws such as the Absentee Property Law ensured that Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed could never return to their homes, while their land was transferred to Jewish ownership.

After 1967, the occupation entrenched a dual legal system, one where Israeli settlers in the West Bank lived under Israeli civil law, enjoyed full political rights, and received state protection, while Palestinians lived under military law, faced movement restrictions, home demolitions, land seizures, and arbitrary detention. B’Tselem concluded in 2021 that this constitutes “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” effectively making Israel an apartheid state.

Human Rights Watch’s A Threshold Crossed reached the same conclusion, documenting policies designed to maintain Jewish demographic and political dominance through land control, movement restrictions, and discriminatory laws.

Along with a similar report by Amnesty International in 2022, these claims of Israel being an apartheid state are not fringe interpretations. They are the assessments of leading human rights institutions, and are supported by research by human rights scholars.

Dehumanization as policy and culture

Supremacy is sustained not only through laws but through dehumanizing language. Israeli political leaders have long deployed rhetoric that erases Palestinian identity and strips Palestinians of their humanity. They rarely refer to Palestinians as “Palestinians” at all, choosing instead the generic term “Arabs,” a deliberate linguistic move that denies a people their name, their history, and their nationhood. This erasure is reinforced by explicit dehumanization. Senior officials have repeatedly used language that casts Palestinians as subhuman or inherently threatening. Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked notoriously described Palestinian children as “little snakes,” even calling for the killing of Palestinian mothers to prevent future generations. Such rhetoric is not incidental; it is part of the ideological machinery that makes domination thinkable and violence permissible.

Such language is not merely hateful—it is functional. It prepares the public to accept policies of collective punishment, siege, and large‑scale military assault.  Also, settler violence, often carried out with impunity and the support if Israeli authorities, reinforces this logic. Sfard’s comparison of extremist settlers to the Ku Klux Klan is not hyperbole but a reflection of vigilante terror used to enforce ethnic hierarchy.

This dehumanization has intensified during Israel’s repeated assaults on Gaza over the years. By mid‑November 2023, Holocaust and genocide scholars—including Marion Kaplan, Omer Bartov, and Barry Trachtenberg—warned that Israel’s actions risked or constituted genocide. Their warnings were grounded in patterns familiar from other cases of forced displacement, destruction of civilian infrastructure, mass killing, and rhetoric invoking biblical annihilation narratives.

Holocaust survivors and descendants have echoed these warnings, arguing that the dehumanization of Palestinians mirrors patterns they recognize from their own histories. Their testimony cannot be dismissed as it is rooted in lived experience and scholarly expertise.

For decades, Israel enjoyed near-total impunity in the international legal system. That era is ending. Cases before the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court have forced a global reckoning with the legal and moral implications of prolonged occupation and systemic discrimination. Some Holocaust scholars who initially defended Israel’s actions in Gaza have since gone silent. Their earlier support for state violence—rather than for the universal principles of human rights—reveals a troubling willingness to subordinate anti‑racist commitments to ethnonational loyalty.

As critics have noted, this silence is a betrayal of the very lessons the field of genocide studies was created to uphold.

Parallels between Zionism and white supremacy

We must also confront the fact that Zionism, as practiced by the Israeli state, shares structural parallels with white supremacy. Both are systems of domination built on similar foundations. Each constructs a superior in‑group understood as uniquely entitled to land, sovereignty, and political power. Each justifies the dispossession of an Indigenous or subordinate population through narratives of civilizational advancement or historical destiny. Both rely on demographic engineering to secure permanent control, deploy stories of cultural or racial superiority to legitimize exclusion, and normalize segregation, unequal citizenship, and the systematic denial of rights. These are not incidental similarities. They reflect the underlying architecture of two regimes organized around maintaining the dominance of one group over another.

In the United States, “manifest destiny” justified the displacement of Indigenous peoples. In Israel, the Law of Return grants automatic citizenship to Jews worldwide while denying Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes. Academic work in Holy Land Studies and other journals describes Zionism as a racial regime that reproduces whiteness through land control and exclusion of Arabs and non‑European Jews.

A society shaped by ethnosupremacy

Haaretz has documented how Jewish supremacy has fractured Israeli society itself, empowering extremist settlers and far‑right movements that now dominate national politics.  The Oslo era did not moderate these forces, it entrenched them. Settlement expansion accelerated, Palestinian territory fragmented into disconnected enclaves, and the logic of domination became normalized. Jewish self‑determination has been transformed into a system of supremacy that denies Palestinians equivalent rights.

This is not a fringe view. It is increasingly the consensus among scholars of settler colonialism, apartheid, and ethnonationalism. Recognizing the supremacist structures embedded in Israeli governance does not diminish Jewish suffering or deny the trauma of antisemitism. It does not delegitimize Jewish collective identity or aspirations for safety. But it does demand a reckoning with the reality that no people can secure their freedom by denying another’s.

Ending the occupation, dismantling apartheid structures, and recognizing Palestinian political and human rights are not acts of hostility toward Jews. They are acts of fidelity to universal principles of justice.

As Sfard asked: How did we produce replicas of our persecutors? The answer lies not in Jewish identity, but in the corrosive power of Zionism, an ideology of ethnonational supremacy. The task now is to build a political order grounded not in domination, but in equality.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Anti-Palestinian racism in Canada: The Nakba exhibit as a national test of truth and power

The Nakba exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is far more than a cultural installation, it is a direct test of Canada’s willingness to uphold universal human rights, justice, and equality.

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack

The opening of Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) on June 27, 2026 marked a watershed moment in Canadian public memory. For Palestinian Canadians—many of whom contributed family artifacts, testimonies, and archival materials—the exhibit represented something long denied to them—recognition that their history of ethnic cleansing is part of Canada’s human rights story, not a political controversy to be managed. Yet the ferocious backlash from Zionist Jewish organizations and the political pressure exerted on federal officials revealed a deeper truth—that anti‑Palestinian racism is very deeply embedded in Canadian institutions, shaping whose suffering is acknowledged and made public and whose is erased.

The controversy surrounding the exhibit did not emerge spontaneously. It exposed a long‑standing pattern in which Palestinian narratives are treated as dangerous, conditional, or illegitimate—while Zionist organizations assert a proprietary right to define how Palestinians and their history may be represented. The Nakba exhibit thus became more than a cultural installation. It became a test of whether Canada is willing to uphold truth, justice, and equality in the face of political interference and racialized suppression.

A campaign to silence Palestinian memory

Opposition to the exhibit began even before its doors opened. Several Zionist organizations—including the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg, and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA)— publicly attacked the exhibit, claiming it lacked “balance” and failed to include their perspectives. Heritage Minister Mark Miller even demanded that certain “omissions” and “errors” be “rectified.” His specific complaint was the absence of references to Hamas (an organization that didn’t exist until the early 1990s), echoing the talking points of those lobbying to undermine the exhibit. His intervention signaled a willingness to revisit the museum’s independence and to reframe Palestinian narratives through a Zionist lens.

The implications are unmistakable: Palestinians, whose lived experiences form the foundation of the exhibit, are not considered legitimate stakeholders in telling their own history. Instead, Zionist organizations asserted that they were the ones “directly impacted” by an exhibit documenting Palestinians’ history of dispossession, and pressured Miller to intervene.

CIJA escalated its objections, accusing the museum of “engaging extreme political activists” and failing to consult “communities directly impacted by its content.” This framing suggested that Palestinian testimony is inherently suspect unless validated by Zionist and Jewish voices—voices representing the very ideology responsible for the ethnic cleansing and massacre of Palestinians in 1947-48.

The hostility escalated further when Shurat HaDin, an Israel‑based legal organization, threatened legal action against the CMHR, claiming that the exhibit “erases Jewish history” and “delegitimizes Jewish self‑determination.” Such accusations rest on a deeper racialized logic: the presumption that Palestinian narratives are inherently destabilizing to Jewish identity. Beneath the surface, this framing implies that the very act of Palestinians recounting their history, indeed, their existence itself, is a provocation.

Asymmetry of memory: The Holocaust vs. Palestinian erasure

The material imbalance between Jewish and Palestinian narratives at the CMHR is stark. The Holocaust exhibit occupies more than 4,500 square feet, while the Nakba exhibit occupies less than three percent of that space. Canadian governments also funds three standalone Holocaust museums—in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver—each dedicated to ensuring that Nazi crimes are remembered, studied, and taught.

When those institutions were created, no one demanded that Nazis or Nazi sympathizers be consulted to provide “context or “balance” for those institutions. Yet in the case of the Nakba exhibit, Zionist and Jewish organizations insisted that their perspectives be built into the curatorial process. This asymmetry exposes a deeper truth in Canada—that Holocaust memory is treated as unquestionable moral ground, while Palestinian memory is treated as dangerous and conditional.

The is no argument that the Holocaust should be taught in schools, commemorated annually, and memorialized.  The massive amount of cultural and academic knowledge that has been produced since World War Two through museums, monuments, films, and an enormous body of academic research, makes it one of the most studied and memorialized events in modern history. But the contrast with Palestinian history is profound. The Nakba—during which more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled and thousands massacred by Jewish terrorist militias and subsequently by the Israeli army in 1948—has received a very small fraction of the institutional attention devoted to the Holocaust. There are no publicly funded Nakba museums, no national commemorations, and no high school curricula dedicated to Palestinian history.

The CMHR exhibit is the first of its kind in a major Canadian institution. Its modest scale is in contrast to the enormous outrage it provoked within segments of the Canadian Jewish community, demonstrating that Palestinian suffering is not merely ignored or forgotten, it is actively suppressed.

A systemic pattern of anti‑Palestinian racism

The reaction to the Nakba exhibit aligns with findings from major studies on anti‑Palestinian racism in Canada. The Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) April 2022 report defines anti‑Palestinian racism as systemic discrimination that includes:

• denying Palestinian existence, history, and identity;
• suppressing or punishing Palestinian narratives;
• portraying Palestinians as inherently violent or antisemitic;
• erasing the legitimacy of Palestinian suffering.

Research by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) similarly documents widespread patterns of media bias, political suppression, and institutional hostility toward Palestinian advocacy.

The backlash against the Nakba exhibit is a textbook example of these dynamics. Legacy Jewish organizations’ insistence that Palestinian narratives be “balanced” with Zionist perspectives—especially in a human rights museum—reflects a racialized hierarchy in which Palestinian testimony is treated as incomplete or dangerous unless validated by those who helped produce the conditions of Palestinian dispossession.

This is not neutral “context.” It is a demand that Palestinians be denied the right to narrate their own history.

Zionist Organizations and Supremacist Logic

Zionist organizations’ efforts to shut down, dilute, or reframe the Nakba exhibit reveal the depth of anti‑Palestinian racism embedded in their political advocacy. Their objections were never rooted in concerns about historical accuracy, and instead were driven by a determination to preserve a narrative in which Palestinians appear only as footnotes to a triumphant story of Jewish nation‑building in colonized Palestine.

Any attempt to centre Palestinian experiences of dispossession is treated as a threat—not because the facts are in dispute, but because acknowledging those facts destabilizes the ideological framework these organizations defend.

CIJA’s claim that the exhibit could “contribute to discrimination, bullying and even assault targeting Jewish students” is a striking example of how Palestinian narratives are stigmatized. The suggestion that acknowledging Palestinian suffering is inherently dangerous to Jews reflects a supremacist worldview in which Palestinians are seen not as victims of human rights violations but as inherent threats to the rights of others by their mere existence.

Similarly, Shurat HaDin’s assertion that the exhibit “delegitimizes Jewish self‑determination” reveals a belief that Palestinian history must be suppressed to protect Jewish identity. This is not political disagreement; it is supremacist logic.

Zionism, as practiced by these organizations, functions as a supremacist ideology—one that justifies the displacement, erasure, and dehumanization of Palestinians. The reaction to the Nakba exhibit demonstrates that these organizations are not defending historical accuracy but rather a political ideology that cannot tolerate the legitimacy of Palestinian narratives.

Institutional Power and Racialized Suppression

The resignation of Mark Berlin—the museum’s only Jewish trustee—became a flashpoint. Berlin accused the CMHR of “institutional anti‑Zionism” and denounced the exhibit as “curation by omission.” His departure illustrated how deeply Zionist ideology is expected to be accommodated in Canadian institutions, and where any attempt to tell stories about Palestinian suffering is swiftly recast as anti‑Jewish, biased, or dangerous.

This reflexive reframing does not arise from evidence. It arises from a political project that treats Palestinian memory as inherently dangerous to Jews and Palestinian voices as needing correction, containment, or counter‑narration.

Canada’s Human Rights Test

The Nakba exhibit is Canada’s human rights test. It asks whether Palestinians can exist in Canadian public memory without being filtered through Zionist ideology. It asks whether Palestinian suffering can be acknowledged without apology, without demands for “context” from those hostile to Palestinian existence, and without political interference.

Canada’s approach to historical memory makes the imbalance unmistakable. The country has invested enormous resources in memorializing the Holocaust but almost none in acknowledging the Zionist Jewish violence and atrocities that accompanied the creation of Israel through Palestinian dispossession. The CMHR exhibit is the first major attempt to acknowledge this history—and even that modest effort has been met with outrage, lobbying, and demands for ideological correction.

This opposition the CMHR display is purely political. The fury directed at the museum for daring to tell Palestinian stories demonstrates that the erasure of Palestinians is not a passive omission but an active project in Canada—one sustained by powerful Zionist organizations that insist Palestinian suffering must be  filtered through their ideological lens.

If Canada is ever to claim a genuine commitment to human rights, it must confront this reality directly. It must reject supremacist ideologies that seek to silence or reshape Palestinian narratives. And it must affirm, unequivocally, the right of Palestinians to narrate their own history—without permission from those who helped produce their dispossession.

Only then can Canada begin to live up to the principles it claims to uphold. 

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

“Anti Palestinianism” – A systemic racism equal in gravity to antisemitism (or maybe worse)

Anti‑Palestinianism is a system that devalues Palestinian life, suppresses Palestinian history, criminalizes Palestinian resistance, and punishes those who support Palestinian rights and refuse to look away.

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

You’ve probably never heard the expression “anti‑Palestinianism.”  It is a term that has become synonymous with the more commonly used term “anti-Palestinian racism” or its acronym “APR.”  Anti-Palestinianism is defined as the systematic erasure, silencing, defamation, and punishment of Palestinians and those who stand with them, and it has become one of the most pervasive and least acknowledged forms of racism and hate in the Western world. It is not merely a matter of interpersonal prejudice, but rather a structural system that operates across governments, news media, universities, policing, and public discourse.

In Canada, the most detailed data available about this racism shows a dramatic escalation of APR or anti-Palestinianism since October 7, 2023. A national report documented a 600% increase of this type of hate in the eight months following October 2023, far above the 506 incidents recorded in 2022. These incidents include defamation, harassment, employment retaliation, censorship, and political vilification. The overwhelming majority—77%—involved defamatory slander portraying Palestinians or their supporters as “terrorist sympathizers” or inherently antisemitic. This was in addition to a reported 1800% increase in incidents of Islamophobia in the year following October 7th, as reported by the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM).

These are not accidental spikes. They are the visible surface of a deeper structure that mirrors, in its logic and effects, the long history of antisemitism in Europe and Western nations.

The Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) defines anti‑Palestinian racism as a form of racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames, or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives, including by denying the Nakba (ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine), justifying violence against Palestinians, erasing their human rights, and defaming them and their allies as inherently antisemitic or terrorist. This definition is not abstract. It is borne out in the way governments, police, universities, corporations, and news media in Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia have responded to Palestinian life, Palestinian grief, and resistance to Israeli oppression and occupation —not just since October 2023, but for almost eight decades since indigenous Palestinians were pushed off their land in historic Palestine.

The parallels between antisemitism and anti‑Palestinianism become unmistakable when we examine how each system constructs a racialized “other.” Antisemitism historically cast Jews as conspiratorial, disloyal, and inherently dangerous, and anti‑Palestinianism reproduces this same logic today by depicting Palestinians as violent, irrational, or terroristic regardless of their actual actions or political views. This pattern is starkly reflected in the 2023 Anti‑Palestinian Racism report by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), which found that 585 documented incidents—nearly 60 percent of the total—involved slander portraying Palestinians as “terrorist sympathizers,” a trope relentlessly circulated in Canadian media and political discourse. Right‑wing news outlets in Canada, the United States, and Europe amplified this narrative by branding peaceful, multifaith, pro‑ceasefire demonstrations as “pro‑Hamas rallies” or “terrorist‑supporting mobs,” even when the protests were explicitly framed around human rights and opposition to genocide. In doing so, these media ecosystems played a central role in dehumanizing Palestinians and their supporters, recasting anti‑genocide campaigns as threats to national security and democratic stability rather than legitimate expressions of conscience.

This racialization is not confined to Canada. Analyses of anti‑Palestinian racism in the US shows how Palestinians and their supporters are routinely framed as extremists or potential terrorists in American media and political rhetoric, especially when they criticize Israeli policy or use language of decolonization. In Europe, similar patterns appear when governments and media describe large pro‑Palestinian marches in London, Paris, or Berlin as “hate marches” or “pro‑terror” gatherings, despite the overwhelmingly peaceful character of these demonstrations. The effect is to mark Palestinian identity and solidarity as inherently suspect, just as antisemitic discourse once marked Jewish identity as inherently dangerous.

Suppression of Palestinian identity and history is another core feature of anti‑Palestinianism. It amplifies anti‑Palestinian bias and prejudice by denying the Nakba, erasing Palestinian indigeneity, and suppressing acknowledgment of decades of occupation, ethnic cleansing, brutalization, and Israeli state violence. The ACLA description, summarized in multiple Canadian and international reports, explicitly identifies “denying the Nakba and justifying violence against Palestinians” and “failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people with a collective identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine” as core manifestations of APR. In Canadian public discourse, 1948 is still overwhelmingly narrated as the year Israel came into being, with little or no acknowledgment of the mass expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians, and the erasure of more than 500 Palestinian towns and villages, bulldozed or having forests planted where they once existed. This erasure extends into education and media. School curricula often omit the Nakba entirely, and mainstream media coverage of Gaza and the West Bank frequently strips events of historical context, presenting Israeli violence as isolated “responses” rather than part of a long continuum of occupation and settlement.

Criminalization of Palestinian political expression is another defining feature of anti‑Palestinianism. A national study of protest policing in Canada between 2021 and 2025 found that pro‑Palestinian protests accounted for only 10.1 percent of all demonstrations, yet they made up 37 percent of all police interventions. The CJPME study found that in 2024, nearly two‑thirds of all protest policing in Canada targeted pro‑Palestinian activity, despite the fact that more than 96% of these events were entirely peaceful. The report describes a coordinated architecture involving federal intelligence bodies and local police, treating a human‑rights movement as a security threat and using surveillance, bail conditions, intimidation and legal overreach to suppress speech. In several Canadian cities, police deployed riot squads and made mass arrests at peaceful sit‑ins and marches calling for a ceasefire, and imposed restrictive bail conditions that barred activists from attending future protests or using social media to express pro‑Palestinian views.

Across the Atlantic, European governments have gone even further. France issued blanket bans on pro‑Palestinian demonstrations, with the Interior Minister ordering police to disperse any such gatherings and arrest organizers. Germany banned or severely restricted many pro‑Palestinian protests in Berlin and other cities, often on the grounds of preventing “antisemitic incitement,” and has moved to outlaw organizations such as Samidoun—a Palestinian prisoner support network—under counter‑extremism laws. In the United Kingdom, senior officials described large pro‑Palestinian marches in London as “hate marches,” and then–Home Secretary Suella Braverman publicly labeled the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” a “hate slogan,” encouraging police to treat its use as potential criminality. In the United States, campus encampments and city‑center protests have been met with aggressive policing. At Columbia University and other campuses in spring 2024, police in riot gear dismantled pro‑Palestinian encampments, arresting hundreds of students and faculty on charges such as trespassing and disorderly conduct, even when the protests were nonviolent.

Punishment of allies is another hallmark of anti‑Palestinianism. Antisemitism historically targeted non‑Jews who stood with Jewish communities against persecution. Anti‑Palestinianism similarly punishes Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and secular supporters of Palestinian rights, branding them “antisemitic,” “extremist,” or terrorist‑adjacent for advocating equality. The “Palestine exception” documented by the Islamophobia Research Hub at York University shows how institutions that celebrate diversity and human rights routinely suspend those commitments when Palestine is involved, targeting not only Palestinians but also their allies. In Canada, the Palestine Exception report and related surveys document numerous cases in which students, academics, and professionals faced retaliation for supporting Palestinian rights. Jewish and non‑Jewish signatories to ceasefire letters have been subjected to internal investigations, contract cancellations, and public smearing. Some university instructors have even had their courses scrutinized or their professional appointments delayed after they spoke out against Israeli apartheid or about the Nakba, while student groups have faced official derecognition or funding cuts for organizing Palestine solidarity events.

This pattern is visible across the Western world. In the United States, high‑profile “doxxing trucks” have driven around elite campuses displaying the names and photos of students—many of them Jewish—who signed statements supporting Palestinian rights, labelling them “antisemites” or “terrorist supporters” and inviting employers to blacklist them. Journalists have been fired or pushed out of newsrooms for using terms like “Palestine,” “occupation,” or “genocide” in their reporting or social media posts. Clergy and lay leaders in European Christian churches who have spoken out for Palestinian rights have been denounced as antisemitic and, in some cases, removed from positions or had their events cancelled. These are not random overreactions; they are the enforcement mechanisms of anti‑Palestinianism as a system that seeks to isolate Palestinians by making solidarity socially and professionally dangerous.

Anti‑Palestinianism is also inseparable from the material system of domination under which Palestinians live. In the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, Palestinians endure military occupation, siege, settlement expansion, home demolitions, and mass incarceration. Repeated large‑scale assaults on Gaza—in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, and the ongoing Gaza genocide since 2023—have killed tens of thousands of civilians, including children, journalists, medics, and elders, with two independent studies estimating the cumulative death toll at 377,000 and more than 680,000. Yet anti‑Palestinian discourse routinely inverts this reality, portraying Palestinians as the primary source of violence while erasing or rationalizing the structural violence imposed on them by Israel. As the systemic APR study notes, justifying violence against Palestinians and denying them equal dignity and worth are defining features of anti‑Palestinianism. In Canadian media and politics, this manifests in the reflexive framing of Israeli military actions as “self‑defence,” while Palestinian resistance—whether armed, unarmed, or purely symbolic—is cast as terrorism. This dynamic is reinforced by the stark imbalance in political and media access, where pro‑Palestinian advocates are granted far less face time with elected officials and far less airtime or column space in mainstream news than pro‑Israel or Zionist voices, further entrenching a narrative that marginalizes Palestinian humanity and perspectives.

These dynamics become even more stark when viewed through the lens of the Mark Carney government’s posture toward the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza. Even as international courts, UN agencies, genocide and Holocaust scholars, and prominent human rights organizations have declared that genocidal crimes are taking place as defined under the Genocide Convention, the Carney government has refused to use the word at all, choosing instead a vocabulary of euphemisms—“crisis,” “conflict,” “tragedy”—that obscures the deliberate, systematic destruction of an entire people. This refusal is not semantic, it is political. To name genocide would be to acknowledge legal obligations under the Genocide Convention, including the duty to prevent, the duty to punish, and the duty to cease all forms of complicity. By declining to name the crime, the Carney shields himself and his government from these obligations and reinforces the broader architecture of anti‑Palestinianism that treats Palestinian life as less grievable, less visible, and less worthy of protection.

The Canadian government’s decision to continue authorizing weapons exports to Israel even as the official death toll in Gaza approached 80,000, even as entire neighborhoods were flattened, even as UN experts warned of famine engineered through the deliberate obstruction of humanitarian aid, reflects the same logic. The government’s insistence that these exports were “non‑lethal” or “not directly linked” to the assault mirrors the logic of anti‑Palestinianism—a logic that minimizes Palestinian suffering, abstracts Palestinian death into technicalities, and treats Palestinian bodies as collateral rather than as human beings entitled to the full protection of international law. The government’s refusal to sanction Israeli political and military leaders—despite their explicit calls for the destruction of Gaza, despite their public statements advocating the genocide of Palestinians, despite their command responsibility for mass killing—reveals a deeper moral failure. When Israeli leaders openly invoke the biblical language of extermination, when they describe Palestinians as “human animals,” when they call for Gaza to be destroyed or completely “erased,” these are not ambiguous statements. They are incitement to genocide. Yet the Canadian government has declined to impose sanctions, declined to restrict diplomatic engagement, and declined to hold any Israeli official accountable.

When antisemitism and anti‑Palestinianism are placed side by side, the parallels between them come sharply into focus. Both operate by constructing an entire people as inherently dangerous or undeserving of rights, and both depend on erasing or denying the group’s history, trauma, and claims to justice. Each system suppresses political expression, punishes those who stand in solidarity, and provides ideological cover for state violence. However, one difference is that Western societies have come to terms with their historic treatment of Jews and made amends, while anti-Palestinianism is embedded within institutions that profess universal human‑rights commitments while simultaneously carving out exceptions when the victims are Palestinians. It is within this broader architecture that the Carney government’s refusal to recognize the genocide in Gaza, its continued authorization of weapons exports to Israel, and its unwillingness to sanction Israeli leaders must be understood. These are not isolated policy missteps or bureaucratic oversights; they are manifestations of a deeper, systemic prejudice that devalues Palestinian life and shields those responsible for Palestinian suffering from accountability.

Recognizing anti‑Palestinianism as a form of racism equal in gravity to antisemitism does not diminish the specificity of Jewish historical trauma, nor does it collapse distinct experiences into a single narrative. Instead, it insists that the tools we have developed to understand and combat antisemitism—attention to dehumanizing stereotypes, to structural exclusion, to the criminalization of identity, and to the role of state power—must also be applied to the treatment of Palestinians and those who stand with them. The CJPME reports and the ACLA study make clear that anti‑Palestinian racism is systemic in Canada, operating across media, politics, education, and law. Analyses from scholars and journalists show that similar dynamics are at work in the United States and Europe, where Palestinians and their supporters face erasure, defamation, repression and persecution.

If antisemitism is rightly understood as a profound moral and political danger that corrodes democratic life and paves the way for atrocity, then anti‑Palestinianism must be understood in the same register. It is a system that devalues Palestinian life, suppresses Palestinian history, criminalizes Palestinian resistance, and punishes those who refuse to look away. It is also a system that enables governments like Carney’s to continue supplying weapons to a state accused of genocide, to refuse to name the crime unfolding before the world, and to ignore the deliberate starvation of an entire population through the blocking of humanitarian aid. To confront anti‑Palestinianism is not to undermine the struggle against antisemitism; it is to extend the same ethical standard to another people whose humanity has been systematically denied. It is to insist that the universal principles invoked in defense of Jewish life must also be invoked in defense of Palestinian life. And it is to recognize that a government that refuses to name genocide, refuses to halt its material support for it, and refuses to hold its perpetrators accountable is not neutral—it is complicit.

© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Reflections on the 78th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe)

There will be no peace in the Middle East until the foundational injustice at the heart of the region—the creation of Israel on stolen land, and its repercussions—is addressed.

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

As Palestinians and their allies mark the 78th anniversary of the Nakba we need to reflect on how the world arrived at this moment in history and what it means. 

In the 1930s and early 1940s, Western governments watched Nazi Germany’s escalating persecution of Jews with a mixture of indifference, appeasement, and self‑interest. That moral failure helped clear the path to the Holocaust. Today, a parallel pattern of ambivalence, active support for Israel, and deep anti‑Palestinian racism among Western political elites is enabling another catastrophe in full view of the world—the ongoing Nakba and the Gaza Genocide being perpetrated by Israel on Palestinians.

This is not rhetorical excess. It is what emerges when one takes Palestinian history seriously, listens to the growing number of Jewish and Israeli voices breaking from Zionist orthodoxy, and examines the historical record—including the United Nations’ own documentation of its permanent responsibility on the question of Palestine, and its role in creating the situation of the Palestinian people.

The reality is the Nakba—“catastrophe” in Arabic— never ended. It refers to the mass expulsion, ethnic cleansing and dispossession of approximately 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war and the erasure and depopulation of more than 400 Palestinian towns and villages. For decades, Western discourse treated this as an unfortunate but closed chapter, a tragic birth pang of a necessary state. But for Palestinians, the Nakba is not a date, it is an ongoing structural injustice that has affected generations of their people.

The UN itself acknowledges that the Nakba was not merely a by-product of war but a systematic process of displacement and dispossession that created one of the world’s largest and longest‑standing refugee populations. The UN’s “About the Nakba” page explicitly states that the events of 1948 “resulted in the displacement of more than half of the Palestinian Arab population” and that the consequences of this displacement “remain unresolved to this day.”

Palestinian writer Aziz Abu Sarah describes the Nakba as having “a dual meaning”—both the razed villages and refugee camps of 1948, the daily reality of land confiscation in the years and decades that followed, settlement expansion, family separation, and legal discrimination that continues to this day. His parents cannot legally live in the house they built just outside Jerusalem without losing their Jerusalem IDs, while nearby illegal Jewish settlers enjoy full rights. Every checkpoint, every denied permit, every demolished home is experienced as a renewed Nakba.

Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV) reinforces this understanding, arguing that the Nakba is “not a historical event but an ongoing process,” one that has evolved from ethnic cleansing in 1948 to what they describe as genocide in Gaza today. Their analysis emphasizes that the logic of elimination—removing Palestinians from their land—has been consistent since the creation of Israel.

Human rights organizations and Palestinian institutions now explicitly frame Israel’s current genocide in Gaza as a continuation of that same project of displacement and replacement. The Al Mezan Center for Human Rights calls the present war “a renewed Nakba manifested in a genocidal war,” noting mass killing, starvation, siege, and the displacement of nearly two million people in Gaza as part of an “ongoing colonial policy based on population replacement, land control, and the erasure of Palestinian national identity.”

The UN’s 2024 Nakba commemoration made the same point: “The Nakba of 1948 and today’s Nakba in Gaza are not two separate events, but an ongoing process of Palestinian displacement and replacement.”

The truth is that to call Israeli oppression of Palestinians merely “a conflict” is to participate in the erasure of Palestinian history and almost eight decades of Palestinian suffering.

Western complicity: From 1948 to Gaza today

The Nakba was not only the work of Zionist terrorist militias and the Israeli army. It was made possible by Western powers—particularly the United States—that endorsed partition of historic Palestine, recognized the new state created on lands beyond the UN partition plan, and then looked away as refugees were barred from returning by Israel in defiance of international law.

Ardi Imseis, in his 2024 UN‑commissioned study The Nakba and the United Nations’ Permanent Responsibility for the Question of Palestine, argues that the UN bears a unique and ongoing responsibility because it played a direct role in partitioning Palestine and then failed to enforce the rights of the displaced population. Imseis notes that the UN’s responsibility is “not episodic but permanent,” rooted in the fact that the organization “helped create the conditions that made the Nakba possible.”

UN Resolution 194 affirmed the right of Palestinian refugees to return or receive compensation, but Western governments never seriously enforced it. Their strategic interests—Cold War positioning, oil, and alliance with a self‑styled “outpost of the West”—took precedence over Palestinian rights.

The same pattern is evident today. As Gaza is bombed into ruins, with hundreds of thousands killed and many more maimed or starved, Western states continue to arm, fund, and diplomatically shield Israel. Legal experts, UN rapporteurs, and civil society groups have warned of a serious risk, and ultimately, the reality of genocide. Just as Western governments once found reasons to downplay or rationalize Nazi persecution of Jews until it was too late, they now supply endless justifications to excuse or minimize Israel’s destruction of Palestinian life. Then, the rationales centered on fear of refugees, antisemitism, and geopolitical calculations. Now, they invoke “counter-terrorism,” “self-defence,” and the imperative to stand with an ally—no matter what that ally does.

Suppressing the story: Nakba denial as a Western project

The Nakba is not only being continued on the ground, it is being suppressed in classrooms, parliaments, and media studios across the West.

In the United States, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy barred Palestinian‑American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from holding a Nakba commemoration at the Capitol after lobbying from the Anti‑Defamation League, forcing the event to move to a different room offered by Senator Bernie Sanders. Senator Jacky Rosen condemned the very idea of calling Israel’s establishment a “catastrophe” as “deeply offensive,” erasing the lived catastrophe of Palestinians in favour of a sacrosanct (albeit false) state narrative.

The Jewish Currents newsletter that reported this incident drew a sharp parallel between this discomfort with Nakba education and white uneasiness about teaching Black history in the United States. It described a “collective narcissism” that reads any expression of Palestinian identity—flags, commemorations, the kheffiya Palestinian scarf, even grief—as an attack on Jews, and noted that Israel‑advocacy organizations are increasingly using the charge of antisemitism to preemptively repress Palestinian speech, from the U.S. to Germany, where Berlin police have repeatedly banned Nakba Day protests.

Inside Israel, the state has passed laws penalizing public institutions that commemorate the Nakba, and Palestinian educators face constant pressure. Abu Sarah notes that the Israeli government not only ignores Palestinian history but “is also trying to force Palestinians to forget their own narrative, by forbidding commemoration of the Nakba.” Organizations like Zochrot, which work to educate Israeli Jews about the Nakba and Palestinian return, have been marginalized and attacked, even as they collaborate with groups like BADIL to bring Nakba testimony to international audiences.

In the U.S., Jewish Voice for Peace’s “Facing the Nakba” curriculum exists precisely because mainstream Jewish and general education has erased this history. The curriculum explicitly teaches that the Nakba “began with Israel’s establishment, and continues to this day,” and is designed to help U.S. Jews confront why they were never taught this story and how that omission shapes their politics. It is initiatives like this that are attempting to resist the Zionist attempt to deny the reality of what Palestinians have endured.

From Nakba denial to a new form of Holocaust denial

Holocaust denial is not only the crude claim that the gas chambers never existed. It is also any attempt to relativize, justify, or erase the systematic destruction of European Jewry. We rightly treat such denial as a moral red line.

Yet when it comes to Palestinians, Western political and media elites routinely engage in analogous forms of denial. They:

• Erase the original crime by refusing to acknowledge that Israel’s creation involved mass expulsion and dispossession.

• Justify ongoing violence as unfortunate but necessary “self‑defence,” even when it clearly targets civilians on a massive scale.

• Suppress testimony by banning Nakba commemorations, criminalizing Palestinian solidarity, and smearing critics as antisemites or terrorist sympathizers

The UN’s 2024 Nakba commemoration made explicit what Palestinians have long said: “The Nakba is an enterprise of displacement and replacement of people that continues to this very day,” and Gaza’s people now face a choice between “displacement, subjugation, or death—in other words, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or genocide.” To deny this reality, or to insist that it cannot be named because it offends Western sensibilities, is to participate in a form of historical and moral erasure that echoes the mechanisms once used to minimize the Holocaust while it was unfolding.

Jewish voices breaking the spell

One of the most hopeful developments is that more Jewish and Israeli voices are publicly challenging the myths that sustain this denial. The Al Jazeera feature on Jewish voices around Nakba Day highlights historians like Avi Shlaim, who calls Israel “a pariah and a war criminal state” whose brutality in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank have created a crisis with world Jewry. Within Jewish communities, projects like “Facing the Nakba” and the work of Jewish Currents, Jewish Voice for Peace, and others are insisting that Jewish ethics demand confronting Palestinian dispossession, not denying it.

Independent Jewish Voices Canada adds that confronting the Nakba is not only a moral obligation but a necessary step toward ending what they describe as Israel’s “genocidal campaign” in Gaza.

Their message is simple: acknowledging the Nakba and opposing genocide in Gaza is not anti-Semitic, it is a Jewish obligation grounded in the very lessons of the Holocaust that Western elites claim to honour.

Justice for Palestinians: The defining human rights struggle of our time

Because the Nakba is ongoing, justice for Palestinians is not one issue among many, it is the central test of whether the international human rights system means anything at all.

The UN’s own language now recognizes that 1948 and Gaza are part of a single process of displacement and replacement.[5] Anthropologists describe Israeli institutions, including universities, as “settler universities” embedded in a 78‑year project of ethnic cleansing and “Judaization.” Palestinian and international human rights groups document patterns of apartheid, persecution, and now genocide.

If the world cannot—or will not—stop a state that openly talks of a “second Nakba,” that has destroyed every university in Gaza, that starves children and then blames their parents, then the post‑1945 promise of “never again” has been hollowed out and is meaningless, not only for Jews, but for everyone.

There will be no peace in the Middle East until the foundational injustice at the heart of the region is addressed—the creation of a state on stolen land, the exclusion of its indigenous people, and the ongoing attempt to erase their presence. 

The UN’s worst decision and what it would mean to undo it

In hindsight, the UN’s endorsement of the partition of historic Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state in a region where Palestinians were the majority may be the single most disastrous decision it made in the 20th century. Not because Jews did not deserve safety after the Holocaust, but because that safety was pursued through the dispossession of another people rather than through de‑Nazification, open borders, and genuine global responsibility for refugees.

Ardi Imseis argues that the UN’s failure to uphold Palestinian rights after partition created a “permanent responsibility” that the organization has yet to fulfill. The turmoil, wars, occupations, and cycles of violence that have followed are not unfortunate side effects, they are the predictable consequences of building a state on a foundational injustice and then refusing, decade after decade, to confront it.

The Nakba was not an accident. It was a choice. Continuing it is also a choice.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

How Zionists have tried to erase Palestinians, and centuries of their culture and history in Palestine

Palestinians were erased or demonized—first as feudal obstacles to “progress”, later as terrorists whose very existence threatened the apartheid, Zionist ethno state.

 

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

 

For almost eight decades, a meticulously crafted false Zionist narrative has dominated Western understanding of Palestine, portraying it as a barren land, sparsely populated by nomadic Arabs, miraculously transformed by pioneering European Jews into a modern democracy. This story—endlessly repeated in Western classrooms, newsrooms, and parliaments—rests on a single, staggering falsehood that Palestinians, as a people with deep historical roots, never truly existed on the soil of historic Palestine, and don’t constitute a people. That claim is not an oversight. It is a political weapon used to promote a lie built upon a foundation of lies, designed to justify the violent dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population of Palestine that had lived, farmed, traded, and worshipped on that land for centuries.

The truth, irrefutably documented in Israel’s own archives, is that Jews constituted a small minority in historic Palestine for well over 2,000 years, only becoming a majority through the systematic ethnic cleansing of 1947–1949 and the mass importation of diaspora Jews into territory seized from its Palestinian owners.

The demographic record is unambiguous. In 1800, the population of Palestine stood at approximately 275,000, of whom only 6,000–7,000 (2–3 %) were Jews. By 1880, after the first faint stirrings of Zionist immigration, Jews still numbered no more than 24,000 out of half a million inhabitants (3–5 %). On the eve of the First World War in 1914, the Jewish community had grown to roughly 60,000 in a total population of 750,000—barely 8%. Even the accelerated immigration of the British Mandate period did not overturn this reality. The 1931 census recorded 174,000 Jews against 1,035,000 total residents (17%), and by November 1947, on the eve of partition, Jews comprised 32% of the population, of whom more than 70% were recent immigrants who had arrived after 1919.

These figures are drawn from Ottoman registries, British Mandate censuses, and the meticulous work of researchs. They demolish the Zionist claim of centuries of Jewish demographic dominance in Palestine. For almost two millennia—from the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE until the late nineteenth century—Jews remained a small, mostly urban minority in a land whose villages, orchards, and ports were overwhelmingly Palestinian Arab.

That population of Palestine was not a transient collection of Bedouin or Ottoman-era migrants, as Zionist propaganda has insisted. It was a settled, multilingual, multi-religious society whose roots reached back to the Canaanites, Jebusites, Philistines, and the Arab conquests of the seventh century. By the sixteenth century, under Ottoman rule, more than 80% of the inhabitants were Palestinian Muslims, 10–11 % were Palestinain Christians, and 5–7% were Jews, most of them Arabic-speaking Sephardim who considered Palestine their home long before Herzl ever dreamed of a Jewish state. Western travellers from the 1830s to the 1880s—Mark Twain’s travelogue notwithstanding—described thriving towns (Nablus, Gaza, Jaffa, Hebron, Jerusalem), terraced hillsides heavy with olive and fig orchards, and a citrus industry centered on the Palestinian-invented Shamouti orange that would later be rebranded as the iconic “Jaffa Orange” after the Zionist dispossession of Palestinian orchards.

This was no wilderness awaiting redemption. It was a living civilization with its own dialects, folklore, land deeds, and centuries-old family lineages. The transformation of this Muslim-Christian majority country into a Jewish-majority state required violence on a scale that Zionist mythology has spent decades concealing and lying about. 

Between December 1947 and May 1948—before a single soldier from any regular Arab army crossed the borders of Palestine—Zionist forces expelled at least 250,000 Palestinians and seized large swathes of territory allocated to the Palestinian state under the UN partition plan. The master blueprint for the conquest of Palestine was Plan Dalet, adopted by the Haganah high command in March 1948. Declassified Israeli documents reveal that the plan explicitly authorized the “destruction of villages,” the “expulsion” of inhabitants, and the “encirclement” of Palestinian urban neighborhoods to prevent any return. 

Over the following eighteen months, more than 530 Palestinian villages—totalling two-thirds of all existing villages—were razed or repopulated with European Jewish immigrants. The human toll was staggering. More than 750,000 Palestinians—over half the Arab population—became refugees, and at least 70 documented massacres punctuated the campaign. The Deir Yassin, Lydda, Saliha, Al-Dawayima and Safsaf massacres, and dozens more are not Palestinian fairy tales. They are acknowledged in the war diaries of Israeli officers and intelligence reports of the Israel Defense Forces themselves.

This was not a war of self-defence against overwhelming Arab aggression, as perpetuated in the myth told to Israeli children. The combined Arab armies that entered Palestine on 15 May 1948 were poorly equipped, uncoordinated, and often more interested in achieving their own geopolitical agendas than in defending Palestinian rights. By that date, the Yishuv’s fighting strength already outnumbered all Arab forces inside Palestine combined, and the Haganah possessed tanks, aircraft, and a unified command structure that the Palestinians and their reluctant allies utterly lacked.

The “David and Goliath” legend (with Israel as David) collapses under the weight of the information contained in the Israeli archives. For decades, these truths were suppressed. Until the late 1970s, Israel kept its military and state archives sealed. Israeli school textbooks portrayed Palestine before 1882 as a desolate wasteland dotted with ruins, and when indigenous Palestinian inhabitants were mentioned at all they were reduced to generic “Arabs” who “sold their land willingly” or “fled on orders from their leaders.” Only when the thirty-year classification rule began to expire, and when a generation of Israeli scholars—Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Baruch Kimmerling—gained access to the files, did the scale of Israel’s deception become undeniable. Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004) lists 24 confirmed massacres by Zionist forces, and admits that in the majority of cases, the decisive cause of Palestinians fleeing was terror attacks by Haganah, Irgun, or Lehi.

Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) demonstrates that the expulsions were not “collateral damage” but the deliberate implementation of Plan Dalet to conquer territory that had belonged to Palestinians for generations. Avi Shlaim’s work on the collusion between Zionist leaders and King Abdullah of Jordan further exposed the myth of a united Arab invasion bent on “driving the Jews into the sea.”

Yet the West swallowed the original narrative whole. From the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to Hollywood epics like Exodus (1960), from the front pages of The New York Times to the speeches of American presidents, the story was always the same—a persecuted people returning to an empty homeland, making the desert bloom, defending Western civilization against barbarism. Palestinians were erased or demonized—first as feudal obstacles to “progress”, and later as terrorists whose very existence threatened the apartheid, Zionist ethno state. Palestinian American academic Edward Said diagnosed this phenomenon as “Orientalism”— the systematic de-humanization of the Muslim and Arab “other” to justify colonial domination.

Seventy-seven years after the Nakba, the consequences of that erasure are everywhere. Israel maintains more than sixty-five laws that privilege Jewish citizens over the 20% of its population that is Palestinian, not unlike the Jim Crow laws of the US south in the pre-civil rights era that oppressed Black Americans. More than six million Palestinian refugees and their descendants are still denied the right of return guaranteed by UN Resolution 194. The West Bank is fragmented by walls and settlements. Gaza is an open-air prison turned genocidal killing field. And whenever Palestinians resist, the same tired myths are trotted out to demonize Palestinians—“there’s no partner for peace,” “they teach their children to hate,” “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.”

It is long past time for a reckoning. The archives are open and the evidence is overwhelming. The New Historians—many of them Jewish Israelis who love their country enough to demand it face the truth—have done the heavy lifting. What remains is for Western societies to undertake a deliberate, institutional re-education and reveal the truth behind Israeli propaganda. Curricula must centre Palestinian historians—Rashid Khalidi, Nur Masalha, Walid Khalidi—alongside the Israeli revisionists. Western news media outlets must abandon the false equivalence that treats occupier and occupied as moral equals. Politicians must stop reciting talking points written in Tel Aviv and start acknowledging that Israel was not “born in purity” but forged through a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity that have never ended.

Only when the West confronts the foundational lie—that Palestine was a land without a people—can there be any hope of justice. Palestinians are not interlopers on someone else’s supposed biblical birthright. They are the descendants of the people who harvested the olives, tilled the land, and prayed in the churches and mosques of that land for centuries before the ethno-supremacist ideology of Zionism decided their presence was an inconvenience to its colonial project. Recognizing their history, and supporting their right to self-determination and freedom from a suffocating and brutal Israeli occupation, is not anti-Semitism. It is the bare minimum required for an honest accounting of the past and a viable path toward coexistence.

The Israeli myths are crumbling. Let us finish the job of tearing them down, and bring justice and peace to Palestinians—a people that should rightfully be seen as the most persecuted and brutalized minority in the world today.  

© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.