Palestinian liberation is here. Once sidelined as a “niche religious conflict,” the Palestinian resistance movement is increasingly recognized by Americans as one of the most vital political struggles of our era. Swarming social media, plastered across walls, and now, spilling into the streets – one cannot turn a corner without hearing the cry, “Free, free Palestine!”
But with any movement comes misinformation. American weapon manufacturers, real estate moguls, and pro-Israel officials, all profit from the Israeli colonization project. These players have a political-financial interest in prolonging Palestinian genocide.
We, a group of artists, writers, and concerned anti-imperialists, have prepared this zine with the goal of combating myths about Palestine. This is only an introduction! We implore you to research Palestine on your own. Please feel free to reprint and share this zine with anyone who may find it useful.
This zine was produced and printed on Powhatan land. We the zine-makers acknowledge our presence as settlers in so-called “Richmond Virginia.” Together, we recognize the American government’s ongoing genocide against the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, as we protest the Israeli government’s ongoing genocide against indigenous Palestinians.
Some say this "conflict" started during the Nakba in 1948, but to truly grasp where this began, we need to go back even further…
European Jewish immigration to Palestine began in the late 1800s under the Ottoman Empire. Jewish settlements began encroaching on the land of Palestinians, despite regulations that attempted to prevent this.
In 1917, while at war with the Ottoman government, Britain announced its support for a Jewish nation in Palestine through the Balfour Declaration. After WWI, the British took control of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. The colonial ideology of Zionism created tensions between Jewish settlers, and the indigenous Palestinians who already lived on these lands.
The sweeping Palestinian disapproval of Britain’s governance, due to the debt and dispossession they experienced, led to the Great Arab Revolt (1936-39). During this time, the British government recruited Zionist paramilitary forces to police Palestinians. Palestinians were subjected to beatings, torture, detention camps, home raids, deportation, and imprisonment. Furthermore, Palestinian leaders were intentionally targeted, eroding the military, and their capacity to resist.
In 1947, the British referred the question of the future of Palestine to the UN. The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine created a partition plan in which Palestinians received a smaller state than Jewish people, despite their much higher population. This plan was rejected by Palestinian leadership. Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist military forces embarked on a quest to conquer as much land as possible, far beyond the partition lines. They violently expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. Today, this is referred to as the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic).
In 1967, Israel launched a surprise attack on Egypt, disrupting peace talks between Egyptian and American diplomats. The one-week War of 1967 ended with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where it would unleash devastating bombardment, policing, and violence over the following decades, which lasts to this day.
In 2007, Israel established a blockade on Gaza, effectively controlling every aspect of life for Palestinians. Since 2008, Israel has launched several devastating attacks on Gaza.
This slaughter continues today, in record time, and is broadcast worldwide, via modern technology.
Distinguishing between these two “anti-” words is KEY to us recognizing our shared humanity!
Judaism is a beautiful & diverse religious and cultural tradition practiced by over 15 million people around the world. Often, members of a religious minority can be the targets of harmful stereotypes and violence. When prejudiced language or violence is directed towards Jewish people and their religious or cultural practices, we call it antisemitism.
Zionism is a political ideology that originated in the late 1800s in Europe. Its initial founder, Theodor Herzl, called for the creation of a political state strictly for Jewish people in his manifesto, Der Judenstaat. He suggested a large number of different places around the world where it could be enacted – not only in Palestine. No matterwhere, though, Herzl’s definition of Zionism required the majority population of the state to be Jewish. In order to fulfill this political ideology, 750,000 Palestinian Arabs (half the population at the time) were forced out of their homes in 1948 to make way for the founding of Israel. Today, over 5 million people are registered as refugees of the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 war.
Did you know? Many supporters of Israel are also antisemitic. Millions of American evangelical Christians believe that the “Jewish return to Israel” will usher in a biblical Armageddon, and the second coming of Jesus Christ. Megachurch leader John Hagee has infamously said that the Holocaust was a help to getting more Jewish people to return to the Promised Land. Huge YIKES!
Anti-zionism is simply opposition to Zionism - not Judaism. Zionists believe in an ethno-nationalist state; that Israel should remove Palestinian people from the region in order to maintain a Jewish majority. You might hear some anti-Zionists talking about how “Israel shouldn’t exist.” Hold your alarm! This is NOT a call for violence towards Jewish people. Rather, it is a call for the end of the racist, ethno-nationalist state of Israel, and the return of Palestinians to their rightful home.
Anti-Zionists fight for a future in which there is no ethnonationalist country in Palestine, refugees and their descendants are allowed to return to their homeland, and all peoples live in safety and dignity.
Israel is not the bulwark against antisemitism that Biden and Netanyahu would have you believe. Like any ethnonationalist state, Israel systematically oppresses those who do not conform to the state’s racial-ethnic standard.
The state of Israel categorizes Jewish people with any Arab and/or Muslim heritage as “Mizrahi Jews.” Since its foundation, Israel has relegated Mizrahim to ghettos, and targeted them for repression. In the 1940s and 50s, hundreds of Yemenite Jewish immigrants reported that their babies and toddlers were abducted by the state; reports indicate that many of those children died in hospitals, their families uninformed. As recently as 2013, Israeli officials admitted to targeting Ethiopian Jewish immigrants for forced contraceptive injections, since 2008. How can a state that targets its own Jewish immigrants, be trusted to keep Jewish people safe?
Furthermore, Israel does not protect or represent the Jewish people who live beyond its borders – which is to say, over half of the world’s Jewish population. Expecting all Jewish people to be loyal to Israel first alienates them from their communities and heritage. In fact, many Jewish scholars argue that Zionism breeds antisemitism in non-Jewish communities. In 1917, Jewish British politician Edwin Montagu criticized the idea of an ethnic Jewish state, stating it would mean “that Turks and other [Muslims] in Palestine [would] be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine.” Today, the image of Israel as a Jewish “safe state” is used to ostracize Jewish anti-zionists who protest its violence, and brand Palestinians who dare raise their voices as antisemitic and ignorant.
Finally, the militarized and policed nature of the Israeli state makes its Jewish citizens, and all people in the world, less safe. To quote professor Carolyn L Karcher of Temple University, “the killing of approximately 1,200 Israelis by Hamas on October 7 actually shows the opposite of what many are claiming. Rather than proving that the state of Israel keeps Jews safe, the bloodshed shows that Israeli Jews cannot expect to enjoy security by imposing a brutal siege, erecting walls, multiplying checkpoints, demolishing homes, confiscating land, and dehumanizing, imprisoning, or killing any Palestinians who stand up for their rights, whether nonviolently or violently.”
Israel was created, and is maintained, through racist, settler-colonial violence. This violence does not keep anyone safe - not even Israel’s own settlers. Only an end to the settler state can bring peace and safety for all.
Religion has been used to “complicate” injustice throughout history. Colonizers who took over the land now known as the United States used Christianity to justify the genocide of indigenous peoples to steal their land. Israel similarly hides behind Judaism to justify genocide because religion is a sensitive topic– one we’re told not to discuss. Zionists use that cultural norm against us so we feel uncomfortable contradicting them.
You shouldn’t let this rhetoric make you feel uninformed. You don’t have to have a masters in religious studies to know bombing hospitals and civilians is wrong. It’s actually a war crime!
It is dangerous to believe Israel’s violence is a religious conflict because that makes it easy to reduce the narrative to “these groups of people just don’t get along.” This makes the issue feel like no one else’s problem but those two groups. This also reduces the region to two types of people: Arab Muslims and Jewish Israelis. But Palestine is much more diverse than that: there are many Christian and Jewish Arabs, for example. This simplification twists the narrative to erase the diverse and indigenous people of Palestine. The “conflict” is not Jews vs Muslims fighting over land they have equal claim to; it is foreign Israeli settlers using aggression and violence to steal land from Indigenous Palestinians of many religious backgrounds.
How, then, can Israel’s actions be justified? Simple answer: they cannot. Israel is only hiding behind Judaism to guilt the world into allowing their violence. They need our silence because they know if the west condemns them and they lose U.S. support, they will fall. Will you do their bidding, then, and enable genocide?
The cultural history of Palestine is ancient and diverse, encompassing Jewish, Christian, and Muslim peoples, and more. This is still true of Palestine today! It is modern-day Israeli settlers who claim that the historic presence of Jewish people in the area is justification for ethnic cleansing.
Throughout the ages, Palestine has been under the influence and rule of many civilizations, peoples, and empires, from Bronze-age Canaanites, to the Assyrians and Babylonians, Rashiduns and Umayyads, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Ottomans. In fact, Palestine has been a recognized and growing country since Roman times, long before Israel was created, and Zionism sought to create a cultural and religious divide in the region.
Modern-day Palestinians are, in fact, descendants of Jewish Palestinians, just as much as they are born from Muslim and Christian Palestinians. It is vital to challenge the narrative that either Palestinian Muslims or Israeli Jews resided in the area. This narrative creates further division and misinformation about the complex and shifting mix of cultures, religions, and ethnicities that have made up Palestine and the surrounding areas for thousands of years.
It is true that some Jewish Israeli colonists have heritage in Palestine. Needless to say, this does not justify settler-colonial genocide. It also does not erase that the vast majority of Jewish Israeli colonists today are first-generation settlers, or their recent descendants. Nobody’s indigeneity, ethnicity, or religion, can ever justify the deliberate extermination and ethnic cleansing of an entire people.
This myth is troubling on a few levels. First, it paints a false image of Palestine as a geographic wasteland. Second, it assumes that Palestinians have neglected the land that they have lived upon for centuries, while also suggesting Israeli settlers were the land’s first “successful” stewards. Lastly, this myth buries an ugly truth: that the Israeli settler project has devastated the physical environment of Palestine.
Palestine is located in the Fertile Crescent, a famously fruitful geographic region that stretches from modern-day Egypt through the Persian Gulf. Palestine’s land encompasses wetlands, plains, mountains, and deserts. Peoples of many cultures and faiths have cultivated this land for generations, producing olives, figs, almonds, and citrus fruits. Even its most arid deserts are farmed by Palestinian Bedouins, who still use traditional techniques to preserve water.
Considering this history, how could modern Israeli settlers possibly be the region’s first farmers? In actuality, the overwhelming majority of modern Israeli agricultural projects are based on stolen Palestinian farmland. In 1953 alone, Israel used the Land Acquisition Law to seize nearly 1.3 million dunams (739,750 acres) of agricultural land from Palestinian farmers!
But it doesn’t end at theft. One must consider the toll of the Israeli military on Palestinian land. Today, white phosphorus floods the air of Gaza, poisoning the rainwater its people rely upon to drink. We watch Tik Toks of Israeli soldiers demolishing homes and burning olive fields are regularly available to view worldwide. According to a report obtained by the Guardian, between October and December 2023 alone, Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza burned the equivalent of 150,000 tons of coal in CO2. (This estimate is considered extremely conservative.)
And yet, to engage with this myth whatsoever is to overlook the material reality of Zionism. Even if it were all true – if Palestine was all barren desert, if its people never learned agriculture, if settlers weren’t poisoning their land – none of these fables could justify the Israeli occupation.
Let’s talk about what PEACE means. How do you define peace? Is it the absence of physical violence like bombings and shootings? Is it the presence of “law and order”? Is there peace in Palestine/Israel when there is dignity and equal rights for all residents of the region, or just once you stop hearing about it in the news? It’s vital to ask yourself (and others!) what you mean when you talk about peace.
Did you know? In 2007, Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza, widely seen as illegal because it collectively punished the entire population for Hamas’ election and limited access to essential supplies: food, water, electricity and medicine.
In 2018, people in Gaza gathered for the Great March of Return to resist the strict blockade with a demonstration. Tens of thousands arrived at the border fence, and a few threw stones or burned tires, attempting to express their frustration and demand acknowledgement of their situation. The Israeli military responded to the unarmed demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. Over a year of demonstrations, Israeli soldiers killed over 250 Palestinian demonstrators and injured 30,000 more.
Did you know? The Israeli military systematically demolishes the homes of Palestinians under the premises of “not being up to code” or “harboring terrorists”. Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are especially vulnerable to this. These housing demolitions rarely make it into Western news, so it might seem like there is “peace” when, in truth, we just aren’t hearing about the injustices and violence Palestinians face on a daily basis.
How is it that the West Bank is governed by the Palestinian Authority, yet the Israeli military issues and rejects building permits and demolishes structures in the territory? Palestine is not free!
Did you know? Israel routinely arrests Palestinians and throws them inprison without charge, under a practice known as “administrative detention.” According to B’Tselem, “the person is detained without legal proceedings, by order of the regional military commander, based on classified evidence that is not revealed to them. This leaves the detainees helpless – facing unknown allegations with no way to disprove them, not knowing when they will be released, and without being charged, tried or convicted.” Israel has held 100+ Palestinians in administrative detention every single month since March 2002.
Palestinians are not violent monsters, but they do endure monstrous violence every week with no Western media coverage. This is why we call for liberation from the river to the sea.
How does a settler-colonial state “defend” itself from the indigenous population? This myth frames Palestinian resistance as a series of unrelated escalations, detached from the 75+ years of colonial violence enacted by Israel. How can the settler state be the sole and perpetual victim of its own genocidal regime?
But what does the law say? International humanitarian law (or “IHL”) states that there are only two methods for a country to lawfully initiate a war: either through getting the UN security council’s approval for matters of international importance, or through claiming the right to self-defense in response to an attack or imminent threat from another state. Palestine, according to the UN, is not a state, but an occupied territory of Israel, of which Israel is responsible for maintaining “normal life” for its people. By this factor alone, Israel cannot claim “self-defense” in its bombardment of Palestine. However, Israel has insisted since 1967 that IHL is not applicable to Palestine. Israel refuses to recognize the occupied territories as “occupied” at all, instead describing them as "disputed" territories which Israelis and Palestinians both have claims to.
Even if Israel did have an acceptable motive for initiating war, war is still subject to the rules of IHL. Here are just some of the ways Israel has violated IHL since October 7th:
Reminder: According to United Nations resolution 37/43 (adopted in 1982), it is the right of the Palestinian people to resist colonial domination “by all available means, including armed struggle.”
The refusal of both Israel and the United States to cooperate with IHL should not be understated. Out of the 89 times the US has used its veto power in the United Nations since 1945, 45 of these vetoes were in Israel’s favor, including shooting down resolutions requesting Israel’s compliance with IHL.
The U.S. gives Israel a monopoly on violence. Painting this violence as “cyclic” ignores the power imbalance between the settler-colonial state and the indigenous population struggling for liberation against it. Given the U.S.’s bloody history, does this really come as a surprise?
Zionists would have you believe that “from the river to the sea” is a call for Jewish extermination. But as we have already discussed, Jewish people have historically existed in Palestine for generations. It is the state of Israel, not Palestine, which is based on a system of ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
“From the river to the sea” was adopted by diaspora Palestinians in the 1960s as a popular way to call for Palestine to be restored to a secular state, one that was safe from all oppression. Jewish people who were willing to see through the Zionist lies and coexist with Palestinians were welcome to stay. In a speech given to the United Nations in 1974, Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman and Fatah leader Yasser Arafat said, “when we speak of our common hopes for the Palestine of tomorrow, we include in our perspective all Jews now living in Palestine, who choose to live with us there in peace and without discrimination.”
A free Palestine does not equate to the annihilation of Jewish people. This is a racist idea thatt undermines the context of Palestinian liberation movements throughout history. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is exactly what it sounds like–from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, Palestinians want to move throughout their original lands without restriction; they want equal rights; they want to be free.
Israel and the United States of America are more similar than you realize. Israel’s national history echoes our own with disturbing accuracy. In fact, our two countries are so politically aligned that the US government has directly supported Israel’s colonization project since 1948. But it’s not just American leadership that’s responsible – your tax dollars fund the genocide of Palestinians.
To understand why, you must first understand that the US is no stranger to slaughter. From Christopher Columbus’s massacre of Indigenous peoples, to the African slave trade and plantation system, to “manifest destiny” and westward expansion, genocide is foundational to American history. This nation would not exist without it. Consider the impoverishment and mass incarceration of Black and Indigenous Americans today – especially in comparison to white Americans – and you'll see that colonization is alive and well.
But why does the US support Israel, in particular? In short, occupied Palestine is an ideal location for an American military base. Prior to Israel’s founding in 1948, America did not have a strong military presence in the Middle East. Since then, our government has poured billions into creating and strengthening that presence. In 1986, then-Senator Joseph Biden declared Middle East policy should always be guided by the “naked self-interest of the U.S.” More recently, in 2021, he claimed as President, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel, to protect her interest in the region.” (President Biden is also a top recipient of funding by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Remember that the next time he says he’s “standing against antisemitism!”)
All of this is done with your money. Israel is by far the #1 recipient of United States foreign aid, receiving over $300 billion in American tax dollars since 1948 (adjusted for inflation). Today, Israel uses most of that money to purchase weapons back from American manufacturers. The US Campaign for Palestinian Rights estimates that, on average, each American taxpayer unknowingly contributes $25 a year to killing Palestinians.
Whether you like it or not, if you are an American citizen and taxpayer, you are complicit. We have given you the tools to understand. What will you do about it?
Please visit the Sources Cited page.
How are you feeling? Sad, angry, numb?
We urge you to channel whatever you’re feeling into action. You have the power to change this. We all do, when we come together.
Palestinians haven’t given up. We owe it to their strength and humanity to do our part.
Here's some steps you can take: