The Time Has Come for Britain’s Anti-Zionist Jewish Groups to Unite

At a Time of Genocide, Division and Disunity is a Luxury We Cannot Afford

When I ‘came out’ as an anti-Zionist Jew in 1970 it was a lonely experience. I lived in Liverpool where my father was a rabbi in a community of about 8,000 people (now less than 2,000).

The only other Jews I knew were in a socialist group which I joined at the age of 16 (expelled at 19!), the International Socialists (now the SWP). It was thanks to them that I read my first anti-Zionist pamphlet, the Class Nature of Israeli Society, by Moshe Machover, Haim Hanegbi and Akiva Orr.

This pamphlet, which first appeared as an article in the New Left Review, helped me to make sense of my instinctive hostility to Zionism as a Marxist. Zionism I began to see as an exclusivist ideology and movement whose only concern was the Jews. This was before the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians and the Apartheid nature of Israeli society had become widely known.

At that time there was no Palestine solidarity movement in Britain and much of the left had illusions in Israel. Tony Benn and Eric Heffer, two stalwarts of the Labour left were members of Labour Friends of Israel.

Today everything is different. Jewish anti-Zionists are not rare. Zionism is no longer assumed to be the natural home of Jews. Its alliance today with the far-right – the EDL, Tommy Robinson, Bannon, Orban etc. – is well known, clear and unmistakable but half a century ago things were different.

interview with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer on Israel’s Channel 2 about why he calls himself a 'white Zionist'

Hasbara, the Zionist version of propaganda still held sway. The Labour Zionists who had formed the government of Israel from 1948-77 continuously spoke of peace whilst they waged war. As I wrote in Tribune in July 1984, there was nothing Likud had done that Labour hadn’t done before it.

It took the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 for the scales to fall from the Left’s eyes. Benn and Heffer resigned from LFI. For much of the left Israel had been an oasis of socialism in the Middle East. Even Hannah Arendt was fooled into believing that the Kibbutzim were ‘perhaps the most promising of all social experiments made in the 20^th century.’ [The Jew As Pariah, p. 185.

The image of the Kibbutzim seen in the West - Zionism and Socialism - however Arabs played no part in this 'socialism'

The kibbutzim were held to be models of socialism with their collective organisation and their lack of private property. No one told me that they were racially exclusive societies that banned Arabs from membership or that they had been established over the ruins of confiscated Arab villages whose inhabitants had been expelled. Nor had we been told that they had been established as the most effective and economical method of colonisation and were stockade and watchtower settlements.

Israel was not founded for the benefit of Jews. The West does not support Israel because it calls itself a ‘Jewish’ state. As James Baldwin noted in 1979:

Whenever criticism of Israel is made our rulers profess to be concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’. It is the only form of racism they are concerned about. Even Donald Trump, a bigot and racist for every season, is not only concerned about Jewish students (Zionist Jewish students naturally) suffering from anti-Semitism on campuses but he has cut federal funding from those universities and colleges which allow Palestine solidarity protests on campus.

This is at the same time that he is insisting that diversity and anti-racist programmes be ended, migrants be deported and that Confederate flags and symbols be preserved.

You would have to be stupid (unfortunately many people are) not to see how the rich and powerful, not least racists like Starmer, are using Jewish people and what they call ‘anti-Semitism’ (i.e. anti-Zionism) as a means to intimidate and frighten off support for Palestine and opposition to Zionism.

The same is true in this country. The racist Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley, has used the pretext of Jewish Sabbath Services to reroute, ban and delay Palestinian marches on the grounds that they might cause offence to Zionist Jews. Jewish residents of Swiss Cottage are the pretext for banning demonstrations against Israel's racist ambassador, Tzipi Hotoveli.

British and Western support for Zionism is not because of their concern for Jews but because of their own imperial interests. Jews constitute the moral alibi for imperialism in the Middle East.

It is for that reason alone that it is incumbent upon Jews who are not Zionists to say in both words and deed that what Israel does is not in my name.

Jews in America, for a number of reasons have been in advance of British Jews. From May 1-4 over 2,000 members of Jewish Voice for Peace gathered in Baltimore for a member’s conference (see Massive JVP member meeting vows to fight Zionism, fascism, and the weaponization of antisemitism).

In the United States 40% of young Jews see Israel as an apartheid state and one suspects that that figure is far higher today in the midst of the current genocide. No one who is progressive and Jewish has any excuse any longer for neutrality. Non-Zionism is no longer an option. It is fence sitting.

As Martin Luther King said ‘The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.’  

Archbishop Desmond Tutu observed that if you are neutral at a time of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

Today it is not difficult to be Jewish and anti-Zionist. On April 10, the Zionists’ propaganda organ, the Jewish Chronicle, woke up to the fact that young Jews were turning against Zionism and carried an article ‘Who are the young Jews turning against Israel?’ by Jane Prinsley.

Former General Amiram Levin

Of course Jane, like all the Jewish Chronicle’s journalists is a Zionist. If she wasn’t she wouldn’t be working for them. The JC had started to realise that ‘Radical new groups for Jews who do not support Zionism have formed on campuses up and down the UK’. It went on to say that

‘radical Jewish student groups have emerged to cater to Jews who do not support Zionism. From Leeds, Liverpool, Brighton and Birkbeck to Edinburgh, Warwick, Cardiff, Cambridge and UCL, students have formed Jewish communities, or kehillot.’

This followed an article by Karen Glaser who used to be a features writer on the New Statesman where she wrote what I called the most ‘trivial, trite and superficial’ article the NS has ever run. Its subtitle was  ‘How Karen Glaser’s ex-boyfriend had a very very narrow escape!’ The article was about how Ms Glaser had kicked her Corbyn supporting, socialist boyfriend out of the nest at 2 am in the morning because he doubted that Corbyn was quite the anti-Semite that his girlfriend imagined.

So the article ‘I can’t discuss Israel with my anti-Zionist kids – it’s pointless’ was on a par with Glaser’s normal output. It described how 11 year old Talia had given her mother back the Star of David she had been given as a baby and further that she was ‘resigning as a Jew’.

Not only that but Talia had disposed of her mother’s big Israeli flag! Bright and intelligent child you might think. Clearly someone to interview. Karen though thought differently:

Zionist parents whose children are scared of being associated with Israel; youngsters who have internalised antisemitism, in particular its political iteration, anti-Zionism. Their parents say these young people openly loathe the Jews’ nation state. And anecdotal evidence suggests that the problem has grown exponentially since the October pogroms.

Karen Glaser is nothing if not stupid. That after all is why the Jewish Chronicle sought her out. It probably hadn’t occurred to her that it isn’t internalisation of anti-Semitism but detestation of burning children alive and bombing hospitals that is making Jewish youngsters puke at the mere mention of the ‘Jewish’ state. Talia doesn’t sound like someone who is intimidated.

Naturally I wrote a letter to the JC suggesting that it might have been a good idea to interview the children concerned and find out their views. And equally naturally the JC refused to print it. The last thing the JC wants to admit is that there may be good reasons why young Jewish kids detest Jewish racial nationalism.

Shortly after these articles 36 members of the Board of Deputies signed a letter to the Financial Times. It was not an anti-Zionist letter. Far from it. But even hardened Zionists had begun to realise that they were defending the indefensible. A war driven by neo-Nazis in Israel's government.

Equally predictable was the reaction of the genocide supporting President of the BOD, Phil Rosenberg, and the rest of the Board's Executive. There is no atrocity, no genocide that they cannot support. The presence of open fascists in Israel's government worries them not. They immediately suspended Harriett Goldenberg, the Vice-Chair of its International Division and opened disciplinary proceedings against all 36 signatories.

Moshe Yalon – Ben Gvir & Smotrich are Mein Kamp Reversed

Being good Zionists the last thing they wanted to see is any discussion over the rights and wrongs of the actions of what I have called ‘Hitler’s Bastard Offspring’. The BOD is there to support whatever Israel does, right or wrong. Jewish neo-Nazis like Itamar Ben-Gvir trouble them not. After all even Gvir and Smotrich are Jewish and Zionism is about the unity of the Jewish tribe.

Rosenberg then issued a disingenuous statement that proclaimed ‘The Board of Deputies is a democratic organisation’ without mentioning the suspension of one officer and the disciplinary process (in the form of a complaint) that was taken against the dissenters.

It is clear that the worm is beginning to turn. That all those who have not become overt fascists and racists, like Rosenberg and his Executive, have developed qualms about the genocide being conducted against 2 million Palestinians in the name of a war against Hamas.

It is therefore incumbent upon Jewish anti-Zionists to come together and form one united organisation like Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States.  At the moment we have a plethora of organisations. I am in Jewish Network for Palestine, there is Jewish Voice for Labour, formed in the Labour Party during the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign against Corbyn and there is the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Organisation and the newcomer on the block Na'amod, which contains a few Zionists, non-Zionists and anti-Zionists. Na'amod is the most moderate and probably the largest.

There is also the older Jews for Justice for Palestinians which is a 2 states group that does very little except canvass for signatures for its founding statement and there is also Independent Jewish Voices which made a big splash when it was created in 2007 but which is now inactive. Its website was last updated a year ago and its last meeting was over four years ago.

By my estimates there are about 2,000 people who are members of the above organisations. There are undoubted differences between people but there is no reason why there should be so many organisations.

JfJP and IJV are not membership organisations. Clearly Na'amod, in so far as it contains some Zionists, will not be able to join a unified anti-Zionist organisation but there is no reason why the 3 anti-Zionist Jewish organisations cannot come together into one single anti-Zionist Jewish organisation.

Although JVL has not explicitly declared itself as anti-Zionist, in practice it is. There will obviously be differences over things like one or two states though the consensus today is that two states cannot be achieved given the number of settlers in the West Bank.

However we owe it to the Palestinians who are undergoing such terrible massacres and pogroms to put aside minor differences in the name of not only unity but effectiveness. A single united anti-Zionist Jewish group would be a pole of attraction, in particular to young Jews who do not wish to have to bear the strain and the stain of being seen to support genocide in the name of Jews. Most Jews who have grown up with the exploitation by Zionism of the memory of the holocaust find it strange that the most ardent supporters of Zionism today are the neo-Nazi and far right in politics.

When Tommy Robinson, Donald Trump and Viktor Orban are on your side, with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer declaring that he is a White Zionist, many Jews will decide that they have had enough of Zionism and its quest for Jewish racial purity. It is the duty of the existing anti-Zionist groups to facilitate that journey not to erect obstacles to it.

Tony Greenstein

Helen Aksentijevic interviews veteran anti-Zionist Moshe Machover, one of the founders of Matzpen, the Socialist Organisation in Israel

 Machover looks back on life since his childhood under the Palestine Mandate and describes both his own family and political background

There are not many people who can justly be described as legends in their own lifetime but Moshe Machover is one such person. An indefatigable optimist he was the ‘one who got away’. Targeted by the Zionists and expelled summarily by the Labour Party’s discredited Sam Mathews, there was such a groundswell of opposition both within and without the Labour Party, that Moshe was reinstated within a month after Corbyn’s office had been forced to intervene with the Compliance Unit.

Unlike the cowards of the Socialist Campaign Group, Dianne Abbot et al, Moshe was proud to appear in Zoom meetings alongside expelled members like myself and Chris Williamson, the only MP who did not subscribe to the false 'antisemitism' narrative

Moshe has subsequently been suspended by Starmer as part of his purge of anti-Zionist Jews (its official name, as befitting such doublethink,  is ‘rooting out anti-Semitism’).

Helen Aksentijevic is a filmmaker who decided to make a series of films about supporters of Palestine including Moshe. See Enlightenment and Pure Joy. Helen can best be described as a travelling protest photographer.

The first pamphlet that I read, at the age of 18 when I was coming out as an anti-Zionist, was by Moshe Machover and two fellow members of Matzpen, Akiva Orr and Haim Hanegbi. Up to then my opposition to Zionism was largely instinctive rather than theoretically worked out. This was a time when the very word ‘Palestinian’ was disputed. I had been brought up to consider Palestinians as just ‘Arabs’. It is as if Romanians or Swiss nationals were referred to as Europeans. Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister famously declared that there was no such thing as the Palestinians.

Moshe as a child

‘The Class Nature of Israeli society’ was published by New Left Review in January/February 1971 although I read it in a pamphlet published by the International Socialists (SWP). It helped me to clarify my intuitive feelings about Zionism, that it was an exclusivist and chauvinist project that rejected the basic ideas of Socialism. The pamphlet helped me to jettison many of the ideas that I had grown up with in a Zionist environment.

A Young Moshe Machover & Jabra Nicola

Matzpen (Compass), which Moshe helped form in 1962, was the first Israeli anti-Zionist organisation. In the film Moshe describes briefly the origins of the organisation and the influence of the Palestinian Marxist Jabra Nicola over him and others. Nicola saw the solution to the dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians as being a regional one involving workers and peasants struggle in the Arab East to overthrow the corrupt and repressive regimes which dot the landscape.

The Israeli Communist Party, from which Matzpen broke, never rejected Zionism. Indeed it has never had any analysis of Zionism worthy of the name. It sees Zionism as largely irrelevant and doesn’t see the Israeli working class as a settler working class.

The Irgun, a terrorist militia which perpetrated the massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948 before the declaration of independence

By way of contrast Matzpen developed an understanding of Zionism and Israel as a settler-colonial ideology and movement or what Moshe describes, using Kautsky’s terminology a ‘work’ or ‘exclusion’ colony as opposed to an ‘exploitation colony’.

In my view these categories are too rigid, as some colonies like South Africa could be both exploitation and exclusion colonies. Hence South Africa’s Bantustan policy.

Jabra Nicola

Rakah, the Israeli Communist  Party believed and still believes that the Israeli state can be reformed and that Israeli Palestinians can achieve equality within it. They never understood that it was Zionism which ensured that Israel could never become a state of its own citizens. Rakah was a Stalinist party that went along in 1948 with Stalin’s support for the establishment of a ‘Jewish’ state, a policy which all but destroyed the Arab Communist Parties in the region.

The idealised image of the Kibbutzim and Jewish Labour - what wasn't shown were the evictions of Arab peasants with the help of the British army to make way for the Kibbutzim

Today the Palestine solidarity movement and academia takes it for granted that Israel is a settler colonial state, but for many years people saw Israel as either a liberal democracy or a social democratic, if not socialist society, with the Kibbutzim as their idea of socialism in practice. The idea 60 years ago that Israel was a settler colonial state was ground breaking.

I freely confess that Moshe has been an enormous influence over my own political development although, as often happens with one’s mentors, we disagree on certain issues. I don’t for example accept Moshe’s belief that the Israeli or Hebrew people constitute a nation in their own right with a right to self-determination as a Hebrew state in the future. In my view such a state would inevitably contain within it forces seeking to reconstitute themselves as a Zionist and Jewish Supremacist state with all that entails. Hebrew culture in Israel is inevitably a culture of oppression.

Zionist 'socialism' was a strictly Jewish only affair and thus it negated the basic principle of socialism, the unity of the working class whatever its ethnic or religious origins. Today that has played out in the presence in a far-right coalition of the Israeli Labor Party and Meretz

Unlike Moshe I also believe that the idea or concept of a unitary democratic secular state is one that the Palestine solidarity movement should adopt. Why? Firstly because it negates the concept of a Jewish State, which the two state solution does nothing to challenge. But also because a solidarity movement that is unable to present a vision of what it is striving for will in the end succumb to partial solutions such as a repartition. How such a goal will be achieved is a separate question.

I also have less faith in the future potential of the Israeli working class than Moshe because experience has shown that in settler colonial states, be it South Africa or Ireland, the settler working class is to the right of its own bourgeoisie. Their support for an ethno-supremacist state means that they are incapable of acting as a class for itself.

The ethnic cleansing of Jaffa - the only people driven into the sea were the Palestinians

I see no progressive or socialist potential in the Israeli Jewish working class because its identity wrapped up in the super oppression of the Palestinian working class.

Today the idea of Israel as an Apartheid State has become widely accepted. This idea, that Israel is a state in which racial oppression is not a side effect or by-product of its other policies but inbuilt into the state itself, has gradually taken hold. Ideologically Israel and its defenders are in a weaker position now than they have ever been.

The flight of the Palestinians was necessary to create an artificial Jewish majority in Israel

This development has taken place at the same time as Israel is militarily and economically stronger than it has ever been although still dependant on its benefactor, the United States.

Where I agree with Moshe is that the Question of Zionism or Palestine cannot be solved within the borders of Palestine. The great mistake of the Palestinian leadership, the PLO, was to believe that they could become yet another corrupt Arab leadership in a Palestinian state of their own side by side with the Israeli state. The PLO leaders desired nothing more than the right to oppress their own people, as the Palestinian Authority today demonstrates.

Tel Aviv, a Jewish only city in its early days in British Palestine

It was this that led to the disaster that is the 1993 Oslo Accords. At the time those of us who opposed Oslo were very much in a minority. Fateh activists were enthusiastic about its prospects and their prospects. This enthusiasm derived from the belief that Zionism could be confined within pre-1948 borders and could live alongside a Palestinian state. Unfortunately the Palestinian leadership never understood the nature of Zionism and how it is an inherently expansionist and colonisatory project. Or if they did understand it rhetorically they never incorporated it in their theory and practice. Today it is very clear that the Israeli state cannot be reformed and Zionism cannot change its spots.

An artist's view of Tel Aviv

The other mistake of the PLO was, in exchange for subsidies to finance their operations, to establish uncritical relationships with the very Arab regimes which oppressed their own people. These regimes paid lip service to the Palestinian cause whilst in practice abandoning them. Today we can see this clearly with the Abraham Accords, which follow on from the 1978 Camp David Accords whereby Egypt recognised Israel. Following Oslo, Jordan also established diplomatic relations with Israel.

The Arab regimes fear, despise and oppress their own peoples. They are the junior allies of imperialism. Regimes such as that in Saudi Arabia and Egypt are some of the most brutal on the planet. They are jealously guarded by the Zionist regime in Tel Aviv yet the Palestinian movement has largely been uncritical of these regimes. The role of Israel is to ensure that radical Arab nationalism never triumphs in the region.

Where I disagree with Moshe is that I don’t accept that it is necessary for a socialist revolution to take hold in the Arab world before Zionism can be overthrown. If only because the establishment of socialism has proved rather more difficult than Marx and the early socialists envisaged. I think it is possible for nationalist revolutions to overthrow the ancien regimes in the Arab world and in that way to threaten the very imperialist interests that Israel is paid to watch over.

The original advert  in Ha'aretz

Moshe has lived through the entire period of the Israeli state. He recalls how, in September 1967, Matzpen was the first group to place an advert in Ha’aretz decrying the Occupation of Gaza and the West Bank which an Israeli Labor not Likud Government, presided over. Moshe also recalls the hostility and calls of ‘traitor’ that greeted this advert. The advert met with unbridled hostility and threats to the individual signatories.

Moshe tells how, at the age of 3, his first definite memory was the day that World War 2 broke out. He describes the bombing of Tel Aviv by the Italian airforce and says that by 1944 it was clear that something horrendous had taken place in Europe in respect of the Jews.

This is in itself instructive because the Zionist leadership in Palestine were well aware that the Holocaust was taking place from at least mid-1942 if not earlier but they did their best to play such reports down. The Hebrew press even whilst it reported on what was happening in Europe also cast doubt on its own reports. Zionism, which has fashioned the Holocaust into an ideological weapon, was at that time more concerned with state building than rescuing Jewish refugees.

Moshe emigrated to Britain in 1968. Many others in Matzpen also emigrated to the West because life was made very difficult for those who were seen as traitors to Zionism. Moshe became a Professor of Mathematical Logic and Philosophy at King’s College in London. Far from being a democratic society Israel has always been extremely intolerant of Jews who dissent from the Zionist narrative.

Moshe describes in some detail how, in the wake of the Nakba between 1947 and 1949, he and other children would hike into the Galilee and see the ruins of the Arab villages. They saw the artifacts and belongings left after the Zionist militias had looted much of what remained when the original owners had been forced to flee from Palestine. The Zionist myth that people like Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli still propagate is that the Palestinians voluntarily left.

It was the Israeli Labor Party that presided over the 6 Day War and the conquest of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and Golan Heights. I remember very well how Israeli propaganda portrayed the situation as a possible new holocaust. We really believed that Israel might well suffer defeat and that the Jews would be driven into the sea. Of course this was a lie meant to fool not only Israeli Jews but the wider Jewish communities world-wide. We now know that this was, as Moshe says, ‘poppycock’.

The ILP was also responsible for the establishment of the first settlements. It was an Israeli Labor Government which launched a pre-emptive war on Syria, Jordan and Egypt with the intention of completing what was they considered unfinished business in 1947-9, namely the conquest of the whole of what was Palestine under the British Mandate. In 1956 Israel had launched the Suez War, in conjunction with Britain and France, against Egypt following Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. At that time Israel had been forced to withdraw after the US Administration of Eisenhower had made its displeasure clear.

The remains of the Arab villages after they had been looted and their inhabitants expelled or massacred

Moshe explains how one of the cardinal beliefs of the Zionists is that Jews don’t merely constitute a religious community but a nation in its own right. That is integral to the Zionist claim on what they call Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel). The basis of this claim is that God gave the land to the Jews. Given that the early Zionists were atheists, we have the absurdity that Zionism based its claim to Palestine on the promise of a god who doesn’t exist!

I hope you find this interview as illuminating and interesting as I did.

Tony Greenstein

Haim Hanegbi – Founder of Matzpen - An Appreciation

Obituary in today's Ha'aretz from Matzpen

Hebrew translation of Ha'aretz advert

Haim Hanegbi, a founder of the Israeli Socialist Organisation (Matzpen) died on March 2^nd 2018.  Below is the paid advert and the translations thereof in Ha’aretz newspaper.  Also I copy below an obituary of Haim by Ahmad Jaradat of the Alternative Information Centre and a film by Eran Torbiner, a socialist Israeli filmmaker.

Arabic translation of the obituary in Ha'aretz

I first came across the name Haim Hanegbi when I was about 16 and just becoming acquainted with the reasons for opposing Zionism.  I was in the International Socialist group (forerunner of the SWP) and I came across the first coherent analysis of why Zionism was a reactionary, racist and class collaborationist movement.  This was a pamphlet, The Class Nature of Zionism which had been written by Akiva Orr, Haim Hanegbi and Moshe Machover.  Of the three only Moshe is still alive.

I suspect that if I had known Haim that I would have disagreed on many things not least his illusions in the Oslo Accords and his belief that a 2 state solution was ever possible.  But he was as he said a true Palestinian Jew and a Hebronite Jew.  His assessment of the Israeli Left cannot be disputed.  ‘what was known as the ‘left’ the Jewish left, is disappearing, gone.’ In a vivid phrase he described it as  ‘a corpse lying in the street and no one is burying it.’  

Likewise Hanegbi was correct to say that Zionism and its expulsion and massacres of the Palestinians didn’t begin with Begin and Likud but the so-called Zionist left:  ‘Begin didn’t do bad anything that hadn’t been done before him.’

Rest in peace Haim and may you be buried, as you wished, in a Muslim grave in Hebron.

Tony Greenstein

Haim Hanegbi Bajayo, the Palestinian Hebronite Jew

March 4, 2018 9:31 PM Alternative Information Center Hebron, Human interest, Human rights 0

A native of the Jewish community of Hebron and founder of Matzpen, Haim Hanegbi Bajayo passes away on March 2nd, 2018.

POSTED BY: AHMAD JARADAT MARCH 2, 2018

The Palestinian and Hebronite Jew, as he liked to say.

The man who formed a committee of Hebronite Jews after 1967 to stand against the settlement project and settlers in Hebron.

The man who in 1967 published a strong statement to the Hebron municipality, asking it to take full sponsorship of Jewish properties and homes in the city, emphasizing that the Hebronite Jews would not return to their homes until the Palestinian refugees return to their land and cities and homes.

The man who wished his body could be buried in Hebron.

The man who met most Palestinian leaders, including Arafat.

The man who said I am against the Zionists, who fought not only in solidarity with the Palestinians, but as a leftist against this state and its nature.

The man known by the Palestinians in Hebron as Haim Bajayo, who is respected there as a true fighter for justice.

The man who said Hebron is in my heart.

Years ago Haim and I walked the streets of Hebron. I asked why he looked so sad and he said for two reasons. One, I am seeing the settlers occupying my home. And two, I am remembering my life here.

He said to me, I am Palestinian. My nationality is Palestinian. The settlers occupied my home like the rest of the Palestinians. Because of this I fight the occupation.

Haim Hanegbi, Haim Bajayo passes away today. This is a sad moment.

Ahmad Jaradat is the Senior Project Coordinator of the Alternative Information Center (AIC).