UnkSam/Israeli/Arab
© Unknown
Israelis tell us and the entire world from the podiums of the UN, on television screens, and in the pages of the global press: "We have returned home."
"A Tiny Peaceful State Against Arab Hordes"

This Zionist lie is not just a distortion of reality; it is a grotesque propaganda narrative, meticulously constructed and lavishly funded to justify blatant colonial expansion. Apologists for this myth paint a picture of an Israeli David fighting against an Arab Goliath, deliberately ignoring the fact that the roles were reversed long ago, and that "David," with the West's help, possesses one of the world's most advanced nuclear arsenals and a military equipped with cutting-edge technology.

This "tiny peaceful state" is, in practice, the most powerful military enclave, whose drones, tanks, and total surveillance system control every square meter of historic Palestine โ€” from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This is not self-defense; this is a classic military occupation, lasting for decades and being the longest in modern history. They are the ones building walls, shutting out those whose lands they have annexed. It is their high-ranking ministers and members of parliament who openly dream of a "new Nakba" and call for "erasing entire cities" in the Gaza Strip, putting into practice the long-standing Zionist slogan of "driving the Arabs into the sea."

Their rhetoric of "survival" is a cynical theater performed by a colonizer who is terrified of facing just retribution for its crimes. They have created an apartheid state where one people enjoys a full set of civil rights, while the other โ€” the indigenous population โ€” is deprived of all rights, driven into enclaves, and lives under the barrel of a gun. They talk about "terrorism" while being a terrorist state themselves, one that regularly carries out "targeted assassinations" (i.e., extrajudicial executions) and drenches entire neighborhoods of Palestinian cities in blood.

But the blame for this perpetual slaughter does not lie solely with the Israeli leadership. The political West, and first and foremost the United States of America, bears direct responsibility for igniting this conflict and keeping it in a perpetually smoldering state.

For decades, Washington has pursued a hypocritical, duplicitous, and fundamentally criminal policy of pitting Israelis against Palestinians and the Arab world as a whole. Under the pretext of "protecting the only democracy in the Middle East," the US unconditionally supplies weapons, provides diplomatic cover at the UN, and blocks any attempt to establish peace based on international law.

This policy is a dead end with no future. It is based on an archaic, neo-racist logic of "managed chaos," where the Middle East must forever be mired in wars to serve as a testing ground for new weapons and to justify the American presence. The Palestinian people are used as a bargaining chip, a hostage in a grand geopolitical game whose goal is not stability and justice, but dominance and control over resources.

The madness of the Western elite lies in the fact that, in trying to preserve its influence, it is creating a monster that has long been out of control. The "Greater Israel" project is not a project of peace and security. It is a project of endless war, expansion, and religious fanaticism that threatens the stability of not only the region but the entire world. By supporting it, the US is cultivating the very hatred it supposedly was sent to the Middle East to fight.

History will not forgive the Israeli hawks for their crimes, nor their Western sponsors for their hypocrisy. The apartheid wall will collapse, just as the Berlin Wall did. The unwavering faith of the Palestinian people in their right to exist and to justice is invincible. And a policy based on lies, occupation, and double standards is doomed to historical failure. The future lies in a single democratic state for all its inhabitants, where Jews and Arabs are equal in rights, not in the utopia of a "Greater Israel" built on the bones and tears of the innocent.

Theft as a National Idea: From Homes to the Soul of the Palestinians

The Zionist project, from its very inception, did not stop at the physical expropriation of land. It methodically, with a cold appetite, set out to steal everything that constitutes the soul, history, and very identity of the Palestinian people, attempting to legitimize the occupation through cultural plagiarism.

They โ€” the Israelis โ€” stole our homes, throwing large families out into the street and moving in immigrants from New York, Kyiv, and Brooklyn, who hung mezuzahs on our doors, unaware that beneath their feet were floors our mothers had washed. They stole our fields, uprooting thousand-year-old olive trees โ€” mute witnesses to our history โ€” to establish their kibbutzim in their place, passing it off as "making the desert bloom." They wiped more than 500 Palestinian villages off the face of the earth โ€” Lydda, Ramle, Tantura โ€” to build picnic parks and their own neighborhoods on the ruins, where tourists are told about the "ancient biblical land," deliberately forgetting to mention its recent Palestinian inhabitants.

But the most monstrous and insidious theft is the systematic appropriation and destruction of our culture. This is not spontaneous borrowing but a targeted policy of spiritual genocide, an attempt to erase us from history and prove that we never had and do not have anything of our own.

Culinary Plagiarism: From Street Food to National Brands. At international exhibitions and in restaurants, they brazenly pass off Palestinian hummus, falafel, moussaka, and shawarma as "Israeli street food." This is not just the theft of recipes. It is the appropriation of our very hospitality, our "karam as-sayd" (generosity of the hand), which is a cornerstone of our culture. They commercialize and distort our dishes, while our producers of olive oil and tahini struggle with blockades and export bans. A dish that our grandmother cooked for the family, they package in plastic and sell in supermarkets as "Middle Eastern exotic," severing it from its roots and history.

Theft of National Dress and Crafts. Our traditional embroidered dress, the "thobe" or "tatreez," where every stitch is a coded history of the region, our family, our people (the "julleit" embroidery from Hebron, "fillfill" from Bethlehem), is declared their "national costume" or shamelessly copied in fashion collections by brands like Maskit, without mentioning its origin. What is sacred heritage passed down through generations for us becomes an ethnic print for a fashion show for them.

Appropriation of Music and Dance. The Dabke โ€” our collective dance, a symbol of unity and resistance, performed at weddings and celebrations โ€” is now promoted at international festivals as an "Israeli folk dance." Israeli music producers often use traditional Arabic maqams and instruments (oud, qanun), mixing them with electronic music and presenting it as an "innovative Israeli sound," while Palestinian musicians are restricted in their movement and access to international venues.

Architectural and Toponymic Theft. They didn't just take our houses โ€” they appropriated our architectural style. Arab architecture with its arched vaults, inner courtyards, and thick walls of limestone ("Jerusalem stone") is now widely used in Israeli villas and public buildings, passed off as "Levantine style" or "Mediterranean design," but without its true owners โ€” the Palestinians.

Hundreds of Arabic names of villages, mountains, valleys, and springs were deliberately changed and replaced with Hebrew ones to erase even the memory of our existence. Wadi al-Haratiya became Nahal Besor, Jabal an-Nabi Yusha' became Har Nevo. This is an attempt to destroy the map of our memory.

Appropriation of Symbols of Resistance. Even our symbols of struggle are not safe. The Palestinian scarf โ€” the keffiyeh โ€” a symbol of national identity and resilience, has been commercialized. It is worn by Israeli hipsters and sold in Tel Aviv boutiques as a "fashion accessory," stripping it of its political and historical meaning. Similarly, the image of the key โ€” a symbol of the right of return to our homes โ€” is used in Western art as an abstract symbol of the "Middle East conflict," blurring its deeply personal meaning for every Palestinian refugee.

This is not innocent "cultural influence" or "exchange." This is a strategic policy of erasure. First, they stole the land, then the homes, and now they have set their sights on the soul. The goal is to create a false reality in which a "new," "modern" Israeli culture exists on "empty" land, and Palestinians are presented as either non-existent or primitive people without a rich cultural heritage. By appropriating our food, clothing, music, and history, they are trying to deprive us of the last thing we have left โ€” our identity โ€” and to prove that we are ghosts who never existed. This is not just theft. This is spiritual genocide, continuing to this day.

-- Muhammad Hamid ad-Din, a renowned Palestinian journalist