Gaza - We cannot remain Silent.

 

  Highlights of Susan Abulhawa's speech to the Oxford Union.

• Introduction & Opening Statement
  She began by requesting that the audience refrain from interrupting. Then she laid out a historical context:

  “Chaim Weizman…said Palestinians were akin to ‘the rocks of Judea, obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.’
  David Ben-Gurion said, ‘We must expel Arabs and take their places."

• Early Zionist Ideology
  She documented the troubling rhetoric of early Zionist figures, such as:

  “Benny Morris…expressed regret that Ben Gurion ‘did not finish the job’… the ‘Arab problem.’” 

  
  
  

   

• Escalation of Violent Policies
  She referenced more recent statements by military and political figures like:

  Efraim Eitan (2004): “We have to kill them all.”
  Aaron Sofer (2018): “We have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.” 

• Personal Testimony
  She recounted a harrowing anecdote:

  “When I was in Gaza, I saw a little boy no more than nine years old whose hands and part of his face had been blown off from a booby‑trapped can of food…”

  
  
  

   

• Core Message
  She emphasized the value of Palestinian life:

  “This debate is ultimately about the worth of Palestinian lives; about the worth of our schools, research centers, books… our humanity and our agency.” 

  
  
  

   If the roles were reversed she said: 

   

• Because if the roles were reversed — if Palestinians had spent the last eight decades stealing Jewish homes, expelling, oppressing, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, raping and killing Jews; if Palestinians had killed an estimated 300,000 Jews in one year, targeted their journalists, their thinkers, their healthcare workers, their athletes, their artists, bombed every Israeli hospital, university, library, museum, cultural center, synagogue, and simultaneously set up an observation platform where people came to watch their slaughter as if a tourist attraction;

  if Palestinians had corralled Jews by the hundreds of thousands into flimsy tents, bombed them in so-called safe zones, burned them alive, cut off their food, water, and medicine;

  if Palestinians made Jewish children wander barefoot with empty pots; made them gather the flesh of their parents into plastic bags; made them bury their siblings, cousins, and friends; made them sneak out from their tents in the middle of the night to sleep on their parents’ graves; made them pray for death just to join their families and not be alone in this terrible world anymore, and terrorized them so utterly that their children lose their hair, lose their memory, lose their minds, and made those as young as four and five years old die of heart attacks;

  if we mercilessly forced their NICU babies to die, alone in hospital beds, crying until they could cry no more, dead and decomposed in the same spot;

  if Palestinians used wheat-flour aid trucks to lure starving Jews, then opened fire on them when they gathered to collect a day’s bread; if Palestinians finally allowed a food delivery into a shelter with hungry Jews, then set fire to the entire shelter and the aid truck before anyone could taste the food;

  if a Palestinian sniper bragged about blowing out 42 Jewish kneecaps in one day as one Israeli soldier did in 2019; if a Palestinian admitted to CNN that he ran over hundreds of Jews with his tank, their squished flesh lingering in the tank treads;

  if Palestinians were systematically raping Jewish doctors, patients, and other captives with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks, and fire extinguishers, sometimes raping to death, as happened with Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh and others;

  if Jewish women were forced to give birth in filth, get C-sections or leg amputations without anesthesia; if we destroyed their children then decorated our tanks with their toys; if we killed or displaced their women then posed in their lingerie…

  if the world were watching the livestreamed, systematic annihilation of Jews in real time, there would be no debating whether that constituted terrorism or genocide.

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• Defiant Conclusion
  Her closing remarks were poignant:

  “You will not erase us… We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories… Palestine will be free.” 

  here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc3EwBh_nCM 

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