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Introduction

The Jewish perspective,
grounded in Jewish values
of truth and justice,
provides a clear
path to peace.

PEACEFUL PALESTINE

Historical and first-hand
accounts of who the
Palestinian people are
do not fit the stereotype
seen in the media.

CREATION OF STATE

During the 30 years
leading up to the creation
of Israel in 1948, increasing
tensions and population
shifts set the stage for
further conflict.

TERROR + CONFLICTS

Previously a peaceful
region, Palestine would
see far more violence,
including terror attacks
by both Arab and
Jewish groups.

CIVIL RIGHTS

Non-violent and peaceful
protest are a means of
action taken by Palestinians,
alongside Israeli as well as
international activists.

CONCLUSION

Support peace with justice
for our Israeli and Palestinian
brothers and sisters.

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TERROR + CONFLICTS

Featured Voice

Jews Step Forward

Moral voices of bravery and justice

John Mahoney calls the film, “the most powerful documentary I had seen on the subject of Jewish-American support for Palestinian rights.”

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Featured Interview

Gideon Levy

Israeli journalist speaking out

An Oxford Union debate on the Two-State Solution

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Featured Interview

International Solidarity Movement

A way to get firsthand experience

ISM volunteers stand with Palestinians and share their experiences.

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Featured Interview

Marc Lamont Hill

Passionate for equality, freedom and justice

Hear Marc Lamont Hill speak his mind on safety for Jews and freedom for Palestinians.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_5k6AJoNDs

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Featured Interview

Together for Freedom

Jewish Voice for Peace: Our Roots

This video describes the origins of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization standing for uncompromising Jewish values of peace, justice, equality, and human rights.  

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Featured Documents & Books

Were there Palestinians? Was there a place called Palestine?

The Jewish Encyclopedia

The latest exhibit added to the Jewish Museum of the Palestinian People is a 1909 copy of The Jewish Encyclopedia.  The Encyclopedia, before Balfour/1917, makes numerous references to Palestine and Palestinians, including late 1800’s Jewish interest in colonizing Palestine.

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Featured Voice

Parents Circle

Bereaved Families Speak

Hear bereaved parents speak about Peace, Reconciliation and Tolerance.  Read about recent presentations.

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Featured Voice

How the Palestine movement taught me to confront anti-Semitism

Tom Pessah describes his journey

Tom Pessah is a sociologist and activist. Writing in +972 Magazine, Tom separates anti-Semitism from speaking out against the mistreatment of Palestinian families.  

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Featured Voice

Wrestling with Zionism

Jews tell their stories

A series of short videos from people from a range of backgrounds who share their evolving relationships to Zionism.

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Featured Documents & Books

The Palestine Jewish Colonization Association

Is Israel a colonial project?

This 1936 telegram shows that people colonizing Palestine called it colonization.

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Featured Voice

Eran Efrati speaks out

Efrati describes killing of Palestinians in Gaza

Eran Efrati, former sergeant in the Israeli Defense Force, describes the IDF’s actions in Shejaiya, Gaza,.

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Featured Voice

Anna Baltzer

"I found a system of segregated roads"

Jewish American Anna Baltzer visited Palestine and found that much of what she had been taught about Israel/Palestine hadn’t been true. She published an account in her book, Witness in Palestine, and describes myths and answers frequently asked questions.

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Featured Voice

Michael Ratner

From a Zionist Youth to an Outspoken Critic of Israeli Actions

In this video, Michael Ratner describes going from a typical Jewish upbringing, one entirely supportive of Israel, to realizing that Israel’s actions are inconsistent with Jewish values.  His Jewish commitment to justice makes the mistreatment of Palestinians feel untenable; he describes how he moves to a belief that all people in Israel/Palestine should be treated as equals.

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Featured Documents & Books

The Dawaymeh massacre

They taught us we are moral, but we committed massacres

This June 14, 1949, UN report describes a brutal massacre of Palestinian civilians.  The story of the massacre was also described in a disquieting  report from one of the Jewish Israeli soldiers.

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Featured Voice

Jewish Voices: Gideon Levy

Gideon Levy, columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, sppke in Washington in 2018

“Zionism has many meanings…  the belief about the Jewish people having the right to live in Palestine side by side with the Palestinians, doing anything possible to compensate the Palestinians for the terrible tragedy that they went through in 1948, this can also be called the Zionist belief.”

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While Palestine was a largely peaceful, multi-faith region, the early 1900s would see far more deaths, including by terrorist attacks–by both Arab and Jewish groups. Jewish terror groups, like the Irgun and the Stern Gang, were labeled as terrorists by the British government and even by Jewish leaders.

David Ben-Gurion, a founder and later Prime Minister of Israel, called the Irgun an “enemy of the Jewish people.” However, leaders of the Irgun (Menachem Begin) and Stern Gang (Yitzhak Shamir) would become Prime Ministers of Israel.

 

Palestinian Israeli Christian Pastor Elias Chacour describes the fear Begin spread among the land in his book, Blood Brothers:

“Throughout the winter months and into spring 1949, we heard of more terror, of villages blown up by barrel-bombs while others narrowly escaped the flaming ruins of their homes. Thousands were now uprooted, living in the hills and arid wastelands.
Most especially, we came to fear one name—the highly-trained and single-minded Zionist organization called the Irgun. One of its leaders had been among the ten terrorists most wanted by the British for his part in bombing the luxurious King David Hotel in Jerusalem. His name was Menachem Begin and his proclaimed goal was to ‘purify’ the land of the Palestinian people.”

Wanted Poster

Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both later to become Prime Ministers of Israel, were once universally recognized as terrorists by the British government and even by leaders of the nascent Jewish state. The Wanted poster below includes Menachem Begin.

 

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The rise of Begin’s party in Israeli politics was called “the most disturbing political phenomena of our time” in a 1948 letter published in the New York Times, which was cosigned by Albert Einstein.

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Despite their terrorist past, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir later would become leaders of Israel and are honored throughout Israel with main roads bearing their names. Just last year, Israeli leaders dedicated Jerusalem’s Highway 9 entrance to Shamir. Meanwhile, Highway 50 in western Jerusalem is officially known as Begin Boulevard and also called the Menachem Begin Expressway. Similarly, a major thoroughfare in Tel Aviv is known as Begin Road.

The Irgun bombs of 1937-38 sowed terror in the Arab population and substantially increased its casualties.  Until 1937 almost all of these had been caused by British security forces (including British-directed Jewish supernumeraries) and were mostly among the actual rebels, but from now on, a substantial proportion would be caused by Jews and suffered by random victims.  The bombs do not appear in any way to have curtailed Arab terrorism, but they do appear to have helped persuade moderate Arabs of the need to resist Zionism and to support the rebellion.

The first Irgun attack occurred on November 11, 1937, killing two Arabs at a bus depot near Jaffa Street in Jerusalem, and wounding five.  Three days later, on November 14, a number of Arabs were killed in simultaneous attacks around the country-a day that the Irgun thereafter commemorated as the “Day of the Breaking of the Havlaga (restrain).” On July 6, 1938, an Irgun operative dressed as an Arab placed two large milk cans filled with TNT and shrapnel in the Arab market in downtown Haifa.  The subsequent explosions killed twenty-one and wounded fifty-two.  On July 15 another bomb killed ten Arabs and wounded more than thirty in David Street in Jerusalem’s Old City.  A second bomb in the Haifa market-this time disguised as a large can of sour cucumbers – on July 25, 1938 kill at least thirty-nine Arabs and injured at least seventy.  On August 26, a bomb in Jaffa’s vegetable market killed twenty-four Arabs and wounded thirty-nine.

– Excerpt from Benny Morris’s Righteous Victims: A history of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001

Hotel Attacks

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King David Hotel attacks

On July 22, 1946 the King David Hotel, then headquarters of the British Mandate Government, was bombed. The Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, took responsibility for the attacks, and claimed that they had made phone calls to the hotel as a warning before the bombs detonated. The bombing, which killed 91 people including British, Arabs, and Jews, remains the deadliest attack in Israel.

Sabra/Shatila Massacre

“On the night of Sept. 16, 1982, the Israeli military allowed a right-wing Lebanese militia to enter two Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. In the ensuing three-day rampage, the militia, linked to the Maronite Christian Phalange Party, raped, killed and dismembered at least 800 civilians, while Israeli flares illuminated the camps’ narrow and darkened alleyways. Nearly all of the dead were women, children and elderly men.

Thirty years later, the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila camps is remembered as a notorious chapter in modern Middle Eastern history, clouding the tortured relationships among Israel, the United States, Lebanon and the Palestinians. In 1983, an Israeli investigative commission concluded that Israeli leaders were “indirectly responsible” for the killings and that Ariel Sharon, then the defense minister and later prime minister, bore “personal responsibility” for failing to prevent them.”

-Seth Anziska for the NYT

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New York Times, Sept. 26, 1982; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Times

Democracy Now article

NYT article: Declassified Documents

Cycle of Violence

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View the source of this data at: "1929 Hebron massacre," Wikipedia.org (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Hebron_massacre)
See the source of these statistics here .
View the source of this data here .
View the source of this data here .
Data from B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization.
Data from B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization.
Data from B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization.

Gaza 2009 & 2014

Recent operations taken on by Israel against Gaza have left disproportionate casualties and immense destruction. In 2008, Israel carried about Operation Cast Lead, also known as the Gaza War or the Gaza Massacre. The operation’s goal was stated to be an end to the smuggling of weapons into Gaza and an end to rocket fire into Israel. According to B’Tselem, 1,387 Palestinians were killed—a vast number of casualties being civilians, including 320 children. Nine Israelis were killed, including six soldiers and three civilians.

Under the Rubble

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Under the Rubble
A story from Gaza
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Source: B'Tselem.com

A Soldier's Story

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This Guardian article features the story of an Israeli soldier who testifies that “Most of our shooting was random… we didn’t think about civilian casualties”.

Institute for Middle East Understanding: Operation Cast Lead

More recently in 2014, Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza caused the death of 2,131 Palestinians, with 1,473 being identified as civilians, including 501 children according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The OHCA report also stated that at least 373,000 children required “direct and specialized psychosocial support” because children were “showing symptoms of increased distress, including bed wetting, clinging to parents, and nightmares” as a result of Operation Protective Edge.

Operation Protective Edge was said to be carried out for nearly exactly the same reasons as 2008’s Operation Cast Lead, with the same result – a largely disproportionate number of Palestinian civilian casualties.

BBC: Gaza Crisis: Toll of operation in Gaza

Dar al-Fadila Association for Orphans, consisting of a school, computer center and mosque in Rafah serving 500 children, were destroyed by the Israelis during Israel's assault on Gaza. – Jan 12 2009
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Dar al-Fadila Association for Orphans, consisting of a school, computer center and mosque in Rafah serving 500 children, were destroyed by the Israelis during Israel's assault on Gaza. – Jan 12 2009
Whole sections of Beit Hanoun have been demolished, making it one of the hardest hit communities in the recent offensive, along with Gaza City, Beit Lahiya, Khuza’ah and Rafah. Photo by Muhammad Sabah, B’Tselem field researcher in Gaza, on 5 August 2014, in the course of the ceasefire.
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Whole sections of Beit Hanoun have been demolished, making it one of the hardest hit communities in the recent offensive, along with Gaza City, Beit Lahiya, Khuza’ah and Rafah. Photo by Muhammad Sabah, B’Tselem field researcher in Gaza, on 5 August 2014, in the course of the ceasefire.
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A human rights group in Ramallah has dubbed Israel’s seizure of nearly $400m of funds belonging to Palestinians – for acceding to the International Criminal Court – a “war crime” prosecutable by the Geneva-based tribunal.

A new report by al-Haq, the West Bank affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, outlined the devastating effects of Israel’s withholding of taxes it collects on behalf of the Palestinians, calling the seizure “unlawful” and a form of “collective punishment”. – AlJazeera

Wars

Michael R. Fischbach writes in Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict that on August 26, 1955, “U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles delivered a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in which he stated that ‘compensation is due from Israel to the refugees.’” The compensation plan (confidentially called the Alpha Project) would pull international loans, including from the United States, to provide compensation to Palestinian refugees for their property losses. But, adds Fischbach, “the years 1955 and 1956 witnessed tremendous turmoil in the Middle East and the worsening of Western relations with the Arab world. Project Alpha fell victim to these events, and yet another plan for compensation failed to reach fruition.”

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Damaged tank and vehicles, Sinai War, 1956

Instead, 1956 saw the Suez Crisis—an invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain and France, with the main goals of re-establishing control of the Suez Canal by Western powers and dismantling Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser due to his nationalization of the canal.  The war is also called the Tripartite Aggression because it interfered with armistice lines established between Israel and Egypt when Israel occupied the Sinai until March 1957. Armistice lines between Israel and several of its neighbors were eventually broken in the Six-Day war in 1967. It was in this war that Israel tripled its land by occupying the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem.

For more on the decades of war between Israel and its neighbors, view this CNN interactive which provides briefs of several conflicts beginning with the founding of Israel in 1948.

 “Israel compromised itself through its partnership with European imperialism — providing evidence to enemies who had asserted all along that Israel was no more than a European imperialist itself. And its victory in the Sinai campaign — one of many dazzling triumphs — illustrated the paradox that the more Israel won on the battlefield, the further it got from achieving the peace that it sought.”

– David Fromkin, Stuck in the Canal, New York Times, 2006

Stuck in the Canal

Implications of the Suez Crisis
Dulles Returns Hopeful on the Suez
New evidence from 1967 war reveals Israeli atrocities
BBC-Truth Behind the Palestinian and Israeli Conflict

Although before the 1900s, Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived in peace, Jewish terror attacks became a significant influence on the flight of Muslim and Christian Palestinians to neighboring countries. A growing problem for the British authority, these Jewish terror groups also conduct attacks on peacemakers, including the Swedish UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte who had expressed a desire for Palestinian refugees to be able to return to their land.

Israeli terror operations have been called a “response.” But does Israel have a moral high ground for this massive killing knowing that Israel was created by making and keeping Palestinian families refugees from their homes?

Today, Palestinians suffer continuous attacks on their homes and infrastructure as seen in Israel’s recent Operation Protective Edge, which nearly mirrored the devastation caused by 2008’s Operation Cast Lead. More severely, Palestinian suffering has become institutionalized as collective punishment by Israel.

Next Exhibit:

CIVIL RIGHTS

Non-violent and peaceful
protest are a means of
action taken by Palestinians,
alongside Israeli as well as
international activists.

Host an exhibit
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