Miko Peled
Miko Peled

Miko Peled is an Israel-American activist, speaker, and author of the books The General’s Son: The Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (Just World Books, 2012) and Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five (Just World Books, 2018).

At a conference entitled “The Israel Lobby: Is it Good for the U.S.? Is it Good for Israel?”, Peled broke down the myth that Israel is a democracy: “Israel has from the very beginning defined itself as a racist apartheid state that prefers Jews.” Peled has also written for Mint Press News about the reality in Hebron and hosted a roundtable discussion of K-12 curricula in Israeli and Palestinian classrooms.

“The myth of Israel as a democracy has no factual basis, yet it, too, has become an indisputable fact. Israel has from the very beginning defined itself as a racist apartheid state that prefers Jews. No attempt has been made to hide this fact, and for almost seven decades Israeli lawmakers have made it their business to develop the state for the Jewish population at the expense of the Palestinian population, be they citizens, residents or simply people living without any legal definition at all. Palestinians have been pushed out of every aspect of the life of the state from the very beginning, not to mention the fact that they were pushed out of the country and not allowed to return. The web of laws that govern the lives of Palestinians, whether they live in Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem, the Naqab desert, Ramallah, Jenin or Khan Younis, is too complicated to even attempt to understand, yet regardless of where in Palestine Palestinians reside, they are governed by the state of Israel under laws that are vastly different than the ones that govern the lives of Jewish Israelis.”

“And still, we hear that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.”

“Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which took place in June of 1967, is sold as though it was the result of an inevitable war, a response to an existential threat at the end of which Israelis prevailed, and the ‘territories’ are the ‘spoils of war.’ But in fact, the conquest of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was the final stage of the occupation of Palestine, and all were planed far in advance. The war of 1967 concluded the occupation of Palestine and the creation of a single state over all of Palestine, with exclusive rights for Jewish people. What is Jewish about this, as Alice Rothchild asked earlier, I don’t know. Most Jewish people do not live and have never lived there, and today, the majority of those who live there are not Jewish, and Israeli certainly does not espouse any Jewish values.”

Peled describes his impressions of the mistreatment of Palestinians in Hebron in Mondoweiss and in this detailed article.

Latest Posts

A Burglary Motivated by Racism

A Burglary Motivated by Racism

Haaaretz journalists Gideon Levy and Alex Levac reported on a West Bank burglary case in 2020 in which a small Palestinian business was repeatedly burglarized by Jewish settlers. Was this burglary motivated by racism? Mohammed Mahmadi, 29, left his restaurant job in...

read more
Curt’s Hebron

Curt’s Hebron

Curtis Bell, President of Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East, spoke to the First Unitarian Church’s Department of Social Justice about his two months in Hebron and what he learned about the Palestinian experience under Israeli occupation. Video...

read more
Virginia Tech GPSS

Virginia Tech GPSS

The Graduate and Professional Student Senate (GPSS) at Virginia Tech passed a resolution in October 2021 demanding that the University’s administration enact an academic boycott of Israel and institutions “complicit in maintaining the Israeli occupation.” The...

read more
Jerusalem