ARE PALESTINIANS UNREASONABLE?

For nearly 77 years, Western governments and media have helped justify Israel’s occupation of Palestine, often blaming Palestinians themselves for supposedly rejecting peace.

Listen to US comedian Dave Smith dismantle the argument while speaking in 2024 to environmental lawyer Robert F Kennedy Jr (@robertfkennedyjr on IG, @RobertKennedyJr on X), who later became US President Donald Trump's Health and Human Services Secretary. Kennedy has long defended Israel, a point of contention for people who had looked to him as a progressive candidate in the 2024 US presidential election.

Smith criticised Kennedy’s argument that Arab states refused to recognise Israel, saying Kennedy left out the root causes. For example, the UN's 1947 partition plan allocated 56 per cent of the land to the Jewish population despite their demographic and land ownership minority, arguing that Palestinian resistance was a legitimate rejection of ethnic cleansing, land theft and settler-colonial expansion beyond UN-assigned borders. Then, Zonist forces expelled Palestinians before the official 1948 war, leading to displacement of 57 per cent of Palestinians, or more than 800,000 out of 1.4 million people. Israel continues to justify klling defenceless civilians, including saying everyone in Gaza supports H*mas.

This context remains relevant given Israel’s military onslaught had klled more than 186,000 Palestinians between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024, according to the Lancet medical journal. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice provisionally ruled that Israel’s action could plausibly amount to gnocide. 

Video credit: Dave Smith (@comicdavesmith on X, @theproblemdavesmith on IG)

Sources

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/middle_east/israel_and_the_palestinians/key_documents/1681322.stm

https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/the-dangers-of-arab-normalization-with-israel/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/5/15/the-nakba-five-palestinian-towns-massacred-75-years-ago

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/nakba-palestine-catastrophe-explained

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/26/1227078791/icj-israel-genocide-gaza-palestinians-south-africa

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/8/gaza-toll-could-exceed-186000-lancet-study-says

https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/portalspcbs/pressrelease/pressen_nakba65e.pdf

https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-206581