‘The genocide in Gaza is part of an Israeli ethnic cleansing plan,’ says Palestinian activist

Brasil de Fato

“Nowadays, you can’t put people on trucks and throw them out of the borders, as in 1948. But you can create positive conditions to convince them to leave,” said former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon in the 80s. The euphemistic phrase is nothing less than the guidelines of a plan that has been systematically put into practice by Israeli governments, especially in this century.

That’s the opinion of Jamal Juma, a Palestinian activist who recently talked to Brasil de Fato. Born in the surrounding area of Jerusalem in 1962, he got a close look at the main events of the Israeli occupation, including the first intifada (the Arab word for popular rebellion that became a synonym for broad Palestinian insurrections), in the 80s; the almost-peace agreement known as the Oslo Accords, in the 90s; the second intifada; the 9/11 attacks; the house arrest and later death of the great Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the violent disputes between Fatah and Hamas; the blockade on Gaza and the series of massacres seen since then, which culminated in the current genocide.

On a visit to the Brasil de Fato newsroom in the city of São Paulo, Jamal talked about a lot of subjects: from his childhood and the first episodes of violence of which he was a victim to the different but equally desperate realities of the occupations in the Palestinian territories, the political panorama inside Israel and what the rest of the world can do about it. Check out the full interview below [in English].

Brasil de Fato: We’ll start talking about the current genocide. Where were you on October 7, 2023, and what do you think about Hamas’ operation that day?

Jamal Juma: On that day, I was in Ramallah, where I live. I live between Ramallah and Jerusalem. I heard about this [attack] on the news, and that’s something really shocking. I know very well the political context. I know how tense the situation is in Palestine. We, in the West Bank, have been under heavy attack for two years. People are killed every day. [Israeli] Settlers attack the people, there are gangs of settlers that have clearly started a process of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, especially Bedouins.

And the situation in Gaza has been really, really terrible for 17 years, not since October. They live in hell. Imagine 2.3 million people living in 360 square kilometers, totally locked up. Israel controls everything that enters Gaza, particularly food. Israel counts calories so that only the necessary to keep people alive are allowed to enter.

Starvation is a policy, isn’t it?

That’s been a policy from the very beginning. In 2008, Gaza lived a one-month-long massacre with aerial attacks, heavy bombardments, thousands of people dead, and thousands of houses destroyed. After that, they devastated the lives of people for two or three years, which was followed by another attack against Gaza, in 2012, and five other attacks until 2023. The most recent was in 2021.

So, that was the situation in Gaza. That sieged area has been systematically bombarded, with fighter jets destroying thousands of houses and killing thousands of people. Even UN reports and documents from other international organizations say that Gaza is becoming uninhabitable due to water contamination, a broad problem with electric energy supply, widespread famine and hopelessness. All around the world, somehow, the emergence [of a conflict] was expected.

Add to this the fact that Israel denies the rights of Palestine and even eliminates these rights. In Netanyahu’s speech at the UN two or three months before October 2023, he showed a map of Israel where there was no Palestine…

The “Great Israel”…

Yes, the “Great Israel” transposes the borders of historic Palestine. Meanwhile, the US government works aggressively to normalize their relations with Arab countries, putting pressure on Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel.

It means the end of the Palestinian cause. It is all accompanied by great projects for the Middle East, headed by the United States. They want to build a kind of Arab NATO led by Israel to integrate the country into the region.

And that’s to oppose the interests of China, Russia and Iran, [countries] that became monsters to the US So, they started to plan and even got ready to implement an alternate Silk Road, whose beginning would be Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Jordan going all the way until Haifa.

There are other projects, such as the Ben Gurion Channel. They intend to have an alternative to the Suez Channel, from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. In fact, the route crosses Gaza. However, considering it seriously, these projects and all the agreements won’t work as long as there is Palestinian resistance.

Would they have to get rid of the Palestinians?

Exactly. Hamas knew and all the Palestinians knew too – and I’m talking about rumors being shared – that after October 2023 and the Jewish festivities, a huge attack would target Gaza. What Hamas did – not only Hamas, but actually the Palestinian resistance in Gaza – was break the prison walls down.

Was it a preventative Palestinian attack against Israel?

Exactly.

But when you saw the attack, did you imagine that Israel’s response would be so terrible, so horrendous?

Not to that extent, honestly. People under occupation have the right to resist, break the siege and escape from their prisons, which is guaranteed by international law. [They have the right] To fight and resist by all means, even with arms. When they broke the prison walls down, Hamas militants went to the Israeli military base, which is responsible for the attacks on Gaza, and to the air checkpoint, which is also a military base and controls all the sophisticated military apparatus brought into Gaza.

When they broke the wall down, the problem was that the Gaza population ran away, and then chaos started. All the Gazan population wants revenge.

To begin with, they are like refugees, expelled from their homeland. Many of them – if not all – have lost relatives and children in the constant attacks perpetrated by Israel from time to time. These people are in a kind of prison, [but] the doors have opened and they have come out.

But Israel’s reaction… When we analyze in depth why they reacted in this way, we see that the Israelis never expected an attack like this from the Palestinians. For them, for the US and all those who defend Israel…

It was the largest attack Israel had ever seen…

For them, it was unacceptable because it shook up the whole system, the whole occupation.

Why is Israel destroying so many buildings and killing so many children and women? What do you think Israel wants from all this?

Ethnic cleansing and the end of the Palestinian people. And, believe me, after they finish with Gaza… They’ve already started in the West Bank, but not on a large scale. So far, they have ethnically cleansed 26 Palestinian communities. These settler terrorist groups in the West Bank are making a huge effort to destroy all means of life, everything a human being needs to survive so that life becomes impossible.

In Gaza, there are no houses left, only piles of rubble and debris. There are no schools, universities, clinics, nothing. It would take two or three decades just to bring life back to Gaza. They chase people towards the borders of Egypt, hoping that they will open and people will flee. It’s not something the Egyptian government or the Palestinian people want.

We experienced expulsion and ethnic cleansing in 1948, when 85% of our population was wiped out. We know how bad life was for Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. We know how much Palestinians have suffered worldwide in the diaspora, 60% of our population are refugees. For more than 75 years, Palestinians have been living in refugee camps, the longest period of refuge since the 20th century. These camps, by the way, are not only in Jordan and Syria, but in Palestine itself, in the West Bank, where there are 14 large refugee camps.

These people originally fled or were expelled from the towns and villages destroyed in 1948, when 530 of them were completely wiped out. This is the Palestinian cause.

Is it a dehumanizing tactic?

Yes, but how is it possible for invisible and dehumanized people to promote an attack such as the one seen on October 7? This shocked the Israelis. But then, they used the attack to continue their plan.

Do you think the Israeli plan failed and isn’t working well for the Israelis themselves?

If there is anything positive about what has happened, something that gives us hope, it is the fact that the world has really been shaken, it is talking about us for the first time in history. You watch the genocide on TV every day, people being torn apart before your eyes. I think that it shakes the conscience of humanity and people. The question of Palestine is at the top of the world’s agenda. The US never expected this massive solidarity with Palestine.

Protests are being held all around the world, starting at universities in the United States.

Yes, the US was a hopeless case for us. We never expected to see crowds on the streets there and in Europe. And this proves that our enemy is the same: it’s imperialism. The monsters hiding behind “humanitarian workers”, “human rights”, “human laws” and “democracy” are the ones who are carrying out these atrocities against the people.

They don’t consider us. We have to leave because we are in a land they can use for profit, especially the US.

You are from the West Bank, right? Have you been to the Gaza Strip?

Yes, I’m from Jerusalem. I was even able to go to Gaza by car until the Oslo Accords, in 1991. After that, I managed to go there with a permit. I went twice, until 1999, and then never again. You’ve touched on a very important issue: the Israeli plan is to fragment the Palestinian people, at least the generations who are less than 30 years old, people who have never been together. Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and the lands that are now inside Israel. These people have never visited or seen each other. This is part of the colonial control, to divide people.

What are the main differences caused by the process of isolation of these Palestinian populations?

I don’t see any differences between the people of the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza. We are all equal and share the same principles, history and language. We communicate with each other. Our parties and movements in Gaza and the West Bank communicate with each other. We can’t see each other face to face, but we do talk.

The difference is that Gaza is even more oppressed and massacred. It’s in worse conditions than the West Bank. [Gaza] is locked. It’s a coastal area, as you said, and it is also a sandy region.

But they can’t enjoy the sea, can they? Can people in Gaza go to the beach like anyone else in the world?

No, and we, in the West Bank, can’t enjoy the sea in Gaza. However, before the Oslo Accords, that is, in the 70s and 80s, [Gaza] used to export citrus fruits, vegetables and fruit to Jordan and across the Gulf in large quantities.

So it’s possible, right?

That was possible, but Israel transformed the place into a desert. Israelis destroyed over a kilometer of the surrounding areas of Gaza and put trees down claiming that Palestinian fighters were hiding behind them. Their goal was to extinguish the subsistence resources of Palestinians so they could starve them to death if they wanted to.

About your childhood and teen years, what are the fondest memories you have of Palestine?

I grew up in a peasant family, originally Bedouin. I was born in 1962 near Jerusalem, about 7 kilometers towards the sea and Jericho. I spent my life surrounded by sheep and goats. That was my life. But it was the life of a witness to the occupation. That’s the life of any Palestinian: no matter your lifestyle, the occupation is always there.

The first experience that opened my eyes [to the Israeli occupation] was when I was 15. I was going from my village to Jerusalem when soldiers got on the bus and asked for our ID… By the way, in Palestine, the most important thing in your life is your identity card. You have to prove who you are all the time. I said that I was very young and didn’t have an ID, and the soldier thought it was a lie: “Stand up”. I stood up, but I’m tall, so he thought I was lying and slapped me in the face. I couldn’t accept that kind of humiliation and I punched him back. I was beaten up for a whole day. I still remember their boots on my face.

Prisoners who leave prison are almost starved to death months later. I have friends who were unrecognizable when they left prison, losing weight from 90kg to 60kg, and getting decades older. They don’t see us as human beings and think they have the right to kill us. Jewish settlers in the West Bank can kill a Palestinian and go home, no one questions it. But if a Palestinian child throws a stone, he gets at least two years in prison.

Since 1970, more than a million Palestinians have been imprisoned. You can’t find a single family in Palestine that doesn’t have a relative, now or in the past, in prison. As for the houses destroyed, in Jerusalem alone, more than 15,000 houses have been demolished since 1967, and the same goes for the West Bank. There isn’t a family whose son hasn’t seen his father beaten by soldiers. The dehumanization and level of oppression you experience from birth has become even more brutal in recent decades.

Prisoners who leave prison are almost starved to death months later. I have friends who were unrecognizable when they left prison, men who went from 90 kilos to 60 kilos and aged decades. They don’t see us as human beings and think they have the right to kill us. Jewish settlers in the West Bank can kill a Palestinian and go home, no one questions it. But if a Palestinian kid throws a stone, he gets at least two years in prison.

Israel treats teenagers as adults, doesn’t it?

Not only teenagers, but children too. There are children as young as 10, 11 and 13 being arrested. They are on their way to school and then they are arrested. In Silwan, a neighborhood near Jerusalem, 1,000 arrests of children were recorded in 2008.

Why are they arrested?

To discourage their future involvement in the cause. Terrorize them from an early age, causing trauma. I think [Israel] is the only country in the world to arrest children continuously and systematically. 

In Brazil, some people find it difficult to understand the causes and reality of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis and all the oppression you face. And it’s common in Brazil to hear people saying simplistic things like ‘Why can’t they just relax and be friends, live together? I’d like you to explain why a young Palestinian can’t be a friend of a young Israeli.

I don’t know how to be friends with someone who wants to kill me, steal my house, kick me out of my homeland, who doesn’t see me as a human being. Israelis want Palestinians to behave like slaves: clean up their garbage, work in their factories and homes. In Israeli society, by the way, racism isn’t just against Palestinians – there are different levels. You have the Europeans, like the Ashkenazi white Jews, then the Russian Jews, the Ethiopian Jews, the Arab Jews who came from Arab countries. Palestinians come last.

That’s why there are cracks within Israeli society making them turn against each other. The first law approved in Israel when they occupied Palestine in 1948 was already very racist. It offered and guaranteed the right of Jews, anywhere in the world, to live there and forbade Palestinians – who had been expelled two weeks previously – to return.

Thus, the settlements began and our land was stolen and put into a fund called the Jewish National Fund to be distributed to new immigrants.

You’re campaigning against the wall Israel is building in the West Bank. Why is this wall so bad?

The wall is one of the biggest steps taken by colonialism in the West Bank. It’s the 21st-century version of ethnic cleansing. In 1989, former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon said “Nowadays, you can’t put people on trucks and throw them out of the borders,” as was done in 1948. “But you can create positive conditions to convince them to leave.”

The wall represents the “positive conditions” he mentioned, that is, surrounding Palestinians with a wall to fragment society. You don’t just have Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank; you have the North Bank, the Middle Bank, the South Bank, and the East Bank. So even if you’re Palestinian and live in the West Bank, you can’t communicate with your neighbors or friends.

Especially after October 7, they have been using the war in Gaza to consolidate colonial apartheid. We can no longer use our main roads as we want: there are armed settlers there, checkpoints everywhere and you can be shot at any time.

Have the rates of violence in the West Bank risen much?

It’s increasing every day. Yesterday [June 11], six people were killed in Jenin. The day before, there were four [killed] in Ramallah. Two or three days later, another six people were killed in Jenin. A week earlier, 14 people were killed in Tulkarem. From October 7 until today [June 12], more than 600 Palestinians have been killed.

They are killing people every day. All the Bedouin communities are out of reach, isolated and eliminated. 26 Bedouins have been killed so far.

Aren’t the settlers afraid of the law, of being held accountable?

The Israeli police support them. They received 30,000 machine guns after October 7. We’re talking about more than 60,000 settlers well organized, militarized and trained, people who are serving in the Israeli army. They are the armed arm of the government. Legally, the government would take longer [to steal Palestinian lands]: It would have to go through a whole legal process and justify the confiscation with evidence. The settlers speed up the process. They go into the communities with guns in hand, expel the people and seize the land.

Jamal, one of the groups that facilitated your visit to Brazil was the Jewish Voices for Liberation, a collective formed by Jews who oppose the occupation and the government of Israel. They also have a question for you: “As a group of Jews who understand Judaism as a tradition of equality, justice, unity and opposition to violence, we support BDS – Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions – as an important tool for social justice, with no relation to anti-Semitism or Jew hatred. More importantly, we envision a future in which this tradition serves as a solid foundation for the world we live in, and not just as an abstract concept honoring the idea of our exceptionalism. Boycott and divestment are non-violent practices aimed at dismantling apartheid. As an exercise in futurology, beyond the essential task of undermining companies and policies complicit in the genocide and colonization of Palestinians, is it possible to dream of a life there based on coexistence and cohabitation?”

My father used to say that, before 1948, there were Palestinian Jews who used to live together with us. During Shabbat, since they couldn’t light the fire, the Palestinians lit it and cooked for them. Historically, we lived together – Muslims, Christians, Jews – in Palestine, as brothers, comrades, neighbors.

Until Zionism emerged and destroyed this mosaic of relationships. Our problem is not with Jews, but with Zionism as a colonialist ideology, which unfortunately wears the garb of Judaism. Palestinians today are ready to live together in a single state, with equality between the people as it was before 1948. What brings us together is our humanity. I’m against having two states. It’s not a solution.

Why not?

It’s not fair. As a Palestinian, I sacrificed 78% of my original land in the Oslo Accords to have two states. Palestine’s most beautiful, fertile and richest lands are under their control. The West Bank is mountainous, with a semi-arid climate, and Gaza is on the coast. But we sacrificed even that to live side by side. But what happened in the end? We were persecuted even within the 22% [of land that remained for us], and they created a colonial apartheid system for us.

So the problem lies in the mentality, and this is one of the responsibilities of the Jewish people who are aware of the situation and taking a stand now. We are very grateful for that and consider them our comrades-in-arms. 

Regarding the BDS movement, is it possible to measure how effective it has been in terms of the damage it has caused to Israeli interests around the world so far?

The first Palestinian movement for BDS began in 2005, and the reason it happened so quickly was the apartheid wall. As Palestinians, our response is to call on the whole world to stand in solidarity, to work together to put an end to this atrocity.

BDS was created based on human rights. There are three situations we want to achieve that will resolve the issues of occupation in 1967, racial discrimination against Palestinians in 1948, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. What they call a conflict is actually a genocidal war.

Netanyahu seems to be nearing the end of his term. He seems weak internally and externally. If his government ends soon, what do you think will replace it? An extremist right-wing government, or is there any hope Israelis will change direction and elect a less brutal and violent right-wing government?

The problem is that Israel’s current fascist and fanatical government makes the world think that the opposition in Israel is the “dove of peace” or a progressive left that really wants peace and would die for it. But no.

The conflict in Israel is between two sides: Zionist liberalism, which identifies and ties itself more closely to the “liberal and white question” and wants to cooperate with the style of European and American politics; on the other side, the right-wing ideology of the fascist groups that are currently in power and is represented by Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu and others.

They don’t care what the US and Europe will say about them. They just want to achieve their goals, to say that the land is theirs and everything else must disappear. We can’t forget that the massacres with the highest death toll in Gaza were carried out by liberal Zionists. It is estimated that 80% of Israeli society leans to the right. This is how fascist groups came to power. The so-called left has disappeared from Israel. There are anti-Zionists and anti-colonialists, but they are few.

Why did this happen?

I don’t know. The Israeli Zionist machine has been able to terrorize the Israeli population all the time, creating this kind of paranoia that their