Only resistance can stop Israel crimes against Palestinians: Schoenman

Press TV has conducted an interview with Ralph Schoenman, author of Hidden History of Zionism in Berkeley, to discuss Israel’s demolition plans in the occupied Palestinian territories.  

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: We are witnessing more demolition by the Israelis. Tell me what is it going to take to stop this? We are continually seeing the expansion of settlements, the razing of olive gardens, and of course the razing of homes, in this case, tents. How can this be stopped?

Schoenman: This question has been posed for the Palestinian people since the Nakba. The elimination of the Palestinian population from 85 percent of Palestine was accomplished by precisely such methods of massacre and of driving out people and of demolishing their homes and confiscating their land. This is an ongoing process. It is one that has continued since the 1967 war and it has expanded and never has ceased in any respect.

I would like just to call your attention to the report of Human Rights Watch on August 24, 2013; one of a dozen of such continuing reports, and it says ‘Israel! Stop the unlawful West Bank home demolitions, the spike and destruction raises war crimes concerns.’

Israeli forces, the report said, routinely and repeatedly demolished homes throughout the occupied territories. The only purpose is to drive families off their land which is a war crime, said Joe Stork, Middle East director of Human Rights Watch.

Israeli forces destroyed the tents of a family with seven people sheltering after the military had already demolished their home twice. In another case, Israeli forces cut the road leading to the remaining home of an extended family in East Jerusalem, demolishing these and other adjoining homes.

And these reports are constant and continuous, it is not just the massive 35 page report of 2013, which illustrates this but it is a continuing process.

Israeli authorities zoned 13 percent of East Jerusalem and then expropriated 35 percent of the area for settlement constructions. In an area called “Area C” under exclusive Israeli control, one percent of the area is allowed to Palestinians and according to B’Tselem, an Israeli rights organization, the Israeli authorities have allocated 63 percent of that area to new Israeli settlements.

The first demolition in January 2013, the report says the Red Cross had given Palestinians tents. They were set up. The next morning the Israeli army came and demolished them. They were rebuilt. They took the tents away. They moved to a site 150 meters away. The army came again. The last time there was no warning.

Israeli home demolitions have displaced 3,799 Palestinians since the beginning of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s term in 2009.  

Press TV: But how can it be stopped? As you said this has been going on since the Nakba, this destruction, this expansionism. What will it take to stop this?  

Schoenman: Only the resistance of the Palestinian people and the international movement of boycott that seeks to cut Israel off from arms and from trade and from coordinated support from imperial powers across the world.

It has to be resistance mobilized by international opinion and the organizations that secretly defend the survival rights of the Palestinian people as inalienable right, the right to self-determination in their own land, resistance on part of the population, support from the population of the world, escalating the isolation of the Zionist state which is an apartheid state of oppression, subjugation and displacement. It has never been any different. That is Israel’s raison d’être. They will continue to do this until they either succeed in destroying the Palestinian people and removing them from their land and from history or until the Zionist state itself is brought to its knees by international resistance. Resistance alone can temper and in any way mitigate the ongoing onslaught on the people of Palestine by the Zionist apparatus.  

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