Palestine was not a land without a people; it was not, as Israeli leaders have described it, a wasteland. There was life on this land. There was a political life, a cultural life, a social life, a religious life. It had schools and universities, cinemas and cultural halls, it had villages and villagers, families and communities, whose life was disrupted by the impact of a promise made thousands of miles away, over a hundred years ago.  A breach of a sacred trust that relegated the indigenous people of the land to the status of ‘non-Jewish communities’, according them only civil and religious rights, denying their existence as a people and their rights as a nation, and paving the way for their dehumanization and mass expulsion from their homeland decades later.

…for decades, the Palestinian people have been denied this right (to self-determination) and have endured both colonialism and apartheid. There are those who are outraged by the use of these words. They should instead be outraged by the reality we are living.This reality is known by every Palestinian, suffered by millions, generation after generation.

It is a reality of the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their own land, not just during the 1948 Nakba, which led to the expulsion of up to 900,000 Palestinians; not just the expulsion of more than 400,000 Palestinians in 1967, but continually, including now, as I address you at this very moment. It is the indiscriminate maiming and killing of Palestinians. It means you can spend the entirety of your life as a refugee, denied your dignity and your right to return home. It means your life and family, your community and home are under constant threat, your loved ones can be taken away and thrown in an Israeli jail, held there indefinitely. Your land can be stolen, colonized and annexed without hesitation. Freedom is nowhere to be found, there is no safe haven. It means discrimination everywhere and no justice, anywhere.

It is a reality where Israel can destroy Gaza, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, almost half of them children, leaving one million children starved, terrorized and traumatized for life, orphaned of a mother, a father, or both, amputated and disabled, leaving nearly 2 million people displaced and desperate, with nowhere to shelter from the onslaught