An interview with Mohammed Zraiy on Jewish Currents
Alain Alameddine: How is the situation on the ground?
Mohammed Zraiy: There’s no electricity, no internet, no medicine, no water, no food supplies, indiscriminate bombing—houses, hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, United Nations buildings, civilians, ambulances, paramedics, and reporters have been targeted, entire neighborhoods have been flattened, thousands have been martyred, including 10 people in my immediate family. It’s a massacre—and it is but one of many stations in Israel’s ongoing Nakba against us. For 75 years, we have been fighting for our liberation against occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism.
AA: How does this make you feel?
MZ: It’s a constant weight; we all feel it on our chests. In Gaza, we are used to war. It’s been part of our lives since we were babies. As we grew into adulthood, stuck in refugee camps, without basic rights like work or freedom of movement or travel, everything felt gloomy. This military operation [by Hamas], however, felt different. Now we feel sadness, fear, and pride. Sadness for those who died in the massacres. Fear for those who will die here. And pride for having broken the hubris of an army that has long wielded the sword of genocide to tamper the spirit of resistance. A spirit of defiance burns in our hearts.
I come from Tell Jammeh, which was razed to the ground [in 1948] and supplanted with the colony of Re’im. [On October 7th], I followed the news minute by minute, as the resistance battled the occupying army and freed my grandparents’ town for several hours. I watched as Palestinians ran into the Palestinian territories occupied in 1948 shouting, “We got back home, we got back home!” I felt then that return is possible—but only through resistance. The spirit that has grown in refugee camps will blossom into freedom.
AA: You mentioned sadness and fear. Do you wish the Palestinian counterattack had never happened?
MZ: We are human—we don’t want to kill, we don’t want to die, we just want to live. Destiny so willed it that when deciding which land to colonize (to use Herzl’s frame), the early Zionist fathers chose Palestine instead of the other lands they were considering stealing (to use Ben-Gurion’s frame). For 75 years, agents of this settler-colonial project have been working to ethnically cleanse us from our lands, and couldn’t care less even about international law that is biased in Zionism’s favor, let alone about human rights (or, as the colony’s government described us, “animal” rights). A people under occupation has only three options: to resist, to resist, and to resist. It’s the settler colonization of Palestine that I wish had never happened, not our reaction to it.
AA: So, you don’t blame Palestinians for the counterattack?
MZ: Do you know that most inhabitants of Gaza are not from Gaza? We come from the Palestinian lands occupied in 1948, like al-Lyd, Ramla, Yafa, or Birsabeh. We were deported to the Gaza Strip and supplanted by hundreds of thousands of settlers. Now we wait for the UN to help us with basic necessities, which only reach us when Israel “allows” them to go through. Israel denies us the right to go home because we’re not Jewish, while it welcomes Jews who are living peacefully elsewhere. These settlers live comfortably on our lands, while the natives are segregated, dispossessed, and killed. This is the reality imposed by Israel and its supporters, especially the United States and United Kingdom. Which side did you ask if we should blame? How could this even be a question?
AA: So what are you proposing?
MZ: We want a solution that guarantees that Palestinians in Gaza will not be bombed in the “safety” of our homes; Palestinians in the West Bank will not be deported to Jordan as part of the ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing; Palestinians in Haifa will not be expelled for holding a Palestinian flag; Palestinians in the Naqab [the Negev] or Jerusalem will not fear eviction from their own houses. The settler colony is the cause of all this, so the solution is to dismantle it and establish its fundamental antithesis: an inclusive, secular, democratic Palestinian state that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, ethnicity, or any other identity, and that protects its society from racist ideologies and movements like Zionism.
AA: What would your message to Israelis be?
MZ: Unlike what they’ve been told, we’ve never had a problem with Jews. Jews have been part of the fabric of our society way before the establishment of Israel. In fact, Jews escaping European persecution found refuge in Palestine. Gaza had a Jewish quarter. They were living peacefully, not with Arabs but as Arabs, right up until 1948. The establishment of Israel didn’t protect Jews; it caused the divide and danger. The solution is to roll back and dismantle the colony. My message to the colonizers who left their home countries to occupy our lands is simply to go back home. As for those who were born here, my message is: You are secondary victims of this colonial project. You are being used to occupy other people’s lands, and your Jewishness is being politicized for colonial means. Meditate carefully on the examples of South Africa, Angola, Algeria—they may not apply wholesale to the settler colonization of Palestine, but they hold lessons for you. Today you must make a choice: Either support this deadly colonial project, or side against it by supporting the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a democratic state that liberates Palestinians, as well as Jews, from Zionism. A state that will honor the right of Palestinian refugees to return and compensation and that will welcome and protect its Jews as citizens of Palestine. This transition from Zionism to democracy will not cost anyone’s life; it will cost you your colonial privileges, and will free you—and us, its primary victims—from colonialism.
AA: What is your message to other Palestinians, and to their allies globally?
MZ: Refuse any proposal that legitimizes Zionism’s basic foundations such as the politicization of identity and the partition of Palestine. That includes the two-state proposal and calls for a binational or confederate state. I encourage all those reading this to take part in our efforts to work for a transition from Zionism to a single democratic state, the only way to peace.
