Sumaya Awad > Quotes

“White/Western feminism's attempt at erasing the political context of Palestinian women's oppression was evident yet again around the 2017 Women's March on Washington, when liberal feminists objected to the leadership of Palestinian American organizer Linda Sarsour, and the newly minted "Zionesses" complained of "antisemitism" because Palestinian women's circumstances were on the platform, as part of a broader discussion of US President Donald Trump's Muslim ban and the overall Islamophobia he pandered to.”
― Sumaya Awad, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

“The Palestinian Nakba is neither a distant occurrence nor a completed history, and treating it as such only reproduces the Israeli contention that Palestine and Palestinians are romanticized representations of the past. The Nakba is not situated fully in the past, nor is it fully in the present: it transcends the notion of linear, progressive, and positivist history. It is a continuous and complex struggle against occupation, against apartheid, against erasure. It is the daily physical and abstract dispossession of land, identity, culture, and history. It has not ended.”
― Sumaya Awad, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

“In this sense, the Nakba is reminiscent of the United States’ dispossession and erasure of indigenous Americans, from the colonization of “New England” to the Trail of Tears, and until today.”
― Sumaya Awad, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

“The Nakba refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, when, over a period of several months, Jewish militia groups known as the Irgun and Haganah conducted raids, massacres, and depopulation campaigns across Palestine—all under orders from Zionist leadership, which aimed to drive Palestinians out en masse.”
― Sumaya Awad, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

“In 1947–48, four hundred Palestinian villages were completely destroyed, replaced in many cases by illegal settlements, resorts, and parks—all of which Palestinians are barred from entering.”
― Sumaya Awad, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

“In the late 1940s the United Nations intervened with the 1947 Partition Plan, which divided Palestinian land into areas designated for Jewish settlement and areas for Palestinians, legitimizing the Zionist claim to control over the land. Plan Dalet,”
― Sumaya Awad, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

“The destruction of the strong anti-Zionist tradition among European Jews has meant that Zionism has been able to claim that it represents the unified voice of Jews throughout the world; therefore, anyone who opposes them is an antisemite.”
― Sumaya Awad, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

“In fact, Palestine was only one of several territories Herzl considered for colonization. Argentina, Uganda, Cyprus, and even a couple of states in the Midwest of the United States were discussed as possible locations for the Jewish state. But the religious faction in the Zionist movement fought hard for Palestine, and Herzl, never one to overlook the power of a symbol, agreed that the ancient Jewish “homeland” would give the movement more emotional power.”
― Sumaya Awad, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

“The Black radical tradition calls attention to the anti-Black racism essential to US society and casts doubt on the compatibility of Black freedom and the United States project. After all, the Black presence in what is now called the United States, beginning with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, spans nearly five hundred years. And yet the Black American population has yet to experience civil equality in US society…. Similarly, the prospect of Palestinian freedom explodes the notion of Israeli democracy, showing over the course of the Zionist project that the most basic rights for Palestinians — such as that to return to the homes from which they were expelled — are incompatible with it. The Black-Palestinian intersection then is a powerful one, pointing necessarily to deep critiques of US and Israeli societies and politics, and the transnational systems of power in which they are embedded, leading those who engage with it to revolutionary conclusions regarding both countries and beyond.”
― Sumaya Awad, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

“The 2018 law enshrines at least three important tenets of Zionism: first, that the “right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” in other words, that the right to self-determination does not apply to Palestinians. Second, that the state language is officially Hebrew, downgrading Arabic to a language with “special status.” Third, “The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.”
― Sumaya Awad, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

“Interestingly, the "Zioness Movement" sprouted on the US activist scene with the explicit intention to counter feminists who were successfully denouncing Zionism. It chose the slogan, "Unabashedly progressive, unapologetically Zionist" in direct response to the growing, if belated, understanding among many Western feminists that Zionism is racism and has no place in progressive movements.”
― Sumaya Awad, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

“In 2011, Israel introduced the Nakba Law, which authorized the state to withhold funding from any public institution that mourns or commemorates the Nakba.”
― Sumaya Awad, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

“Naming and remembering the Nakba is the most basic precondition for building a movement that can effectively resist the racism and erasure at the heart of Israel’s settler-colonist project.”
― Sumaya Awad, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

“In the late 1940s the United Nations intervened with the 1947 Partition Plan, which divided Palestinian land into areas designated for Jewish settlement and areas for Palestinians, legitimizing the Zionist claim to control over the land.”
― Sumaya Awad, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

“We need to look honestly at the history of Zionism, a movement that has allied itself in every case and at every moment in its history with the powers of world imperialism; a project that has built its very existence on the colonization of another people, the Palestinian people, on the obliteration of their history, their culture, and their land.”
― Sumaya Awad, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction