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The Case for Palestine: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care
In 1948, the State of Israel was founded. While the philosophy of Zionism that advocated for a Jewish homeland in what was then known as Palestine dates back to 1897, the creation of Israel in 1948 was justified by the terrible crime of the Holocaust committed by Nazi Germany during WWII. Many defenders of Israel would like us to believe that the creation of Israel was a peaceful process on a land at most barely populated, however, this is far from true. Rather, the creation of Israel was accompanied by what is known by the Palestinians as the Nakba (catastrophe)—an operation in which 700,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their land and their homes. Since that time, Israel has continued to usurp more and more land from the Palestinians who they falsely portray as a people without a history and without a culture. Israel has been particularly cruel with the people of Gaza—70 percent of whom are refugees from the 1948 Nakba. Gaza has been converted by Israel into what some call a giant open-air prison surrounded by barbed wire. It is in this context that we are currently witnessing the tragic violence between Israel and the people of Gaza—violence on a scale not seen in this land since the Nakba of 1948. Indeed, many Palestinians are calling this a second Nakba, with around 1.5 million Palestinians already displaced and thousands killed. All of this is being accomplished by Israel with critical military and diplomatic support from the United States. This second Nakba is also being facilitated by the mainstream press that both downplays and justifies what many believe to be genocidal violence against the Palestinian people. The Case for Palestine is written as a counternarrative, with the hope that, if the truth is told, this violence and displacement can be stopped before it is too late; before Gaza is no more.
264 pages, Hardcover
Published May 28, 2024
8 people are currently reading
112 people want to read
About the author
Dan Kovalik
13 books82 followersTeaches International Law and International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 23, 2024
This is so needed! Because the mainstream media just isn't doing it.
January 20, 2025
Calling Gaza an open-air prison is misleading because its 2.3 million residents haven’t been convicted of any crimes. As Amnesty International noted, Gaza remains “under an Israeli air, sea and land blockade, in force since June 2007.” The US can easily stop Israel’s violence with a single phone call: “Reagan halted Israel’s bombing of civilians in Lebanon with one phone call to Begin.” Imagine Biden doing the same. Ha ha… In fact , you should know that back under Reaga, Senator Joe Biden said of Israeli killing civilians, “It was great! It had to be done! If attacks were launched from Canada into the United States, everyone here would have said, attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if ALL the civilians were killed.” Fact check that quote yourself! But no US liberal will fact check that of course. In less than a year after October 7th, 2023, “Palestine became the moral center of the world.” Israel intentionally began a major bombing of civilians during the last US Super Bowl (2024) to minimize US outcry; that same US Super Bowl had an Air Force flyover that cost US Taxpayers around $4 million. Today’s Israeli settlers are nothing less than colonizers. Of them, Palestinians will tell you, “It is not our resistance they oppose, but our existence.”
Israeli hero Ben-Gurion said, “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves …politically we are the aggressors, and they (Palestinians) defend themselves …the country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view, we want to take away from them their country.” He also said, “We must use terror, assassination, and intimidation. We must steal their land and eliminate every social service to free Israel from its Arab population.” No wonder Zionists revere him. At the time of the Balfour Declaration, only 8.1% of Palestine was Jewish out of a total population of 660,000 people. “The Zionists intended to create a state for Jews in a province that was 90% Arab.” And that involved “making the Palestinians pay for the West’s crimes”. Why?
Jesus Christ: When Israel expelled 750,000 Palestinians by force in 1948, did you know that 50,000 of them were Christians? The LA Times notes that “there were 1,000 Christians remaining in the Gaza Strip at the time that Israel’s military operations against Gaza began after October 7th.” Kovalik calls Jesus Christ, the most famous Palestinian in history; could you imagine mainstream US media ever saying that? The Reverend of Bethlehem’s Lutheran church, Munter Isaac said, “If Christ were born today, he would be born under the rubble and Israeli shelling.” Jesus said, “just as you did it to one of the least of my brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.” That is almost identical to Rabbi Hillel (30BC-10AD) who said “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another. This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.” Can you imagine ANY Zionist saying Hillel’s quote today? Israel has “turned the colonizer into the victim, and the colonized into the aggressor.” “Silence is complicity.” “Gaza today has become the moral compass of the world.” “If you fail to call this a genocide. It is on you.” “If you are not appalled by what is happening; if you are not shaken to the core – there is something wrong with your humanity.”
Ilan Pappe humorously stated it as “Most Zionists do not believe that God exists, but they believe that he promised them Palestine.” Well said. Those who would wrongfully have us believe there is NO backstory to October 7th should remember JFK said: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” And listen to Gabor Mate (descendant of victims of the Holocaust): “Take the worst thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by 1,000 times and it will still not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians.” Yep… Or simply compare Israeli actions to a home invasion: “The homeowners have the right to deter and defend themselves from the invasion; the invaders do not have a legal right to defend themselves from the homeowners.” Most homeowners would agree with that – even Zionist homeowners.
Hamas has issued that statement that: “Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.” Those rare Americans who study world history know that the “Jewish problem” was only a problem in Europe “while the Arab and Islamic environment was across history a safe haven for the Jewish people.” Look at Palestine - look at Al-Andalus from 711 CE until its fall in the early 11th century.
Israeli Prisoners: No Zionist will dare tell you that “Israel takes three times more children prisoners per year for many years than all the hostages (236 total) taken by the Palestinian militants on October 7th.” Fact check it yourself… “As of October 7, Israel was holding around 5,200 Palestinians prisoner, and many of these (around 2,200) were being held in ‘administrative detention’ – that is, without charge and without a definite sentence of confinement.” To make it worse, B-Tselem estimates that 85% of Israelis detainees are subject to torture. Shitting on the sacred Jewish values of Tikkun Olam, one detainee at a time. Norman Finkelstein said, “I am all for freeing the hostages; ALL the hostages: the 240 Israelis being held hostage and the 2.3 million people of Gaza who have been held hostage for twenty years.”
Of October 7th, US Ambassador Freeman said, Israelis were holding “a music festival on the border of a concentration camp (imagine this happening at Auschwitz during WWII). And the people in the concentration camp could hear and see what is going on. This is outlandish to say the least. But the people who were killed there were largely killed, it appears, by hellfire missiles and by other undisciplined fire by Israeli forces who reacted in a chaotic manner to what had happened.” Add to that Israel’s Hannibal Directive (look it up) and “seventy cars hit by Israeli helicopters, tanks or anti-tank missiles”. In December 2023, Israeli forces killed their own – “three hostages in Gaza in December even though they were holding white flags and despite the fact that one even spoke Hebrew to try to make his case for not being shot” (this from PBS.org). Know that 70% of Gazans are refugees from the Zionist Nakba displacement of 1948.
News: “Israel’s flooding of the underground Hamas tunnels in Gaza with seawater is expected to destroy Gaza’s aquifers, which the people there depend upon for drinking water.” And how is Jared Kushner expect to secure lovely Gazan beachfront property soon for the missus if Gaza’s aquifers are destroyed? The Center for Constitutional Rights “sued the Biden Administration for failing to prevent the genocide in Gaza – as the United States is explicitly required to do as a signatory to the 1948 Genocide Convention.” Meira Weiss’s book “Over Their Dead Bodies” shows that “organs taken from dead Palestinians were utilized in medical research at Israeli universities’ medical faculties and were transplanted into Jewish-Israeli patient’s bodies.” Hey, back off - theft and murder are ALWAYS okay if you delusionally believe you are personally chosen by God – just ask Jim Jones, Marcus Delon Wesson, David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite and Charles Manson. If they could, why oh why can’t Zionists? And how dare the non-delusional tell Zionists what they can and cannot do?
Right BEFORE October 7th, Israel was obsessed with removing all Gazans and shoving them in the Sinai desert in order to create the Ben Gurion Canal Project (p.101) AND better steal illegally occupied Gaza’s ample gas reserves. They figured if you leveled Gaza and moved all Palestinians by force, it would be easy-peasy to move south the planned Ben Gurion Canal Project to substantially shorten it and save costs. You can be sure Egypt would welcome losing the Sinai for free so that Israel could better cut deeply into Egypt’s annual canal profits. After all, if you can delusionally believe a bearded white man in the sky promised only your ethnic group land, then you can believe ANYTHING. So – back-off all doubters.
Dr. Brian Feeney wrote of Israeli settlers in the Irish News, “There are over 500,000 American colonists some of them the most racist, aggressive, and violent in killing Palestinians and stealing their land. They seem to think they’re in the Dakotas in the 1870’s or Oklahoma in 1890 exterminating Sioux and Cherokee.” A retired IDF lieutenant colonel Amos N. Guiora wrote “the settlers committing the pogroms are terrorists and must be held accountable.”
Fun Facts: “When a Palestinian home is demolished, the Palestinians living there must either demolish the home themselves or be forced to pay the Israelis to do it for them.” This is like the Nazis who made families pay for the bullets if one of theirs was sentenced to death. Zionism is “the belief in the superiority of one people over another.” It is a disproportionately powerful state “colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity.”
Vatican II: Liberation Theology took off like wildfire after the Pope John XXIII initiated Vatican II and “Latin American Bishops adopted ‘the preferential option for the poor’, renewing the radical pacifism of the Gospels that had been put to rest when the Emperor Constantine established Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire.” This led to US trained forces freely murdering Jesuit priests and Archbishop Romero in El Salvador. The US School of the Americas helped kill off liberation theology by training those murderers. “Now pull the trigger, Jose – Put down your cocaine and pull the trigger!” If you care about or protect the world’s poor the US historically will make your country pay for that in spades (death count).
Israel supported “the brutal military dictatorship in Guatemala that killed 200,000 of its own people.” “Experts have pointed out that ‘at least 300 Israeli advisers’ were in Guatemala during the (1982) coup by General Rio Montt.” [Another book I reviewed said Israel also gave weapons to Rwanda during its nasty-assed genocide.] Making a killing through killing – how noble.
Israel destroyed Gaza’s single airport control tower and radar station in 2001 and then emboldened, bulldozed the runway in 2002. Note this was all before Hamas took power – so what was Israel’s excuse then? Israel’s Minister of National Security Ben Gvir, paragon of Zionist morality, who yesterday resigned, “recently stated, and proudly, that spitting on Christian priests and churches is in fact ‘an ancient tradition’ (p.142).” You’d think other Zionists might say, “That’s too much! You don’t spit on fellow humans, especially men of the cloth!” but apparently not. And remember comically, if you think that’s morally wrong, you can only be anti-Semitic or a Jew hater. Good Lord… “Criticism of Israel’s human rights violations is not antisemitic any more than criticism of Saudi violations is Islamophobic, criticism of Myanmar violations is anti-Buddhist, or criticism of Indian violations is anti-Hindu.” When you are smeared by Zionists, the author says raise your voice, not lower it.
The IDF runs a Telegram channel “72 Virgins” which runs snuff films of Palestinians being murdered. On page 172, you get some of its content such as: “You won’t believe the video we got! You can hear the bones crunch.” And another says, “Exterminating the roaches …exterminating the Hamas rats …Share this beauty.” While another says, “Garbage juice!!!! Another dead terrorist!! You have to watch it with the sound, you’ll die laughing.” The author then says, “This is why this occupation must end, for Israel will not stop oppressing and killing the Palestinians until every Palestinian in historic Palestine is either ejected or dead.” “Palestine is multi-cultural, multiethnic, multireligious” Israel is the complete opposite. “And the United States, like Israel, was built on settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing and genocide against the indigenous population.”
Yet another great book by Dan Kovalik; you should read his other books too – all great. I’m so glad I read it, and you will be too. Bravo, Dan.
Israeli hero Ben-Gurion said, “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves …politically we are the aggressors, and they (Palestinians) defend themselves …the country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view, we want to take away from them their country.” He also said, “We must use terror, assassination, and intimidation. We must steal their land and eliminate every social service to free Israel from its Arab population.” No wonder Zionists revere him. At the time of the Balfour Declaration, only 8.1% of Palestine was Jewish out of a total population of 660,000 people. “The Zionists intended to create a state for Jews in a province that was 90% Arab.” And that involved “making the Palestinians pay for the West’s crimes”. Why?
Jesus Christ: When Israel expelled 750,000 Palestinians by force in 1948, did you know that 50,000 of them were Christians? The LA Times notes that “there were 1,000 Christians remaining in the Gaza Strip at the time that Israel’s military operations against Gaza began after October 7th.” Kovalik calls Jesus Christ, the most famous Palestinian in history; could you imagine mainstream US media ever saying that? The Reverend of Bethlehem’s Lutheran church, Munter Isaac said, “If Christ were born today, he would be born under the rubble and Israeli shelling.” Jesus said, “just as you did it to one of the least of my brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.” That is almost identical to Rabbi Hillel (30BC-10AD) who said “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another. This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.” Can you imagine ANY Zionist saying Hillel’s quote today? Israel has “turned the colonizer into the victim, and the colonized into the aggressor.” “Silence is complicity.” “Gaza today has become the moral compass of the world.” “If you fail to call this a genocide. It is on you.” “If you are not appalled by what is happening; if you are not shaken to the core – there is something wrong with your humanity.”
Ilan Pappe humorously stated it as “Most Zionists do not believe that God exists, but they believe that he promised them Palestine.” Well said. Those who would wrongfully have us believe there is NO backstory to October 7th should remember JFK said: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” And listen to Gabor Mate (descendant of victims of the Holocaust): “Take the worst thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by 1,000 times and it will still not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians.” Yep… Or simply compare Israeli actions to a home invasion: “The homeowners have the right to deter and defend themselves from the invasion; the invaders do not have a legal right to defend themselves from the homeowners.” Most homeowners would agree with that – even Zionist homeowners.
Hamas has issued that statement that: “Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.” Those rare Americans who study world history know that the “Jewish problem” was only a problem in Europe “while the Arab and Islamic environment was across history a safe haven for the Jewish people.” Look at Palestine - look at Al-Andalus from 711 CE until its fall in the early 11th century.
Israeli Prisoners: No Zionist will dare tell you that “Israel takes three times more children prisoners per year for many years than all the hostages (236 total) taken by the Palestinian militants on October 7th.” Fact check it yourself… “As of October 7, Israel was holding around 5,200 Palestinians prisoner, and many of these (around 2,200) were being held in ‘administrative detention’ – that is, without charge and without a definite sentence of confinement.” To make it worse, B-Tselem estimates that 85% of Israelis detainees are subject to torture. Shitting on the sacred Jewish values of Tikkun Olam, one detainee at a time. Norman Finkelstein said, “I am all for freeing the hostages; ALL the hostages: the 240 Israelis being held hostage and the 2.3 million people of Gaza who have been held hostage for twenty years.”
Of October 7th, US Ambassador Freeman said, Israelis were holding “a music festival on the border of a concentration camp (imagine this happening at Auschwitz during WWII). And the people in the concentration camp could hear and see what is going on. This is outlandish to say the least. But the people who were killed there were largely killed, it appears, by hellfire missiles and by other undisciplined fire by Israeli forces who reacted in a chaotic manner to what had happened.” Add to that Israel’s Hannibal Directive (look it up) and “seventy cars hit by Israeli helicopters, tanks or anti-tank missiles”. In December 2023, Israeli forces killed their own – “three hostages in Gaza in December even though they were holding white flags and despite the fact that one even spoke Hebrew to try to make his case for not being shot” (this from PBS.org). Know that 70% of Gazans are refugees from the Zionist Nakba displacement of 1948.
News: “Israel’s flooding of the underground Hamas tunnels in Gaza with seawater is expected to destroy Gaza’s aquifers, which the people there depend upon for drinking water.” And how is Jared Kushner expect to secure lovely Gazan beachfront property soon for the missus if Gaza’s aquifers are destroyed? The Center for Constitutional Rights “sued the Biden Administration for failing to prevent the genocide in Gaza – as the United States is explicitly required to do as a signatory to the 1948 Genocide Convention.” Meira Weiss’s book “Over Their Dead Bodies” shows that “organs taken from dead Palestinians were utilized in medical research at Israeli universities’ medical faculties and were transplanted into Jewish-Israeli patient’s bodies.” Hey, back off - theft and murder are ALWAYS okay if you delusionally believe you are personally chosen by God – just ask Jim Jones, Marcus Delon Wesson, David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite and Charles Manson. If they could, why oh why can’t Zionists? And how dare the non-delusional tell Zionists what they can and cannot do?
Right BEFORE October 7th, Israel was obsessed with removing all Gazans and shoving them in the Sinai desert in order to create the Ben Gurion Canal Project (p.101) AND better steal illegally occupied Gaza’s ample gas reserves. They figured if you leveled Gaza and moved all Palestinians by force, it would be easy-peasy to move south the planned Ben Gurion Canal Project to substantially shorten it and save costs. You can be sure Egypt would welcome losing the Sinai for free so that Israel could better cut deeply into Egypt’s annual canal profits. After all, if you can delusionally believe a bearded white man in the sky promised only your ethnic group land, then you can believe ANYTHING. So – back-off all doubters.
Dr. Brian Feeney wrote of Israeli settlers in the Irish News, “There are over 500,000 American colonists some of them the most racist, aggressive, and violent in killing Palestinians and stealing their land. They seem to think they’re in the Dakotas in the 1870’s or Oklahoma in 1890 exterminating Sioux and Cherokee.” A retired IDF lieutenant colonel Amos N. Guiora wrote “the settlers committing the pogroms are terrorists and must be held accountable.”
Fun Facts: “When a Palestinian home is demolished, the Palestinians living there must either demolish the home themselves or be forced to pay the Israelis to do it for them.” This is like the Nazis who made families pay for the bullets if one of theirs was sentenced to death. Zionism is “the belief in the superiority of one people over another.” It is a disproportionately powerful state “colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity.”
Vatican II: Liberation Theology took off like wildfire after the Pope John XXIII initiated Vatican II and “Latin American Bishops adopted ‘the preferential option for the poor’, renewing the radical pacifism of the Gospels that had been put to rest when the Emperor Constantine established Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire.” This led to US trained forces freely murdering Jesuit priests and Archbishop Romero in El Salvador. The US School of the Americas helped kill off liberation theology by training those murderers. “Now pull the trigger, Jose – Put down your cocaine and pull the trigger!” If you care about or protect the world’s poor the US historically will make your country pay for that in spades (death count).
Israel supported “the brutal military dictatorship in Guatemala that killed 200,000 of its own people.” “Experts have pointed out that ‘at least 300 Israeli advisers’ were in Guatemala during the (1982) coup by General Rio Montt.” [Another book I reviewed said Israel also gave weapons to Rwanda during its nasty-assed genocide.] Making a killing through killing – how noble.
Israel destroyed Gaza’s single airport control tower and radar station in 2001 and then emboldened, bulldozed the runway in 2002. Note this was all before Hamas took power – so what was Israel’s excuse then? Israel’s Minister of National Security Ben Gvir, paragon of Zionist morality, who yesterday resigned, “recently stated, and proudly, that spitting on Christian priests and churches is in fact ‘an ancient tradition’ (p.142).” You’d think other Zionists might say, “That’s too much! You don’t spit on fellow humans, especially men of the cloth!” but apparently not. And remember comically, if you think that’s morally wrong, you can only be anti-Semitic or a Jew hater. Good Lord… “Criticism of Israel’s human rights violations is not antisemitic any more than criticism of Saudi violations is Islamophobic, criticism of Myanmar violations is anti-Buddhist, or criticism of Indian violations is anti-Hindu.” When you are smeared by Zionists, the author says raise your voice, not lower it.
The IDF runs a Telegram channel “72 Virgins” which runs snuff films of Palestinians being murdered. On page 172, you get some of its content such as: “You won’t believe the video we got! You can hear the bones crunch.” And another says, “Exterminating the roaches …exterminating the Hamas rats …Share this beauty.” While another says, “Garbage juice!!!! Another dead terrorist!! You have to watch it with the sound, you’ll die laughing.” The author then says, “This is why this occupation must end, for Israel will not stop oppressing and killing the Palestinians until every Palestinian in historic Palestine is either ejected or dead.” “Palestine is multi-cultural, multiethnic, multireligious” Israel is the complete opposite. “And the United States, like Israel, was built on settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing and genocide against the indigenous population.”
Yet another great book by Dan Kovalik; you should read his other books too – all great. I’m so glad I read it, and you will be too. Bravo, Dan.
January 16, 2025
This is one of the most important books of our time. Well researched and written with passion. I thought that I had a good grasp of what was happening in the Middle East, but I was wrong. The story is horrific to say the least. Israel’s actions go well beyond ‘the right to defend itself’, and has been rightly been called a genocide.
July 24, 2024
Great. Important book. If you've read The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017 and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and if you've been keeping up with the news following 7 October, much of the contents will be familiar to you. But this is an important topic that bears repetition. Plus there's no shortage of interesting thoughts and nuggets of information to make Dan's book unique.
September 10, 2024
Another heart-wrenching, but important read, about just how much suffering Israel is inflicting upon the Palestinian people and how intentional it all is. This is the most up to date of the books I've read on the topic, and it shows how the escalation of genocide from 2023-2024 matches a long established pattern of treating Palestinians like a problem to be removed. So, so important for everybody, but especially the "Israel is just targeting Hamas" crowd to read. Frankly, if you're still supporting Israel at this point, you're either willfully ignorant and unaware of what their intentions are, or you're just plain evil. I can't believe in 2024 people get more consequences for protesting against genocide than they do for funding it
January 3, 2026
One of those books that will become outdated within a few years. Still, for the time being it provides a brief overview of the Palestine/Israel conflict, a look at the atrocities committed in Palestine in the past few years and a look at the case for genocide being made.
A great resource for the time being.
A great resource for the time being.
November 14, 2024
Absolute must read!
January 21, 2026
I guarantee you don't hate Israel enough. Free Palestine.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews