David

“…what the Palestinians are demanding and what for many of them has become a sine qua non is that they be recognized as the victims of an ongoing evil. Consciously perpetrated against them by Israel. For Israeli Jews to accept this would naturally mean undermining their own status of victimhood. This would have political implications on an international scale, but also, perhaps far more critically, would trigger a moral and existential repercussions for the Israeli Jewish psyche. Israeli Jews would have to recognize that they have become the mirror image of their own worst nightmare.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“The brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalization since 1978 are analogous to the catastrophic processes that shaped a “Third World” in the first place, during the era of late-Victorian imperialism (1870–1900). At the end of the nineteenth century, the forcible incorporation into the world market of the great subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa entailed the famine deaths of millions and the uprooting of tens of millions more from traditional tenures. The end result (in Latin America as well) was rural “semi-proletarianization,” the creation of a huge global class of immiserated semi-peasants and farm laborers lacking existential security of subsistence. As a result, the twentieth century became an age not of urban revolutions, as classical Marxism had imagined, but of epochal rural uprisings and peasant-based wars of national liberation.”
― Mike Davis, Planet of Slums

“International law can be accurately and fairly described as a derivative of a colonial order and therefore structurally detrimental to former colonies, peoples still under colonial domination and individuals who lack nationality or who, like refugees, have been forcibly removed from their state and can no longer invoke its protection.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“Israel's establishment in 1948 realized Jewish Zionist settler sovereignty in Palestine. And its acceptance as a UN member state normalized the sovereign exception, justifying the erasure of Palestinian peoplehood. The 1948 war and the demographic and territorial shifts it engendered, were the culmination of a process that had begun at least three decades before. The transformation of Palestine into Israel helps illustrate international laws utility in advancing settler colonial ambitions and in consolidating their gains.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine