Munther Isaac: “Israel is a terrorist entity built on the Palestinian land by ethnic cleansing of the indigenous populations”

In a nutshell, Muther Isaac’s message to the world of moral majority – in the Global South and the civil society in the Global North, is this: We don’t have a Palestine-Israel conflict, but only the state terrorist Israel committing ethnic cleansing and genocidal destruction of native populations for its expansionist settler colonial project in God’s name.

The activist and theologian rightly views Israel as a part of the colonial matrix of the US-UK Empire that seeks to control & dominate the world.

Our international delegation was a part of an ongoing program hosted by Sabeel, the Jerusalem-based Liberation Theology Centre, which is aimed at building people-to-people solidarity ties between the international community of conscience and the Palestinian people. That is, Palestinians who are not only under illegal military occupation in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, and but also the Palestinian citizens of Israel who are denied by Israel equal and full citizenship rights, like the Jewish Israeli inside Israel.

During our week-long intensive travels throughout the territories, we met with more than one dozen Palestinians – from different organizations and locations – who have been commonly engaged in various forms of non-violence resistance. Most of our conversations were recorded with their consent. We also met with Palestinian resisters who had been imprisoned and severely tortured in Israeli prisons. For their safety, we did not record those conversations.

All of them welcomed and appreciated international solidarity visits in their darkest hours of need when many whom they thought were friends unmasked themselves not to be so.

During the 12 recorded conversations, our group heard the grounded and rich analyses of Israel’s decades-long relentless, systemic and systematic attempts to ethnically cleanse the land of Palestinian of its indigenous Palestinians – most of whom are Muslims.

FORSEA opens this Palestine Dialogue Series with the 25-minutes analysis offered by Dr Munther Isaac, the renowned activist and liberation theologian.

A man of faith and erudition, with apparent down-to-earth demeanour, the pastor received us very warmly at his college in Beit Sahour (Sheperd’s Fields), and introduced himself as a pastor for two congregations – in Bethlehem and Beit Sahour, adjacent to each other -, an activist and a father of two children in elementary school.

The renowned activist and theologian who is committed to non-violence resistance for the liberation of his homeland sees the 3 fundamental factors behind Israel’s continuing international crimes against Palestinian people: centuries of (western) colonialism, European racism and warped interpretation of theology/religion.

Isaac was spot on when he said Israel as a settler colony built on other people’s land, by definition, “necessitates the ethnic cleansing” of those who are indigenous to the land. Israel has been terrorist, criminal and violent from its very inception.

In her Hebrew-language book Through the binding ropes (Jerusalem: Domino Press, 1985), Netiva Ben-Yehuda, a female Zionist fighter in the elite fighting command called Palmach of the Hagana (or future Israeli Defence Force) and a writer, wrote about how her comrades looted the city of Tiberias in April 1948.

She fought in the Battle of Tiberias, the first racially mixed city (with an estimated population of 5,310 Arabs and 6,130 Jews) that fell a month before the founding of the state of Israel in May 1948.

In her words, “These scenes were familiar to me, but I was always used to associating them with what others did to us during the Holocaust, during the world wars, and during all the pogroms. Oy, how we knew those scenes so well. And here – here we were doing these horrible things to others” (p. 162) (quoted in Adan Raz, “How Israel Stole Palestinian Property”, Verso, 2020, p.21).

Watch below as Munther Isaac dissects the no-conflict genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Israel, the ever-expanding settler colony and terrorist entity, that serves the interests of the (Anglo-American) Empire while enjoying the unconditional backing of Germany.

Maung Zarni