NOTHING PREPARED ME FOR THE BRUTALITY OF THE OCCUPATION
December 18, 2023SAMI MANAUSA’S ISRAELISM STORY:
She explains how she went from being a passive Jew believing the propaganda she was taught about how peaceloving the Israelis were and they were the victims, to becoming a vocal and strong advocate for the Palestinians after travelling to Israel and witnessing for herself the truth.
#myisraelismstory #visitpalestine #ceasefirenow #FreePalestine #Interfaith #StandWithUs #Truth #Palestine #Gaza #Humanrights #Israel #فلسطين #اسرائیل #غزة
English Script:
I tend to say that I grew up passive Zionist because there is plenty of Israel programing happening around me like in my synagogue, but I just didn’t think about it that much. Around 2020, for a variety of reasons, I did start to pay attention and immediately I was confused and I was pretty distressed. I was seeing all these progressives who I agreed with on every other issue say that Israel was an apartheid state and was committing war crimes and was violating international law.
And that totally clashed with the image that I had in my head of Israel, in my head, who is this romanticized place where Jews could be safe and weren’t in the minority so to deal with the kind of ethical and political cognitive dissonance that I was feeling, I just started reading everything I could. Zionists, anti-Zionists, Palestinians. I just wanted to understand and I came to understand that my education had been heavily propagandized by 2022 when I went to Palestine and Israel for the first time.
I had done a lot of unlearning of that education and I was more aware of the reality, but nothing could have prepared me to see the brutality of the occupation with my own two eyes in Jerusalem, in Umm Al-Khair, in Masafer Yatta in Bethlehem, in Haifa, any possibility of me deriving joy from being in a place with lots of other Jewish people had obviously completely disappeared.
I felt very urgently like I needed to be a very vocal Jewish ally to Palestinians, and I need to do everything I could to fight for a future where Jewish safety doesn’t have to come at the expense of Palestinians.
Related News
