On the 17th day of the continuing and worsening Israel-Hamas conflict, Dalal Iriqat, a professor at the Arab American University of Palestine and one of the most distinguished Palestinian scholars, answered the question, “What is it like to be a Palestinian in Israel?”
Iriqat said that the two million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel are second and third-class citizens.
She also talked about how Hamas is viewed by three categories of Palestinians – Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, Palestinians who live in the West Bank, and Palestinians who live in Gaza and how popular it is in Gaza today.
Asked if a free, fair and credible election were to be held in Gaza today, the way it had happened in 2006, would Hamas win a victory, Iriqat categorically said no. In fact, she clearly suggested that a free and fair election is perhaps the best way of diminishing and reducing Hamas. But the Israelis, she says, will not allow a free and fair election.
This is a transcript of Iriqat’s interview. It has been edited lightly for clarity and style.
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Karan Thapar: Hello and welcome to a special interview for The Wire. On the 17th day of the Israel-Hamas conflict, we ask what it is like to be a Palestinian in Israel. Joining me now from Ramallah to answer that question is a professor at the Arab American University of Palestine, Dalal Iriqat.
Dr Iriqat, I want to talk to you about what it’s like to be Palestinian in Israel. I’m told Palestinians in Israel fall into three broad categories: citizens of Israel, those who live in the West Bank where Israel is effectively a colonising power, and those who live in Gaza blockaded and besieged by Israel.
Let’s start with Palestinians, who are citizens of Israel. I’m told there are some two million of them. Do they have equal rights with Jews or are they second-class citizens?
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Dalal Iriqat: Well, thank you very much. Those two million Palestinians who live in Israel hold Israeli citizenship, but it was documented that they don’t enjoy equal rights as any other Israeli “Jewish citizen”.
In Israel, they had passed in the Knesset, which is the parliament of the Israeli people, what is called the Jewish Nation State Law in 2018.
The Jewish Nation State Law stipulated very bluntly that those who enjoy full rights in Israel are the Jewish citizens of Israel alone, not only depriving two million Palestinians – and those are of course Muslims and Christians and atheists, if you want – of the basic rights, but also all the other minorities who might be living in Israel.
If you are not a Jewish citizen of Israel, you are a second or third-class citizen. This of course applies to the Palestinians who live there. So the Palestinians–yeah, go on.
KT: Sorry, I was just going to say, this is why the term ‘apartheid state’ is used for Israel. Is that right?
DI: Yes, and let’s be clear here, apartheid is not only a term, it’s not only a label or it’s not an invention that the Palestinians came up with. Apartheid, under international law, by definition is a sort of crime.
And it’s important to also clarify to your audience and to Indians in general that it was international human rights organisations which conducted research and which approved and documented the crimes of apartheid against the Palestinians who are not only in the West Bank, but also the Palestinians who live inside Israel.
It is a documented crime, and international human rights organisations and Israeli human rights organisations also documented the crime. This is a very important message to convey to your audiences that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid under the framework of the Israeli military prolonged occupation for 75 years now.
A street in Hebron, West Bank. Photo: Travel2Palestine/Flickr. CC BY 2.0.
KT: Now, I believe Israel has what’s called a ‘law of return’, which allows Jews from anywhere in the world to come to Israel and get automatic citizenship.
But family members of Palestinians who were born in Palestine but left either at the time of the Nakba or the 1967 War are denied this right. Am I correct in that?
DI: You are very correct on that, although the Palestinian refugees have a right in UN resolution 194 – it’s a Security Council resolution – for the right of return. However, in practice, Israel does not allow any return of any Palestinian refugees.
On the contrary and on the other hand, they of course permit and allow and they intensify the return of the Jewish people from all around the world to the state of Israel.
This is the way, this is the strategy that they have been implementing to increase the demography of the Jewish people on this land at the expense of the Palestinian existence as a nation, as a population.
KT: So the law of return in Israel directly breaches the resolution 194 of the UN. It is a direct defiance of it.
DI: Yes, and there is no other interpretation for that. All the UN and the international community understands very well that there is an embedded right for the Palestinians in 194 and there is a blunt violation [of] it by the Israeli military regime.
KT: Now in recent months, there have been serious protests in Israel against Prime Minister Netanyahu’s attempts to dilute the power of the Supreme Court.
But I’m told that whenever laws that discriminate against Palestinians are challenged in the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court upholds those laws and doesn’t strike them down. So are Palestinians also second-class citizens in the eyes of Israel’s judiciary?
Protests against judicial reforms proposed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government rocked Israel from January to October this year. Photo; Wikimedia Commons/Lizzy Shaanan Pikiwiki Israel. CC BY-2.5.
DI: Well, of course. The fact that Israel has been treating the Palestinians with “military orders” – you know, the judicial system [when] it comes to Israeli Jewish citizens is laws, but when it comes to the Palestinians, it comes by military orders. This mere fact is evidence that yes, the Palestinians are second-class citizens.
But talking about Netanyahu, Netanyahu has been here for six terms of government. He had been manipulating his own people, he had been, you know, winning midterm victories in his tactics with Hamas or with Gaza at the expense of finding a peaceful solution for the Palestinians and the Israelis alike.
The protests that we had witnessed in Israel are a very a nice reflection of democracy in Israel. However, I had wished and I had hoped that those people in Israel who were demonstrating against Netanyahu’s “judiciary reform”, that they would raise a sign calling for the end of the occupation, that they would raise a sign calling for humanity for the Palestinians – not only the 2.2 million Palestinian civilians who live in Gaza, but also the three million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and the two million Palestinians who live inside Israel.
Discrimination, apartheid and racism have been documented and have been practised for 75 years. I really had hoped for the Israeli enlightened pro-peace camps, those who call themselves, you know, leftists, to call upon their own governments to stop the genocide and the collective punishments and the occupation and the military orders against the Palestinian civilians.
KT: You’re making two very important points there, Dr Iriqat. First, you’re saying that the people who came out in hundreds of thousands to protest against Netanyahu’s judicial reforms were certainly protesting in support of democracy, but only democracy for Jews in Israel. They didn’t extend their protest to cover even the two million Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Israel’s Supreme Court. Photo: israeltourism/Flickr. CC BY 2.0.
And, secondly, you’re saying this belief that the world has that the Supreme Court in Israel checks the abuses of democracy may be true to the extent it supports Jewish rights, but it is not true to the extent to which it does not support Palestinian rights. This Supreme Court has validated anti-Palestinian laws passed by the state. It hasn’t struck them down.
Those are two very important points you’re making both about the Israeli people and about the Israeli Supreme Court.
DI: It’s exactly how you framed it; it’s exactly how you framed it. Israel is democratic when it comes to its tailored democracy, when it comes to serving the interest of the Jewish citizens of Israel alone.
But when it comes to seeing other people as human beings, it fails. When it comes to treating its own citizens as equal citizens. it fails. When it comes to addressing what its own state has been practising against another nation – you know, we are witnessing a second Nakba: forced eviction orders, you know, forces displacements, collective punishments, genocide.
Unfortunately, what the Jewish people had suffered in the Holocaust is being repeated by themselves on the Palestinians today. This is the sad reality that we should be learning from history, we should be, you know, safeguarding and protecting humanity. We should be, you know, prevailing justice and humanity over all those violence and crimes.
Unfortunately, the Israeli public is not saying what should be said to their own leadership.
KT: That’s a very important point you made which I’ll repeat for the audience before I go to my next question. What the Jews suffered during the Holocaust is exactly what Israel is doing today to the Palestinians and that is not just a paradox, it’s an irony that the Jews are doing to others what happened to them without realising it.
My last question about the Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, before I come to other categories of Palestinians: what sort of political involvement beyond voting is permitted to the Palestinian citizens of Israel?
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DI: Well, you know, the situation for the Palestinian citizens of Israel is really dire and it’s really… the framing is second or third-class citizens. They can vote, they can run for elections; however, it has been documented that the Israeli authorities made sure to maintain and to accelerate the levels of crimes between the Palestinian communities inside Israel.
The levels of drugs, for example… so they are trying to convert and to transform the Palestinian communities into really, a bad image of communities which don’t deserve equal rights. Unfortunately, this has been happening systematically against the Palestinian communities inside Israel.
The Palestinians, on the other hand, are mostly educated and most of them go into medicine and nursing and really the most scientific fields. So they are still needed when it comes to hospitals and medical service, yet they are not enjoying political rights as equal citizens of Israel when it comes to the Jewish people.
Before we finish, I also want to mention the settler terror because we were speaking about the Holocaust comparison. Last January and February, we have witnessed the settler terror all over the West Bank, in Huwara… It was called by the Israelis themselves [as a] pogrom, it was really a repetitive scenario of what the Israeli Jewish people have suffered under the Holocaust.
KT: Absolutely, now that we’ve begun talking about Israeli settlers, let’s come to the Palestinians who live in the West Bank, where many view Israel as a colonising power.
These people, these Palestinians in the West Bank, are not citizens of Israel. So first, let me start, what sort of rights do they have under Israeli occupation and control of the West Bank?
DI: The Palestinians, you mean?
KT: That’s right.
An older map showing territories in the West Bank not under full Israeli control in solid red. Photo: TUBS/Wikimedia Commons. GNU FDL 1.2.
DI: Well, 30 years ago we had witnessed the opening of what was called the Middle East peace process. And the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organisation] had signed an interim agreement, a declaration of principles with the government of Israel.
We are supposed to have an interim government of ruling. However, the reality is that those agreements have entrenched the Israeli occupation in every Palestinian city, village, and council The reality is that yes, we do have certain councils that do the public administration or the civil administration on a daily basis; for example, they do the [civil registry], those who are born, those who die.
But when it comes to real rights, when it comes, for example, to our rights to education, mobility, worship, even going to the al-Aqsa mosque, the churches in Bethlehem or Jerusalem, we still need a permit from the Israeli military authorities.
So in fact, in reality, on the ground, the Israeli occupation had been entrenched under the cover of a peace process, under the cover of the sugar-coated negotiations. On the ground, for the past 30 years, the number of settlers have more than tripled. Today we have more than 750,000 settlers living in settlements, you know, dividing the West Bank. There is no territorial contiguity between any Palestinian city.
So when they advocate for the two-state solution, geopolitically speaking, and you know, on the ground, it is not possible.
You know, I’m a professor of diplomacy and I am a very big fan of bringing about the two-state solution for a strategic solution for the Palestinian and the Israeli people alike.
However, if we are realistic and if we take a realpolitik approach on the ground, the Israeli settlements are basically, you know, the reason behind putting the Palestinians in small ghettos, divided and surrounded by those settlements which basically hinder any possibility of any two-state solution.
KT: Absolutely, for an Indian audience I just clarify that the West Bank is supposed to be – under the 1967 agreements – a Palestinian state, but because Israeli settlers, 750,000, have settled in the West Bank creating little pockets and islands, it is impossible now for the West Bank to actually ever take the shape of a separate autonomous country.
This has been a deliberate Israeli policy to ensure that the West Bank can never become a Palestinian state.
Let me then ask you what is the relationship between these 750,000 settlers and the Palestinian people. What sort of relationship do they have?
DI: They are weaponised, they are militarised, they practise terror on the Palestinians. They are treated as first-class citizens in comparison with the Palestinians. Unfortunately, the Palestinian citizens are suffering from the attacks and from the violence and terrorism that those settlers are practising against the Palestinian civilians and guess what? They are protected by the Israeli military army. Military soldiers.
I also want to clarify to the Indian audience that they need to understand that 30 years ago, the Palestinians had made a big concession, because we believe in peace, because we believe in the rights of the peoples of Israel to live in peace and security. We agreed to the two-state solution on the ‘67 border line.
This means that we gave up on 78% of historic Palestine. We accepted – as the PLO, which is the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people – we accepted to have our own state on 22% of Mandated Palestine.
The two-state solution was the position of the international community. It was the concession that the PLO gave in our will and hopes for bringing peace, prosperity and security to the Palestinians as well as the Israelis.
What did we gain after 30 years of procrastinated so-called peace talks? More settlers, more settlements, no possibility on the ground of any independence of sovereignty for the Palestinian people. More extrajudicial killings on a daily basis, more detentions – you know that 5,200 Palestinians are still [behind] Israeli bars, you know, inside the Israeli prisons, suffering from every kind of racism and punishment.
There are 1,264 who are administratively detained, and I want to, you know, explain this to the Indian audience because I’m sure they haven’t heard about administrative detention before.
Administrative detention only exists in Israel. This is a very illegal way of detaining and arresting people, where they can basically renew the arrest every six months without putting them to court, without putting them to trial, without giving them the chance to see a lawyer.
Can you imagine, you know, 140 of those are women and 170 of those are children. Where on Earth in 2023 can you imagine that a state, a state that has the recognition of the world order, you know, abuses the rights of civilians, practises apartheid, practices every kind of racism, administrative detention, arrests on daily basis, confiscations of lands [and] extrajudicial killings?
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We face on a daily basis, incursions, raids, killings, violence, settler terror. Everything is documented today and the world is an open world of communication. It’s sad that we are still telling our story under the Israeli occupation.
The root cause of what we are witnessing for the Palestinians and the Israelis alike, if we are calling for peace, we need to start by ending the Israeli military occupation.
KT: Absolutely. And as you said – I’m just, again, highlighting this for an Indian audience – even your hope of being able to form an independent, sovereign Palestine state on just 22% has been quashed by the settlers and the fact that you can’t do so [sic].
And it also means that because of continuing Israeli control on what is accepted internationally as your land, you’re even there second-class citizens.
Now I notice, since October 7th, I’m quoting Al Jazeera, “over 91 Palestinian people in the West Bank have been killed in clashes with settlers.”
This is since the 7th of October. Are these clashes a recent development or have they been happening regularly?
DI: The Israelis tried to mislead audiences that this whole thing started on the 7th of October. Let’s truly explain the reality and convey the reality and the right narration, because people in India deserve to learn the truth: that Israel had been manipulating, had been executing, had been practising apartheid and occupation against the Palestinian people for 75 years.
The crimes, under international law, under humanitarian international law, it’s all… we don’t need to really interpret things or to be clever about it. Doesn’t really take a genius to discover that the Israeli military occupation had been, you know, targeting every Palestinian, have been extrajudicially killing the Palestinians, have been targeting our lands, confiscating them for the for the interest of building more settlements.
The settler colonial project has been ongoing for so long. The Israeli state is built on the doctrine of settler colonialism that we have been suffering from for a long, long time.
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The message that the world needs to hear is that those states who have recognised the state of Israel for 75 years today need to realise that Israel doesn’t have a border line until today. Why? Why don’t we start by asking Israel to define its borderline?
When they say they want peace, when they say … that the Palestinians deserve peace, I want to tell the Indian people that no Israeli leader has ever uttered the word ‘state for the Palestinians’ or the ‘right of self-determination for the Palestinian people’.
On the contrary, they have been ongoing with their settler colonial project, with their terrorism against the Palestinians, more killings, more detentions, and more treating us as minorities who are only entitled to very minimal religious rights, in the case that we are not even allowed to go to Bethlehem or Jerusalem to even pray.
What the Israelis have been trying is to mislead audiences and unfortunately the hasbara, the Israeli propaganda, the investments they put in their narratives had to a certain extent succeeded in misleading audiences so far.
KT: Now the third category of Palestinian people are in Gaza. They live under a Hamas government, but they’re blockaded and besieged on three sides by Israel and on one by Egypt.
What sort of authority and control has Israel exercised over their lives since 2005 when it withdrew its government and withdrew its settlers from Gaza?
DI: Thank you. Let’s also be honest with the audience.
Gaza for the past 16 years has been suffering from a deadly siege, a deadly blockade imposed by the Israeli occupation. Yes, Israel conveyed to the world that they withdrew from Gaza in 2005. In reality, and I have publications on that and it’s all documented, that the Israelis disengaged, they dismantled the settlements inside Gaza; they never really withdrew control over Gaza.
For 16 years, the air space and sea of Gaza has been totally controlled by the Israeli occupation. Nothing could go inside or outside of Gaza but with Israeli permission.
The Gaza Strip has one of the highest population densities in the world. Photo: Dans/Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
So the fact that they are framing what is happening as an Israeli-Hamas war, and this is against Hamas in Gaza, this is totally not true.
For the past 16 years and let alone before – the Israeli occupation of 75 years – you know, Hamas just got created in 1987. Before 1987, there was also the Israeli occupation in Gaza. So, the narration that they withdrew in 2005, that Hamas is controlling Gaza, is totally not true.
And I want to quote Dov Weisglass, who was the aide and one of the supervisors for [Ariel] Sharon at that time: he said that this dismantling and this disengagement is basically formaldehyde, that was a strategy for divide and rule.
They made sure to make Hamas seem empowered inside Gaza while [Gaza was] being totally controlled by the Israeli occupation on all kinds of borders. Yet they misled the world that Hamas is controlling there and they made sure that there is no hope for one Palestinian state.
They made sure to divide the Palestinian national interest by dividing us into Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas and Fatah. And that is a sad story for us as Palestinians.
KT: So, in a nutshell, what you’re saying, Dr Iriqat, is although life for people in Gaza has deteriorated horribly since the 7th of October because they are now bombed practically every day with air strikes and there’s a threat of a ground invasion.
But actually what you’re saying is life for people in Gaza has been pretty miserable for 16-17 years; even though the Israelis claim they have withdrawn, they’ve encircled it and blockaded it, they prevented things coming in [and] going out, and the Gazans have been suffering for a very long time – that’s the point you’re making?
DI: Yes, for the past 15 years, the Gaza people, 2.2 million civilians, suffered four wars, four incursions, four attacks on the civilians of Gaza. Those people – and this is the fifth war, which started on October 7 – the people in Gaza were totally deprived from the basic minimum human rights.
You should know that people in Gaza don’t even enjoy the services of 2G when it comes to the internet. You know, this is a human need in the 21st century; let alone electricity, let alone water, let alone mobility rights, education rights.
People, two million civilians, were left with no hope, no reason to live. They really suffocated the people – thousands, thousands of young, smart, intelligent youth chose to go in the sea, seek refuge and you know prefer to die in the sea rather than to live under the Israeli military blockade, inside a big open air prison of 365 kilometres, deprived from the basic human needs in the 21st century.
KT: You’ve said something that will shake people: people in Gaza don’t even have 2G. And I’m told people in Gaza for years, if not decades, have been used to six and eight-hour power cuts regularly. They’ve been used to shortage of water regularly.
That has been the condition in which they’ve lived long, long before October 7.
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DI: Yes. Yes, and this is what people need to realise. Those people were [put in] a pressure cooker.
You deprive them from… can you imagine living without the internet for one hour today? Here I am addressing young people and old people, and everybody, you know, we cannot live without smartphones, without communicating with the world.
Can you imagine that in 2023, for 16 years, people are hearing about us communicating, about… and here we need to maybe clarify that people in the West Bank also enjoy only 3G services.
And this is all under an Israeli decision of depriving the Palestinians of this minimal human need. This is not, it’s not okay to tolerate that Israel is practising all those kinds of racism, crimes against humanity, against the Palestinians, and the people are watching and are keeping silent.
KT: Dr Iriqat, let’s now talk a little about Hamas.
How is Hamas viewed by Fatah, and the Palestinian authority government in Ramallah? How do they view Hamas?
DI: Well, it’s their competitor. I mean, they don’t agree with Hamas doctrine, they don’t agree with the strategy and with the approach that Hamas took for liberation and for resistance.
The PLO, which is the official leadership for the Palestinian people, had said and had demonstrated so many times that they are for peace talks, that they are for dialogue, that they are for negotiations. They promised the people of Palestine that they will get us dignity, freedom, independence and state through the peace talks and through negotiations.
What did they get us after 30 years of this sugar-coated peace process? More deterioration on the ground. Every Palestinian family has a family member behind Israeli bars. Every Palestinian family has a martyr, every Palestinian family has suffered from settler attacks or having their homes demolished, for example.
Many Palestinian young people had opportunities to go and study, they got scholarships, but they were not allowed to leave the country because the Israelis decided not to give them permits to leave the borders.
Everything in our daily lives, the aspects of our human reason to live, is basically controlled by the Israeli military occupation.
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KT: Are you also saying…
DI: I cannot plan a weekend for my kids, I cannot go visit my mother in Jericho, who is 30 minutes away, without crossing two checkpoints. My kids have to see the Israeli soldiers pointing the guns at the car at least twice, if we want to go and visit their grandmother on the weekend. This is not okay. Those…
KT: Are you also saying, Dr Iriqat, are you also saying that the people of the West Bank feel let down by the Palestine Authority?
DI: Let me put it this way. There is a lack of trust, yes, between the Palestinian people and the PNA [Palestine Authority].
But again, because the PNA and the PLO had promised us independence, state, sovereignty and dignity to say the least, yet we did not get anything.
So, I think the Israelis and the international community had led and had you know trapped the PLO and the PNA into this point where the PLO and the Palestinian leadership had lost the trust of their own people.
KT: Let’s come back for a moment to Hamas.
Do you have any sense of how popular Hamas is in Gaza today? We are often told by international statesmen that Hamas doesn’t represent all the people of Gaza. But what percentage of Gazans support Hamas?
DI: Okay. Well, Gaza is about 2.2 million civilians. Those people want to live in dignity and peace. Those people, the 2 million people, half of them are children! Half of them are children, so they don’t know what Hamas is. They don’t know what, you know, even the right of resistance is.
This is what needs to be made very clear to your audiences in India. 1.1 million of that population are children who don’t understand politics. So this messaging is very misleading when we say that there is, you know, encouragement or that people are fans of Hamas. This is totally untrue.
People want to live with dignity. As I just told you, we have documented data for tens of thousands of youths who chose to escape in the sea and die, and, you know, drown in the sea, trying to search for a dignified life. We don’t want violence; we want to live as normal human beings in 2023.
Parents want to provide milk, water, food and you know, a living for their families to have a nice and safe home and roof for their own kids…
KT: I understand.
DI: …Good education, a good healthcare system, this is what the people of Gaza deserve and that is what they want.
KT: Let me ask you one more question about Hamas. How is Hamas viewed by the Palestinian people who live in the West Bank, as well as the Palestinian people who are citizens of Israel?
I would guess that the Jews and the Palestinian people who live as citizens of Israel are both sometimes living in fear of Hamas rockets.
DI: Let’s… yeah… What you’re saying can be – yes, of course – true because they live there, and we have seen incidents where Palestinians and Arabs suffered from injuries or death from the rockets.
But also, I want to mention the Palestinian right to resistance. The Palestinian right to resistance – as any other nation under occupation, we have the right to struggle for our freedom. And resistance has many different ways. I resist through education, through my writings, through lecturing, through teaching in the university and through my publications.
Other people you know resist through art, through music, through acting, through journalism, through academia, through literature, yet armed resistance is one example of the right of resistance that people under occupation can enjoy if we are faced with … under fire [from] the Israeli military occupation.
You know that Israel is the fifth-most powerful country when it comes to military might. You know that they get $3.8 billion of military aid from the United States alone. They have the iron dome, they have shelters, they have been bombing and shelling [the Palestinian people] with missiles for 75 years.
People in Gaza have been suffering … As I said, five wars in 15 years, and where you see your children, your friends, your homes, the hospitals, the mosque: everything has been targeted. So the fact that the Palestinians are calling for their own freedom should be also comprehensible to citizens of the world.
KT: Can I ask like this, if another free, fair, credible election for the Palestinians was to be held – like happened in 2006, when Hamas beat Fatah to everyone’s surprise – if such a free, fair election were to be held – in the West Bank where Palestinians live and in Gaza – would Hamas once again win, or do you think that’s no longer the case?
DI: Absolutely not, absolutely not. As I said, we are living in 2023. Palestinians are humans. We want to live in dignity, we realise that we are going to live once. We want to have families, we want to have proper careers, we want to enjoy basic universal human standards of living.
Of course not, Hamas gained victory over Fatah not because people believed in Hamas per se, but because they were deceived by what the PNA had promised them and could not deliver.
And here I don’t blame it only on the PNA, but also on the international community and Israel, who made sure to weaken Fatah and to weaken the PNA in the eyes of the Palestinian people.
You cannot continue to promise people things while they are on the ground suffering on a daily basis and everybody’s watching the Israeli crimes against our people without acting.
KT: Can I interrupt and suggest something? What you’re saying sounds as if the best way of diminishing the influence of Hamas is to let the Palestinian people have a free, fair, full election. They will themselves vote Hamas out, that’s what you’re suggesting, am I right?
DI: Of course, of course, we deserve to have elections. And I realise that this is an internal setback for the past 15 years that we didn’t have proper elections. Yet – yet, we also need to realise that the international community and Israel is implicated in the fact of this divide and rule reality that we are facing.
They have hindered any possibility of elections for the Palestinian people, they are very happy with the status quo. It is serving their own interest.
KT: And the refusal and the denial of free, fair elections by Israel ensures that Hamas continues to be in power in Gaza. An election might have removed them. Failure to hold an election has entrenched them. It’s worked to the opposite of Israel’s [inaudible].
DI: Yes, Netanyahu has said in different announcements, in different declarations that he made, that he is keen about empowering Hamas in Gaza.
Benjamin Netanyahu. Photo: Av Jolanda Flubacher/WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM/swiss-image.ch. CC BY-SA 2.0.
And the Indian population needs to hear that the cash money which used to go into Gaza used to go through Ben Gurion airport.
Why? Because Israel knows… the Israeli military commanders realised a while back that in order to hinder any possibility for the two-state solution, for any democracy for the Palestinian people and for the Palestinian national interest, they need to maintain the divide between Gaza and the West Bank.
KT: But you’re also confirming something, Dr. Iriqat, which Reuters reported I think yesterday or day before – that the money that Qatar gives Gaza is rooted through Israel. You’re now confirming it, aren’t you, when you say it comes through Israel?
DI: The Israelis confirmed it. Netanyahu himself confirmed it in so many announcements. They confirmed it. Actually, many Israeli citizens now blame it on Netanyahu, because they realised that he had been allowing the cash money into Gaza. They said it to him.
KT: My last question Dr Iriqat: both King Abdullah of Jordan and president [el-Sisi] of Egypt have emphatically said they will not accept any attempt by Israel to drive the Palestinian people into either Jordan or Egypt.
My question is a little different: Given the life Palestinians are forced to live in Israel or in the West Bank or in Gaza, would the Palestinian people themselves welcome the prospect of going to Jordan and Egypt?
DI: The Palestinian people have suffered from the Nakba in 1948 and then the Naksa in 1967, so I think we have learned the lesson very, very well. And the fact that the Palestinian refugees are still deprived of their basic right of return, I think the population of the Palestinian people will not leave and will not accept the forced displacement orders.
However, it is time that audiences realise that Israel has been systematically colonising and this settler colonial project has been ongoing. This [war of late] is being framed as an Israel-Hamas war because this is a logical argument that they could convince audiences with.
In reality they are using this pretext, they are using Hamas as a fig leaf, but their target is Gaza, is the land, is to evict the Palestinian people, is to continue to annex the land as part of their settler colonial project which will continue also in the West Bank. They are hoping that the Palestinian people will be evicted.
That’s why the Jordanian and the Egyptian position, which might sound a little bit inhumane in face of the sufferings of the millions of civilians, but on the political level we need to realise that they are saving the Palestinian national project, which is part of the deal of the century.
That’s why we see the USA, the shuttle diplomacy from Blinken and Biden providing this legal coverage for the Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people, it is basically to serve their interests in their electoral campaigns coming soon, and for the right-wing leaders, of course, in Europe as well.
But also, because this is a pragmatic scenario of a win-win, a cake sharing scenario for the Israel, the US and many other regional players at the expense of the Palestinian national rights, at the expense of the Palestinian right to self-determination, at the expense of the lives of two million civilians living in Gaza.
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KT: Permit me one last question before I let you go. I know in the middle of this interview you said you passionately support the concept of a two-state solution. But is it still feasible and practical with 750,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and with Israel having declared the whole of Jerusalem as its capital?
Is a two-state solution still possible or would you agree with someone like Gideon Levy, the Haaretz correspondent, who said to me in an interview on Saturday that a one-state solution with equal rights for Jews and Arabs, with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians, is the most sensible solution?
And he said Israelis may not accept it today because it’s emotionally difficult. Palestinians may not accept it because it’s emotionally difficult, but that has to be the solution.
Would you agree with him or would you say no, this is too idealistic?
DI: No, he’s very realistic, because if you live here, if you commute north to south here, you will see, realistically and logically speaking, if you take the reasoning of reality, it is not possible anymore to have a Palestinian state, given all the settlements, the divisions, and given all the military system, that is the occupation system, that is entrenched, that is hindering any possibility for the Palestinian state.
Let alone Netanyahu and his leaders and his government’s statements of saying no to Palestinian state. The fact that they are saying no to a Palestinian state, no to peace talks, no to negotiations, make us have – it’s a wishful scenario of having a one-state reality.
Why would I say no to a one state reality, if I want to honour civilians, if I want to honour humanity, if I want to end the sufferings of the millions of Palestinian people under the Israeli military occupation?
Yes, under equal rights, we don’t want an apartheid state. The fact that Israel is trying to export what is happening here as a religious issue has led to the fact that the Israelis will not accept a one-state [solution].
Because this is not a Jewish-Muslim or a Jewish-Muslim-Christian conflict. No, it is a conflict over land. It is a settler colonial project. We don’t have a problem with the Jews.
You know, I have many Jewish friends all around the world, I studied with many of them, I have colleagues, many of them, and I keep good, positive and healthy relationships with many of them. Those who are enlightened, those who are in education, those who believe in me as an equal citizen. This is the message that we need to realise.
If Dalal Iriqat in Palestine, and Shlomo in Tel Aviv or Herzliya, or Ahmed in Pakistan or in India or in New York or in Paris or in Shanghai or in Greenland, are seen as equal human beings, then we will not look at the shape of the solution but we will look for humanity and for justice for every civilian – whether it is Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or atheist.
This is the message that we need to hear – the Palestinians are not being treated or viewed by the Western media as equal citizens who are entitled to equal universal human rights.
KT: Dr Iriqat, thank you very much for the time you have given me and thank you very much for explaining in detail what it is like to be Palestinian in Israel. Take care, stay safe.
DI: Thank you very much.
