After a year of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza, and after more than 75 years of Israeli occupation, Palestinians like Ashira Prem Rachana Darwish still believe in the hope of a free Palestine. In its murderous rush to flatten Gaza and embroil the Middle East in a large-scale war, “Zionism is breathing its last breath,” Darwish says. In Part 1 of this two-part episode of The Marc Steiner Show commemorating the solemn anniversary of Oct. 7, Marc speaks with Darwish, a journalist and trauma specialist, about the ongoing genocide, the future of Palestine, and about her own experiences of torture under Israeli occupation.

Watch Ashira in the feature documentary Where the Olive Trees Weep.

Studio Production: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, it’s great to have you all with us once again. And today, we’re going to have another session talking about this incredible film that has been made called Where The Olive Trees Weep. We’re talking to Ashira Darwish. She’s a centerpiece in the film, and before she got into her trauma healing work, she was recognized for her investigative journalist work for Internews, the BBC, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International.

She was given an award as one of the most inspirational women in Palestine by the BuildPalestine organization, many other awards. She suffered trauma of imprisonment and torture for fighting for the liberation of her people in Palestine, and she works at healing trauma with other people. And we are honored to have her with us. Ashira Darwish, welcome. Good to have you on The Marc Steiner Show.

Ashira Darwish:

Good to be here, thank you so much.

Marc Steiner:

So I have to answer this question first before we even begin. So are you related to Mahmoud Darwish, the poet?

Ashira Darwish:

No. So Mahmoud is from Al-Birwa, which is a village in the north of Palestine. And my mother’s family, Darwish, they come from the old city of Jerusalem, Bab Hutta.

Marc Steiner:

Gotcha, that’s it.

Ashira Darwish:

So right next to Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Marc Steiner:

As someone else who has the last name, Darwish told me once when I asked that question, he said, “Darwish is like Smith in Palestine.”

Ashira Darwish:

Exactly, but my mom was friends with Mahmoud Darwish when they were together in Lebanon, so…

Marc Steiner:

Aha, there you go. Okay.

Ashira Darwish:

There’s still a connection.

Marc Steiner:

So one of the things that came through in this film and your conversations in the film was I think both the power of your resistance and internal strength, imbued with all the negative repression and the occupation, what’s happened to you. One of the questions is, in the midst of struggle against oppression, and in Palestine against the occupation, how one keeps their energy up, how one keeps their life up, their ability to resist?

Ashira Darwish:

It’s not an option or a choice, it’s a survival mechanism. In order for us to be able to survive the occupation and to survive the living under Apartheid in a situation of genocide currently, we need to keep going, and we need to find ways to survive. And I think one thing that is wonderful about the Palestinian society is that we are still a community of… We haven’t been individualized. The globalization and very much capitalist universe did not really dissect us or go into us as much as the rest of the world.

So if you look at places, in cities in Palestine, you will see that there’s much more individualism. And this was created through the creation of the Palestinian Authority, and bringing in the money, and trying to create, to separate from the tribal kind of communal life that we normally have. If you look at the rest of Palestine, the refugee camps, and you look at the villages, you still have the tribe, you still have the community, and you still have the concept of Sumud. We withhold, we withstand, and we are resilient together in community. And I think part of what Israel does and part of what most of colonization around the world fights is this community and tribe, because if they divide us, then it’s much easier to control us. And if they divide us and turn us into consumer slaves, well, they get the money out of us and they also get to control us, and it’s much easier to annihilate us as well, if we don’t think about the other rather than thinking about ourselves.

So part of the Sumud that is built within the Palestinian society is the caring of each other, is the taking care of the community. It is not about one person, it is about Palestine. It’s not about one person. Even if you get imprisoned, even if you lose someone from your family, there’s a bigger picture. And the bigger picture is the survival of the tribe, it’s the survival of the land, it’s the survival of Palestine, and giving it, inheriting that to the generations that come after. And that’s I think what makes us kind of stronger, what makes us still stick together, and withhold, and withstand during this genocide.

But it’s very difficult for people who live in the cities, for people who have been sucked in by the machine of capitalism and consumerism, because then they’re still operating. I can tell you about Ramallah, where I was staying for most of the part, and it’s as if there is no genocide happening in Gaza a few kilometers away. People work, people go to schools, everything is happening. Normally, the soldiers come, invade, they take people out, and everything operates as if it’s a normal situation.

You see the Palestinian police, and it’s far more traumatizing to be there. It’s much, much, much harder to survive if you don’t have the community and your people to hold you together. Whereas, if you look at the villages, if you look at the refugee camps, they know the suffering, and they can be together and they grieve together. Whereas, the rest of us are now already dissected, and living very individualized life, and pretending that nothing is happening, and it’s the worst thing, because it’s depressing all the normal emotions that you have to go through when you’re living under a genocide.

Marc Steiner:

So how do you think that affects the ongoing struggle for the liberation of Palestine, the ongoing struggle of people to have a nation of their own, to fight the occupation? How does that affect that?

Ashira Darwish:

That’s why they created the Palestinian Authority, so that you will have a weaker fight within the cities. This is why if you look at where the fighting happens, where the Palestinian resistance is the strongest, it’s in the refugee camps. It’s not in the cities, and it’s not where the Palestinian Authority has its strongholds, because people are tied to cars, people are tied to loans in the banks. It’s either you get your paycheck from the Palestinian Authority or you get it from the Europeans, who are feeding the occupation by maintaining all these NGOs and creating this donor-dependent culture and economy.

So it’s trying to get people more into making money and living individually then thinking about the rest of us, thinking about the rest of Palestine, thinking about what’s happening in Gaza, and rising, and paying the price for whatever happens, and resisting. So this is why they created them, so that you don’t have as much resistance. And it of course weakens the resistance. The first day that people started marching in protest against what is happening in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority went very hard also militarily. They ran over a Palestinian protestor and killed him immediately. And then, the first few minutes of the protest, they used unbelievable amounts of tear gas to try and stop people from protesting. So they’re using all their force in order to make sure that the West Bank is still under the boot of the Palestinian military and the Palestinian and the Israeli authorities.

Marc Steiner:

This is a bit of a digression here. This wasn’t in the film, what you’re describing now, but I think it’s an important thing, and I may probe this a little bit more, because I think it’s the contradictions inside of struggles for liberation across the globe, but it really does play out in Palestine, between the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas, and Palestinian Authority’s cooperation with the government of Israel to oppress people who, as you just described, who had massive demonstrations, as you were in them, the Israelis attacked you, and you’re describing demonstrations where Palestinians were protesting, and they were attacked by the Palestinian Authority.

Ashira Darwish:

Yeah.

Marc Steiner:

So there’s this double jeopardy happening that I think most people don’t even realize is going on.

Ashira Darwish:

Yeah, I think the lens isn’t really put on what happens with the Palestinian Authority, because the Palestinian Authority is maintained by the funding of the USAID, the Americans and the Europeans. So they don’t let their media cover what they do. They don’t cover what atrocities are done by the Palestinian Authority and what is done in terms of imprisonment, in terms of control, in terms of also coordinating, collaborating with the Israelis, so that there isn’t resistance in the West Bank, and trying to kill any movement or any resistance that is sparked in the West Bank.

Marc Steiner:

So going back to what we learned about you in the struggle in the film, you yourself were in the midst of the struggle. You were arrested, you were tortured, you went through a horrendous kind of imprisonment by the Israeli police. And that’s not uncommon from people I talk to in Palestine, this happens to so many.

Ashira Darwish:

What happened to me is nothing. What is described in the film is nothing in comparison. I was never charged, I never actually made it to the real prison. I was only held for a few days, and my first detention was a few hours, and it had this life-changing impact on me. And people don’t understand that I’m a very privileged Palestinian. I come from East Jerusalem, I have an Israeli passport. I come with all these privileges that even protect me from even further kind of torture. But the reality of it is we have 10,000 Palestinians inside Israeli prison. They get kept and tortured for months. The regulations for torturing Palestinians from 48 or Jerusalem, there’s a little bit more restriction on how they torture them versus how the Palestinians from the West Bank and Palestinians from Gaza, oh, my God.

The stories, the horror that we are hearing right now, from sodomy to rape. Rape was always used as a weapon by the Israelis. And it’s the systematic weapon of war. and torture. and sexual harassment for the Palestinian female prisoners and the Palestinian male prisoners. This has been used by Israel historically. But the level, the amount of use right now indiscriminately, systematically, just if you raise your voice against the prison guard, you get sodomized and killed, like one of the cases that was so well documented, and the people who perpetrated it, the soldiers were defended by the Israeli society, and by the Israeli ministers, and by the Israeli government, and they didn’t have to pay the price for it. And you have Israeli journalists calling for it to become a legal policy.

It is already a policy. They don’t need to write it down. This is what they have been doing historically. So the types of torture that we have have always been there and they’ve always been horrific, but we’ve never seen them being used at such a high level, and it’s become much more consistent. You can’t get in and not be tortured. And the torture, not only there’s the mass… The level of sodomy, and sexual harassment, and rape, and then you have the barring of food. People are starving inside the Palestinian prisons. The prisoners are coming out in horrendous trauma, nothing that we have seen before, because they’re also separated, the prisoners, and they’re not allowing them… Usually, when you get… You have the first stage of torture, and then once they finish with torturing you and they charge you, you are taken to the prison itself, which I never made it to.

And there at least you’re welcomed by the rest of the prisoners there. We had the system of operation where you make your own food, where you have the community to take care of you. And it’s the first place where you process your torture, where you process your detention, where you process what you’ve gone through. What Israel has done is now they have separated people to the point that you’re not allowed to speak to anyone. Every prisoner is in an individual solitary confinement. You’re not allowed to have community anymore inside prison, so you get to spend all of the time being tortured on your own. And then, the prison sentence, you’re spending it on your own, and you come out after that in a horrific state of trauma.

Marc Steiner:

What you just described raises so many questions here. It raises a lot. I mean, I’ve seen pictures of Palestinian prisoners being released who were skin and bones.

Ashira Darwish:

[inaudible 00:12:28], who was in the film, Where the Olive Trees Weep, he was only detained for six months, and he came out, and he lost half of his body weight. He didn’t know how to walk, he couldn’t remember how to shave his face. He was destroyed in the detention.

Marc Steiner:

So as a Palestinian woman who has been in the midst of the struggle, as someone who has suffered themselves, and I think, and also as a healer and a therapist, which is what you also are, it makes me think about… Well, let me step back for a second. Many, many, many decades back, I wrote this poem called Growing Up Jewish, one of the poems I wrote. And in the poem, I have this line that says, “How the tortured become torturers themselves.”

And when I see what’s happening inside of Israel/Palestine at the moment, and watch what happens to people who come out of concentration camps like my family did, to be able to do this in return. And then, I watch you in this film, and one of the things that you say later in the film is talking about how you have this hope in the future and believe that healing can take place. How do you see that? How does that take place? When you say that, what’s behind those words, and where do you see it going?

Ashira Darwish:

I think healing is possible, because, well, first, we’ve been seeing healing happening with the Jewish community by rising up against this genocide. And I think one thing where you’ve said about the torture becoming the person who tortures, the Jews never had a chance to heal. And I think the main reason why they continue the cycle is because they’ve never given a chance. The anti-Semites, the real, true anti-white Semites, the white supremacists, kicked them out of Germany, and from the concentration camps, and from Europe, and instead of repatriating them, instead of giving them back their land, and taking them back to what they’ve lost in Europe, and giving them their houses, and their lands, and everything, they shipped them to a war, they gave them guns and sent them to another war.

They’ve occupied them with a whole other war, with not giving them a single moment to breathe, to heal, to understand who did what to them. And I think the fear of the Europeans and the Americans was that the Jews will sit, and have a moment to breathe, and realize who did what to them. Instead of that, they created immediately another enemy for the Jews, they created the Palestinians.

Marc Steiner:

Yes.

Ashira Darwish:

And they sent them there to serve their interests. If the Israelis are not serving the interests of the Americans, the Americans would not be paying a penny.

Marc Steiner:

Forcing refugees to create refugees.

Ashira Darwish:

Exactly. And they put them in that place, and they kept them in a state of fear, they kept them in a state of fight, and they never had the chance to heal. So of course, the trauma is going to continue. If you look at the Jews that are coming, that are outside, like you, that are people who… The Jewish voices for peace, the young activists that are marching now, protesting in Congress, they’ve had a chance to process, and that is the difference. They’ve had a chance to process the trauma. Many refused, many until today are connected directly with Israel, and their existence is directed towards Israel. And they never looked within at what they went through, and they refused to do any therapy or anything, and they continue to support the Zionist entity.

But many woke up, and they’ve done the work, and being able to stand up now as a Jew and say, “Not in my name,” is their trauma therapy, because they didn’t get the chance. You didn’t get the chance to stand up and say anything when the genocide was happening to your grandparents. You didn’t have the chance to stand up for your family, but now you get the chance to vocalize it. And this, I do somatic therapy, and the chance to be able to stand and say, verbally say, “No, not in my name,” and to try and actively act in order to end this genocide, it’s as if you’re standing up for yourself, for your family, and you’re healing your intergenerational trauma. So the Jews are healing their intergenerational trauma through this genocide that the Israelis are perpetrating, through standing up for the Palestinians, and many other people who are oppressed, who are able to rise for the Palestinians. So I see that the healing happening in this cycle.

And I know that for us as Palestinians, the only way we are going to heal, and I say the main way we heal is collective healing. We’ve gone through this trauma collectively, as collective bodies. And the collective body, for us, the collective healing is the liberation of Palestine. When Palestine is liberated, immediately there would be healing within us, because all of our sacrifices did not go in vain. All the children we have seen, all the people who have lost their families will know that every drop of blood that was spilled was to the path so that their kids and their grandkids will have a liberated Palestine, and they will have freedom, and one of them will get to experience joy and to live in their land.

So collective healing is our way to healing, and the liberation of Palestine is the first step into the healing. And having the Jews also being in this process of fighting against Zionism and standing up against genocide means that the cycle will not continue afterwards. That we know very well, that it’s not the Jews, we know very well that it’s the Zionists, we know very well that it’s the instruments of the Americans that are operating, and we will be able to heal the wounds. We will be able to forgive at one point, when Palestine is liberated.

Marc Steiner:

So you have been through so much, as a woman, as someone who stands up to the oppression of Palestinians in your homeland. I have a semi-personal question, if it’s… So how did you leave? Why did you leave? What pushed you out of Palestine to here?

Ashira Darwish:

So the only reason I’m here is so that this film can be seen. So most of my work in Palestine, I used to do it without any noise. So the first time that it came to the public that I’m working with former child prisoners and women prisoners is through this film. So there was a danger that I would get detained for the work that I’ve been doing. And also, because they arrest anybody for speaking, singing, writing, anything that you do, you can get arrested and tortured for. So I decided to take my kids out and to come out so that people can see the film. I didn’t want to bury the film, because I was [inaudible 00:19:11]-

Marc Steiner:

No, right.

Ashira Darwish:

At some point, I was like, “If it’s either between leaving the country or the film getting buried, I would feel guilty for the rest of my life if I didn’t allow for the film to be seen.” And I also know very well that I’m leaving for the short term. I know that I will go back to Palestine, and I have a feeling that I will go back to a liberated Palestine. People might think it’s a bit crazy, but I think with everything that’s happening now, each and every movement that is happening is showing us that, actually, Palestine is going to be free very, very soon.

Marc Steiner:

Let me explore that a minute with you, that whole idea. Let me start this way, A, It pains me to watch what’s happening in Israel, as a Jew, as a person that has family in Israel, seeing what we have become in that place. And I also think about the years that many of us demonstrated to fight to end Apartheid in South Africa, and it happened. So I’d really like to get your perspective on how you see that developing, how you think, where the struggle goes, how what happens in South Africa, something similar, not the same, but something similar can happen in Israel-Palestine, inside the Holy Land. How do you see that happening?

Ashira Darwish:

We’re seeing it, it’s happening. It’s already happening. We have never seen so much people awaken to what is happening in Palestine. The veil has been removed over the Zionist entity. They can no longer pretend to be a democracy while they’re protesting for sodomy. I don’t know if you’ve watched the film, Holy Redemption?

Marc Steiner:

No, I’ve not seen that. No.

Ashira Darwish:

Oh, you should see that one. It shows you the reality of what Zionists are, the way they approach, the way they look at the Palestinians, the way they think that we are mice, and they’re ready to crush us, the way that they watch over the bombs dropping on Gaza, the dancing and rejoicing, and thinking about where they’re going to settle, and how they’re going to take over. And the Zionist dream, saying it very strongly, that this is not about just Palestine. “We wanted what God gave us in the Bible, from the Euphrates to the Nile,” having that so much… This is what the Palestinians have been saying for years, that this is not only about Palestine, they’re coming after all of us. The Zionists are coming after all of us.

And now, with Lebanon also being targeted in such a horrific way that is… Well, it’s horrific, but at the same time, it’s exactly the expected thing from Israel, and they’re blowing up the last bullet in themselves. What I think Israel has done, and I used to tell Israelis, liberal Israelis who I used to know, I was like, “So you’re killing the chance of a two-state solution. You don’t want to live with us, it’s very clear. And the more you do it, you’re only leaving one chance, which is a one-state solution, where we will all live together. Obviously, you don’t even want us in this one-state solution. You want us completely ridden, and packed into trucks, either dead or in the sea. So how do you envision that this is going to sustain itself when you have millions of us still here? So if you’re not…”

They’re trying to eradicate us, but the reality is they cannot eradicate all of the Palestinians. It’s not going to be very easy to kill all of us. And the reality of what is happening now is the whole world sees them. This genocide is the most documented genocide in the history of mankind. Dropping people from houses in the West Bank two days ago, bodies, using Palestinians as human shields and putting them on Jeeps, burning the kids in the West Bank and dancing over it, dropping bombs in schools, and dancing, and celebrating, the world has seen them. They basically committed suicide with this genocide in Gaza. Israel as a state committed its final stage of suicide. And now, with targeting Lebanon?

And let me tell you, I had a dream when I was living in Tarshiha. That was in 2020, when I had my daughter. And so I am a spiritual person, I have visions, and a lot of them come true. And I had this vision of Hezbollah being in the north of Palestine, liberating Palestine till Jabal al-Tur. And I saw them all the way through, and I was like, “Oh, my God, this is impossible, Ashira. This is just a dream. It’s not a vision.” And then, I would keep seeing it. And then, I went to the Jabal al-Tur, and I meditated there in the church, and I saw the same vision again. And it was very clear with also all the imageries on the wall that it’s a very important church, and a place of ascension of Jesus Christ.

And I saw it again and I was like, “But it’s impossible. They’re so strong, how could this possibly be?” And here we are today. I can see it more clearly than ever, more clearly than ever that Israel is in its last days. Hezbollah will liberate the first until the Galilee, the Syrian army will take over the [inaudible 00:24:46] and slowly and surely, the Palestinians in the West Bank will join the Liberation Army, and Egypt as well, and this is it, and there’s no other way.

Marc Steiner:

There’s no other way.

Ashira Darwish:

There’s no other way. Having to think about the Israelis coming to a peace agreement and saying, “We know they don’t want us. We know that they don’t want to live with us.” This is the only way that Israel is going to end. And there’s no other… Again, I would love to say for any Israelis, I would love to see them. My vision, my recreation, my addition to the vision would be that all the Jews get to leave peacefully out of the airports, and out of Jordan, and to be sent back to where they came from, to their original countries in Europe, so that they can have their houses, whatever their grandparents, every inch of land that was taken away from them, they can go back to in Europe.

And those born in Palestine who don’t have Europe, they can come out, and then they will be welcomed back into Palestine, as Jews living in Palestine under the peace which will be mandated by the Palestinians. But the Zionists as they are, Zionism is breathing its last breath. And if it doesn’t happen through that, it will happen through the protests, the mass… It’s just a matter of time for the ICJ to come out with a declaration, with a decision about the genocide. No one can deny what Israel is doing.

Marc Steiner:

They cannot, they cannot. When I think of where we are now, most of the family I have in Israel, but born in Israel, they weren’t born in Poland, they weren’t born in the United States-

Ashira Darwish:

Tell them to come out for a little bit and inshallah, they’ll come back when the land is liberated.

Marc Steiner:

I mean, and there’s a poster that I’ve had since 1968, and I got it in Cuba in 1968. And the poster shows a map of Palestine, and it has a crescent cross Star of David down the middle, and across it, it says, “One state, two people, three faiths.” Now, that might sound naïve. That’s kind of been my mantra since 1968, of what a world should look like and how you struggle to get to that place.

Ashira Darwish:

We get there with the liberation of Palestine, because this is what we want. We have no issue with Jews living in the land. The problem was never with the Jews being in Palestine, and especially [inaudible 00:27:29], if you come from a Muslim background or [inaudible 00:27:32], I think more Muslim, there’s a connection to Judaism that no one can deny. There’s a connection to language that no one can deny. We are the Semites, we are the cousins.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah, absolutely we are. Yeah.

Ashira Darwish:

The issue is with one Zionist entity that wants to wipe out the rest, doesn’t want the Christian Palestinians, doesn’t want the Muslim Palestinian, and doesn’t want even the ultra-Orthodox Jews, if you come to it. They don’t want the African-American Jews as well, they don’t want the Ethiopians. They don’t want anyone who is not white, and who is not a settler, and does not follow the exact same sect of settler mentality. So they won’t be able to sustain so much hate.

Marc Steiner:

So one last thing before we go, and everything you’ve just described, and your belief in how things are and should be, in your work as someone who heals and works with trauma, as a Palestinian woman who wants liberation, who’s been through her own tortures, do you have hope that actually peace can come, that there’ll be a different way, that it can actually happen?

Ashira Darwish:

Yes, yes. I really see it. I see that we will tell the Jews to come out, the anti-Zionists and whoever wants to come, so that the Palestinians can have a right of return, and the Jews will eventually have a right of return. So those, like for example, your family, if they want to come back and live in a liberated Palestine where everyone is treated equally, of course, and there will be peace on that land, there will be peace on that land. It’s the most beautiful place on Earth. It is the garden of Eden, and people will get to enjoy and live in Palestine, in a free, liberated land where everyone is treated equally, where everyone is treated as a human, and the hate will be eradicated. There’s no place on that land for any more hate, and it has already endured so much hate, so much anger, and it’ll not endure any more.

Marc Steiner:

Well, let me just say this has been a fascinating conversation for me, and to meet you as well. I think you’re the heart of this film, and I share a wish, really appreciate the time you’ve taken with us today, and look forward to showing this film around, and I hope you stay well and strong, and I hope one day we’ll actually meet. Thank you for being with us.

Ashira Darwish:

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Marc Steiner:

After recording the powerful conversation with Ashira that you just heard, I admit I found myself wrestling with some of what she said, about the future she envisions for Palestine and the people living there, both Palestinians and Israelis. And I knew that many of you, our listeners, might be wrestling with it as well. It was hard to hear, important but hard. And I personally and politically disagreed with what she said, but I wanted to listen and understand as best as I could. And I wanted to have the chance to follow up with Ashira, and ask if she could unpack further what we discussed, and to address the questions that were on my mind, and that may be on the minds of many of you listening.

She graciously agreed, and what you’re about to hear is a short follow-up discussion we recorded a few days after our initial interview. I asked Ashira about the vision she laid out in part one of our conversation, a vision in which Israeli Jews living in historic Palestine would need to leave, at least for a time. And those who had no ancestral homelands to return to would be, as Ashira said, quote, “Welcomed back to Palestine as Jews living in Palestine, under the peace which will be mandated by the Palestinians,” end quote. How would that work? Where will the Jews go? Is there any other way for the Palestinians and Israelis to live together in peace? And I posed these questions to Ashira, and here’s her response.

Ashira Darwish:

Yeah, it’s beautiful that, it’s beautifully said, and how and where do they go? The reality is this question wasn’t asked of my grandparent, was it?

Marc Steiner:

It was not.

Ashira Darwish:

No. When my family was kicked out of Palestine, nobody cared, did they?

Marc Steiner:

They did not.

Ashira Darwish:

Nobody cared about my grandparents. Nobody cares about my uncles, who haven’t been able to visit us since 1967. No one cares that there’s over two million Palestinian refugees currently living around the world. Egypt didn’t want them, Lebanon didn’t want them, Jordan didn’t want them, but they were forced to take them. And until today, the Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon have no basic rights of working, studying inside Lebanon, or citizenship. So it’s the same, I think with left Israelis, it’s all nice and dandy if they think about giving Palestinians some rights, but not retribution, not if they recognize what happened to us in ’48, in our expulsion, then they should understand the need for us to be going back to our country and going back to our homes.

And the fact that Israelis came as refugees, it wasn’t my problem. We didn’t make them refugees, we didn’t do the Holocaust. The Palestinians were not the ones who annihilated and killed the Israeli Jews, and we accepted Jewish refugees, and they came, and they survived, and they lived in Palestine before the Zionist entity was created, and they were living happily and peacefully with their neighbors. We married each other. There wasn’t a problem with Palestinians ever accepting refugees and giving them a home, and a house, and a warm welcome in our communities. It was a problem when the Israeli Zionists started kicking us out. And those who arrived as refugees, they didn’t arrive as refugees in 1948. They had guns in their arms. They went into each and every Palestinian village, and they killed Palestinians, and they kicked them out of their land. It wasn’t peaceful refugees coming to seek sanctuary in Palestine.

They need to choose, was it a war of independence when they kicked us out, or was it refugees coming for safety and sanctuary? Because refugees don’t usually arrive into your land with guns. Had they been refugees, they would have been welcomed. They came with their arms and their guns, and they kicked out our families and our people from their land. They massacred people wherever they stepped foot. They massacred Palestinians in Tantura and buried them in mass graves for fun. They raped our women when they walked in as refugees. They were not refugees when they came in in ’48. Any Jews that arrived before ’48 were refugees, and they were welcomed, and they were safe.

So to come and ask us now to think about the Jews who need to leave Palestine, because they’ve been massacring us now again, and trying to ethnically wipe us from the land since 1948, I don’t see the sanity in that. I don’t see the sanity in asking the people who have been victimized, who have been trying to survive under the worst, most fascist government on Earth to think about where the Israelis should go. Had they arrived in as refugees without guns raised, they would’ve been welcomed, and they would’ve lived with us, and more than happily, we would still want them to stay there. As people who lived as refugees around the world, we don’t want anyone to suffer the same fate. But the reality is, until today we are being slaughtered.

Yesterday, they dropped airstrikes in Tulkarem. Children were wiped and killed in Tulkarem, in the heart of the West Bank. Why should we accept this to continue? Why should we be the ones to think and consider what is the situation of the Israelis who are trying to wipe us out completely? And we have to be the considerate ones right now, when we are collecting the remains of our infants in body bags, in rice bags, while our friends and families are starving, while our men are being, and friends and family are being tortured inside prison chambers, being sodomized? We need to think right now about how to please the Israelis when there’s a resolution, when there’s an end to our bloodshed?

It’s very gracious of us to even think about allowing them to leave peacefully. They’ve been murdering us since 1948, until now, even with all the fighting, the Palestinians are trying to avoid civilians with our resistance, while Israel wipes us out. What are we supposed to do? And coming to say about the Arab countries accepting refugees, there’s Jews living in Iran, there’s Jews living in Jordan, there’s Jews living in Morocco, there’s Jews living in Tunis until now, and they’re safe and they’re unharmed. And I am sure that when there’s a resolution coming that the Arab countries will tell them, “As long as you stop the murder of the Palestinians, you can come and live peacefully if you don’t try to occupy our land, if you don’t try to do what’s happening in Lebanon,” if they can live peacefully with their neighbors.

At the end of the day, we didn’t create the genocide, we didn’t create the ethnic cleansing, we didn’t create the nine million Palestinian refugees around the world. If somebody has to think about where they want to go, they should have been very gracious refugees when they arrived and not wiped us out. If they don’t want to be refugees around the world right now, then they should stop the killing and the murder of Palestinians. They should stop the genocide right now, and try and beg for justice and retribution. They haven’t stopped. And not only in Palestine, now Lebanon is bleeding. They’re bombing Yemen, and we are supposed to think about allowing them, where they’re going to go after they finish killing us, if we are lucky enough to survive this genocide, if any of us are allowed to survive after this?

Marc Steiner:

Yeah, I remember in ’67, ’68, I was a very young man, I think 21, 22 years old, and I volunteered to go fight in the Israeli Army, right after the war started in ’67. And then, I began meeting left-wing Israelis, and I began meeting lots of Palestinians as well. And something shifted, and what could have been a moment of liberation for Israelis and Palestinians became a moment of occupation, so-

Ashira Darwish:

Exactly. And Oslo was another chance where the Palestinians gave to the Israelis to tell them, “Let’s put everything behind, even the murder of all of our people, even even the massacres you’ve perpetrated in ’48 and ’67, we are willing to forgive.” Even the expulsion of millions of Palestinian refugees, we were willing to forgive, and we were willing to let go of [inaudible 00:38:13], the heartland of Palestine we were willing to give up so that we can have peace, and coexist, and live next to them as neighbors, and claim peace. We changed our curriculum, we changed the way we teach our children, and we started talking about peace, and what were we offered? Too much has been asked of us as Indigenous people who are being wiped out. I think for any left-wing Israelis right now existing, any Jews who are abroad, they’re the ones who should try to think about what happens to their people afterwards, if we are allowed to even live and survive through this genocide.

They should think about a plan. Where will these people be located? Who is willing to accept people with so much blood on their hands to live with them as neighbors? Who’s willing to take the murderers of our children to live with them, and next to them, and bring them into their homes? If you’re willing to take somebody who’s been killing children, let me know. Those dancing as they bombed the schools and pulling the triggers, those dancing in the middle… To songs, young Jews dancing to songs, of burn their villages and kill them. If you’re willing to have them in your house, maybe that’s the solution for the diaspora and for the Jews who have been living outside, to see if they have open hearts to accept the murderers into their houses.

Marc Steiner:

So if we move on from this moment, is it possible for the Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, Christians to actually find a way to live in that land together in the future? Is it too late? Is it done? Is it finished?

Ashira Darwish:

I think Israel is killing any chance of that. I think Israel, with the genocide in Gaza has killed any chance of that. Before that, maybe there was a chance that people were willing to pay another price for peace. But right now, we know they’re very outspoken about what they want to do with us. They have no problem saying that they want to annihilate us. They have no problem in actually actively going and wiping us out. How am I, as a Palestinian right now, experiencing the genocide of my people? Expected to think about surviving and shaking the hand of people who have been tearing my friends into bits and pieces, and tearing their children into little smithereens? How am I supposed to think about living next to somebody who’s sodomized my friends in prison for pleasure? How am I expected to live with people who are starving, my friends, my family? It’s gone beyond anything that we were ever willing to accept and forgive.

There’s so much that has been destroyed right now in our hearts that it’s unbearable to even think about the idea of being close to them and forgiving. I know that forgiveness is the first step to trauma, and I have done my share of that, but I cannot ask the orphan children of Gaza to forgive. Do you know how many orphans we have? We have over 200,000. How are they supposed to forgive? I don’t see a reality on the ground where we can sit and coexist, until the blood is wiped out of our streets to begin with. There needs to be time for us to be able to heal, to carry our wounds. Even before we even were asked to think about forgiveness, we need this bloodshed to stop. We need them to stop murdering us, so that we can have a breath and a break, to even digest the idea of living next to them.

As I speak to you right now, they’re still bombing, the bombs are being dropped. How are we even mentally supposed to think about coexistence? Israel is the prime evil. I don’t like to use the analogies that they use of the… What does he say, Netanyahu, in his speeches, and what do they call us? But if there’s evil in this world, it lies there. And good is always better, and good is always forgiving. And I have faith in my people that we will always accept the light and always search for the light. And always, because of our religion, because of our faith, that also forces us to forgive when times that we don’t wish to forgive, we will have to come to that point, but not now, not until the last drop of blood is wiped. Not until we count our dead and we know who’s missing, who’s dead, who’s massacred.

There’s people who don’t… Israel isn’t even giving us the ability to know who is being killed. They just dropped 80 bodies in Gaza without any name. They’ve been decomposed. They’re just killing people and dropping them off, and we don’t have the capabilities of DNA testing. We don’t have anything. So people are being buried in mass graves, and forever, mothers, and children, and daughters will be thinking, “Is my dad alive? Is my mother alive or not?” This answer will never be given to them. Even if the bodies are under the ground in mass graves, they will never know. They will never have closure. And we have mass graves all over Gaza. Don’t ask us to forgive or coexist until we know how big our wound is, and see if we can begin to heal.

Marc Steiner:

Ashira, thank you for your willingness to have this conversation, and your openness, both in your mind, heart, and spirit to say what you said.

Ashira Darwish:

Thank you.

Marc Steiner:

I want to once again thank Ashira Darwish for joining us today. Her voice and commentary in the film, Where the Olive Trees Weep, was profound and deeply moving. I knew we needed to have a conversation together. And I appreciate her willingness to lay bare the reality of what she and Palestinians face in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, in Palestine, and to be so willing to share that reality, the one she lived and suffered through with all of us, and her hope for the future.

Once again, thank you, Ashira Darwish, and thank you all for listening. And thanks to David Hebden for running this program, and our audio editor, Alina Nehlich, our producer, Rosette Sewali, and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today and what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.

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