Alexis Lathem

Palestinian refugee and activist Wafic Faour talks about what it means to be treated as an Other, the Palestinian liberation movement, and why social justice movements are all connected.

Interviewed by Alexis Lathem

Wafic Faour is a Palestinian refugee who has lived in Vermont for thirty years. I came to know him not only for his work with Vermonters for Justice in Palestine and the Vermont Coalition for Justice in Palestine, but through his local anti-racist and decolonizing work in our small rural community, where he has deeply engaged in solidarity work with Migrant Justice, Black Lives Matter, and Indigenous and LGBTQ communities. I traveled the flood-damaged mountain road to his home last July, where he lives with his wife of three decades and where they raised their two children, to talk with him about his early life as a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, his family’s experience of the Nabka, and his immigration to the United States. I also asked him to talk about how his participation in other liberation movements connects to his story.

In Part Two we discuss the Palestinian liberation movement post October 7, the presidential election, and why it’s important to work for change at the local level.

Since he often reads poetry when he gives speeches or talks, I asked him to start by reading a poem.

Part One.

WF: “Think of Others” is by Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian born in Galilee before the Nabka [the “catastrophe”], 1948. He is considered one of the greatest, not only Palestinian poets, but in all the Arab world. I will read first in English: “Think of Others.”

[“Think of Others” by Mahmoud Darwish, from Almond Blossoms and Beyond. Translated from the original Arabic by Mohammed Shaheen. © Interlink Books, 2010.]

Wafic Faour reads “Think of Others” by Mahmoud Darwish

So, this sums up what other questions you put forward about the subject we are going to talk about. I was born in 1960 in a refugee camp from two parents who became refugees in 1948. Both were born in a small village called Shaab, about ten minutes from a major city called Acca (the Israelis changed its name to Acre). When my parents became refugees and scattered, not all my uncles or grandparents left Palestine. My mother is one of sixteen. Her father was killed in 1948 and I will come back to that, how did he get killed at 80-something years old.

My father, one of four, became a refugee at sixteen. He and his sisters and two brothers and grandmother and grandfather became prisoners of Israel in 1948. The whole family was scattered in 1948 through the Nabka. Many of the people of the village, many with children, they heard about the massacre of Deir Yassin^[i] and Qubie and a lot of them headed to the caves around the town, or to the olive groves. The Zionist terrorist organization Haganah entered the village, destroyed many houses. Many people returned, but by that time two things happened: the Israelis passed the absentee law, which means if the owner wasn’t there when they came to a village, it became owned by the new government. That’s why my grandfather on my mother’s side, they killed him because he was a land owner. Maybe the second biggest land owner in Galilee, and they put their hand on his land and houses and they built at least three kibbutzes surrounding that village. My grandfather on my father’s side was opposing both the British mandate and the new Israeli government; they jailed him until he lost his eyesight and then they let him go. My grandmother returned to her house that her parents built, within two or three days. But she became a tenant, renting her own house from the new government until her death.

My parents got married in 1952 and I was born in 1960. Life in the refugee camp, first in Baalbek, which had been a French military base housing soldiers in 1943. In 1963 they were forced to move to another refugee camp in southern Lebanon called Rashidieh, next to the city of Tayyar. We lived six years there. It was built as a modern camp out of cinder blocks – two rooms for each family – with small a small piece of dirt next to it that my mother made into a garden. There is no running water, there is a common bathroom for the neighborhood, no electricity. But nonetheless it was better than living in tents like in other refugee camps. It was by the seaside. In the camps we reproduced the pattern of our villages in Palestine. Our neighbor from our village became our neighbor in the camps.

Thinking about early memories, I never thought that the world outside that refugee camp lived differently. I thought the whole world lived the same, everybody. But I noticed as I was growing up that the refugee camp only has one entrance and one exit and there is a military checkpoint outside of it where daily laborers will sit, who were hired as cheap laborers for farming – picking citrus, lemons, and oranges. They would sit on the ground and a truck will come from the other side driven by Lebanese and they would choose laborers, no different than you see migrants here, who are picked up in major cities to work for a day. In summer they picked tobacco, in the winter it was citrus. And this is to bring up the subject of how I see our migrants here – when I see them I don’t see a difference the way they live here than my uncles, my aunts, my neighbors growing up. It is not surprising that I will identify with them, or when I bring my story to them, they can identify with me.

Racism was huge for us. The Lebanese never considered us as equal. Until today 76 years later still my brothers cannot own their own business, they cannot own their own houses. It has to be listed under a Lebanese name, or you have to be married to a Lebanese. At least 64 jobs are registered that the Palestinian cannot do in Lebanon. They are not considered second class citizens – they are non-citizens, carrying refugee papers only, and considered by majority of the political parties as a refugee problem, even though Lebanon accepted them 76 years ago and the majority of refugee camps – in Syria, Jordan, anywhere – they are rented for 99 years. So, the United Nations knows that the refugee problem is not temporary.

If you don’t have a small business like a butcher shop there is not much work to do in the camp. Many women open their own sewing shop or bakeries so it was a survival struggle. The United Nations opened schools up to tenth grade but after that it is up to you to send your kids to high school to finish the state-required baccalaureate. This changed the Palestinian society completely, because we could not own land and were a farming community the majority of us. So we concentrated on education. It became the only way to get out of the situation we are living in.

In 1967 – it was the first time I participated in a rally – on the second or third day of the 1967 war – we call it the Naksa [the “setback,”],^[ii] like the Nabka, another major defeat – when in the refugee camp in Rashidieh the young people demonstrated and broke through the checkpoints. On that day people walked and demonstrated, chanting, Take us to the border, we want to go home. I was surprised that the checkpoints weren’t manned – there was no Lebanese military on that day. They demonstrated all the way three miles to Tayyar where there is a military base, to ask for arms, saying we want to fight to go back home. But they stopped us.

I was six and a half years old. I came home and nothing happened. By the time the war settled, and we all knew that more Palestinian land – Gaza, and Jerusalem, and Golan Heights, Sinai, have been occupied – I saw the Lebanese secret service was looking for the leaders of the demonstrations. I saw them whip them and take them away by their hair and release them one or two months later with shaved heads and almost losing half their weight. We heard about brutal treatment of those who volunteered to go and fight with the Arab forces.

After six years in Rashidieh – my father was working in Beirut 1969 and was coming home one day a week – my mother insisted we move closer. So we moved to another refugee camp called Burj al-Barajne, which is close to Beirut airport. In 1969 something else happened – the first military intifada against the Lebanese government oppression inside the camps.

1969 – the first intifada in the camps to liberate the Palestinians from this brutal treatment – brought the new modern Palestinian liberation movement to us where it became normal that we would organize. Inside the schools we formed unions of Palestinian students, and I start seeing more unions flourishing. Through that it brought more freedom for us to continue our education. Because of a relationship between the PLO and eastern European countries, and Cuba, these countries  started accepting Palestinian students to go to college. There were also relationships with other Arab countries – Egypt under Nassar accepted many Palestinian students to medical schools.

That is why you shouldn’t find it strange that Palestinians are considered the most educated among the Arab population. Now you can consider them – both inside Palestine and in Gaza and outside – they may be the most educated people per capita. For example, in Gaza, which is only 36 kilometers square, we have twelve universities.

I finished high school during the Lebanese civil war. During that time this racism in Lebanon at the government level and in many institutions in Lebanon against the Palestinian population, who are now second and third generation – we were made into Others. And that is why – to answer your question – why I relate to these movements – to Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ rights – I see the otherization here. I don’t see myself as strange to people in these communities – I identify with them and they identify with me.

In the U.S., it’s different – if you are born here you are American, but not there. You are forever Other. You don’t belong. The colonialist maps drawn by Sykes-Picot^[iii] insisted on great differences though we all lived for hundreds of years all together. They created that division as any colonial powers do until today. Post colonialist – they chose the Christian Lebanese, in particular the Maronite, to be their own servants and they created an administration where the Maronite are first-class citizens and the other Christians are second, the orthodox and the Druze are below. By divide and conquer they succeeded in creating a new structure. They did the same in Syria – the French chose the Alaouites. You see it everywhere – in Iraq, the Sunni, where they are not the majority. So they played them to serve their purposes to stay in control. A lot of people don’t understand the French influence after they left – they didn’t leave without keeping the water departments, the telephone, electricity, banking, in contract with French companies for another 99 years. The life of the government is still under the hand of the French. You can see this in Africa, Asia, Latin America. This is how post-colonialism is a colonialism with a new flavor.

Moving forward, I passed the baccalaureate and I was taking ESL at the British consulate. Next door to the consulate was the American Friends of the Middle East. It is a Quaker organization to help students to apply for I-20 visas to go to college here. They helped me apply for colleges and I paid my fees and I was accepted and I chose Northeastern University in Boston. This is 1978.

So, I came to Boston. Of course, I was homesick. I don’t know many people. There was a community of students from Palestine and other Arab countries, and also the Iranian students – this was the time of the revolution in Iran against the Shah – were a part of it. To continue to be an activist was the most natural thing. I was suspicious of relating to the American community at large because I saw the U.S. position towards Palestine/Israel was one-sided and it supported Israel. If you open a subject like occupation or the refugee question, the Americans acted like they didn’t know or didn’t want to know. They don’t want to learn about it. They were always sympathetic to Israel and believed the Israeli narrative that all the Arabs are against them and want to throw them into the sea. That the land was empty.

But the Arab governments never seriously fought for us; they were post-colonial governments and their survival was dependent on continuing their job to guarantee the American and European interests in the Middle East, which is raw material, oil, and of course water navigation. That is the sole purpose of their existence. And now they are talking about normalization of relations with Arab countries as if something new has been achieved recently due to the politics of some U.S. administration – actually like South Africa, the relationship goes back to 1936. This is according to the Israeli archive. The Palestinians know through our fathers they have been betrayed in 1948 by the so-called Arab Salvation Army that came to help Palestine but they assisted the Zionist terrorist organization to create the Nabka.

As we go forward the Palestinians are not only in refugee camps – in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, we are in all Arab countries as the cheap labor. But we are also the educators and doctors and engineers of those countries. The basis of education in, let’s say, Kuwait, even Algiers post-liberation – many are Palestinians who built the foundations of the education systems in those countries that are still standing until now. As I said earlier, we have no choice but to invest in education because we had no land and were not allowed to own businesses. Let’s say in 1968 I have a memory of at least nine of my cousins in Lebanon who became doctors. Many of my cousins became nurses and they worked in Libya and in the Emirates. This is one family.

It is not strange that people make excuses for not wanting to talk about the Israeli/Palestinian question – they say, “Oh it’s a complicated, thousands-of-years-old problem.” It is the biggest lie. It is very modern. Zionism is an ideology, it’s not a religion. The Palestinians are struggling against Zionism, which is at its heart based on racism and supremacy. I don’t have to go back to the massacres and ethnic cleansing recently – all I have to do is look at Israel and its laws. The moment you see how they control the Palestinian land that was mandated by Sykes-Picot, you will see that 2.2 million Palestinians don’t enjoy the same rights as Jewish citizens of that land. It’s not a slogan. You can see it in the justice system, in policing, in schools – the spending on Arab schools inside is 25 percent in comparison to the Jewish schools. Or health care – the last hospital built in an Arab community was before 1948. There is no Israeli state hospital in Arab communities and the hospitals that exist are funded and operated by NGOs and churches. For housing, the newest housing for Arabs was 1948. After 524 villages had been destroyed by the new state. In comparison to thousands built for Jews only.

In every field racism exists, even for those Palestinians who carry Israeli passports. You go to the West Bank – they have over 425 checkpoints for Palestinians only. They have roads for Israelis only. You cannot go to your school, you cannot go to your fields, you cannot go to the hospital. They are not considered citizens in the eyes of the Israeli, they should leave. They are Arabs and there are many Arab countries and they should leave.

In 1982 my family lost their house from the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. They lost their house and they moved to the Bakaa Valley where they lived until they died. The massacre of Sabra and Shatila^[iv] made clear what Israel is capable of doing. The invasion of Lebanon is no different from the invasion of Gaza today. Or the siege of Beirut of 78 days. It is the same Israeli expansion program to control Lebanon and to divert water from the Litani River, and to occupy the historic Palestine. You remind me of American policy then, which makes Kamala Harris look like she is on the right. Reagan ordered the Israelis to leave Beirut in 1982. He was firm with Begin. I don’t hear that from Biden or Kamala Harris – to stop the invasion and genocide of Gaza.

Israel never stopped attacking Lebanon since 1948. Many Lebanese got killed, in multiple wars. I have a memory in 1969 – when we lived in the refugee camp next to the airport, when the Israelis came and occupied the Lebanese national airport for hours and destroyed planes. They have always wanted part of Lebanon and its water because upper Galilee is thirsty for water. They tried to do it in 1982. So now, it’s no different. Hezbollah didn’t exist before the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. So, occupation is creating the resistance. You can look at all the right-wing Israeli policies and the maps they draw – Lebanon is part of their planned expansion. They believe in the Greater Israel.

My family is still in Lebanon. I talk to them every day. They are still refugees. For four generations. With limited rights, suffering from discrimination. Israel and the U.S. want to push Lebanon to accept the Palestinians as citizens, but this would disrupt the balance of sectarian divisions in the country. The Palestinians don’t want to be Lebanese. We are distinct. Even though we have a lot of similarities as Arab people living on the same land, we share a similar cultural heritage and traditions. But Palestinians want to go home.

[i] Deir Yassin was one of dozens of massacres of Palestinians by Zionist paramilitaries during the 1947-48 war, where 110 men, women, and children were killed, despite a non-aggression agreement. News of the massacre accelerated the flight and expulsion of Palestinians and was central to the Nabka. After being emptied, the village was resettled by Israelis.

[ii] The Naska, the “setback,” refers to the 1967 Israeli seizure of all that remained of Palestinian land – the West Bank (of Jordan), East Jerusalem, and Gaza, as well as the Golan Heights in Syria and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.

[iii] Sykes-Picot was a 1916 treaty that divided the former Ottoman Empire outside the Arab Peninsula into British and French “spheres of influence,” creating the modern borders between Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq.

[iv] In September 1982, Christian Lebanese militias, with the support of the Israeli Defense Forces, killed between 2500 and 3500 Palestinian and Lebanese Shia civilians in two days in the Sabra neighborhood and Shatila refugee camp near Beirut.

Part Two.

AL: What has it been like for you to see a significant protest movement here in support of Palestine – especially on college campuses – finally – after all these years of occupation? Do you see a change in the narrative?

Mistakenly a lot of people put October 7 as a breaking point without looking at the last 75 years or even October 6 or October 5. They marginalize the problem as if the Israeli and Palestinian sides are equal and we have to look at both sides equally. So, they equalize the occupiers with the occupied, the colonizers with the colonized. Even though we have been educating all the time, at every opening, every chance we have. In the education system you cannot teach about the Nabka, you cannot talk about it and now if you teach about it you are considered antisemitic. If you want to teach about Palestinian history you are considered antisemitic.

No one is talking about the hundreds since October 7 who have been killed in the West Bank and thousands injured. Come to Gaza where of course Israeli settlers left in 2005. They couldn’t control Gaza, they couldn’t push them into the desert. The strategy goes back to the 1950s to empty Gaza and push them into Sinai. So they leave and then they put a wall around them. It is considered the largest open-air prison over there. What to expect?

For the Palestinian the right of self-determination is engrained in us, we are born with it, it is our right. We deserve freedom in our land like anybody else.

We are not activists just since October 7. We have been trying to tell our story for the longest time. The mainstream media never reported us, never opened its doors to us, never accepted us as equal. And when they talked about October 7 they adopted the Israeli narrative. We condemn any deaths of civilians for sure. A death of an innocent person – in our faith, in the Muslim faith, and the Palestinian culture – is the death of all humanity. But they keep concentrating on this and don’t talk about the Palestinian deaths. They see us as numbers. They blame the victim by saying, “They voted for Hamas.” But 15,000–16,000 children are killed, born in the last 17 years. You blame them by saying they voted for Hamas? They marginalize us by killing all the people and not just Hamas fighters. The Israeli narrative has succeeded. But the people are waking up.

Israeli victims have names, hopes, aspirations, relatives, favorite colors, favorite dolls. But the Palestinians are numbers. Under international law, you cannot occupy a people and put them under siege and kill children and justify this by saying there is a fighter hiding among the civilian population. You can’t claim self-defense. It’s a collective punishment.

The Israel project is a project of the United States and Europe: it has a job to do for the colonialist power, which is to keep the Arab world divided and dependent on protection from the U.S., to keep the oil flowing and the shipping lanes open for commerce. That’s why it is more like a base for the U.S. and the U.S. taxpayers are paying for it. Creating Israel in a foreign land and calling it the only “civilized” country in comparison to the inhabitants – it is unethical to say that. But the countries’ histories are similar. The U.S. was created as a promised land and safe haven for the persecuted people of Europe. That’s the mythology. Israel took a similar idea. You don’t hear about the Indigenous people – another example of why I relate to the Indigenous people here – we have the same story.

AL: One thing that is left out of the media coverage of the protests, where the focus is mostly on antisemitism, is that the movement has significant participation from Jewish groups – like Jewish Voices for Peace and Not in Our Name. In fact, at rallies I have been to, it is Palestinians and then the Jewish groups who are out there in front, leading the march, and so many of the speakers are Jewish. Many of these activists express that their advocacy for Palestinian liberation is an expression of what it means for them to be Jewish. Can you talk about your work with Jewish groups, and what this relationship has been like?

WF: To say that America supports Israel because it cares about the Jews would be a mistake. Antisemitism is dangerous and alive. We saw it a few years ago with Charlottesville with the torch-bearing white supremacists chanting “the Jews will not replace us.” In the 1940s the most liberal president did not accept the Jews who were escaping Germany.

There are Zionists here who stand up for the right of self-determination and equity for the Blacks, the migrants, the Indigenous, they get involved in their causes, but when it comes to Palestine they say no. They block their minds to the existence of the Palestinian.

Our Jewish siblings have two kinds of struggle: on the one hand, they were educated to believe in the land-with-no-people-for-a-people-with-no-land. So we don’t exist. It’s just a new creation. When it’s the opposite. The Jews come from all over the world for all kinds of reasons but when they try to create something they call Israeli, look at it ­– their food is Palestinian food – they claim it is Israeli to make hummus or falafel – you can’t tell me that the Polish brought hummus here when they don’t have sesame to make the tahini. You listen to the Hebrew language. Of course, there were ancient Hebrew texts, but in modern Hebrew, thousands of words are Arabic words. They take everything from us and we don’t exist, we never existed for them. They say that the Palestinian flag or the keffiyeh is just a 1960s creation, the idea of Palestine is a modern creation – but they are projecting their own reality on us.

Besides Vermonters for Justice in Palestine, the students at Middlebury and UVM, and now in many high schools – the number one allies on the question of Palestine, who consider the Palestinian struggle as part of their struggle – is Jewish Voices for Peace. Recently, in the last 20-25 years, many have turned to oppose the Zionist ideology and the narrative against Palestinians. They are part of the Vermont Coalition for Palestinian Liberation and we meet them often – last Saturday we met and we meet again next Friday. We are working together on the apartheid-free communities campaign.

We are seeing a change in how they see the Palestinian – there are waves of members of the Jewish community coming to VJP to understand. They are struggling with how to identify themselves – they reject occupation and apartheid but are still for a Jewish Zionist identity. But they believe in the right of Palestine to self-determination and the end of apartheid and the right of Americans to practice BDS.

AL: A lot has been said about the phrase “from the river to the sea.” Last year Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib made a speech in support of Palestinians in Gaza that was condemned as antisemitic because she used the phrase “from the river to the sea.” Can you talk about the origins of this phrase and what it means to you?

WF: The first time the phrase appeared – it means the River Jordan to the Mediterranean – it was the Israeli Likkud party in the 70s. The Knesset is moving a bill forward to annex parts of the West Bank. It is stated in the government’s manifesto that this is the goal, that the Jewish people have an “exclusive right over all the Land of Israel” and they mean all of historic Palestine. And the Knesset just voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution opposing Palestinian statehood.^[v] There is no opposition group in the Israeli government like the Peace Now that existed in the past. We see some synagogues here selling real estate inside Gaza. They are talking about full control – from the river to the sea. It’s beyond that – the map carried by Netanyahu in the last speech claims more Arab land from Jordan and others – from Euphrates to the Nile is the Greater Israel. They have the right to say that, and my relatives there, I am originally from there and yet I am not allowed to say it?

When we say it we say this: even when we accepted the two-state solution with only 20 percent of the historical Palestinian land, we called for the right of return of refugees. What we are trying to do is end the state of military occupation and apartheid. From the river to the sea – that all citizens can live equally on that land.

But if you look at Israeli law and their rhetoric, it’s based on the premise of Jewish supremacy over all that land and for us it is unacceptable.

What we are working on now with these groups is creating apartheid-free communities in Vermont. The language is very clear. It states: WE PLEDGE to join others in working to end all support to Israel’s apartheid regime, settler colonialism, and military colonialism.

It’s an advisory to cities and towns. We use it as a tool for education. It is part of what we studied from the South African struggle. When you call a state an apartheid state – and Israel is called that not only by Palestinians but by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and by the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem – the moment you call a state an apartheid state you have the right to boycott. And the boycott should be a tool not a goal to build pressure for policy change.

The other activities – we are invited on September 8 to be a part of the Pride Parade in Burlington. By getting invited, it is another sign of solidarity we are finding from all corners of our racial and social justice community here in Vermont, and how much the Palestine issue is becoming a local issue. In the long run, we are studying a resolution to be presented the Vermont legislature, which is to recognize May 15 as the Palestine Nakba Day. This is project we are working on with Jewish Voices for Peace.

AL: I hear from many critics of Israel who don’t support an academic boycott of Israel. Some universities that have agreed to student protesters’ demands have drawn the line here. Can you talk about BDS and the reasoning behind an academic boycott?

Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) – when it comes to an academic boycott it is to institutions not individuals – most of the institutions of higher education in Israel are embedded with the military and security of the Israeli government. The students at the University of Vermont tried to get the university to boycott investments and pensions in Israel – the first time was 13 years ago – they froze it because the president said we’ll veto it. But they are also boycotting us. When they didn’t allow the Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd to come to UVM,^[vi] isn’t that a case of boycott? Why is it a right for them and not for us? Educators here have lost their jobs because they want to educate about Palestine, they are called antisemitic. And they have been reprimanded. They are changing the meaning of antisemitism. Because of the conflation of Judaism with Zionism, everything we do – calling for a cease fire or for a resolution to the city council – we are called antisemitic. I am not saying it doesn’t exist – but those of us who are working for Palestine, we are anti-Zionist, we are not anti-Jew.

Those academic boycotts are just a tool to bring the conversation into higher education where we have not been allowed to be a part of that conversation. My daughter at Middlebury was an organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine and co-president of that chapter. When she was attacked as antisemitic and she was doxxed, that made her physically sick for weeks. At the time she was doing her finals. She is a superb student. She didn’t find any protection from the administration. On the contrary. So there is discrimination against Palestinian and Muslim students all across the campus and from the administration when they organize for Palestine. I didn’t see any protections for those students. But to boycott Israel – it is the least we can do.

Americans came very late to the South Africa boycott. Israel was part of the South African project, that is why South Africa and Israel, the practices are carbon copies of themselves. We learned from the South African struggle. You hear this from South African activists and foreign ministers – we are rooted together. The first time I saw South African people was in Beirut in the 70s. They came to our refugee camps. Same with the Irish. There is a common link between the Irish struggle, the Palestine struggle, the South African struggle.

AL: Many of us feel a real dilemma about the upcoming election, because it is going to be very hard to vote for Harris, because of the Biden/Harris administration’s support for the genocide. How important is it to defeat Trump, or does it even matter? Do you think the outcome of the election matters for Palestine? And if it doesn’t, but it matters for other reasons, what should a voter do?

WF: From the Palestinian point of view, it doesn’t matter. They have same or similar positions on the Israel/Palestine conflict. It is getting worse. In the last debate, Trump said Biden is “becoming a Palestinian” as if it were a degrading word. Americans need to rethink this country and its promise, and why we participate in elections. If you want theater, then you are going to get stuck with two parties. We are worried that our representatives who support Harris, who also claim they are supporting a cease fire – they are throwing the solidarity group here in Vermont under the bus by saying, well, if you won’t vote for Harris, then you are supporting Trump. Which is not true. We are in dilemma. We refuse that the Palestinian question and the genocide in Gaza be allowed to be swept away.

AL: Are you afraid – even if they aren’t different on Palestine, what about so many other issues? For BIPOC communities, for the Supreme Court, for immigrants?

WF: Always we think, if we vote the right way we are going to tackle discrimination, and that didn’t happen even under Barack Obama. I think Gaza and Palestine is exposing them on the world stage – all that they have said about human rights and equal rights – Gaza is exposing them on their domestic policies here. I feel it is time that we rethink us as people, the idea of collective liberation and how we can come together and bring a real alternative. Jill Stein is bringing an alternative and what’s wrong with that? On the issue of Palestine, I saw her in D.C. and she spoke for Palestinian rights and self-determination and she shows up wearing a keffiyeh and she is talking about the Palestinian issue as an American issue. It’s a choice, and it’s worth the vote. She’s not a winnable ticket, neither was Cornel West, but my question to the American public is, why vote for the least evil when it is evil?

You will call it a dilemma because you don’t want Trump – anyone but Trump – but the system is the same, if Biden is President or Trump, and the policy is the same.

AL: But it could be worse. What Trump showed us is it could be much worse. He could be worse for Palestine. (His son-in- law, assigned the role of brokering a peace agreement for the Trump administration, wants to push the Gazans into the desert. )

WF: We need to listen to the people from the Middle East and hear what they say: how do we feel? Both Republicans and Democrats, they destroyed us in the Middle East. It was Obama who did Libya, it was Obama who did Syria, it is both Democrats and Republicans creating this anti-Muslim atmosphere for the last 40-50 years. It wasn’t only Trump. He is more in your face – with the Muslim ban, more openly anti-Arab, anti-Muslim. But the actions by Biden and Blinken are no different.

At the community level, I believe this is the only way we can change. It doesn’t matter the number of people. Some people think change can happen instantly and this is not true. We all have to get involved at the very, very local level first and to make every question as domestic as possible. When I talk about the aid to Israel or Ukraine, and then I see the struggle of Vermonters post-flood, or not passing school budgets in many municipalities. I go to Burlington almost daily and see the homeless. And then you close your eyes to trillions of dollars leaving the country to protect “American interests” and American lives. I see American lives in danger here.

I am not an outsider. I am living it. Last Wednesday our road was wiped out and I could not get to my home for two days. The roads still haven’t been fixed. One of the difficulties is we don’t have budget for that. How come the right wing always talks about the debt which is around everyone’s neck but silently they vote for sending military aid and for freeing big corporations from paying taxes?

Americans come together when its needed. I see them coming together to support us now more than ever. It’s a great, great feeling. But I want them to think – this is important for me – instead of giving us solidarity, I want them to take responsibility, first to our community here, and to relate it to their responsibility to others. That is why I brought you that poem, “Think of Others.”

AL: You mentioned that Gaza has twelve universities. You used the present tense, although all of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed since last October by the Israeli forces. Just last week Netanyahu described his war in Gaza as a conflict between “civilization and barbarism,” while his army is working to destroy Palestinian civil society. The journal Lit Hub profiled last December the Palestinian poets and writers who had been killed by Israel in this war, in addition to the 66 Palestinian journalists killed.^[vii] It is just staggering, breathtaking to read. This attack on the heart of Palestinian society – as you said education is so important to modern Palestine – is partly why scholars of genocide, and the human rights organizations you mentioned, are calling this a genocide. Was it deliberate when you used the present tense? Do you believe they will rebuild?

WF: Of course. If Israel and their supporters are going to keep seeing us as terrorists, they need to learn more about who we are. Gaza has graduated thousands of doctors, engineers, and scholars, and they are serving around the world. There are two Gazans working at NASA. Even before 1948 Palestinians are the teachers and doctors of the Arab Gulf. The Indigenous people here were called “savages,” like the Black people are called “thugs,” and the Palestinians are called “terrorists.” This is another Israeli policy to marginalize the Palestinians to make them an enemy who deserves to be eliminated. But we know about the historic Arab contribution to Western civilization – when Christianity was in the dark ages the Arabs were advancing mathematics and scholarship. That is why I am involved in the Education Justice Coalition – not only to bring attention to the Arab contributions in math, medicine, language, poetry, and the arts, but to bring attention to the contributions of Black and Brown people and the Indigenous people to what you call Western civilization.

Of course, we’re going to rebuild. We’ve done it before. And the 350 schools. And the hospitals. And the churches and the mosques. Gaza is unique. Gaza withstood many invasions – from Alexander, the Romans, Napoleon, the Crusaders… This is not isolated. We are going to rebuild. Because we love life. We respect life. There is a lot in this world to live for.

[v] “Knesset passes preliminary reading of a bill that annexes part of West Bank territory to Israel.” https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/144338

Michael Sfard, “Israel is officially annexing the West Bank.” Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/08/israel-palestine-west-bank-annexation-netanyahu-smotrich-far-right/

“Israeli Knesset voted to reject Palestinian statehood.” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/18/israels-knesset-votes-to-reject-palestinian-statehood

[vi] In October 2023, the University of Vermont cancelled a scheduled lecture by the Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd, citing “safety concerns.” https://vtdigger.org/2023/10/23/citing-safety-concerns-university-of-vermont-cancels-event-with-palestinian-writer/

[vii] “These are the poets and writers who have been killed in Gaza.” https://lithub.com/these-are-the-poets-and-writers-who-have-been-killed-in-gaza/

Recommended for further reading on the history of Palestine: The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, by Rashid Khalidi.

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]