Month: October 2023

I was born in Haifa, British-occupied Palestine, and grew up in occupied Palestine, a.k.a. the state of Israel. Throughout my childhood and youth, I have been indoctrinated by the Zionist regime and told to de-humanise Palestinians and regard their country as ‘ours.’ This was done through the education system, everyday discourses, popular songs, literature, youth movement activities, cultural activities, family talk, in short – everything.

A few weeks after the 1967 war, having met a group of members of Matzpen, the Socialist Organisation in Israel – I learnt the truth about Zionist colonisation, imperialism, and racial capitalism, though these were terms I got to know many years later.

Two years after the war I moved to Ireland; I was a late comer to academia and my interest in race and racism led me to understand racism, according to African American abolition scholar Ruthie Wilson Gilmore as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” This, and my work on race and racism in Ireland and elsewhere led me to put race front and centre in thinking and writing about Zionism.