“Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others. Occupation leads to foreign rule. Foreign rule leads to resistance. Resistance leads to repression. Repression leads to terror and counter-terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people. Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. We must leave the occupied territories immediately.”
This intervention in the form of an advertisement first appeared in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 1967. It was inserted and signed by 12 members of Matzpen which was an organization consisting of Jewish and Arab activists who were committed to a socialist revolution in Israel, opposed to Zionism, and champions of Palestinian rights. Sadly, it’s warning about the escalatory causal mechanics of the Zionist/ Palestinian conflict seems prophetic in light of the horrific events of October 7th and what has ensued.
In the video below Moshé Machover, the document’s only surviving signatory explains that it was not a moral statement but a definition of a process. He says,
” … It is inherent in this process that it escalates because the victims of oppression resist and the perpetrator of oppression, the colonizer, can only find one way of dealing with this resistance and that is to increase the repression. Increased repression creates more resistance, escalates more resistance, and this is a dynamic process … it escalates…”
This escalatory process has led to what is happening in Gaza today, to what Machover describes in another interview as ethnic cleansing by expulsion or extermination.
Image: https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/ethnic-cleansing-in-the-current-conflict/
https://matzpen.org/english/about-matzpen/?mc_cid=c0f61aa411&mc_eid=c19c9f61fe
The Koboi Project 
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