"The importance of speech."
A report from Switzerland.
“We humanize what is going on the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.”—Hannah Arendt “We cannot rely on the silenced to tell us about their suffering.”—Hanan Ashrawi
26 April
I write from the New Imperial Hotel, Jaffa Gate, Old Jerusalem, where I begin work on “Palestinian Voices,” the research and publishing project for which I have spent many weeks preparing. In a matter of days I will enter the West Bank.
I arrived here from Switzerland, where I delivered a paper on the corrupting influence of the Israel Lobby in the United States. While there, I was able to meet with Dr. Sumaya Fahart-Naser, the longtime Palestinian peace activist, after a talk she delivered. Fahart-Naser gave her lecture in German. The simultaneous English translation was at times a bit rough; I almost certainly missed details and some nuance.
I wrote what follows prior to my departure for Israel-Palestine.
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On the morning of 13 April, I joined a small group of people gathered in Sirnach, a village 50 km to the north and east of Zurich, to hear Palestinian peace activist Dr. Sumaya Fahart-Naser speak about the ever worsening, ever more dangerous situation in Palestine.
Beyond the windows, beneath a warm spring sun, pear trees clothed in dazzling white blossoms dotted green pastures. The contrast between what I saw out the window and heard from the podium could not have been greater. Speaking in German, Fahart-Naser confirmed some of the worst of what has been documented by journalists reporting from Gaza.
From 1997 to 2001, Fahart-Naser was director of the Jerusalem Center for Women, a feminist organization promoting educational and empowerment projects for Palestinian women. The Center worked on peace initiatives with Bat Shalom—an Israeli women’s group also situated in Jerusalem—through a coordinating body called The Jerusalem Link. Fahart-Naser wrote poignantly and candidly about their efforts, hopes, and failures in her book, Daughter of the Olive Trees (Lenos Velag, 2014).
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Of the numerous human rights violations Fahart-Naser reported in her talk, the worst by far was an account described by one of her daughters who travels daily into Gaza with a German aid organization. The daughter, not identified by name, reported that a truck returned full of Palestinian men who had been held captive and tortured. Their arms and legs had been intentionally broken. The damage from this type of torture—common, according to Fahart-Naser—is severe and can require amputation when flesh has begun to die. Fahart-Naser spoke of a doctor who confessed to being physically and emotionally overwhelmed by the number of amputations he was forced to perform.
These are among the countless realities that go unreported in mainstream U.S. media, where pro-Israeli bias has long been the norm. It is a situation that will continue until Palestinian lives and rights are valued—and the Israel Lobby in the United States, AIPAC chief among them, is weakened.
Fahart-Naser recounted other vivid examples of brutality in Gaza and the West Bank, where settler violence is escalating. More than 466 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces and settlers since 7 October.
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The violence of ethnic cleansing and genocide becomes possible when a people are routinely dehumanized, silenced, and erased. It is this—the evil of dehumanization—that must be resisted. And it is for this reason I will shortly travel to the West Bank.
The main focus of Fahart-Naser’s message was the importance of speech itself. Speech and the urgency of speaking:
We have to talk to restore our humanity. If we aren’t allowed to talk, evil is normalized.
Just as we most need to hear Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, they are being silenced. Palestinians and those who support Palestinian rights are now censored in the United States and Europe. Conferences, events, and protests are cancelled. People are threatened with arrest and deportation. Pro-Palestinian protests have erupted across campuses in the United States and students—accused of anti-semitism and hate speech—are being arrested and suspended. In Israel, the situation is much worse. Any _expression_ of protest or resistance is met with extreme violence, imprisonment, or death.
Fahart-Naser lives in the West Bank only 45 km from Ben Gurion Airport. But it took her nearly five hours to get there on the day when, in the first week of April, she flew to Germany to deliver a series of talks. She was turned away at multiple checkpoints and ultimately had to bribe a taxi driver to smuggle her into Israel. She was then detained at the airport and not allowed to board her scheduled flight.
“I’ve been invited to speak by the mainstream media, and it will be a blemish on Israel if I cannot come,” she told airport authorities. Eventually they allowed her to board.
For Palestinians living under military occupation, there is no freedom of movement. Because the government does not want anyone to witness or report on what’s happening in the West Bank, Israel routinely blocks entry into Palestine. For the same reason, Israel increasingly refuses to allow Palestinians to leave. Citing security concerns, the Israeli military enforces an extreme form of racist segregation, a policy central to the ongoing military occupation of Palestinian territory.
In the United States and Europe, Palestinians and those who support Palestinians rights face increasing censorship. When Fahart-Naser arrived in Germany, a few days before her talk in Sirnach, she learned that three of the organizations that had invited her to speak had cancelled her talks. All had hosted her before and all were afraid of being accused of anti-Semitism. In Germany, accusations of anti-Semitism can result in legal prosecution for hate speech, a crime that carries a sentence of up to five years in prison.
The day before Fahart-Naser spoke in Switzerland, German police shut down a pro-Palestinian conference in Berlin. While it was scheduled for three days, police stormed the venue as the first panelist, Dr. Salman Abu-Sitta, began speaking by video. One minute into his address police switched off the power and closed the conference. (Abu-Sitta’s speech can be read on here, on the Palestine Land Society’s website.)
Three of the scheduled conference participants have been banned from entering Germany or even addressing German audiences by video link. These are Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, now Secretary-General of the pan-European political party Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), Palestinian researcher Dr. Salman Abu-Sitta, and his nephew, British-Palestinian surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sitta, who was recently appointed rector at Glasgow University.
Scheduled to give eye-witness testimony on conditions in al-Shifa and al-Ahil hospitals in Gaza, where he worked for 43 days following 7 October, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sitta was detained at the Berlin airport, questioned for more than three hours, and then expelled from the country.
Here is what Ghassan Abu-Sitta he had to say of the incident in a video Varoufakis posted on X:
At the end of three and a half hours, I was told that I will not be allowed to enter German soil, and that this ban will last the whole of April. And not just that.
That if I were to try to link up by Zoom or FaceTime with the conference, even if I was outside Germany, or I were to send a video of my lecture to the conference in Berlin, that would constitute a breach of German law and that I would endanger myself to having a fine or even up to a year of prison.
I then was asked at the end to book a flight back to the UK. My passport was taken away from me and then I only got my passport back as I was boarding the plane.
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Only two weeks ago it seemed I might have to postpone my trip when Iran retaliated for Israel’s unprecedented bombing of its embassy in Syria. But Iran’s measured, largely performative response has so far succeeded in calming an exceedingly dangerous situation, likely averting a regional war. We must all be grateful for Iran’s steady patience.
For once, Israel appears to have shown a similar measure of restraint. Last Thursday it launched further attacks against Iran that appear to have been minor, and which Iran pretended didn’t happen. We can only hope that the leadership in Washington will hold firm in its refusal to be dragged into a war with Iran.
Let us all continue to keep watch—and pray if we’re so inclined—and speak out at every opportunity.
Now that I am in Israel-Palestine, my reports on Winter Wheat and The Floutist may be sparse until I am able to return to the United States. This depends upon various circumstances I cannot yet read. In the meantime, thank you for your support.
Note: Yanis Varoufakis’ banned speech is available here.