What West Bank Arabs* Really Mean

When they say from the river to the sea

Since this genocidal slogan now echoes around the world, you should listen to Palestinians answer questions about its meaning. Years before the war these were posed by Corey Gil-Shuster’s The Ask Project: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+ask+project.

Gil-Shuster is an administrator at Tel Aviv University’s Conflict Resolution and Mediation Center. He’s done 3000+ videos in over a decade that ask ordinary Jews and Palestinians in Israel and on the West Bank questions submitted by the project’s viewers worldwide.

Here we’ll focus on West Bank Arabs’* answers and let them speak for themselves, disintermediated from Palestinian Authority run media. I’ll limit my comments to defining terms whose definition may be different from how Anglo-Americans’ and Europeans’ define these: occupied territories, occupation, right of return, Palestinian, stolen land, our land, Zionism, Jews, Dhimmi.

After the videos interviews we’ll look at how the interviewees’ sentiments translate into hard data: 2020 poll numbers by professional Palestinian pollsters. We’ll see how the data show the window for negotiation to be narrow indeed, squeezed between the right wing settler minority in Israel and the West Bank Arabs’ theocratic majority that superficially…