Omar Suleiman: evaluation

Transcript context

…So Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson was one of the few co-sponsors of a bill that has been on the floor of Congress for years, initially sponsored by Congresswoman Betty McCollum to penalize Israel for its detention of child prisoners. Thousands of children arbitrarily detained, put in military courts, solitary confinement, and yes, sexual violence that’s been documented by human rights organizations against them, and there have been no repercussions. So I want you to think about this, just the thought of conditioning aid to Israel so that it doesn’t indiscriminately bomb entire populations has not been able to find any home in mainstream American politics. For years. Just trying to stop Israel from picking up children and throwing them into military prisons where they disappear for decades at times, has not found any thrust in mainstream American politics. Whereas any resolution that is pro-Israel will make it past both chambers relatively quickly. When people talk about Israeli hostages and then talk about Palestinian prisoners, there’s already a problem with that framing. First of all, 2. 2 million people in Gaza are hostages. Every Palestinian that live… Two million people in Gaza are hostages. Every Palestinian that lives under occupation is a hostage. But all of those prisoners that have been picked up, women, children, innocent people with absolutely no process of making sure that they’re treated right, or given fair trials, or even given a communication line with their families, or with any government to help them, is absolutely criminal. All of those prisoners are also hostages. When you already propose this idea that there are Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, you’re already implying that one group is complicit in their own devastation, whereas another group has had devastation visited upon them entirely out of their own doing. So it’s important for people to learn about children prisoners who are indeed hostages to an apartheid system. Even what happened during that four-day truce, which all of us hoped would be extended and become permanent, where 150 Palestinian prisoners were released, Israel just went and picked up another 135 in the West Bank and threw them in prisons. That’s what I mean when I say you’re not addressing the root of the problem. The root of the problem is the occupation. The root of the problem is the apartheid. The root of the problem is the desperation that then drives the creation of all sorts of circumstances that will only further lead to the devastation of everyone, right? If you don’t solve that problem. At the root of that problem is the dehumanization of the Palestinian, because no one is raising alarms for those Palestinian hostages in Israeli military prisons. No one is putting up their pictures, and no one is talking about who they are, and their human stories, and the violence that’s been wreaked against them at every level. s in Israeli military prisons. No one is putting up their pictures, and no one is talking about who they are, and their human stories, and the violence that’s been wreaked against them at every level. If you don’t solve not just the root of occupation, but also the dehumanization that drives the occupation, which is unfortunately so pervasive right now in the discourse, then you’re going to continue to have this gap in how the world sees the plight of the Palestinians and how, unfortunately, the American public sees the problem of the Palestinians. And to you, big peace agreements of the like of Abraham Accords should include Palestine.…

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