IN STEREO

How are you going to deal with the native people? The answer was, you transfer them, you ethnically cleanse them. This is what happened, and of course, historically we know that 500 Palestinian villages and towns were wiped out. Again, these are villages that go back thousands of years. And today, 7.5 million of us Palestinians are refugees or displaced people, living in refugee camps and other places around Palestine [and in] Lebanon, Syria, [and] Jordan. The Palestinians are allowed to live on 8.3% of historic Palestine. The 8.3% is also not contiguous. They are tiny islands. Palestinians are squeezed into this area. And it shrinks – every year it shrinks. There are a million Jewish-Israeli settlers who live in the West Bank: actually, per square kilometre there are more Jewish-Israelis here in the West Bank than there are inside the Green Line, or inside ‘Israel proper’, if you want to call it that. All the Jewish-Israeli colonies, built on stolen Palestinian land, including land of my own relatives here in Beit Sahour.

This is a phenomenon that's fairly common. The diagnosis is called settler colonialism. It sounds like a really bad diagnosis, but it's not. It's actually common in human history. In fact, what countries have not suffered from this illness? Everywhere in the world, in New Zealand, Australia… That's what happened. Everybody's had it – it's like the flu, everybody catches it, OK? And now that we’ve destroyed planet Earth, we're talking about colonising Mars. Let's just hope that Mars doesn't have living things that we're going to be displacing. This is common. [And that] is [helpful] for us to understand the outcome, the prognosis. What is the [most common] outcome for colonial/anticolonial struggles? For the descendants of the colonised and the descendants of the colonisers to live together in one country. Now that leaves only one subject for us to cover, which is therapy, right? How do we get to accelerate the outcome that's inevitable? – Mazin