A Palestinian Arab in occupied Palestine giving the polite finger to his occupier
Stop the censorship! It is impossible for Palestinians to advocate against Israel without using the words “Jews” And “Jewish”.
My answer on Quora to ‘What is the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)” movement regarding Israel?’ does not break any Quora rules, certainly not the one meant to keep discourse on Quora civil, even when the question itself was altered after I wrote the answer. [The original question referred to “Jewish supremacy”.]
And yet it was “collapsed” by Quora Moderation — i.e., it became invisible to the community and everyone else unless the url of my answer is clicked.
The reason given is that some of my content in the answer “violates Quora’s Be Nice, Be Respectful policy”.
Quora bills itself as “a place to gain and share knowledge. It’s a platform to ask questions and connect with people who contribute unique insights and quality answers. This empowers people to learn from each other and to better understand the world.”
My answer does not direct “hate speech” against individuals or a group of people because of their ethnicity or religion. It is critical of Israel’s settler-colonial Zionist regime, the core purpose of which is to maintain itself as a Jewish State — i.e. to maintain Jewish supremacy in historic Palestine — “as expressed in law and the design of Israeli State institutions”. [See Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid]
The establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine is our Palestinian Nakba by definition. We are about to commemorate 70 horrible years of it.
Censoring my answers on Israel is a political act on Quora’s part that results in maintaining Israel’s present settler-colonial regime in historic Palestine.
Quora is not only unfair, it actively stands in the way of justice and restitution ever coming our way.
Egregiously, this kind of Quora censorship of Palestine speech goes on while the “Zionist narrative” blankets the media.
As an example, March 16th marked the anniversary of Rachel Corrie’s death (an Israeli bulldozer mangled her to death in Gaza during a peaceful protest). The story featured on Quora (i.e., the top story that comes up if you Google the question) is the one by Elke Weiss, Israeli-American contributor:
The Quora question, for which I also wrote an answer, is about a street in Tehran being named after Rachel Corrie. But my answer is buried under the steam of paid bots that pump certain answers up. [See Buy Quora Upvotes -Dominate Your Answers].
Elke Weiss’s answer begins like this:
“I think it’s [naming the Tehran street to honor Corrie] a curious gesture which is extremely insulting to the Iranian people, and a praise to the Israeli people.”
Quora bills itself as a place to “gain and share knowledge”. I hope the moderators will stop allowing it to remain a place where Palestinians cannot spread knowledge about the ongoing catastrophe that rocks their lives and the lives of their children daily.
Israel’s insistence on imposing a Jewish state on Arab Palestine discriminates against Palestinian Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, and is a clear “religious freedom issue”, as a report on the state of religious freedom in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory concludes:
While religion is not the defining feature of Palestinian identity, Israeli state discrimination against Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, is based on their non-Jewish identity and is therefore a clear religious freedom issue. To suggest that such discrimination is based on citizenship rather than religion or national origin is tautological because, if Palestinians were Jews, they would be entitled to Israeli citizenship as a matter of right under the Law of Return (discussed in chapter 2, infra).
Israel is a settler-colonial Zionist Jewish state. Palestinians cannot discuss and advocate against it without using the words “Jews” and “Jewish”.
The best the Jewish state aspires to is a democracy based on voting freely and equally for Zionism in Palestine. Such a state can never be a democratic state.
It is clearly imperative now that we move toward a unitary secular democratic state in historic Palestine for all.
My Quora answer (to a question that was unnecessarily edited to change its focus) goes to clarify and inform on the issues above. Censoring it is a political act on Quora’s part that results in helping to maintain Israel’s present settler-colonial regime in Palestine.
I urge Quora to reconsider this ruling and reinstate my answer to the question on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, as well as acknowledge that a forum “where questions are asked, answered, edited, and organized by its community of users” does not work fairly when that community is infiltrated by Zionist propaganda and people paid by the Israeli government to stop Palestinian speech in its tracks. [See Beware of pro-Israel Quora.com]
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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
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