"The life of the bedouin in the past was freedom... Today there is no freedom. We want to go to the land that makes it. We want to go to the land that grows 'rikaybeh'. We want to go back to the land that produces the things that we eat and know. Today we are imprisoned on this bit of land... whereas our land before, we knew it and we knew its limits. We're not allowed to go to it. We're banned from harvesting a bit of wheat or barley for our children to live on."
(
Fadhiya Abu-Ghurood, Bir Hadaj, Nagab, April 6 2000).
"Before [the Palestinians] very eyes we are possessing the land and the villages where they, and their ancestors, have lived...We are the generation of colonizers, and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a home." (Moshe Dayan, quoted in
Beit-Hallahmi 1992)
"The Israeli colonial project is not a genocidal project but a "spacio-cidal" one. In every conflict, belligerents define their enemy and shape their mode of action accordingly. In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Israeli target is the place." (
Hanafi 2005).
