Quoting Dr. Ruchama Marton: “We didn’t want to negotiate with them because we didn’t want to establish borders, and unofficially we wanted to expand them.”
Dr. Ruchama Marton, founder of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, was a direct witness to war crimes in 1956 that influenced her lifelong documentation of Israel’s systematic violations of international law and human rights. In her book’s afterword (written after October 7): “Without a shadow of doubt, genocide is taking place in Gaza now… war crimes and genocide. These are words but it’s also true.”
At age 19, Dr. Ruchama Marton served as a soldier in the IDF’s Givati Brigade 54th Battalion during the 1956 Suez War, where she witnessed Israeli reserve soldiers executing Egyptian prisoners of war who had surrendered - thirsty, barefoot men who came down from the dunes. This traumatic experience left her unable to eat or sleep, requiring medical leave, and when she returned home, no one would listen to her account of what she had witnessed. The experience completely shattered her belief in #Zionism and concepts like “the most moral army in the world,” marking a definitive break from the ideology on which she was raised and setting her on a lifelong path of documenting Israeli war crimes and human rights violations.
Dr. Marton rejects #Zionism as an inherently violent and exclusionary ideology, viewing its “hard core” as creating “a land clean of Arabs.” She argues that Zionism’s trajectory from its beginnings was predictable and unjust, contrasting current force-based thinking with the peaceful coexistence she witnessed in pre-1948 Palestine, where her grandmother could safely walk through Palestinian neighborhoods. She dismisses concepts like “the most moral army in the world” as propaganda clichés and criticizes even the Zionist left for maintaining belief in Israel’s fundamental righteousness, arguing that contemporary Israeli society has become systematically racist and unwilling to consider alternatives to domination over Palestinians.
# Contextualizing Palestinian rejection of the partition of their homeland
Dr. Marton challenges the narrative that Palestinian rejection of the 1947 partition plan was unreasonable or the primary cause of the conflict. When confronted with the argument that Palestinians have consistently refused compromises, she responds: “Only they refused, we never refused, right? If you divide the world into two parts and see only one part, you can’t understand.”
Marton contextualizes Palestinian rejection by noting that under the partition plan, “they received 22% of the whole that they had. The British were against them and so was the rest of the world.” She argues that Palestinians “were never smart, but were we smart?” and points out that Israel benefited from “a lot of foreign money and weapons, mainly American and not only, which gave us the possibility of force and more force.”
Marton rejects the framing that portrays only Palestinian rejection as problematic, stating “They refused and we refused. We refused to negotiate with them because we didn’t want to establish borders, and unofficially we wanted to expand them.” She argues that American diplomatic, financial, and military support enabled Israel’s force-based approach, making the conflict’s trajectory less about Palestinian intransigence and more about the power imbalance that allowed Israel to avoid genuine compromise while pursuing territorial expansion.
Hebrew haaretz.co.il/gallery/galleryf… or archive.is/suiai
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#nakba #israel #palestine #gazagenocide
רוחמה מרטון: "בלי תשובה מעשית לשאלה לאן הולכים, ידינו ריקות"
רוחמה מרטון, מייסדת "רופאים לזכויות אדם", חוזרת באוטוביוגרפיה לשורשי סלידתה מהציונות ומסרבת להתרכך בעקבות המתקפה באיראןגילי איזיקוביץ (הארץ)
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