A Conversation with Sami Abu Shehadeh, activist, historian and political leader of Palestinian Israelis.
10 Apr 2025 – As part of the international delegation of conscience to Palestine, hosted by Sabeel, the Palestinian Liberation Theology Centre in Jerusalem, FORSEA’s Dr Maung Zarni visited the headquarters of the Yaffa Youth Movement on the outskirt of Tel Aviv in January.
In the founding days of Israel in 1948, a group of Israeli soldiers guarding the Jeffa Ghetto newly established for displaced Arab Palestinians, as captured on an inmate’s camera (photo courtesy of our local guide and historian from Zochrot – iReturn )
Only 100 years ago, as a vibrant port city on the Mediterranean, Yaffa or Jeffa was the most important Arab centre in terms of its demography size, cultural vibrancy and commerce and industry.
Road signs in Jeffa or Yaffa, photo by Zarni, Jan. 2025.
As the direct result of the extremely violent Zionist Project of building Israel, conceived as the Jewish majority state – nah, Jewishsupremacy -from its very inception on the land with Arab majority – Yaffa underwent, from such a vibrant Arab city into a run-down neighbourhood of Tel Aviv, the first Zionist Jewish settlement, which began in the early 1880’s.
Our delegation spent over two hours learning from a highly trained professional historian whose family have been deeply rooted in the once famous city whose oranges were world famous.
Downtown Yaffa, photo by Zarni, Jan. 2025
Sami Abu Shehadeh (سامي ابو شحادة), born in 1975, is a member of the Joint List representing the Arab nationalist Balad. He began his political activism as a student activist Tel Aviv University where he studied Middle Eastern History in the 1990’s He wrote his PhD thesis on Jeffa as the most important Arab center in Palestine, demographically, economically and culturally.
Sami Abu Shehadeh.
Sami’s grandfather and family were among the first wave of the displaced Arabs during what the native Palestinian Arabs call the Nakba or the Catastrophe, perpetrated by the Zionist settlers led by the Polish settler David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister.
Abu Shehadeh was first elected to the Knesset in October 2019 and was previously Director of the Yaffa Youth Movement and, before that, a member of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa City Council.
In January 2021, he was elected chairman of the Balad Party succeeding Mtanes Shehadeh. He is a historian.
In October 2023, Israeli authorities arrested him over his opposition to the war in Gaza.
In his 110-minutes talk to our delegation, Sami walked us through one hundred years of Zionist project as experienced by the Arab natives of Palestine.
Port of Yaffa or Jeffa, 50-miles away from Gaza, on the same Mediterranean, is one of the ports in Palestine from where thousands of Arab natives fled the Zionist ethnic cleansing in 1948. (photo by Zarni, January 2025)
The large majority of Palestinians – over 750,000 – fled the violent emergence of settler colonialist Israel in 1948 and became refugees overnight whose right of return is never recognized by the Zionists who exercise their (fairy tale) “biblical right of return”.
A small minority of Arabs who remained for various reasons in their native Palestinian cities such as Jeffa which became a part of Israel in May 1948 were instantly rendered “a minority”, displaced from their original homes, and put in the “Arab ghettos”, in the newly established state of Israel.
These Nakba Palestinians, like Sami and his family, are second class Israeli citizens in the apartheid system which Israel – and its genocidal collaborating states of the West – shamelessly spins as “the only democracy” in the Middle East. Israel treats them as a religious minority, without the proper group/minority rights.
Watch the extremely enlightening talk-interview Sami gave below.
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A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni is the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.
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