“A Beautiful Vision”— A Conversation With Miko Peled

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2024, pp. 70-71

Personality

By Matthew Vickers

IN MID-JULY, I had the opportunity to interview Miko Peled, a leading anti-Zionist activist and author of The General’s Son. We discussed his work as president of Dar Alhurriya: Palestine House of Freedom (PHF), a new Washington, DC-based initiative founded earlier this year that supports the creation of a single, democratic state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. During our conversation, Peled also shared his thoughts about the one-state solution, the student movement and the future of Palestine. 

Located on Pennsylvania Avenue on Capitol Hill, the PHF has tasked itself with the mission of dismantling Israeli apartheid and establishing a single state in all of Palestine as a resolution to more than 76 years of occupation and dispossession. Toward that goal, it builds ties between organizers, activists and movement builders. 

One of the main objectives of the PHF is to counter the skewed political education that many Americans receive through an aggressive Zionist educational campaign targeting everyone from lawmakers, staffers and the media to the general public. The PHF argues that establishing a free democratic Palestine from the river to the sea with equal rights for all inhabitants is the way to dismantle apartheid and achieve Palestinian liberation—peace with justice. “When it comes to the state of Israel, to Judaism, to the Holocaust, to ancient times, biblical stories, Americans are quite familiar with that,” Peled said. “They get it in school, get it in their churches, other faith institutions, and so on. But Americans learn nothing about Palestine.”

One of the PHF’s first projects has been disseminating the findings of the 2022 Amnesty International report, which found that Israel’s system of domination in the West Bank, Gaza and within Israel’s own borders fulfills the legal criteria of apartheid, defined under international law as a crime against humanity. “We’ve taken the apartheid report, the Amnesty report, and we’ve spliced it in a way that people can just look at it and see the different avenues, the different ways in which apartheid is operating, and then some specifics,” Peled explained. 

Projects such as these show that the PHF embraces a movement-based approach to politics, defined in its mission as “circumventing traditional politics through creative strategy.” Indeed, Peled spoke at length about how he hopes the PHF office can be utilized as a physical space for all sections of society—students, workers, lawyers, faith leaders and everyday citizens—to celebrate, discuss and fight for Palestine. 

The conversation moved to long-term objectives, namely what a just solution for a “free Palestine” would look like. In seeking to dismantle the formal system of apartheid, Palestinians and Arab states have advanced numerous proposals, but since the Second Intifada, the one-state solution has slowly been embraced (mostly by scholars and activists) as an instrument to surmount military occupation, formal discrimination and the permanent exile of Palestinian refugees. In polling, Palestinians have shown that they both view the Palestinian Authority and the two-state solution unfavorably. 

Peled believes the one-state solution would “improve the lives of Israelis and Palestinians alike, it’s a beautiful vision.” He acknowledges that “it’s a tall order, but it must be done. The conversation has to take place…or else we’re never going to see the end of the violence, we’re never going to see the end of the oppression.” Israeli lawmakers and voters have rejected any proposal for the establishment of any Palestinian state, let alone a one-state solution. Indeed, in mid-July the Knesset overwhelmingly passed a resolution that rejected the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. 

While the one-state solution seems far off, Peled sees immediate hope in this year’s campus uprisings in support of Palestinian liberation, termed by some as the “Student Intifada.” Starting in April 2024 with the arrest of a coalition of pro-Palestine students at a self-constructed liberated zone on campus, the movement exploded internationally with hundreds of other encampments, culminating in over 3,000 arrests in the U.S. Peled praised the contributions of students, saying, “[the] liberated zones…created on campuses will be remembered as the highlights of student activism.” Describing his time visiting the encampments, he reflected, “you almost came out speechless, the display of humanity on these campuses was just incredible.” Peled hopes the PHF can serve as an incubator for future student organizing, inviting students fighting for Palestinian liberation to utilize the space for organizing, as well as community celebration of Palestinian life, art and humanity. 

Regarding the relative silence in the U.S. mainstream media on the dire situation in the West Bank, Peled spoke about his own friends who had been thrown in Israeli prisons and his experiences with Bedouin Palestinians in the Naqab (more commonly known as the Negev in English) who have long protested the occupation and Israel’s treatment of the Bedouin. Referring to the West Bank, Peled said, “It is miraculous that they have lasted as long as they have. But at the end of the day, with killing, the arrests, the torture, the destruction of homes, horrific oppression in terms of life, in general, I mean, every aspect of life….There’s only so much that people can do.” 

With factors such as deadly raids by the Israel Defense Forces, settler vigilantism, the imminent fiscal collapse of the Palestinian Authority and announcements of new settlement projects, a reckoning has to be near, Peled believes. However, the question remains: at one point, will the situation become truly unbearable? 

Peled concluded that the genocide would continue as long as apartheid remains, calling on a renewed movement to adopt reconfigured realities. “There’s no reason to expect this is going to end unless the apartheid regime is brought down…It’s up to us. It’s not going to come as a result of a particular candidate or a particular president.” Speaking to me directly as a student organizer, Peled confidently advised, “If we don’t force it to end, it’s not going to end. And so it really comes back to us.”

Matthew Vickers is an undergraduate student at Occidental College, where he is majoring in diplomacy and world affairs. He was an intern at the Washington Report this summer.