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“Most game reserves in Botswana are large tracts of totally undeveloped wilderness. There are no paved roads, fast-food stands, water fountains, campgrounds, restrooms, or any of the other “improvements” found in parks and reserves in more developed countries.”

Quote by Mark Owens

Book:Cry of the Kalahari
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Cry of the Kalahari

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Mark Owens

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“We need to change how we talk about Israel and Palestine. There is no point in talking about peace, as if both sides are equally at fault, when the process we’re really talking about is decolonisation. Historical Palestine has been subject to settler colonialism for over a century, at great cost. Decolonisation is closely associated with other terms that mainstream political discourse in the West avoids when it comes to Israel and Palestine: liberation and reconciliation.”

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“- [ ] The Gaza Strip is a ghetto of children. Of its 1.8 million residents, a majority are under the age of 18. Most have never left the 360 square kilometers where they were born, raised and confined. There is no discernible future for them beyond the Israeli military occupation that has endured nearly 50 years and a siege that was officially proclaimed in 2007. The formative years of these young people have been marked by three major military assaults. These are their rites of passage. The Palestinians of Gaza have no reason or experience to believe that a fourth war will not arrive soon. The violence in Gaza has become a ritual that has confounded many outsiders, leading to the rise of simplistic explanations for the bloodshed as the product of religious extremism, endemic anti-Semitism and intractable conflict. But a brief look at the history leading up to the 51 Day War of 2014 presents a different reality. Eighty percent of Gaza's residents are refugees from the State of Israel. Their families were among the 750,000 indigenous Palestinians who fled or were forcibly expelled in the period from November 1947 to late 1948 known to them as the Nakba, or the catastrophe. Since Israel was founded, every one of its governments has identified these refugees as a demographic threat whose repatriation would threaten Israel’s Jewish majority and the Zionist project itself. Palestinians in Gaza are ultimately confined and excluded from Israel for one simple reason: They are not Jews. There is simply no place for them in an Israel that defines itself as an exclusive Jewish state, and that will not grant equal rights to these people. That is why Gaza has become a warehouse for a surplus population that the Israeli-American scholar Martin Kramer described as “superfluous young men.” And that is why Gaza resists.”

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“I still believe in the metaphor of Jews as a family. But it has been corrupted. Jewish leaders have turned our commitment to one another into a moral sedative. They have traded on our solidarity to justify starvation and slaughter. They have told us that the way we show we care about the Israelis taken hostage by Hamas is to support a war that kills and starves those very hostages, and that the way to honor the memory of the Israelis Hamas murdered is to support a war that will create tens of thousands more scarred, desperate young Palestinians eager to avenge their loved ones by taking Israeli lives. We need a new story — based on equality rather than supremacy — because the current one doesn’t endanger only Palestinians. It endangers us.”

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