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September 24 - October 11, 2025
Having been born and raised in Palestine, I did not need to be particularly astute to understand the law as often the most lethal weapon in the oppressor’s arsenal.
I often use “he” in reference to “the Palestinian” because I want to force the reader to come face to face with the Palestinian man. I want the reader to contend with that complex and contradictory demographic, and not just those assumed to be the gentle or generous among us—not only the fathers, but the fighters as well.
ZIONISM* IS THE LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE, through both direct, state-sanctioned violence and indirect, consequential violence, which trickles down through suffocating bureaucracies, inescapable psychological onslaughts, and impetuous intercommunal conflicts. Yet this man-made quietus is treated like any other leading cause of death—heart disease in the US, dementia in England—and is scarcely cause for concern, let alone condemnation.
Our blood is the price of the colony’s sense of “security.”
The globe grieves Israeli loss without qualifiers and morphs that grief into fuel for genocide.
the standard, across industries, is to dehumanize the Palestinian.
The former director general of the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs* called it “waging a holistic campaign against the other side. Take him out of his comfort zone. Make him be on the defensive.”13 Argumentum ad hominem. “You discredit the messenger as a way of discrediting the message” has long been an Israeli mantra.14 For our plight cannot be “discredited,” but our characters can be. They turn us into criminals of thought, guilty of our rage and grudges, of our natural responses to brutalization. They test our answers against the viewer’s inherent bias. The bombs raining down on the
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Citizenship has historically been a hollow formality for those condemned to the category of the dehumanized.
In the case of the latter, those who pledge allegiance to this status quo likely do so because they earnestly believe in the binaries it upholds (good vs. evil, civilized vs. uncivilized, terrorist vs. soldier, etc.) but feel there are certain exceptions to those dichromatic categories. For example, some might respect the violence of men and women in military fatigues as a prosaic, indispensable fact of life, while simultaneously clutching their pearls at violent acts orchestrated by “lone wolves” in flip-flops and tracksuits.*
Zionism—the political ideology, born in nineteenth-century Central and Eastern Europe, that argued that the creation of a Jewish state would be the only viable solution to the persecution of Jews—is an ideology of dispossession, an expansionist and racist settler-colonial enterprise. The Nakba, enduring and ongoing, remains the clearest crystallization of the Zionist ideology.
You need to be polite in your suffering, should you be granted the right to a roof over your head. Crass statements are corrosive to your plight, even when such statements are about those who first steal your home and then loot your tent. The violence inflicted upon our lands and our bodies, we are told, is secondary to the blemishes tarnishing our image, the blemishes that stand between us and justice, it seems. The smears we live to scrub clean.
We sanctify our victims in our testimonials and eulogies, adorning them with commiserating anecdotes. We hamper them with innocence. And we do this not only in the Palestinian context but also with regard to Black American victims of police brutality: “They were artists” or “They were mentally ill” or “They were unarmed.”3 (It is as if condemning the state for sanctioning the death of a Black person is permissible only if the slain person is a sterile model of American citizenry.) One could say the same about sexual assault victims: we must notify the listener that the victim was sober and
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We are not human, automatically, by virtue of being human—we are to be humanized by virtue of our proximity to innocence: whiteness, civility, wealth, compromise, collaboration, nonalignment, nonviolence, helplessness, futurelessness.
Humanization diverts critical scrutiny away from the colonizer and onto the colonized, obscuring the inherent injustice of colonialism, thus shielding the colonial project. In misplacing their focus, advocates (or lawyers or journalists, etc.) insinuate that the oppressed must demonstrate their worthiness of liberty and dignity, first and foremost. Otherwise occupation, subjugation, police brutality, dispossession, surveillance, and “extrajudicial executions,” would be excusable or even necessary.
“Respectability,” like “congruence” and “moral authority,” comes at a steep price, which, for most, is unobtainable.
When it comes to Palestine, the sacred laws of journalism are bendable. Optional even. Passive voice is king. Omitting facts is standard. Fabrication is permissible.
Through her resounding exclusion of Hamas from the category of those entitled “to live with rights and dignity,” Amanpour effectively suggests that the supposedly universal Declaration of Human Rights can be conditioned upon one’s political affiliations. Similar suggestions would spark outrage if uttered in relation to any other contemporary political party or any group.
For when she insisted that she is “not talking about Hamas,” she pledged allegiance to the belief that underpins both Israeli and American societies, across the political spectrum: unless Palestinians perform a preapproved sociopolitical disposition, one remains without an obligation to even pretend they are human.
We are meek and we shall inherit no earth.
The men offer consolation instead of receiving it, and the voyeurs at these televised funerals offer their conditional condolences in return. Once again, it is only through defanging that the Palestinian can communicate and narrativize.
Our enemies employ what Mourid Barghouti calls “a simple linguistic trick” to turn the world on its head: they fail to mention what came first and start their story from “secondly.”8 “Start your story with ‘secondly,’” Barghouti writes, “and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals, and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim. It is enough to start with ‘secondly’ for the anger of the black man against the white to be barbarous” as opposed to justified or even admirable.
They see the thieves banging their gavels and the liars boasting of their journalism degrees. They know their pockets are picked to pay for the butcher’s knives. And they have seen those knives at work, stabbing their siblings, slicing their flesh. There are people who have contempt for the world that greets a nurse with her husband’s corpse on a stretcher, the world that forces a boy to carry his brother’s limbs in a bag. I am one of those people. And I am grateful for my disdain, for it is dignifying; it reminds me that I am human.
It did not matter that their boots were on our necks, and that their bullets and batons bruised us. Our statelessness and homelessness were trivial; what mattered was how we spoke about our keepers, not the conditions they kept us under—burglarized, blockaded, surrounded by colonies and military outposts—or the fact that they kept us at all.
The settlers squatting in our home had to be the secondary point of my presentation, second to an effusive denunciation of global antisemitism.
A Palestinian’s perceived resentment doesn’t have the backing of a Knesset to codify it into law. Tropes aren’t drones, nor can one convert conspiracy theories into nuclear weapons. We are past the early 1900s. Things are different, power has shifted. Words are not murder.
Most of all, I am tired of the false equivalence between semantic “violence” and systemic violence: only one party in this “conflict” is actively engaged in the intentional and systematic attempted eradication of an entire population.
Nothing in my character or on my bookshelf, even the horrid, should determine whether I live or die. Nothing in my ideology, even if it is inflammatory; nothing in my disposition, even if it is uncouth.
Colonial logic gaslights us to believe that it is our shortcomings, not colonialism itself, that stand between us and liberation.
PROPAGANDA IS A CHILDREN’S BOOK. Successful propagandists strive to create talking points that are simultaneously simplistic and incoherent. The overt simplicity invites an easy, enthusiastic repetition, which becomes a melody of sorts, transforming even the dim into leading singers in the choir. The incoherence invites ceaseless argumentation; the very point is to make you want to bang your head against the wall.
The very quality of propaganda—illogic—is precisely its strongest suit, because it is a distraction. Distraction from what? The focal point: colonialism, siege, military occupation.
Often, the impulse to debunk myths, the reflex to refute fabrications—whatever you want to call it—leads us to forget that propaganda is, by design, a diversion. “Even if” does not forget this fact; “even if” is a sobering refrain.
Colonialism is the robber and the policeman at once, committing the crime and legalizing it.
Why do we indulge them? It is as though we have internalized their lines (There are no innocents in Gaza. Palestinians are terrorists.) and we are working to disprove it not only to our enemies and allies but even to ourselves.
But the world needs to contend with the fact that childhood, in the context of the oppressed, is deformed beyond recognition, not because of cultural regression as the colonists love to argue, or because “we teach our children to hate,” but because of the ceaseless colonial degradation of children and their families in our world.
The premise that Jews, Israelis, and Westerners are less biased or more truthful is entirely unfounded, for it presumes they have no skin in the game. And the itch to continually cite their institutions is, in debate terms, argumentum ad verrecundiam.
Here, holding a mirror to one’s audience proves to be a difficult choice, whereas coddling them is the more popular one. Yet the strategy of favoring non-Palestinian voices does little to bypass the reader’s anti-Palestinian bias. Instead, it reifies that bias and the power structures that manufacture it, cementing the impression that Palestinian voices are suspicious or subpar.
misapprehending identity politics inevitably creates a slippery slope toward elite capture.47 Under the guise of progress, superficial inclusion allows entrenched powers to maintain control in a perpetual and profitable status quo.
Protest movements are generally revered in the past tense, once their radical demands become a boring norm. In real time, though, they are led by killjoys and looters who don’t understand that there’s a time and a place.
Colonial logic says that if I were to have that mere desire within my heart; if I am fantasizing about cartoonish revenges, that alone negates my claim to justice. Thus, any testimony of the injustices I have witnessed and endured is unreliable. The brutality of colonialism, the very brutality that is institutionalized and legalized, can then be excused or even warranted,
We placate this fallacious logic instead of saying: Even if—even if!—my dreams were your worst nightmares, who are you to rob me of my sleep?
I do not care if I am a “human animal” in Israeli folk tales, or if they dream about drowning me in the Mediterranean. My concern is that they have the power to actualize their fantasies, fables, and theology. They have the tools to transform them into a macabre reality, much like they have done in the besieged Gaza Strip. I only care about their dreams because they have taken them to the Knesset.*
For we exist in opposing universes: In ours, they have razed our homes and looted our towns, transformed us into populations of refugees and amputees. In theirs, we have acted senselessly, stabbing settlers and kidnapping soldiers. We have rained rockets on their prosperous, fenced-off colonies. The question of our motives is obsolete. Why their prosperous colonies are surrounded by poverty is a question I doubt they ever ask themselves or one another. The settler is self-deluded. The settler’s gaze ignores the ruins atop which the settler town is built. Always in the settler’s peripheral
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We forget that belief has little to do with truth. People tend to believe the powerful, the compelling, not the sincere.
of contrarian tendencies or for the entertainment value. I am flippant because I realize that the majority of the Palestinian People do not possess the capacity or desire to coddle ethnocentric values and racist attitudes. Where, in the warzone, would I find the space to alter our vocabulary?
“If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he has the power to lynch me, that’s my problem,” and “Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you’re anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.” Kwame Ture, in response to a student’s question after a talk at Federal City College (now the University of the District of Columbia), in October 1968.
