I shared yesterday how I’m seeing more people talking about Palestine for the first time, and I thought about posting those thoughts in a way that might facilitate further sharing. But as I was thinking about doing that, I started reflecting on how I started talking about Palestine myself. About the people I met along the way, the voices I’ve centered, and the faces I’ve left outside the frame. I’m still going to share what I intended, but I want you to read the rest of this with that interior eye wide open: how did you come to think what you think today?
There are a lot of people talking about Palestine for the first time. The more you engage, the more you learn the depth of gaslighting indoctrinating pro-zionists. There’s stuff out there that glosses over history to make it seem like Arabs always had issues “with their Jewish neighbors” like settling didn’t happen. There’s nonsense out there about “offering them a state” that makes it seem like a Palestinian enclave is somehow what people mean by Free Palestine. Conversely, “from the river to the sea” is heard as expulsion or worse, not the actual post-zionist liberation people mean.
These questions are actually infuriating because their subtext is that Arabs are murderous & obtuse. Any genuine engagement with the cause would take pause & question why in the world anyone clings to it without good reasons. But no matter. Combat the production of ignorance.
Remind them that Arabs are neither stupid nor monolithic. In college, I had Lebanese professors argue that the Palestinian cause was being abused by Arab despots to distract their people from local affairs. There are Arabs who would much prefer the whole thing goes away through a cheap peace treaty of some kind. There are people—family members, in fact—that you would call Arabs who have cheered when Gaza was bombed before and might even be cheering now—I don’t know, I’m not there—because of their anti-Muslim prejudices and wartime traumas.
And still, a just cause cannot and will not die that easily. The dream of Palestine is still alive. Why?