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Before I answer, what exactly is the “Palestine Question”?

Before I answer, what exactly is the “Palestine Question”?

There is no room for nuance when framed by images of children with head wounds from snipers, amputees in wheelchairs shot at peaceful rallies, young people with IVs in their wrists burning to death. PHOTO: REUTERS

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There is no room for nuance when framed by images of children with head wounds from snipers, amputees in wheelchairs shot at peaceful rallies, young people with IVs in their wrists burning to death. PHOTO: REUTERS

As personally invested as I am in the Palestinian people’s struggle for autonomy and freedom, there are certainly large gaps in my disconnected funds of knowledge (read: misunderstanding) of the history of the conflict. But as far as I know, when they generally refer to the “Question of Palestine” they do so with inherently problematic assumptions, none of which I think apply to most people reading this.

As far as they have probably come to understand, the question can be paraphrased as: “What do we do with these Palestinians whom we forcibly displaced and continue to subjugate without completely losing our moral standing on the global stage?”

As such, “our” response to the so-called “Palestine Question” is, in fact, neither required nor desired; is a question exclusive to the colonizer class, whose impressive resumes over the centuries have given them significant experience in this field, answering the same question for ethnicities and nationalities as diverse as the non-Western world itself ( a coincidence, I’m sure). In some way or form, they have “successfully” answered the Question, forced to face the dilemma of how to “solve” (pun very much intended) the problem of a group of people on who struggle to oppress him.

As someone who has not had the heady taste of such extreme levels of power imbalance with other human beings)—something most of us practice an amateur version of in our homes (not to minimize these struggles, of course)—I remain lucky I didn’t have to answer such a difficult question.

I can state with some conviction that there is in fact no “Palestine Question” in any form that the West and most of its inherently undemocratic and flaccid globalist appendages would have us believe, in the same way that there is no “Question of Israel”. .” There may be a “Palestine Problem” that should really be “The Palestinian Problem,” but the question itself is bold in its callousness. A good analogy would be how a person in age could blame current or newer generations for the current state.

The answer, in both cases, may simply look something like this: “You created this mess. Not us”.

Israel’s existence as a settler-colonial-genocide-apartheid-ethno-state (Western ideals funding the only democracy in the Middle East, ladies and gentlemen, is an inherent injustice that must be given labels worthy of its continued supremacist behavior : there is no “understanding” or “question” to be answered in order to figure out what is one of the simplest moral dilemmas that most of us will ever have the privilege of facing.

And if there are questions to be answered, it would be the Palestinians asking and answering them. Some examples: “Should we generously allow the Israelis to stay? How should those who stole our land and treated us like “human animals” be punished? And to what extent?”

In a just world, Palestinians would debate the moral gray areas that exist in these questions. But to ask the West’s version of the Palestinian question, or worse, to try to answer it, is to start from a position of defeat. It is a question that must be rejected as illegitimate.

What I hope to achieve, both for myself and for individuals who may not have been exposed to this particular approach to the subject, is to adopt a position that refuses to cower to the settlers old and new, from the British famine in Bengal to American imperialists hypocritically modernizing themselves, overthrowing democratically elected leaders—this year, an internal coup—and providing arms and cover to a genocidal foreign regime while ignoring its own citizens in the midst of a natural disaster.

In this Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, money is Supreme Court-sanctioned free speech, but criticism of Israel is not. Even in our worst forms, as our ugliest selves, when the most toxic and harmful of our traits are revealed, most of us can be confident in the knowledge of our moral adequacy compared to those who have , supported, defended, armed, and excused the mass displacement and annihilation of Palestinians (with methods and logic that proactively serve a blatantly dehumanizing narrative).

Due to the structures and systems that enforce dependence on powerful economies whose “generosity” we rely on, regardless of our respective nationalist visions of self-actualization, these are mere instruments of control that work to help perpetuate the narrative that erases our confidence. , and it allows me to go back and explain, in the first place, what drives me personally to respond to my own version of the Palestine Question, and one that I think we would all benefit from.

It is the narrative erasure and the unfathomably cruel vilification that Palestinians have had to suffer more than anything else, and that experience, however small our individual traumas may be in comparison, makes the Palestinian struggle universal and one that I believe we all would we need to get clarity before we launch into any other point of view or moral stance. Doctor Gabor Maté explains how traumatic experiences do not necessarily lead to trauma, but manifest “when we are not seen and known.”

The Palestinians have not been seen or known for decades. To really see it would be to effortlessly and unapologetically arrive at a position where the Palestinian resistance is beyond the manipulative ways of talk we see carried out in the Western media. Like Norman Finklestein, we refuse to condemn the actions of the oppressed, because there is nothing there to condemn. There is no room for nuance when framed by images of children with head wounds from snipers, amputees in wheelchairs shot at peaceful rallies, young people with IVs in their wrists burning to death.

And so the only question, which I believe I have already answered, is this: Do you see the Palestinian people? And hopefully you too.


SN Rasul is a writer


The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.


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