| This post is part of a reading series on Zionism vs. Democracy, by Philippe Roussel. To quickly access all chapters, open the book title tab on the Authors & Books page. |
“If I must die, you must live to tell my story to sell my things to buy a piece of cloth and some strings, (make it white with a long tail) so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a blaze — and bid no one farewell not even to his flesh not even to himself — sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above, and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love. If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a story.”
These are the premonitory words of Palestinian poet, activist, and academic Refaat Alareer, posted on his X timeline on November 1st, 2023. They became famous worldwide when the news of his death in an Israeli air strike on December 6th, 2023, was made public by his friends. This was not collateral damage. The Euro-Med Monitor released a statement saying that Alareer was deliberately targeted, “surgically bombed out of the entire building”, after weeks of “death threats that Refaat received online and by phone from Israeli accounts.”1 As he was residing at his sister’s place, he was killed along with his brother, sister, and four of his nephews.
By the end of August 2025—after 20 months of “war”—at least 193 academics and professors had been killed, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office.2 As writer Atef Abu Saif explains in an early report for the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, “The war on culture has always been at the heart of the aggressors’ war on our people, as the real war is a war on the narrative to steal the land and its rich treasures of knowledge, history, and civilization, along with the stories it holds.”3
A colonial power cannot survive without owning the narrative about land and people. By the same token, ethnic cleansing would be impossible if colonial settlers did not convince themselves that a native culture is a subculture that barely exists. The display of its vibrancy, genius, and historical roots consequently undermines these settlers’ righteousness. There lies the real “existential threat” that the Israeli government cries about on any occasion to protect its Zionism, thus confirming the historical pattern of colonialism: those who claim moral and intellectual superiority are the ones who logically drift into barbarity.
Published only three months after the beginning of the bombings on Gaza, Atef Abu Saif’s report could already list all the theaters, libraries, universities, social and cultural centers, historical monuments, schools, churches, and mosques that had been targeted. In response to international bewilderment, the lame excuse given by Israeli authorities has always been that Hamas used each of these sites. This is how Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, could feel comfortable saying during an interview, ″One of the things we realised is that every school, every mosque, every second house, has access to the tunnels.”4
One of the things that, by contrast, everybody else should realize is that “every” school, mosque, etc., is more than an obscene generalization; it is a claim of irresponsibility in the wanton killing of as many people as possible. Time and again, the IDF has effectively proved that people sheltering in these places made a determining factor in the timing of their destruction. In an astonishing fit of cynicism, Tzipi Hotovely defiantly replied to her interviewer’s uneasiness: “Do you have another solution?” Her feeling of entitlement is apparently so strong that it obfuscates her judgment, preventing the ambassador from seeing that blatantly ignoring the Geneva Convention is the clearest testament to an utter disdain for moral values.
Yet, beyond the self-granted license to perpetuate mass murders, there is also an acute perception of the importance of the Palestinian culture in the resilience of its people. This is why the Israeli propaganda has always denied that Palestinians exist as such, claiming that they have no historical presence on the land other than as indistinct “Arabs.” This is also why, paradoxically, Israel has its soldiers systematically burn books, bulldoze cemeteries, and erase all traces of the Palestinian cultural heritage in the Gaza Strip. More than Hamas fighters, the Palestinian soul is, again, the real enemy in the protracted Zionist fight against Palestinians and the very idea of Palestine. Zionists are not wrong; expressed through the brilliance of its artists, writers, and scientists, Palestinian culture is wholeheartedly transmitted from one generation to the next as the primary form of resistance against oppression. It threatens the colonial domination over undifferentiated “savages” and other “human animals” far more than any armed struggle. God forbid, therefore, that the world eventually recognizes what it culturally and humanly owes to Palestinians!
Taking a step back, it is interesting to note that, far from the morbid logic of nationalism and its colonial avatar, a culture is not just a matter of identity but also of mutual enrichment. Expressed in beauty, its singularity reaches universality for all human beings. Like anyone else, Palestinians are thus part of humanity’s cultural treasure. Their contribution as a genuine society, rooted in a specific culture and with a clear political project of self-determination, only awaits full recognition by the powers that be. This has been impossible so far because the said powers have complied with Israel’s colonial requirement to forbid giving space to any other national entity than its own, denying, as a matter of life and death, that Palestinians (“Arabs”) are the lively and unified society they have been for centuries.
The most important, however, is not how far back, but how alive this society is today; that is to say, how easily, freely, and creatively Palestinians refer to their cultural roots. There lies the difference between patriotism and nationalism. The latter only has postcards of a fixated past that never was, forcibly using them as markers of a fantasized and discriminative “identity.” Israeli settlers fake their patriotism in that way, brandishing remnants of a distant past as a divine and historic right to the land,5 and doing so all the more frantically that their lifeless nationalist framework inherently promotes exclusion.
This should come as no surprise. Based on wilful ignorance and a made-up narrative that serves as its gospel, the shallow sense of identity offered by nationalism does not stem from a feeling of deep enrichment, but rather from the hatred of perceived “others.” This perverse attitude is a moral and intellectual facility promoted by demagogues in any country and at any time. In Israel, it drives settlers to feel entitled to ignore the Palestinian human and cultural reality in the name of an undisputable, unquestionable, and absolute right to the land. The point is not to make sense. To them and all those falling in the nationalist rut that has led to so many wars, the point is precisely to be empty-headed, living in a realm that is beyond human comprehension and beyond the acknowledgment of the human, cultural, and political building of a country over many generations.
Seen in its genuine historical perspective, your country is a gift to the world. As in all healthy human relationships, its unique genius is an object of gratitude not only for you as its citizen, but for all citizens from other countries, whom it stimulates and inspires in their own national genius. In that sense, patriotism is alive and open; it expresses the confidence that one’s soul is not something that some “other” can steal or erode, but something one is in charge of. Nationalism, on the other hand, is dead. Hailing being closed upon oneself as a virtue, its power grabs can only be fleeting moments in history—albeit highly destructive ones.
Sadly, the vast majority of Israelis have defined themselves ever more staunchly by opposition to Palestinians. Instead of admitting that all humans have equal rights and dignity, and that no human is specifically born to kill Jews, they consider speaking of a territorially viable Palestinian state as denying Israel the right to exist—a candid confession to the fact that Zionism is a racist, bellicose, and bigoted fantasy.
All settler colonial powers in history have fed on a nationalistic and narrow view of the world, and all, including Israel, have understood that the fight against natives should be primarily psychological. Ethnic cleansing does not stop at killing campaigns and forcing people out. As in any abusive relationship, the aim is to break the spirit of the other party. Constant physical and verbal harassment, as well as regular encroachments on Palestinian properties, implicitly convey a clear message: You don’t matter. Complementarily, to help shape Israelis’ minds into total oblivion regarding Palestinians, planting trees on the vestiges of villages emptied after the 1948 Nakba and renaming places was a necessity. Most Israelis will only see Palestinians in real life at the point of a gun, and occasionally on TV to lament about terrorist attacks. Brainwashed for generations, very few will admit that their country has anything to do with these desperate acts of violence.
Another aspect of the psychological conditioning of colonialism is, of course, to sever the native population from its memory. When you seek to dispose of a population as you see fit, you certainly do not want them to rise as a cultural beacon among nations. The best way to ensure that this will not happen is to proceed from the inside out, as Atef Abu Saif explains in his report. Erasing monuments and all traces of a cultural presence in Gaza, ransacking a medieval library in Jerusalem,6 or destroying olive orchards—symbols of ancestry to Palestinians—in the West Bank are all part of a totalitarian scheme that George Orwell would have found familiar.
Controlling the narrative to rewrite history at will is the ultimate goal of despotic powers; therefore, their worst enemy is education. As Refaat Ibrahim, a Palestinian writer from Gaza, reminds us, “Despite the occupation and blockade, we had one of the highest literacy rates in the world, reaching 97 percent. The enrolment rate in secondary education was 90 percent, and the enrolment in higher education was 45 percent.”7 This level of education runs contrary to the Israeli narrative of Gazans as retarded individuals whose only means of expression is violence. Most importantly, it was a direct threat to Israel as the sole competent voice about its protracted conflict against the Palestinians. Critical thinking has always been the main threat to Zionists, not Hamas. A threat that needs to be shut off as completely and definitely as possible, whereas Hamas is a useful bogeyman. Palestinians, as a result, can be tolerated on their own land as long as they turn into ghosts parked in scattered reserves with almost no communication between them. Hopefully, after enough destruction and murders, having, moreover, no spiritual reason to stay, most will “voluntarily” depart.
Cultural genocide is thus essential to colonization. It works as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once natives are cut off from their unique cultural genius, it is “proof” for their colonial ruler that they convey nothing of value to the world, and that they have, therefore, no political cause to defend. The well-known phrase “A land with no people for a people with no land” explains itself in that perspective. The first Zionist settlers at the beginning of the twentieth century could not ignore that they were setting foot on a territory already inhabited by a population of roughly 600,000 people.8 The meaning of the slogan, which would become a postulate for many Israeli minds, does not refer to a previous void of people on the land, but to the idea that they should not be considered a people. The reason behind this statement is clear: the right to political recognition, including through a national state, is far more legitimate for a human presence rooted in history up to the present than for the abstract and forced solution of Zionism.
That said, however arguable the idea of a specific nation-state for the protection of Jews might be, denying that Palestinians were a people in their own right was not a necessity. Some form of democratic confederalism could have been worked upon. Unfortunately, as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) noted in a famous New York Times article,9 the influential World Zionist Organization did not even mention the Palestinian presence in its Atlantic City Resolution of 1944. Hannah Arendt was a Zionist in the sense that she supported the idea of a national state for the protection of Jews, definitely not that of a Jewish state, as the World Zionist Organization had pronounced itself for.
Predictably, the practical implementation of the latter turned Zionism into a sick human experiment against Jews themselves, promoting a sense of victimhood as civic virtue, conflating their Jewish identity with being Zionist, and making Israelis the implacable oppressors of people who, like many others after WWII, were longing to break free from England’s colonial rule. In that light, it is telling that Israel and its “allies” feel compelled to regularly throw in the face of the world that the country has a “right to exist.” Isn’t it, more appropriately, that it does not have a right to exist as an ethno-state that has nothing to do with Judaism and labels itself Jewish as an excuse to perpetuate its colonial perversion?
Whether passively or actively, Western powers have steadily aided and abetted Israel’s brutal and vicious domination of Palestinians. Yet, if the latter have suffered unspeakable moral and physical harm due to their sole presence on the land where King Solomon once reigned, those in hell are the ones indifferent to their suffering. The moral depravity of this indifference shows when nothing is done to stop what has all the characteristics of a genocide, and to effectively force peace on a power whose colonial hubris has never known legal bounds. It shows as well when Israelis, who, of all people, should remember the historical lineage of the word, label Palestinians “vermin” and endorse their government acting accordingly.
All cultures are beacons of light. Denying that Palestinians are such a gift to the world for the sake of demeaning them all as “terrorists” is more than short-sighted; it is walking like a zombie in one’s life. Doing as if they weren’t entirely our sisters and brothers in humanity is a place where no one with the slightest sense of self-worth and dignity would settle. As Refaat Alareer taught us, this is a choice between hell and heaven.
As one of the brightest and most inspiring Palestinian intellectuals, according to his peers and students, Refaat Alareer’s activism was in his talent with words. Not just their sharpness, but also the creativity, kindness, and sensibility they conveyed. Zionists, on the other hand, predicating their existence on the negation of common brotherhood and universality of the human genius, rightly sensed the genuine threat of being faced with powerful words of love for life. In the onslaught on Gaza, Refaat Alareer, a poet, was to go first.