No More Violence, Just Silence
A decade ago, I read the novel Dancing Arabs by Sayed Kashua in a history class taught by a professor who did not discuss her perspectives on the colonization of Palestine. The MENA certificate included Jewish Studies, Holocaust Studies, and Comparative Literature, and I needed to do well in this history requirement since my Holocaust Studies professor wasn’t impressed when I wrote about Edward Said the semester before. “You have something to say,” she said. “Just don’t use ‘Zionism.’ It is inflammatory.” The docent from Milwaukee’s Jewish Museum who visited the class glossed over the connection between colonization and empire even further: “You know that no one from your community wants to talk. If they wanted to talk, we’d talk.”
I looked down at the essay prompt for the history class assignment. It asked us to answer the question, “Is the ‘plight of the Palestinians’ about land or about something else?” I read the words “something else” again and again, but I could not, for the life of me, understand what it meant. The only thing that was clear was what it excluded: the death of human beings, domination, the carceral state, torture, murder of children, hunger, fear, death, genocide.
I looked up at the professor and around the class. Did the professor want me to think that we could/should/must coexist on “God’s Earth with plenty of resources to go around”? The eyes of my peers seemed to say to me, “Why all the fighting over land?”
I spoke automatically, as if jolted awake by shell shock. It took me away from my body, out of the chair a bit into the air, above myself. I answered, “Well it is about more than land. It is about violence and dehumanization.” I stopped to contemplate just what “it” is. I remembered that you could just as easily replace the word with “conflict,” and the whole matter would sound like a disagreement. Like we could sit down at a table and come to an understanding, just divvy up ownership.
No one said anything in response. No one disagreed. I was taken aback by the heaviness of silence, and I began to hear my ancestors speak to me about the colonial tutelage of submissive agreeability.
“Abu Odeh, you get this portion and place on it a mosque, a community center where your people can congregate and you then get to gather and hold events and weddings. Just do it all up. You even get to place sanasil around it, those little rocks that you stack. Isn’t that generous?”
“Well, what if the people don’t want to move? Our ancestors, they cultivate the land. They are connected to their environments…you know, like that flock of geese, how they have a watering hole.”
“Oh, geese migrate, Abu Odeh.”
“No, I mean like those gazelles. You see the almond-eyes, they are connected to one another.”
“The gazelle are slaughtered, Abu Odeh. Don’t you Muslims eat…? Oh, well you must not want that to happen. You are not making any sense. Your accent is too thick, or it must be that hatta on your head. Let’s just see if the people want to stay. Then we could talk…so many talks.”
“Okay, but our cities don’t match yours. You said that you keep your home in a certain way. We live outside. We walk a lot and eat from the trees.”
“Swing from the trees. No, I’m sure you don’t mean that. We are making a new paradise, Abu Jamal, or is it Abu Maruf, or…well, we need construction material for our watch towers. You could supply us with that from your side, and we’ll pay you. You just need to make sure to share.”
“Your watch towers are on our olive groves. We need the olive oil and the olives to survive.”
“The twenty-first century, Abu…Jerusalem needs to be developed. The olive trees are taking up too much space. We need to tower. And after all, let’s just agree…so many disagreements.”
“I don’t understand. We agreed.”
“Yes, we agreed to agree. Just tell them that you agree, and we will surely afford the accord.” “I don’t understand.”
“Let’s come to an understanding on land. Isn’t that what you want? The old city. You can have it! Let’s break bread. You have flour, don’t you? We’ll give you flour. No more violence, just silence.”
“Write that in your paper,” the professor said, as I fell forward into the space of the class. I wanted to respond and say, “I want to write that this can’t be either about land or ‘something else’ because there isn’t any land left.”
I wanted to ask, “If I write just what I am told, will I be given back my grandparents’ home? Will I be able to walk the trails of my ancestors without fear, or will I be told to go and drink sea water instead?”
No, I just sat. No more violence, just silence.
Discussion Questions
Ibtisam Mohammad Abujad
Consider Indigeneity: In “Reclaiming Palestinian Indigenous Sovereignty,” Jamal Nabulsi argues that “Palestinian indigeneity is the embodiment of the land of Palestine. This is to say both that the Palestinian body inheres in the land of Palestine and that the land of Palestine inheres in the Palestinian body.”[1] Palestinians have a spiritual connection to the land that is reciprocal. The land roots them in their religious practices, sustains and nourishes, and establishes communal connections. What is the difference between an organic connection to the land and extraction, occupation, and accumulation of land as property in settler-colonial logics? How do religious Zionist and secular settler-colonial claims to the land differ from the spiritual connection that Indigenous Palestinians have to the land?
Consider dehumanization: Nick Estes argues that
dehumanization is the first step in genocidal incitement. However, counter-annihilation is also a key feature of settler colonialism. It is the belief and practice that colonial society must annihilate Native people; otherwise, the colonizers, in turn, will be annihilated in a zero-sum calculus. It is a pre-emptive “self-defense” against any real or imagined anti-colonial attack. It makes invasion look like “self-defense.” It is why the chorus of Western media outlets repeat the mantra: “Israel has the right to defend itself.” But the colonized are never granted the authority of self-defense or the right not to be annihilated.[2] (“Settler ‘Self-Defense’ and Native Liberation”)
Estes defines anti-colonial resistance as the “right not to be annihilated.” Considering this definition, what is the difference between self-defense and liberation in relation to the power and freedoms that they provide? How do ideas about the humanity of the colonizer play a role in determining who deserves life and who does not? Marking colonized people as sub-human has historically reinforced a hierarchy of race, access, and mobility. What role does race play in the colonization of Palestine?
Consider anticolonial and decolonial resistance: Poet Ibtisam Barakat finds freedom in the unshackling speech act of writing, arguing for a decolonial resistance to silencing and erasure. What gives her “hope is that I can hold a pen and put letters together into words, words into sentences, sentences into freedom—breaking the prison bars put on Palestinian voices. The heap of broken images and feelings then become alive and vibrant again, like the Mediterranean Sea on the coast of Gaza.”[3] In a similar way, martyred Gazan poet Refaat Alareer calls upon us to tell the tale of his poem, so that it is elevated, giving hope to those children whose fathers are placed in the position of self-sacrifice to protect their families from the violences enacted by the colonizer.[4] In Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani’s poetry about the Intifada, the children of the stones have taught us about our inaction and defeat by struggling collectively to locate their futurity. By scattering “our papers / spilled ink on our clothes,” “they have brought us rain after centuries of thirst / Brought us hope after centuries of defeat.” Martyred poet and author Hiba Abul Nada locates hope in the protection of religion, in the Islamic verses that encircle Gazan families with guidance and protection.[5] What are the similarities and differences between the decolonial resistance of Alareer and Barakat and the anticolonial resistance that Nizar Qabbani and Nick Estes discuss?
[1] Jamal Nabulsi, “Reclaiming Palestinian Indigenous Sovereignty,” Journal of Palestine Studies 52, no. 2, (2023): 26.
[2] Nick Estes, “Settler ‘Self-Defense’ and Native Liberation,” Indigenous Solidarity with Palestine, 7 Oct. 2024.
[3] Ibtisam Barakat, “Of the Freedom Famine in Palestine,” International Dialogue 15, no. 8 (2025): 65.
[4] Refaat Alareer, “If I Must Die, Let It Be a Tale,” Poetry.org, 27 Nov. 2011, https://poets.org/poem/if-i-must-die-let-it-be-tale
[5] Hiba Abu Nada, “I Grant You Refuge,” Trans. Huda Fakhreddine, Protean Magazine, 3 Nov. 2023.