Dima Khalidi's Op-Ed on Palestinian Youth Rising Up

Director Dima Khalidi published a powerful op-ed in Truthout on the importance of following the lead of Palestinian youth charting the path of the movement.

Together with this desperate sorrow and impotent rage, there’s also a familiar energy, a feeling that this is it. There’s no going back. The truth is bare. Our people can no longer contain their need to resist a settler colonial state that has trafficked in generations of dispossession, oppression and lies sold to justify our dehumanization.
It’s similar to the feelings that welled up throughout the U.S. last summer, as yet another Black person in the U.S. — George Floyd — was lynched by the state in public, on video, for an excruciating 9 minutes, and as Black communities rose up to declare an end to their oppression in a society that is racist to its core, a society that was built with the sweat and blood of their bodies on the stolen land of Indigenous peoples.

These are the moments when an oppressed people can no longer take it. Black and Indigenous people have been resisting their erasure and oppression all along. And so have Palestinians.

By definition, Zionism requires the destruction of Palestine and the erasure of the Palestinians to make a Jewish state. This generation rejects the notion that Israel as a Zionist entity can be reformed, just like the Movement for Black Lives rejects that inherently, structurally racist institutions like the police can be “reformed.”

So hear them now. This generation of Palestinians is showing us the path. They are talking to every one of us because all of us together hold the power. The only way out is to end the occupation, end apartheid, end the siege and destruction of Gaza, end the enduring dispossession of generations of Palestinians, acknowledge the historical injustices and repair them — by implementing the right of return, through reparations, and other restorative means. Because only then can we talk about genuine peace — not peace only for Jewish Israelis to enjoy at the expense of Palestinians under their colonial boot.

Palestinians — under occupation and in the diaspora — are asking all of us to witness and share their realities, to say their names, repeat their demands, end our complicity, and join in their visions for a new, decolonized, liberated future for all. Are you in?