Opinion: The Palestinian narrative is finally being heard around the world

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Palestine has been the custodian of absolute human suffering and human struggle for the last 100 years. According to the International Criminal Court, the Zionist state of Israel has been accused of perpetrating acts of evil. In more than 600 days of bombing — with the deaths of more than 57,000 Palestinians, including women and children, with more than 127,000 wounded, according to Gaza Health Ministry; the destruction of homes, neighborhoods, hospitals, schools and infrastructure; the collapse of Palestinians’ communities and livelihood; the now forced starvation of more than 2 million Palestinians, and the denial of medicine and clean water — experts and liberal pundits have been searching for historical and moral frameworks to make sense of the Zionist brutality.

However, the works of anti-colonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon offer a historical perspective and a tool that may explain Israel’s colonization of Palestine and the Palestinians’ ongoing resistance and armed struggle within the context of decolonization.

In his midcentury book “The Wretched of the Earth,” Fanon explained: “In all armed struggles, there exists what we might call the point of no return. Almost always it is marked off by a huge and all-inclusive repression which engulfs all sectors of the colonial people.”

From a Fanonian perspective, the war on Gaza is fundamentally a colonial war, coming decades after European Zionist settlers before even the Nakba of 1948, which marked a turning point when Zionist militias and terrorist groups launched a campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing, destroying more than 500 Palestinian villages and expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes under the pretext of a “land without people for a people without land.”

Fanon explained that most colonized peoples were “overpowered but not tamed.” Resistance is thus not only inevitable but also a means of reclaiming dignity and humanity in the context of anti-colonial struggles. As Ismail Patel wrote in Middle East Eye, “If, as Fanon implies, the violent resistance of colonized peoples is proof of their humanity, then Israel’s Zionist forces are attempting to prevent the Palestinian people from regaining that humanity by waging genocide.”

All my life, I was fed the narrative of Palestine as an occupied land. Now, after almost two years of Israelis’ barbaric war against the people of Gaza with the support of the Americans and the West, the Palestinian narrative is finally breaking through the Western mind and heart, and the Zionist narrative is melting away under its weight and lies. People all over the world — in universities, capitals, parks, streets and workplaces — are calling for a ceasefire and an end to the genocide. The only democracy in the Middle East is revealing its true nature as the only apartheid regime that is based on religion and racism.

Israel has been using starvation as a weapon of war, blocking food, water, medicines and any relief from entering Gaza, where more than 2 million Palestinians live. The U.S.-based Veterans for Peace and other organizations have launched a 40-day “Fast for Gaza.” Having started May 22 and going until June 30, 600 people in the U.S. and abroad are fasting and demanding full humanitarian aid to Gaza under United Nations authority and an end to U.S. weapons shipments to Israel.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of Western colonialism: “Our Machiavellianism has little purchase on this wide-awake world that has run our falsehoods to earth one after the other. The settler has only recourse to one thing: brute force … . [T]he native has only one choice, between servitude and supremacy.”

Now, after nearly two years of war, everyone is exposed. The Palestinian resistance and resolve are liberating not just Palestine but oppressed Arabs and Muslims around the world. They are liberating not just Palestine but the people in the West from their illusions. For instance, they are liberating the Germans from Nazi guilt when they realize that apartheid Israel is committing the same evil act in Gaza. The Holocaust wasn’t just about the Jews and the Nazis, Zygmunt Bauman explained in his book “Modernity and The Holocaust” — it was about all the unwanted in Europe, like Black and gay people, Romanis, Slavs, communists, people who were handicapped, etc. It was about the Western fascist colonial ideology that exterminated millions of Black people in Africa and millions of Native Americans before them.

The Palestinian resistance is liberating Arabs from, as French philosopher Michel Foucault said, “subjugated discourse,” their defeated rationalization and ideology.