Excerpt:

When we were growing up in occupied Jerusalem, the people seeking to expel us from our neighborhood were Jewish, and their organizations often had “Jewish” in their name. So were the people who stole our home, scattered our furniture in the street, and burned my baby sister’s crib. The judges banging their gavels in favor of our expulsion were also Jewish, and so were the lawmakers whose laws facilitated and systematized our dispossession.

The bureaucrat issuing—and sometimes revoking—our blue ID cards was a Jew, and I especially despised him because a stroke of his pen stood between my father and my father’s great-great-grandfather’s city. As for the soldiers that were frisking us to check for those IDs, some of them were Druze, some Muslim, most of them Jewish, and all of them, according to my grandmother, were “godless bastards.” Those who administered the rifles and handcuffs, those who wrote the meticulous and murderous urban plans were—you guessed it.

This was no secret. We lived under the rule of the self-proclaimed “Jewish State.” Israeli politicians have exhausted this line, and their international peers nodded along. The army declared itself a Jewish army and marched under what it has called a Jewish flag. Jerusalem city councilmen boasted “tak[ing] house after house” because “the bible says that this country belongs to the Jewish people,” and Knesset members sang similar tunes. These legislators weren’t fringe or far-right: the Israeli nation-state law explicitly enshrines “Jewish settlement” as a “national value … to encourage and promote.”

Still, though this was no secret, we were instructed to treat it as such, sometimes by our parents, sometimes by well-meaning solidarity activists. We were instructed to ignore the Star of David on the Israeli flag, and to distinguish Jews from Zionists with surgical precision. It didn’t matter that their boots were on our necks, and that their bullets and batons bruised us. Our statelessness and homelessness were trivial. What mattered was how we spoke about our keepers, not the conditions they kept us under—blockaded, surrounded by colonies and military outposts—or the fact that they kept us at all.

Language was more of a minefield than the border between Syria and the occupied Golan Heights, and we, children at the time, were expected to hop around them, hoping we don’t accidentally step on an explosive trope that would discredit us. Using the “wrong words” had the magical ability to make things disappear; the boots, bullets, batons, and bruises all become invisible if you say anything in jest or in fury. Even more dangerously, believing in “the wrong things” rendered you deserving of this brutality. Citizenship and the right to movement weren’t the sole privileges robbed from us, simple ignorance was a luxury as well.

As Palestinians, we understand from a young age that the semantic violence we practice with our words dwarfs the decades of systemic and material violence enacted against us by the self-proclaimed Jewish State. A drone is one thing, but a trope—a trope is unacceptable. We learn to internalize the muzzle.

So, I heeded these calls—what else is a 10-year-old supposed to do?—and I learned about Hitler and the Holocaust, I learned about the nose stereotype, the poisoned wells, the bankers, the vampires, the snakes and the lizards (I just found out about the octopus), and I learned that, when speaking to diplomats visiting our zoo of a neighborhood, the settlers squatting in our home must be the secondary point of my presentation, second to an effusive denunciation of global antisemitism. And when my 80-something grandmother addressed those foreign visitors, I corrected her mid-sentence whenever she described the Jewish settlers in our house as, well, Jewish.

A decade and some years later and not much has changed. The boot remains there; so are the bullets and batons (and I would be remiss not to mention the innovative genius of the AI-powered robot firearms recently added to the Jewish State’s arsenal).

The government titles its project in the Galilee as “the Judaization of the Galilee,” and its quasi-institutions do the same. As for the council members that promised to take “house after house,” alongside their success in stealing houses, in Sheikh Jarrah, the Old City, Silwan, and elsewhere, they routinely march in our towns with megaphones and flags, chanting “we want Nakba now.” The judges still bang their gavels to ensure the continuation of this Nakba; still rule in favor of Jewish supremacy. And, despite disagreeing with the Supreme Court on various things, parliamentarians legislate in accordance with that supremacist attitude. Some openly state the fact that Jewish life is simply “more important than [our] freedom” (and sometimes they’re even nice enough to apologize to Arab TV presenters as they deliver them these hard truths).

A decade and some years later, the status quo remains as is. And we—how my heart breaks for us—we continue dancing among the land mines. We continue betting on morality and humanity, as they bet on their guns

[snip]

Here is where I stand. There is a Jew who lives–by force—in half of my home in Jerusalem, and he does so by “divine decree.” Many others reside—by force—in Palestinian houses, while their owners linger in refugee camps. It isn’t my fault that they are Jewish. I have zero interest in memorizing or apologizing for centuries-old tropes created by Europeans, or in giving semantics more heft than they warrant, chiefly when millions of us confront real, tangible oppression, living behind cement walls, or under siege, or in exile, and living with woes too expansive to summarize. I’m tired of the impulse to preemptively distance myself from something of which I am not guilty, and particularly tired of the assumption that I’m inherently bigoted. I’m tired of the pearl-clutching pretense that should such animosity exist, its existence would be inexplicable and rootless. Most of all, I’m tired of the false equivalence between semantic violence and systemic violence.

I know this essay is within itself a minefield. That it will be taken out of context and disseminated, but I’ll never be a perfect victim—there’s no escaping being accused of antisemitism. It’s a losing battle and, more importantly, a glaring red herring. And it is time we reevaluate this tactic. There are better things to do: we have coffins to carry. We have kin in Israeli mortuary chambers that we must bury.