When Activism Cannot Hear Palestinians |
The Activism That Cannot Hear Palestinians
The contemporary Western activist often does not hear Palestinians first. He hears the echo of his own redemptive script. “Free Palestine” then functions not as a political demand, but as a ritual formula through which the liberator confirms the centrality of his own conscience.
This is not the old colonialism of contempt. It is its subtler, sentimental successor: the colonialism of projection. The Palestinian is not necessarily demonized. He is aestheticized. He becomes a morally convenient canvas on which the Western subject projects the need for clarity, innocence, moral consumption, and absolution. Suffering is turned into raw material. The more photogenic, narratively clean, and easily circulated it becomes, the better it serves as political evidence.
In this mechanism, the Palestinian does not appear as a political subject, but as a figure in the Western drama of conscience. Flotillas, encampments, performative mourning, viral photographs, and carefully selected slogans often do not alter the field of forces. They rather sustain the illusion that “we” stand on the right side of history. It is a history in which the West arrives once again to save the Other, provided that the Other remains sufficiently legible, sufficiently wounded, sufficiently silent, and sufficiently obedient to the assigned script.
This is not solidarity. It is moral sovereignty exercised through someone else’s suffering. Freedom that must first pass through Western aesthetic-political filters ceases to be freedom in the strict sense. It becomes another chapter in the long tradition of “liberating” others, this time in anti-colonial costume, with the language of care and the proper iconography of outrage.
Here appears the threshold that activism usually refuses to touch. The question is not whether Palestinians suffer. They do suffer, and they suffer in reality. Nor is the question whether Palestinian freedom is a legitimate demand. It is. The question is different: what must be excluded from visibility so that Palestine may appear in Western activism as the pure figure of freedom?
This question immediately complicates the image. What happens to the Palestinian who says that he fears Israel, but........