Translation of Rawan Osman's post -
"Free Palestine."
I grew up with those words.
In LEBANON, most around me wanted a free Palestine for an entirely practical reason - to send the Palestinian refugees back. The civil war that tore my country apart was ignited, to no small degree, by the Palestinian armed factions that turned the country into their launch pad. "Free Palestine" meant: free us from them.
In Damascus, where my father's family lived, the sentiment was different but equally self-serving. Palestine should be given back to the Arabs, its rightful owners. No one asked follow-up questions. Nor was anyone expected to.
Palestine was central to Islam, most Arabs are Muslims, therefore support for the Palestinian cause was reflexive. A no-brainer in the most literal sense - no brain involved whatsoever.
No one stopped to point out that Palestine is not an Arabic word. No one found it strange that Jerusalem, allegedly Islam's third holiest city, is not mentioned a single time in the Quran. Not once. Palestine neither. The entire theological and political architecture behind this cause rests on a foundation their own holy scripture doesn't bother to acknowledge.
What was really going on was indoctrination. A systematic, generational rejection of Jewish sovereignty - and honestly, of any minority sovereignty. Jews, Christians, Druze, Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis - the Arab world has been strikingly consistent in its treatment of people who are different. We just don't talk about that.
Instead we talk about Palestine in the West.
In the West, a civilisation that has elevated human rights to its highest moral currency, the Palestinian cause has become the one exception to every rule. In the queue of human suffering, the Palestinians cut to the front every single time. Homosexuals executed in Gaza and hanged from cranes in IRAN? Palestine first. Women imprisoned in SAUDI ARABIA for having fought for the right to drive - a right they were denied until 2018 - girls sold into marriage in AFGHANISTAN, women erased from public life under the Taliban? After Palestine. Political dissidents pulverised in Syrian and Egyptian prisons, journalists disappeared in LIBYA, children starving in YEMEN while their rulers wage proxy war, entire populations hollowed by hunger in SUDAN? All of it waits. Christians ethnically cleansed from IRAQ and SYRIA, the Arab world methodically emptied of every single Jewish community it once held - a demographic extermination carried out over a century with surgical patience and almost total Western silence?
Palestine is still first.
So let's end where we began. Free Palestine. Which Palestine, precisely? The Roman invention? The British administrative boundary? The British Mandate covered the entire territory that is today ISRAEL, the West Bank, Gaza and JORDAN. In 1921, 78 percent of that mandate was handed to the Hashemite family - a dynasty imported from Hijaz in today's SAUDI ARABIA - and became the kingdom of JORDAN, as it still is today. A foreign royal family, on the majority of historical Palestine, ruling it as a monarchy. No one protests that. No flags, no chants, no camps. The remaining 22 percent was allocated to the Jews, became ISRAEL, and is the only part any pro-Palestinian activist has ever had a problem with.
So when you say Free Palestine, you mean the 22 percent. You mean the Jews.
And free it from whom? From a people with a three thousand year documented presence in that land, to restore the glory of a name invented by Roman colonisers, a name borrowed from the Torah, a name with no roots in the Arabic language, no mention in the Quran, no history as a sovereign state?
It is not liberation you are calling for. It is colonialism - the Roman kind, repackaged for social media.
Free Palestine is not a cause. It is a colonial term, invented by invasion forces, recycled by the indoctrinated. The least you can do is have the intelligence to understand it and the decency to reflect on your position.
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❤️🔥🪽
