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We live in a disorienting age, when everyone sensible and moderate hates racism and anti-racism is mostly about dealing with statues and the legacy of the past, while colonial settlers ethnically cleanse Jerusalem right now as their apartheid state is lauded for its Covid policy.
We talk about decolonising syllabi (no bad thing) more than decolonising Palestine. We talk about a postcolonial world while an active process of colonisation dispossesses millions. Politicians kneel to say #BLM, then shake hands with the guardians of an apartheid state
To be Palestinian in the West is to be gaslit constantly - there is no colonialism in the world now, the state whose soldiers rule over you is a democracy, the people bulldozing your home are the real victims, and if you shout too angrily about it you might even be the racist.
Why the gaslighting? Because Israel exemplifies a global truth, that some people are marked for rights and others for dispossession. When victims are blamed them for their own degradation, or it is forgotten or treated as unavoidable, colonial thinking structures our politics.
I find it tragic that some are reading this as "anti-black" - the whole point is that the ongoing, violent dispossession of the Palestinian people and its normalisation highlights the wider racism of our world amid claims about a post-racist society. This is not a competition.
