Between a revolution and a whisper

A Palestinian flag hangs on a building in Amsterdam, Holland, June 20, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

In Amsterdam this summer, I joined a Palestine solidarity march almost by accident. I had been walking through the city center when I turned a corner and found the street alive with chants, flags, and shoulders wrapped in keffiyehs. Someone asked where I was from. When I said “Palestine,” louder than I intended, the crowd answered back: “Free Palestine!” For a brief moment, I realized my body had forgotten what it feels like not to whisper.

Freedom of expression is not just a principle. It’s something you feel in your pulse, your posture, the way your chest expands when you realize you don’t have to measure every word. It’s physical, and once you’ve known it, the absence is unbearable.

At home, as a Palestinian in Jerusalem and Haifa, I trained myself to be silent. Expressing Palestinian identity can carry material costs: a police summons, disciplinary action at work or university, interrogation over a Facebook post, open-ended detention without charge, or worse. That pressure works its way into the body.

When an Israeli asks who I am or where I come from, I pause, do a quick scan of who is listening, and lower my voice, my chest tightening. “I’m Palestinian … as in Arab,” I say, as if that reflexive translation could soften the word in their ears. I try to say it confidently in Hebrew, with my Palestinian accent, but that only draws more scrutiny.

I cried in Amsterdam at the sight of Palestinian expression without fear: flags on windows, stickers on trams, solidarity slogans scrawled across benches. And I am not alone. In London last month, at the Together for Palestine Festival, friends — especially Palestinians — told me they had never felt such collective strength in exile. “For the first time,” one said, “I felt like we are not alone.”

I feel that too in my travels now, an emotional shift from defensiveness to unguarded visibility. Abroad, I do not have to defend my identity or explain the system of oppression we have lived under our whole lives.

I must emphasize that my standards are very low: the occupation taught me that survival itself feels like dignity. And of course, Europe is no refuge from state repression. After October 7, France tried to ban pro-Palestinian demonstrations; Germany, as the second largest supplier of weapons to Israel, has violently suppressed public displays of Palestine solidarity, all while claiming to champion international law.

But unlike in Israel, the sheer scale of popular support in Europe has broken through the fear barrier.

Activists in Amsterdam carry banners denouncing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, October 5, 2025 (Mohammed Zaanoun).

This year’s cascade of recognition made that atmosphere visible in diplomacy, too. Spain, Ireland, and Norway formally recognized the State of Palestine in May 2024, followed days later by Slovenia in early June. By September 2025, the tally of recognitions had climbed past 150 UN member states, as additional European governments announced or moved toward recognition. For many of us, such state-level recognition is huge and emotional — it recalls the mixture of joy and relief that comes from seeing Palestinian identity expressed unabashedly in the open.

And yet, it also feels too late. The cruel irony is that the sudden recognition of Palestinian identity abroad has come only through Israel’s live-broadcast assault on Gaza, a genocide that has taken more than 67,000 lives, which is almost certainly a massive undercount.

I think of Palestinians in Gaza, those who have survived this genocide and the five assaults before it — people who can distinguish, by sound alone, the whir of a drone from the whistle of an incoming strike. At protests, I learned a distant echo of that language: tear gas canisters, rubber bullets, stun grenades, live fire. Even now, when something explodes, my body flinches. On New Year’s Eve in the United States, the fireworks made me cry. My body remembered before my mind did, pulling me back to Haifa, to the months when everyone braced for missiles from Lebanon or Iran.

To the governments complicit in Israeli apartheid and genocide, thank you for recognizing our basic right to self-determination. Will you follow through and condition foreign policy, trade, and arms sales on upholding the very rights you now acknowledge? Or will this remain merely a performance of empathy?

The architecture of control

For years, the Israeli government has sought to restrict any open displays of Palestinian identity, a form of cultural repression that dramatically escalated after October 7. Since January 2023, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has instructed police to strip Palestinian flags from public spaces. The flag is not formally illegal, but in practice it is treated as contraband. Meanwhile, the Israeli flag is everywhere: flown in state ceremonies, draped over public buildings, used to punish citizens for the “crime” of expressing empathy for Gaza.

But the repression did not begin with Ben Gvir — indeed, it has long been baked into Israeli law. The 2011 “Nakba Law” empowered the state to dock budgets from schools, theaters, or municipalities that commemorate Palestinian dispossession in 1948. The 2016 Counter-Terrorism Law broadened the definition of “incitement” to include poems, songs, Facebook posts, or even re-sharing content that authorities claim could “encourage” terrorism. It also created a new offense of “identifying” with a banned group, which can mean waving the Palestinian flag or chanting a slogan.

The arrest image of Intisar Hijazi, Oct. 8, 2024. (Social media; used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)

The vagueness is the point. Since October 2023, Adalah and other rights groups have documented dozens of indictments of Palestinian citizens under “incitement” and “identifying with” terrorist groups, many based exclusively on social-media posts that quoted Qur’anic verses or mourned the killing of Palestinians in Gaza. In November 2023, lawmakers went further and criminalized the “consumption of terrorist materials,” effectively policing not only what you say, but what you read or watch.

Political scientists call this securitization: transforming Palestinian identity from a political issue into a security threat to justify extraordinary restrictions. The effect is as much about punishment as it is about self-censorship. When one student is interrogated over a post or even an emoji, the entire class learns to be quiet.

Growing up in Jerusalem, the awareness of being watched, of always being a little suspect, was stitched into our house rules. Don’t smoke. Don’t date. Don’t take candy from strangers. And also: don’t speak too loudly about who you are. Don’t risk a wrong glance at a soldier, or a wrong turn through a Jewish settlement that could get you stoned.

My parents named me Thawra — “revolution” in Arabic — but my upbringing taught restraint. You can imagine the arguments I had with my father when he would discourage me from going out to protest. “Palestine remains in the heart,” he would say, his way of assuring his only daughter that even if I didn’t take to the streets and fight, I wasn’t abandoning my community or my identity.

My father wanted to shield me from what he himself had endured as a teenager during the First Intifada. In the Israeli prison where he served two years for stone throwing, every meal was laced with cheap cassia cinnamon, usually to cover the taste of spoiled food. The smell, he said, filled the air, coated his mouth, burned his throat and upset his stomach; it got into his clothes, his hair, his skin. He hasn’t eaten the spice in over 35 years, and to this day, before any dish reaches the table, someone in our family will inevitably ask, in jest, “Is there cinnamon in this?”

Israeli soldiers during the First Intifada, in the Gaza Strip, 1987. (Efi Sharir/Dan Hadani Collection, The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, The National Library of Israel)

It took me years to understand that my name was their compromise. Thawra carried the weight of my parents’ guilt, alongside the fragile hope of holding on. For many in their generation, that guilt lingers — the sense that what they could pass on to us was not freedom itself, but only the struggle for it. A struggle handed down because the world ignored them and because survival came before everything else.

Our silence is our citizenship

In Jerusalem, the change since October 7 is visceral. There was a time you could confront soldiers harassing young Palestinian men. Dangerous, yes, but not suicidal; perhaps because I’m a woman, or perhaps because the soldiers were less trigger-happy. Now, if I try to speak, neighbors pull me back: “Where do you think you are? This is Ben Gvir’s police. They’ll shoot you.” And they are right. The implication is chilling: we have internalized the logic of state violence so thoroughly that expecting any protection from authorities is laughable. I cannot help but feel that if I were shot, the narrative would inevitably saddle me with blame — we told her not to speak.

That same dangerous logic applies to the October 7 attacks. “Hamas shouldn’t have done it,” people say, “because Israel’s response was predictable.” Framed this way, Israel’s brutal violence begins to sound natural, as if inevitability were an excuse, inviting the blame back onto Palestinians, who must first condemn before they can speak at all. In practice, the expectation to condemn time and again becomes another form of silencing.

Repression also makes itself felt in the mundane. I was recently walking with my hijabi friend in a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem, avoiding eye contact with residents, careful not to “provoke.” Jewish Israelis tend to treat the hijab itself as a political statement. A religious Jewish man in a kippah slammed the door of the parking lot entrance in our faces and spat at her. These painful encounters teach you more than silence. They teach you how not to look, how not to walk, how to shrink in public space.

Israeli border police officers stand guard at the entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City during the holy month of Ramadan, March 2, 2025 (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

Or I think of the time I stopped for gas in Haifa last December, and a young soldier — barely older than the 19-year-old Palestinian students I once taught English at the Hebrew University — approached me as I paid the cashier. Just released from service in Gaza, he was anxious, pacing, talking fast, curling into himself between sentences. He spoke of his trauma, of a government that had abandoned him, yet still of pride in “protecting Israel.”

I listened, struck by his vulnerability and his youth. He was both a victim of, and a participant in, a genocidal system. He assumed I was an Israeli Jew. That happens often in Haifa, even among those who pride themselves on the ethos of coexistence. They take me for Mizrahi, maybe French-Morrocan. “You can’t be Arab. Muslim too? Impossible,” they say. Passing isn’t always a privilege; it’s a peculiar kind of exposure. You see what people believe when they think you’re one of them. You hear the unfiltered logic of violence, knowing it’s meant to reassure you.

Then the familiar question arose: does he know I am Palestinian? Would it be safe to say so? Could I tell him that I have family in Gaza, that his army was destroying their homes and lives? No. If Jewish-Israelis perform their citizenship out loud — serving in the army, waving the Israeli flag, declaring loyalty to the state — we, Palestinians citizens of Israel, prove our belonging through measured quiet, in what we choose not to say. Our silence is our citizenship.

A division of labor

Palestinian activists in the diaspora sometimes equate our caution with complicity. Those at home sometimes hear in diaspora idealism, its all-or-nothing posture, a dare we will pay for. Both readings are unfair, and both are true.

Think of it as a division of labor: abroad, Palestinians and allies can amplify our collective voice, press governments, and expand what feels politically possible. At home, we protect the identity that still burns inside us, quietly. We lower our voices when we say “Palestine” or speak Arabic on a bus; students carry flags folded in backpacks but rarely raise them at protests; family WhatsApp groups avoid certain words; older siblings warn younger ones what not to like or share on social media.

This is survival under securitization. Every decision is calculated for risk: Will this sentence put my younger brother on a list? Will this gesture keep me from graduating? Will this word cost me my job?

But the difference between existence in the diaspora and here in Palestine is more than just our need to act with caution. From afar, pro-Palestine activists enjoy the feeling of moral clarity that distance affords. Those working to end occupation and apartheid inside Palestine and Israel must survive and resist at once. There is little room for debates about the “most ideal” version of Palestine’s future while checkpoints and demolitions multiply.

And though some may disapprove, part of that work entails cooperating with Israeli Jews who are willing to leverage their bodies and privilege to fight against ethnic cleansing, genocide, and fascism. That partnership does not erase the power imbalance; it simply reflects the urgency of struggle in a place where survival is not theoretical.

Sometimes I imagine what it would look like if every Palestinian descended on Israel’s streets in the same numbers we see at demonstrations abroad. The image that immediately comes to mind is not chanting crowds but mass shootings by Israeli soldiers and police. During Gaza’s 2018 Great March of Return, thousands peacefully protested near the Israeli border fence and were met with live fire: hundreds killed, tens of thousands injured. That memory lives in the Palestinian collective body.

Or when my cousin Mohammad Abu Khdeir was burned alive by Israeli settlers in Jerusalem in the summer of 2014. We searched for him ourselves, because no one trusted the authorities. Their response was to besiege the town and tame our anger, not to scour every street looking. Later, when we carried his picture outside the courtroom demanding justice, settlers spat on us while riot police subdued a grieving family.

Palestinians protest the killing of Muhammad Abukhdeir outside the District Court in Jerusalem, May 3, 2016 (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90).

More recently, demonstrations against the current war on Gaza by Palestinians in Israel have been forcibly shut down by police in riot gear, who fire stun grenades and detain passersby on the flimsiest pretense of “disturbing public order.” Just as when we used to protest — years before October 7 — at Hebrew University during hunger strikes, home demolitions, or the killing of children in past assaults on Gaza, Israel’s response has always been the same: sending riot squads to crush our voice.

And yet another thought intrudes: Israelis protest in large numbers without being massacred. They face police brutality, too, but not live fire. Perhaps the only way Palestinians could take to the streets en masse would be if Israelis formed a circle around us, stepped between us and the rifles, and allowed us to lead from within.

Carrying the smell

On the train back from the Amsterdam march, a boy tugged at a protester’s keffiyeh and asked his mother what it meant. “It’s a scarf,” she said.

My own mother grew up in America at a time when the word “Palestine” barely registered and people confused it with “Pakistan.” I inherited that sense of invisibility, bracing as a child for dismissal every time I named my country, whether at airport counters or in front of substitute teachers.