"AND TO TIGHTROPE IS NO EASY TASK. Read the “wrong” book, follow the “wrong” leader, joke inappropriately, invoke a trope, knowingly or unknowingly, show animosity, read about resistance, write about resistance, graffiti the walls, pick up a rifle, and they will kill you. Sometimes even if you wave a white flag.* Our enemy always possesses probable cause. Something as simple and random as your gender is sufficient to fling you far away from humanity. One cannot simply mourn a Palestinian man, not before absolving him first of his cardinal sin, the crime of being Palestinian.
Obituaries of dead Palestinian men deploy certain identifiers (profession, education level, beliefs, and, more recently, sexuality) not to eulogize but to advocate for the deceased, to satisfy the requisite conditions for grieving the deceased. There are prerequisites without which one cannot denounce the actions of the killers. Denouncing the killers themselves is another story.
After Refaat al-Areer* was murdered alongside several members of his family in a targeted assassination in December 2023, I wrote, in Arabic, that I could not compose a tribute for Refaat in the anglophone news site where I worked as culture editor. To attempt to eulogize a Palestinian man in the colonizer’s lexicon is to self-flagellate. They erase their crimes from the archives and erase us from their history books; they create nations with no natives in their dictionaries, nations that pretend not to know whose blood it is on their hands. Announcing one’s death requires extracting recognition of one’s existence in the first place. English, the language engraved on the missiles that killed Refaat, converts the Palestinian funeral into an arena of strenuous persuasion and pedagogy, where there are no givens or objective facts.
And so, when eulogizing a Palestinian man, we take on the roles of historians, activists, and political analysts, and we riddle our overtures with UN resolutions and human rights reports. The colonizer’s language commands that we qualify him for mourning before mourning, that we wash him of his sins—his geography, religion, color, sex, and affiliations—and exclude him from the ranks of our fighters and fight to exhibit his exceptionalism. Obituaries like these* demand that we sew the wings of angels on the Palestinian’s back, so that he will then, and only then, become mournable."
