Forty years after Edward Said demanded ‘permission to narrate’, the truth from Palestine has never been more widely known. And yet the annih
What accumulated across generations of Palestinian intellectuals was a structure of feeling that I would call exhausted vigilance. Not despair; despair would have been simple. This was the permanent, draining alertness of those who must translate themselves into a language designed not to recognise their words.
Entering the Western public square required that you suppress your own grief and fury. Palestinian suffering was admissible only when abstracted from its own content – drained of the names of villages, the mechanics of land seizure, the grammar of permit and curfew and demolition order – and repackaged in the universalist idiom of human rights, the vocabulary of the very order that had sanctioned the dispossession in the first place.
To show too much of the actual thing was to be dismissed as irrational, partisan, too emotional to be heard. Composure was the condition of entry. And composure, sustained indefinitely in the face of an ongoing catastrophe, produces its own specific damage: it slowly erodes your capacity to speak from within the Palestinian experience.
What made this condition distinctive was that there was no escaping it; there was no way to make yourself heard. An intellectual labouring over an argument already knew, before speaking, that the institutional defences were firmly in place. If your words were not met with deliberate indifference, they faced the strategic distortion that rendered historical catastrophe as “a complex, two-sided situation”.
Palestinian meaning was intercepted before it could land. Grief was required to perform continuously before an audience immunised against its claims. Cruellest of all was not the hostility – hostility can be opposed – but the expectation of gratitude. Access to the Western public square was treated as a gift, shadowing the expression of Palestinian experience with the implicit debt of being permitted to speak at all.
Measured against that long history, the current moment marks a profound shift in how Palestinian speech is received. Across much of the West, being pro-Palestine has become the common sense of a generation: the default orientation for students, cultural workers and the youthful intelligentsia of Europe and North America.
The permission to narrate, so long withheld, has in certain respects been granted: Palestinians now write for major publications; documentaries circulate without suppression. Academic studies have built a substantial field. The Palestinian narrative has been codified, affirmed by Israel’s own historical archives, and validated by the very institutions that once policed its admissibility. Never have we been more visible, more legible or more present in the discourse of the world.
And yet. And yet the annihilation continues. The genocide is ongoing, prosecuted with the full material and diplomatic support of Western states where public opinion has nominally shifted away from unwavering support for Israel. Settler violence across the West Bank accelerates with total impunity, administered in daylight, documented in real time, and met with statements of concern from capitals that simultaneously approve the weapons transfers. European leaders pose for photographs with Israeli war criminals. The narrative has been won, one might say. The argument has been accepted and confirmed. And very little – almost nothing that matters – has changed.
Two years on, this grotesque convergence – total narrative victory coexisting with the unhindered erasure of Palestinian life – reveals that the issue was never a lack of facts or a failure of empathy. The reality of Palestine induces a special form of disavowal, because its implications threaten too much of what the West believes about itself. To truly accept what is happening in Palestine requires acknowledging that the international order is a fiction, and that Western prosperity remains tethered to a brutal, selective inhumanity. Confronted with a truth that would shatter their own moral and ideological self-conception, Western liberals retreat into moral paralysis: they validate the trauma and permit the genocide to continue anyway.
Woody Crumbo aka Woodrow Wilson Crumbo (Native American-Potawatomi, 1912-1989, b. Lexington, OK, USA, d. Cimarron, NM, USA) - One Blue Deer, Paintings: Airbrush and Tempera on Paper
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