The expectation that Palestinian representation entails piety enforces purity culture and perfect victimhood. Palestinians are saints and sinners, priests and prostitutes, angels and atheists, Imams and informants to the occupation. None of the keys kept from ‘48 until today unlock the right to place parameters around what constitutes Palestinianhood. If a woman wearing Hijab winning Alternative Album of the Year, or a contestant on a reality dating show, bothers you, Palestinianness bothers you, and occupation doesn't enough. While you discriminate who gets to be ‘Palestinian’, Palestinians are being bombed indiscriminately. Many just like George Habash and Leila Khaled lived and died for Palestine. At the same time, you insist there is no representation or resistance unless it reads like an worn Ikhwani pamphlet in an East Amman basement.
Painting Palestinian identity as a solely Islamic one enforces the notion that the occupation is a ‘religious conflict’. It undermines indigeneity and inheritance, painting Palestinians as part and parcel of a greater monolithic Pan-Arab-Islamic identity rooted in orientalism, to justify displacement as ‘relocation.’
The Palestinian flag is a harrowing reminder of the failures of Pan Arabism. As we know it, the banner does not display the Yaffa Orange or the crescent cross of distinctly Palestinian proposals. It flew as a plea to the Arab nation that fell upon deaf ears and the deafening rain of barrage after barrage. Until betrayal ran so deep, there was no longer a Pan Arabism or any semblance of brotherhood, and all that remained was Palestinian—that’s how the Palestinian flag became Palestinian. I can’t tell you if the honor of the Arab nation died in the negotiations at Camp David, or black September or in the slit womb of a pregnant woman lying dead in the wake of Sabra and Shatila— but I do know it was born anew, time and time again in that warm womb of Palestine—the mother who nurtured martyrs.
There is no home for the Palestinian except Palestine. Pan-Arabism died with Palestine, when she held its flag as a plea to the Arab nation, only to be ignored, until the Pan-Arab flag became her own. Pan Arabism died in 1970, that fateful September, skies blackened over the only shelter and haven. A second death in ‘75, what is ‘civil’ about war, about being scapegoated, marginalized, expelled, and fenced off in camps, the Phalangists made a slaughterhouse of Sabra and Shatila? To beat a dead horse in ‘91 after Palestinian minds and might, built for the Bedouin, skyscrapers from sand, operating every national post from education to interior, only to be expelled in their hundreds of thousands for the words of one Abu Ammar. Between the Abraham Accords and Arafat, the Arab nation was bled by a thousand cuts.
“Oh, Radiant sun—Jaffa orange, shine over Palestine, over all that is yours, all that is mine until all is mind. Juice and flesh bleed my lady, washing over land, bathing children in drops of gold, inciting in hurting hearts, hope.”