Dr. Afaf Jabiri

Co-Director, Centre for Social Justice and Change, University of East London

Co-founder of Act for Pal

We, Palestinians, are in pain. This pain did not begin with the current genocide; it is a burden we have carried for generations. It began the moment we were born into stories of dispossession, loss, and survival. From an early age, we learned to live with pain, to set it aside in order to teach, advocate, and educate the world about Palestine.

We have been patient—remarkably so. We have entered classrooms, panels, conferences, and coalitions, believing in dialogue, solidarity, and shared struggles. But there must be a limit to patience, especially when it comes at the cost of our own dignity, truth, and survival.

Today, our people are being slaughtered. Our homes, schools, and hospitals are being destroyed. Our land is being stolen. All of it is streamed live for the world to see, committed with impunity and protected by global powers. Our pain is now unparalleled. It is raw, unfiltered, and constant.

What deepens this pain is the silence—or worse, the complicity—of those who claim to be our allies: postcolonial scholars, feminists, environmental activists, LGBTQ advocates, anti-racism organizers. You, of all people, should know what it means to be silenced, erased, and constantly forced to justify your right to exist.

We ask you to examine your language, your frameworks, your silences. If your solidarity is conditional, abstract, or hesitant in the face of genocide, then it is not solidarity at all. You cannot selectively decolonize. Watch your colonial language. If you are not standing with us, fully and unapologetically, then what has all your theory, all your activism, been for?

We ask you to be bold. It is not enough to mention the ongoing genocide in Gaza without naming the root: Israel is a settler colonial, Zionist project, aimed at erasing the Palestinian people. If you refuse to say so, you are aiding our erasure.

We ask you to be consistent. It is not enough to mention the Nakba in passing. The Nakba is not a historical footnote; it is the foundation of our ongoing reality. It must guide your writing, your politics, your understanding of Palestine. The Nakba did not end in 1948; it continues until every refugee returns, and until the settler colonial system that began then is dismantled.

If you are a feminist, do not speak of gender-based violence in Palestine without addressing the violence of settler colonialism and apartheid. One woman is killed every 60 minutes in Gaza. This is not incidental; it is colonial violence targeting Palestinian life.

If you are a postcolonial thinker, you cannot speak of “representation” while ignoring Palestinian voices. You cannot lecture us on the “proper” forms of resistance or on how we speak about our own struggle. Listen. And if you cannot support us, at the very least do not speak over us. Do not police our grief and resistance.

The language you use is not harmless. It adds to our pain. While our people are being killed, your careful wording, your vague statements, and your hesitation to “speak truth to power” do not go unnoticed. Shaping books, articles, and posts to avoid risk, to stay within the boundaries of what is acceptable, even if it means erasing our reality, is not accidental. It is a choice. A choice to protect comfort over truth.