What is the profound force, the impetus that incites in our foes and friends alike the refusal to look us in the eye?

Not universal in a way that indulges the capitalist, commercial connotations of the word, glossing over power, history, and barbed wire, but a universality that recognizes the Palestinian condition is the human condition. Palestine is a microcosm of the world: wretched, raging, fraught, and fragmented. On fire. Stubborn. Ineligible. Dignified. The

often mandatory art of making hagiographies for the living and the dead, to manufacture for them a solemn reverence, a remedy to the profanity of their perceived affiliations. Simply put, the perplexing demand to make humans out of humans.

an obsessive curation of “reliable narrators,” whose testimonies are unthreatening, authoritative, or impartial.

miraculous epiphanies.

“humanization” (or: defanging)

If they advocate for themselves, they must narrate only their personal tragedies. Neither political ideology nor, God forbid, nationalist ambitions should ever incentivize their campaigning. It must remain individualistic, never for a collective cause and never through an organized collective, and must solely seek to remedy humanitarian crises

we are either victims or terrorists.

Our narratives were rationalizations, really, for our place in the world, or lack thereof—our place, in every sense of the word.