OPINION | FREE SPEECH | CENSORSHIP
Palestinian Voices Must Be Heard
How censorship of Palestinian voices is enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza
Saturday, one week after the latest Gaza war started, I awoke to find my LinkedIn profile arbitrarily shut down. While Western governments and media parroted the Israeli talking points, I provided essential context that they had entirely ignored. I dared to oppose the genocidal Israeli campaign against the people of Gaza. Reporting the daily reality from occupied Ramallah, I refused to start time from 6 AM on October 7.
I am not alone, as Israel mounts military-grade disinformation to forcibly silence the voices and opinions of ordinary human beings around the world and in Palestine:
“Digital Iron Dome — Israeli developers combine forces with major platforms to combat toxic posts”
Meanwhile, 500 more Palestinians perished in Israel’s latest attack on a hospital. Two weeks of incessant bombing killed 1000 Gazan children and 1000 Gazan women. Ten thousand lay wounded and over a million were made homeless.
And yet, we are not supposed to say a word about it — or the social media magnates will simply pull the plug.
They silence me because I reject the formula — bemoaning the lost Israeli lives before uttering a word about Palestinian lives — as if Palestinian lives have no value of their own, but only in relation to Israel. Aren’t Palestinians also God’s children? As I wrote in Fugitive Dreams, about 1996,
“I got tired from the condolences my friendly Jewish officemate and I exchanged every time something happened. Why should I feel responsible for every Hamas extremist, and why should he feel sorry for the actions of Jewish fanatics?”
They ban me because I talk about my father’s house in Ramleh, or my mother’s destroyed house in Yafa, from which the Israelis expelled them in 1948. They mute me because I insist on mentioning the 56-year-old occupation, the 20-year-old Wall, or the last two years, during which Israel has bombed Gaza three times, while its daily Israeli raids into Palestinian towns to arrest or assassinate activists have left hundreds dead. They stop me from posting about what I’ve seen in Hebron, or my shock at the growth of their stolenments, or my tears at the destroyed village of Iqrit — its children 75 years denied justice.
The trolls left their most hateful comments on one post defending Rep. Rashida Tlaib for displaying a Palestinian flag in her office, alongside the American flag. I am attacked for commending her pride in her heritage, for speaking out against xenophobia and the obvious anti-Palestinian and misogynistic hatred underneath such insinuations of disloyalty. That’s the same anti-Palestinian and misogynistic hatred that prompted the murder of 6-year-old Wadie Al Fayoume and the attempted rape of his mother, a Palestinian American living in Chicago, or the gunning down of another Palestinian-American home in Colorado.
At almost the exact moment the bomb fell on al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, where sheltered thousands of Gazans Israel had made homeless, I received an email newsletter from a self-proclaimed peace-seeking Israeli apologist, rhetorically asking Gazans if they are “civilized”. “Israel has the right to defend itself,” Biden utters, while Israeli leaders are avowing the “total destruction of Hamas”, which they apparently equate with Gaza as a whole. Palestinian lives to him, as to them, are worth nothing at all.
“You are not alone,” Biden tells Israel, backed up by warships, bombs, strategists and logistical support, and even small arms for the settlers to embolden their escalating pogroms against Palestinians. He lands in Lydd airport, renamed “Ben-Gurion”, on the very eve of the hospital bombing to assert his support for the genocide.
The America that fought the Nazis is dead. Instead, we see the steely face of weapons industries that translate death into soaring profits and stock valuations. American’s own citizens are not safe, threatened by one supposedly-crazed mass shooter after another, racially motivated attacks, or deadly police violence against minorities.
Vegas, Buffalo, Uvalde, Boulder, Lansing, Nashville, Atlanta, Baltimore, LA, …, there is no shortage of American cities visited by gun violence — violence seeded by the very corporations now rushing to re-arm “Israel,” even after its latest war crimes against the people of Gaza.
I am overwhelmed by readers and fans who emailed me to inquire about my well-being. Thank you! I am fine. No need to ask about me. Instead, underneath the rubble, seek and grieve humanity.
And no, they will not silence me, but my voice is hardly enough. We all need to speak out for Gaza, for Palestine, for humanity.
With love from an undisclosed location,
– Ramsey Hanhan
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