When Activism Cannot Hear Palestinians

The Activism That Cannot Hear Palestinians

The contemporary Western activist often does not hear Palestinians first. He hears the echo of his own redemptive script. “Free Palestine” then functions not as a political demand, but as a ritual formula through which the liberator confirms the centrality of his own conscience.

This is not the old colonialism of contempt. It is its subtler, sentimental successor: the colonialism of projection. The Palestinian is not necessarily demonized. He is aestheticized. He becomes a morally convenient canvas on which the Western subject projects the need for clarity, innocence, moral consumption, and absolution. Suffering is turned into raw material. The more photogenic, narratively clean, and easily circulated it becomes, the better it serves as political evidence.

In this mechanism, the Palestinian does not appear as a political subject, but as a figure in the Western drama of conscience. Flotillas, encampments, performative mourning, viral photographs, and carefully selected slogans often do not alter the field of forces. They rather sustain the illusion that “we” stand on the right side of history. It is a history in which the West arrives once again to save the Other, provided that the Other remains sufficiently legible, sufficiently wounded, sufficiently silent, and sufficiently obedient to the assigned script.

This is not solidarity. It is moral sovereignty exercised through someone else’s suffering. Freedom that must first pass through Western aesthetic-political filters ceases to be freedom in the strict sense. It becomes another chapter in the long tradition of “liberating” others, this time in anti-colonial costume, with the language of care and the proper iconography of outrage.

Here appears the threshold that activism usually refuses to touch. The question is not whether Palestinians suffer. They do suffer, and they suffer in reality. Nor is the question whether Palestinian freedom is a legitimate demand. It is. The question is different: what must be excluded from visibility so that Palestine may appear in Western activism as the pure figure of freedom?

This question immediately complicates the image. What happens to the Palestinian who says that he fears Israel, but also fears Hamas? What happens to the woman in Gaza who demands agency not only against occupation and war, but also against patriarchal enclosure, religious control, family violence, and political silencing? What happens to the civilian who does not want to be symbolic capital for Israeli security logic, for Hamas, or for Western activism?

Such voices do not fit the clean image. Not because they are less Palestinian. On the contrary, they are too Palestinian in the political sense: too concrete, too internally complex, too difficult to use as a poster. They introduce into the image what activism most eagerly removes: the internal thresholds of the community, the power of men, the monopoly of an armed organization, the exhaustion of civilians, and the refusal to be represented by those who demand silence in the name of the cause.

This is precisely how the colonialism of projection operates. It does not say: Palestinians are inferior. It says instead: Palestinians are too wounded to be analyzed; too oppressed for us to ask about their internal apparatuses; too sacred as victims to be allowed to become politically ambiguous. This sounds like protection, but it is a form of removing agency. A community that may only be pitied becomes an object of Western moral guardianship.

Such activism does not need to hate Palestinians. It is enough that it needs them in a particular form. It needs the Palestinian as an accusation against Israel, as evidence of the West’s failure, as a figure of anti-colonial innocence, as a moral mirror for its own class, university, milieu, and biography. The Palestinian who speaks against that function becomes inconvenient, badly timed, divisive, suspiciously useful to the enemy, or simply inaudible.

This is how the violence of selective solidarity is produced. It does not have the face of a brutal command. It works softly. It selects which suffering may circulate, which woman may speak, which dissident is admissible, which Palestinian voice confirms the moral architecture of the movement, and which one disturbs it. Visibility is not denied to everyone. It is distributed according to usefulness.

In this form, “Free Palestine” is not a complete political sentence. It lacks the question: free from whom and from what? From Israeli domination, blockade, dispossession, humiliation, military violence, and the reduction of life to a security problem, of course. But also from Hamas, from armed monopoly, from internal repression, from religious coercion, from patriarchal control, and from the right to speak in the name of the people while denying the people the right to speak otherwise.

If that second half cannot be spoken, we do not yet have freedom. We have selective emancipation. Such language recognizes only the violence that fits the structure of Western guilt and disables the violence that would complicate the figure of the victim. As a result, the community is defended as an image, while concrete people inside it are left to the apparatuses that already control their voice, body, movement, fear, and possibility of refusal.

This is not about symmetry. Symmetry is the wrong instrument. One does not need to place Israel and Hamas on the same moral scale in order to see that different apparatuses can cut through the same life. A Palestinian civilian does not live inside an abstract table of guilt. He lives inside a field of forces where external domination, war, blockade, Hamas, family, religion, gender, poverty, media, aid organizations, regional states, and Western activism may simultaneously organize his visibility and invisibility.

A truly anti-colonial thought would therefore not protect Palestinians from analysis. That would be sentimental coloniality. Anti-colonial thought would refuse to turn Palestinians into a sacred image. It would treat them as political subjects, and therefore as people capable of disagreement, contradiction, accusing several apparatuses at once, refusing their own representatives, and disturbing the Western need for simplicity.

The most treacherous point concerns women. In many Western narratives, the Palestinian woman appears as mother, mourner, victim, face of suffering, figure of innocence. She appears less often as someone who may accuse, at the same time, Israeli violence, Hamas, patriarchal control, religious appropriation, family coercion, and Western activism that needs her tears more than her political voice. The woman as image is useful. The woman as accuser of several apparatuses at once becomes a problem.

The same applies to critics of Hamas. They are inconvenient not because they do not fit Palestine, but because they fit it too well. They remind us that no community is a single body, that external suffering does not cancel internal violence, and that an occupied or bombarded person does not cease to be a person entangled in family, power, norm, fear, local loyalty, and local forms of coercion. Western activism often does not want this Palestine, because such a Palestine cannot fit inside its redemptive theatre.

This is where freedom becomes mined. Not because it is false as a desire, but because it passes through a field already occupied by apparatuses capable of using the desire for freedom. Aid can feed bodies while also strengthening the channel that governs their suffering. A slogan can express solidarity while silencing those who complicate its image. Outrage can be sincere while also becoming politically useful to forces the activist does not want to see.

This is the activism that cannot hear Palestinians. It hears Palestine as a symbol, Gaza as an accusation, and suffering as evidence. What it does not hear is the threshold question: who inside this community may speak, dissent, refuse, leave, criticize, accuse, and name the internal guardians of their own captivity?

Without that question, solidarity becomes a theatre of innocence. The Western activist can perform clarity and leave the stage. Palestinians remain inside the consequences. Women remain inside structures untouched by slogans. Critics of Hamas remain in political loneliness. Civilians remain in the place where their suffering continues to work for other people’s narratives.

The point is not to abandon Palestinian freedom. The point is to remove it from the Western need for moral convenience. Palestinians are not free when they are loved only in the form required by someone else’s cause. They are not free when their suffering is heard more clearly than their contradictions. They are not free when their community must remain the image of a victim so that Western activism can preserve its own purity.

A movement liberates no one when the first condition of its solidarity is that the people it defends must not complicate the story.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig