Palestine’s Past is Our Present: Why Its Story Matters to Us All

A new story has emerged out of the ashes of Gaza.  It is the narrative of a people who have fought bravely and who have stood firm against the overwhelming military power and genocidal violence of the Israeli and American regimes.   

Until 7 October 2023, Israel controlled the narrative.  On that historic day, when Palestinians refused to live any longer as prisoners of an illegal, dehumanizing occupation, they broke the stranglehold the Israeli propaganda machine had successfully constructed and entrenched in the West.

Many Americans have begun to awaken from the U.S.-Israeli Svengali-induced sleep.  Israel’s cruelty and injustice have been exposed, while Palestinian sumud (perseverance, steadfastness) has inspired.  

After more than eight decades of unimaginable hardship and suffering, the Palestinian people have refused to be removed from their land. The two largest militaries with the most lethal weapons have been unable to enforce, exact submission or end the resistance.  

What is uncertain, however, is whether humanities’ conscience will be lulled back to sleep, that Gaza will be forgotten, as it was before 7 October 2023, and there will be no accountability for the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide. 

The Israeli propaganda network, abetted by the Western media, is currently focused on insuring that happens, that the world “moves on,” and Israel returns as the occupying force that it was on 6 October 2023. Within one day of the “peace summit” in Egypt (13 October 2025), for example, Israel violated the terms of the agreement, killing seven Palestinians and limiting the amount of humanitarian aid into Gaza.  

Tel Aviv’s propaganda machine was swiftly set in motion with claims that Hamas violated the terms by failing to hand over the bodies of remaining prisoners. This, despite the fact that all sides, including Israel, acknowledged it would take time to retrieve the bodies buried beneath the rubble the Zionists had created.  

Since the start of the 10 October 2025 ceasefire, Israel, as is its want, has violated the agreement numerous times.  Within nine days of the “declared end to the war,” its forces had flouted the ceasefire 47 times, killing 38 Palestinians and wounding another 143.  

For eight decades, Israel has been attempting to erase the history of Palestine, its culture and landmarks. In the last two years in Gaza and currently in the occupied West Bank, it has been mutilating the land to eliminate all that sustains life. Ninety-two percent of Gaza has been turned into 60 million tons of debris, containing the remains of countless innocents.  

How can a people who claim they have an historic and biblical bond to the ancient land of Palestine, as Israelis have, completely destroy the “Holy Land” of the West Bank (Israel calls Judea and Samaria) and Gaza, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world?

The answer is rooted in their perception of and relationship to the land.  For Israelis, it is an exploitable resource, a source of potential wealth accumulation. For Palestinians, it is home.  

The zeal and ferocity of its destruction can also be explained by the fact that modern Israel is an imperial-inspired foreign infliction transplanted into the heart of the Arab world.  

To establish legitimacy for their political project in Palestine, Israel’s European secular founders provided dubious links between past and present.  They strategically and selectively used religious narratives and historical connections as tools in building an Israeli national identity and to legitimize the establishment of a Jewish state on alien land; strategies that continue to this day.    

Hence, Israel and its American enablers are unable to appreciate that Palestine is the locus of Palestinian nationhood.  They will never comprehend that the land has been a living archive of Palestinian history, language and culture for 5,000 years.  As an agrarian society, land has provided a shared sense of belonging and foundation for collective consciousness and national identity. Palestine has been a unifying force, especially since their homeland was recast as Israel in 1948.    

Palestinian poets like Fadwa Tuqan, Samih al-Qasim and the late Mahmoud Darwish, regarded as Palestine’s national poet, have eloquently expressed the deep rootedness and pain of loss, often through the powerful symbol of the olive tree; as in this moving line from Darwish’s 1964 poem, “an alsumud” (“On Resilience”):  

“If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them,
their oil would become tears.”

Olive cultivation, engaged in for thousands of years, has been a vital part of the Palestinian economy, culture and heritage.  The ancient, deeply-rooted olive trees, able to survive harsh conditions, are the perfect symbol of Palestinian refusal to be displaced.    

Since 1967, to further humiliate and break the back of Palestinian resistance, the Israeli army has illegally uprooted an estimated 800,000 to over one million Palestinian olive trees.  In addition to land appropriation for expansion of illegal colonies, economic control and intimidation, the destruction of orchards and access to them, is the regime’s and Zionist squatters’ attempt to undermine their connection to the land and to break Palestinian sumud.

Palestine is unique in the Arab world.  When history began to be recorded in what is often referred to as the Middle East or West Asia, there was no Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar or any of today’s Persian Gulf Arab states.  But, there was Gaza; there was Palestine.   

The recorded history of Gaza spans 4,000 years.  Under the administration of various empires, including the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Achaemenid Persian and the Romans, Gaza prospered.  During the third century, it became part of the province of Palaestina Prima.  

After it seized and occupied Gaza in 1967, Israel reduced the Strip to a concentration camp. Palestinians have, since then, been serving life sentences behind the sophisticated surveillance-equipped “iron wall” that surrounds Gaza. For them, the wall is a daily reminder of occupation and that their hopes and dreams for a future are out of reach.  

Palestinian journalist, Anas al-Sharif, captured the essence of Palestine in his message to the world written prior to his assassination by Israeli forces on 11 August 2025: “I entrust you with Palestine—the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person.”  

 According to the United Nations, by the date of al-Sharif’s targeted murder, Israel, determined to suppress the truth, had killed 242 journalists.    

From the Balfour Declaration (1917) to Trump’s 20-point Gaza “peace” plan (2025), imperial powers have, for 108 years, manipulated and deceived to control Palestine.  They have failed.  

The future is uncertain unless the wrong committed a century ago, when an imperious British government technocrat gave away a land he did not own to European Zionists, is made right.  

There are no ambiguities. Not only has Gaza revealed Israel’s cruelty and lawlessness, it has also exposed the hypocrisy and ruthlessness of the American and British empires as well as the political, economic and military systems that have supported it.  

Unless those who have made Israel’s modern-day genocide possible are held accountable the global community may find itself living in what the 17th century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, described as “war of all against all;” a state of continuous wars, violence and insecurity.  Failing accountability and consequences for the perpetrators, inhumanity and lawlessness will become the standard.  

Additionally, the international community can no longer accept Israel as it currently is—a violent apartheid settler-colonial entity.  It is bound by international law to implement the mandate of the International Court of Justice (19 July 2024) to decolonize the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem).   

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, prophetically spoke to where we are today. In his final speech the night before his assassination, he said that there is “no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.”  

Palestine is more than a geographical place. It is a compelling idea. It cannot be erased just as Palestinians’ rightful demand to return home cannot be erased. 

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