Palestine Beyond Compare

Abstract

This essay explores why and how comparisons of the Palestinian struggle to other historical examples frequently fail. These comparisons attempt to recuperate Palestinian humanity, but the process of recuperation itself reifies Palestine as something outside of or beyond humanity or human comprehension. Instead, we ought to address the history and politics of Palestine with the specificity and directness it warrants.

It is December 2024, and we are coming up on another new year of the Palestinian genocide at the hands of the Zionist entity. Every day, systems of meaning collapse alongside Gazan buildings. Every day, images and videos only hint at the depth of horror Palestinians experience. Every day, language fails us. We want to make sense of what we are experiencing as a means of controlling it. If we understand how this situation came to pass, how it works, we might be able to end it. Many try to find the perfect story, the perfect person who can break through and create empathy for Palestinians. We draw comparisons we hope will ignite emotion in a stoic heart, or more accurately, in a willfully negligent heart. We say, this is Apartheid like in South Africa. We say, this is intentional starvation like in Turtle Island and Ireland. We say, this is Holocaust like in Germany. When we try to imagine otherwise, we look again to historical precedent: the economic boycott in the aforementioned Apartheid South Africa; the FLN insurgency which unseated French colonization in Algeria; the longevity of guerilla warfare in Vietnam. We model our analysis of oppression and liberation on these models. Those who know history might seek to repeat it.

As a Palestinian, I have experienced how these attempts at legibility fail. With time, I have come to a potentially controversial assertion: Palestine is beyond comparison. These similes, analogies, and metaphors attempt a rhetorical operation which grounds Palestinian humanity in its referential capacity. What I mean by this is that we have not yet arrived at a way to name Palestinian experiences in their specificity or singularity, and thus eclipse or obfuscate some of that specificity in exchange for legibility achieved through comparison.¹ What I am not saying is that Palestinian suffering is "more" or "less" severe than other forms of human suffering across time. I see no use in stacking our horrors against one another in what feminist thinkers call the "Oppression Olympics" or the race to the bottom. I am also not denying the significant similarities in the operation of Apartheid in occupied Palestine and South Africa, or the repeated employment of forced famine that characterizes colonial and settler-colonial endeavors. Palestinians are not the first or only people to experience these violences, and history usefully illustrates their imperial banality as well as the aspiration that they might be stopped. Alex Lubin considers deconstructing comparisons a form of decolonial work and writes that "staking a claim for similarity—not exactness—allows us to see particular sites of state and imperial rule not in isolation but as constitutive of larger global systems and circuits of power."² Likewise, Keith Feldman notes that the work of analogy, while never perfect, holds two historical formations in relation, and this tension is what makes an analogy rhetorically effective. Feldman studies how the relation to Palestine drawn in Black Power literature around the struggle for self-determination brings to light "how the uneven development of deindustrializing urban space had its spatial correlates in other colonized sites in the third world."³ Numerous examples like this exist, examples in which communities who share certain relations to power recognize overlaps in their positionality and struggle. And shared struggle is the fertile ground upon which our solidarity and mutual liberation are predicated.

So, to the above assertion that comparisons between Palestine and other historical examples which attempt to kindle broad recognition of Palestinian humanity are largely ineffective. We hope that the familiarity of known stories and images about which we have moral clarity will make Palestine—for many a distant, unclear problem—immediate, worthy of attention, and ideally intervention. We agree that South African Apartheid was bad, and here is Apartheid in Palestine: also bad. We know that the Holocaust of Jewish people and other groups during Nazism was evil and preventable, and so too is the genocide of Palestinians. Where this rhetorical strategy falls apart is in the refusal to grant the metaphor. Consider the vehemence with which Zionist groups like the Anti-Defamation League push back against the use of Apartheid to describe the entity's actions in Gaza and the West Bank.⁴ Or reflect on the backlash to Masha Gessen's invocation of the Holocaust in their New Yorker essay about Gaza, which almost cost them the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.⁵ When an arrest warrant was issued for his war crimes by the International Criminal Court, Benjamin Netanyahu and his lawyers suggested that the ICC was engaging in blood libel. One facet of Zionist discourse is to evade and deny any instance in which they can be perceived as aggressors. Our metaphors crumble under the entity's perpetual victimhood. The entity thus employs a pervasive disinformation strategy that calls into question the legitimacy of Palestinian suffering by first insisting it is warranted (e.g. self-defense), and then, paradoxically, denying it's that severe.⁶ It is not that Apartheid and genocide aren't bad, it is that Palestinians are not experiencing them, and if we are, we really had it coming.

This willful refusal is not only the domain of explicitly Zionist thinkers. For many, refusal of any felt proximity to Palestine arrives as a deflective strategy: We cannot see ourselves or recognize the earlier genocides in the contemporary case of Palestine, because if we do, it may have implications for our complicity, yes, but likewise our disposability. We refuse Palestine so we can say that this cannot or will not happen to us—as though our discursive refusal might mitigate our eventual material interpellation. It comes for Palestine, but we are not like Palestine, and therefore it cannot come for us. This line of comparison at its core rejects another kind of rhetorical act: Gaza as preview. In The Palestine Laboratory, Anthony Lowenstein documents how the entity treats Palestine as a testing ground for tactics and weaponry that are then exported to other places around the world. While the Palestine laboratory is an important part of the global war machine, this thought of "You're next!" asks for empathy merely as a form of prevention. But Gaza is not a preview for Palestinians, nor is it for many other members of the global majority. Consider, for example, how the entity's oppressive forces have been training the U.S. police for decades.⁷ The preview, as it were, is already here. And the film stars us all.

In 2024, I read an interview with Billy Porter, an U.S. actor co-writing a James Baldwin biopic. In the interview Porter lodges his critiques with the industry, which is rife with anti-Blackness and homophobia. But when he is asked about Palestine's location in Baldwin's politics, given Porter's own support of the Zionist entity, Porter quickly dissociates: "This is not my hill, and I am not going to die on it. It's not mine! I'm not Jewish, nor am I Palestinian."⁸ He continues to say that what is happening is bad, that America's actions are bad. He supports peace. Even ignoring his telling slippages—using "Palestinian" in an attempt to name the "extremist" Hamas; using "Jewish" to describe the Zionist entity—Porter situates himself elsewhere, a different hill to die on, a different metaphor. "A hill to die on" is usually etymologically traced back to military battles, and colloquially refers to a position one will hold against all odds, even at great cost to oneself, even in the face of death. What does Porter mean when he says it's not his hill? That Palestine does not concern him as a queer Black man in the U.S.? What does he mean when he says he won't die on that hill? That he understands how support for Palestine is frequently met with social, legal, and material consequences? That his life is not related to Palestinian death?

For Porter, it seems there is no "like or as" between Black people in the U.S. and Palestinians. For him, we are not on the same hill. He elides Baldwin's stance on Palestine by placing it in the distant "there" of the Middle East and thus deeming it irrelevant to the project at hand, which is Baldwin as an American thinker. Porter's statement is instructional on the collapse of metaphor: the "then" of Baldwin is both central to and incommensurate with the "now" of racialization and violence. What we might learn: the distance to Palestine—in time and place and people—is not shortened by other historical anchors, even when those historical anchors, like Baldwin, deliberately extend a bridge between the two metaphorical hills on which both parties are indeed already dying. This is all to say, sometimes comparison means to bring us closer but instead amplifies and reveals distance. Across his work, Mahmoud Darwish frequently approached Palestine via metaphor, or remarked on its capacity to serve as one.⁹ Crucially, Darwish does this as a poet in exile—his relationship to the land only accessed through memory. In his work, Palestine functions as exile, as metaphor. Metaphor becomes the mark of distance rather than the measure of proximity.¹⁰

At the same time, comparison frequently conceals an ugliness around Palestinian credibility. By this I mean that Palestinians are frequently cast as unreliable narrators, or unable to speak for themselves at all. Comparison grounds Palestinians' narratives in historical precedent so that those narratives may be received as truth or fact. Comparison serves as certification. The reference to another well-understood genocide, settler colony, Apartheid system lends credibility to what Palestinians experience: we know what this is, we need only look at another circumstance to recognize it. Why is this the case? Because we cannot imagine Palestinian humanity and need to substitute another figure who is more sympathetic? Because we cannot believe Palestinians without endless cross-examination of their truths? Because we will only believe Palestinians when their experiences are routed through another's experience and another's voice? Have we not yet tired of convoys and delegations on fact-finding missions that testify with their own eyes, ears, hearts to the harrowing circumstances under which we live? Have we not tired of delegations that can go where Palestinians cannot? Be heard when Palestinians are silenced? Even when these reports describe Palestine as "unlike anything they've ever seen" or "unprecedented," they do a certain kind of violence to Palestinians who have been telling us for decades about what we never stop seeing, what is not unprecedented but in fact woven into the material, social, legal, and political fabric of daily life. We should not need Palestine to be the "worst" or "just like" anything to receive it, to witness it. We should not need to calibrate Palestine on a scale of (human) suffering in order to comprehend its reality.

In an essay written shortly after the start of the genocide in October 2023, Hala Alyan narrates the need for Palestinians to audition for empathy. She writes that "to earn compassion for their dead, Palestinians must first prove their innocence…. A slaughter isn't a slaughter if those being slaughtered are at fault, if they've been quietly and effectively dehumanized—in the media, through policy—for years. If nobody is a civilian, nobody can be a victim."¹¹ We Palestinians bare ourselves to challenge dehumanization. We offer our stories, voices, intimacies, bodies in the hopes that we might be recognized as worthy of life, protection, dignity, defense. I have wondered if comparisons are not a similar audition process. They too aim toward recognition. They too establish a bar across which Palestinians attempt to leap. Yet no matter how many smiling, dancing babies turned corpses we hold up, we cannot sway the tide. Palestinians are always already dead, and so our death does not register. Palestinians are sub-human and therefore unworthy of attention. Palestinians are para-human and therefore their suffering is negligible. Lately, I have grown weary of the tendency to lionize our sumud (resilience), even as I too cling to it in the landscape of disappearance. Sometimes we romanticize this position, a swing of the pendulum. We are not comparable to others because of Palestinians' relentless presence. Despite how hard the Zionists try, Palestinians keep living. A rock and a hard place, a hill and a hill. We are expected to suffer (victims) and we are expected to stand it (survivors). We are acted upon, reactive. Objects but never subjects. Stripped of our agency, our particularity, our heterogeneity, our emotional breadth, Palestine lives outside metaphor. Which is perhaps another way to say Palestine lives outside of language. Which is perhaps another way to say Palestine lives outside of humanity.

I have come to bristle at comparison. It is frequently a way to push Palestine from the center of comprehension, to arrive at it only through detour. And it is easy to get lost in detours. To forget where one is headed, to lose time, to arrive much later than anticipated. I am a Palestinian from the West Bank; I carry a green howiya.¹² I have never traveled to Palestine directly because the Zionist entity does not allow it. I fly into Jordan and cross the border. One of my dreams of return is to return directly. To reach Palestine without mediation. I want a path to the heart, to the center of home. I do not want to be made relatable through resemblance. I do not want resemblance to be the ground upon which relatability is achieved. I do not need other examples from history to know beyond doubt the barbarity which we experience. I do not want to fall short of another's humanity. I do not want to audition. Instead give me Palestine without simile or metaphor, clause or caveat. Give me Palestine on Palestinian terms. Let Palestine shake us out of what we think we already know, have already understood. Let Palestine lead us to the language and actions necessary for its liberation.