To be Palestinian today is to feel like you are caught in a fever dream—trapped in someone else's hallucination. It is to be interrogated about the hidden insidiousness of our chants while Israeli politicians boast about ethnically cleansing Gaza in newspapers and interviews. It is to be shouted over, silenced, by people who claim to fear for their lives from the safety of apartments that have never been blistered by white phosphorus, that have endured nothing fiercer than a US winter, while people in another corner of the planet dig for loved ones buried in the wreck of flattened buildings. Conversations about Palestine in the West are steered by abstractions, about the meaning of Zionism, about the threat level of words, about a logistically impossible yet impossibly imminent genocide of the Jewish people: Such details are not minor. In situating the Holocaust outside of history, in placing it not just in the past but in an eternal future, Zionism today has created a status quo in which the possibility of a second holocaust is given primacy over a holocaust happening in the present. I am certain some readers will find those previous lines uncomfortable or even incendiary, but that is precisely the point: language comparing Zionists to Nazis is scrutinized—even penalized—more than the government policies and military actions that beg for the analogy to be made. As long as this status quo persists, as long as Palestinians are subjected to colonial violence and erasure, we certainly can and should refuse indignity as a state of being, refuse to shrink ourselves and our aspirations, refuse to be silenced or shouted over, and refuse to assuage the hallucinations of our colonizers.

snippets from oxford