734 Days Later, Palestine is Still Here

 

By Stacy Lee Kong

 
 

Image: Bisan Owda via UN Women

 

A note on language: As I’ve mentioned in every newsletter I’ve written about Gaza since Oct. 7, it’s super important that we take care with our language when discussing Israel and Palestine, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. So to be clear, when I critique the Israeli government and military, I am not critiquing all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. Characterizing critique of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as antisemitic is inaccurate and unproductive. Furthermore, it is disingenuous and actually dangerous to conflate Zionism with Judaism, as this list of prominent Jewish writers has argued. Lastly, when I use the words colonization, genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing to describe Israel’s actions, that’s based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, as well as other academics who study genocide, legal experts and South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice to bring genocide charges against Israel. It is also based on the language Israeli officials and public figures have used themselves, 500+ instances of which have already been collected by Law for Palestine.

I think I’m a different person than I was two years ago. Not just in a life-has-been-lifing way, or even an I’m-going-to-therapy-and-realizing-I-do-have-an-inner-child way (though yes, on both counts, sigh), but also in a now-I-know-things-I-can’t-unknow way. I have a clearer view of the power structures that govern all of our institutions, from politics to healthcare to media. It’s not that I just discovered the evils of capitalism and white supremacy, obviously. But Palestine has crystallized for me just how flimsy the veneer of political progressiveness actually is. It’s appalling to see how easily media can be controlled—and that government, institutions and corporations will cheerfully pretend nothing’s wrong as they go against the will of the people. As bad as all of that is, though, it’s even worse to realize that I no longer have a sense of shared reality. 

Since Oct. 7, 2023, I’ve found myself returning to the metaphor of alternate universes again and again. For the past 734 days, it’s felt like I’m standing next to someone watching the exact same things—starving, maimed and murdered people; snipers targeting children; Israel attacking hospitals, schools and refugee camps; flattened cityscapes; unending imagery of pain and suffering; a steadily rising death toll that is almost certainly an undercount—but perceiving them completely differently, because the rules of physics or biology or maybe just logic work differently for each of us. It’s like they’re in a universe where genocide is self-defence and lies are truth and dehumanization is mere disagreement, while I am… not. And can I just say, even as a person who has been skeptical of power, wealth and the status quo for decades, it has been very jarring to see privilege and complacency at work like this?

I’ve tried to write about that as best I can. Over the past two years, I’ve sent out 17 newsletters about Palestine, and mentioned the ongoing genocide in several more. I’ve talked about Islamophobia, the myth of objectivity, trauma porn, hope, solidarity and who actually gets it, misinformation and who wields it, student protesters, manufacturing consent, collective liberation. Sometimes things happen—yet another organization names Israel’s actions as genocide, Israel kills yet another journalist (at least 248 reporters have been murdered in Gaza since Oct. 7, per the United Nations), there is yet another cartoonishly evil atrocity that goes viral on my newsfeeds, or I realize how long it has been since I’ve seen one of those images because of tech company censorship—and I want to write about it, but I don’t know what to say that I haven’t already said. But this week, it feels particularly important to say something anyway. And not just because it’s the second anniversary of Israel escalating its decades-long genocide and ethnic cleansing, or even because of the pending ceasefire deal. To me, it feels important to talk about Palestine right now because even if that ceasefire holds—and let’s be real, that is not guaranteed—we have a responsibility not to look away.  

Now that we know, we can’t pretend we don’t

When I say that, I mostly mean it from an advocacy perspective. As I just alluded to, this conflict is not necessarily over—Israel was still bombing Palestine on Wednesday, in the midst of ceasefire negotiations. There are real concerns (informed by past events) that the Israeli government is not actually interested in a lasting ceasefire anyway. But even if this specific conflict does wind down, the goal isn’t actually a simple cessation of hostilities; it is a free Palestine, and that is impossible to achieve without sustained, strategic public pressure from people around the world. 

But there is a more philosophical reason, too. I think we have a responsibility to ourselves to see the world, and our institutions, as they really are. That means grappling with the fact that our political leaders don’t seem interested in representing their constituents’ views or demands, so they definitely don’t feel compelled to do so. You can tell by the legislative action they’re taking around Israel and Palestine, the amount of money they accept from pro-Israel sources and their actual statements on the issue. I mean, just look at former U.S. president Barack Obama’s recent statement on the ceasefire, in which he referenced “Israeli families” and “the people of Gaza.” As AJ+ host and senior producer Sana Saeed pointed out, this wasn’t carefully crafted messaging, it was reflexive dehumanization. “Obama don’t have a comms team meticulously consider the use of ‘families’ for Israelis and not for Palestinians—it is reflexive, without thought and consideration, because that’s how deep the dehumanization is,” she wrote on X. Overall, it’s just so clear that politicians’ actions are deeply out of sync with the massive shifts in public opinion we’ve seen over the past two years. 

I… don’t quite know what to do with that, to be honest. I think I’ve talked about this before, but I’m really not sure how to engage with a political system that keeps showing me my vote only matters to a certain extent, because there is no mechanism to ensure that the politicians we help elect will actually do what we want—or what they promised to do, for that matter. And that’s especially true if what we want conflicts with their own financial or political interests.

It's not just about how bad that feels (though: bad!). This disparity also has wide-reaching implications for our own safety and security, especially those of us who aren’t, well, white men. As equity consultant and antiracism trainer Beisan Zubi wrote in an April 2025 Toronto Star op-ed about why she was taking candidates’ stance on Palestine into account when she voted in the Canadian federal election, “Gaza feels like the best test I can use to gauge a politician’s actual commitment to human rights. The core principle behind human rights is that they are universal (apply to everyone) and inalienable (cannot be taken away). Over the past 18 months, I have watched Israel violate just about every human right that I learned about in school, while so many Canadian politicians stayed silent. If a politician isn’t willing to fight for the human rights of Palestinians, how can we trust they’ll defend Canadian rights? How can I trust a politician will defend women’s rights in Canada if they haven’t said anything about the fact that there are an estimated 48,000 pregnant women in Gaza facing famine? How can I trust a politician will protect Canada’s health care system if they aren’t outraged that Israel has decimated a health care system serving over two million people? How can I believe a politician actually cares about this planet if they don’t speak out about ecocide in Gaza?”

For the past two years, people have been showing us who they are. Let’s believe them

Palestine doesn’t just reveal difficult, disappointing truths about our political system. This genocide also undermines the nice stories companies have been telling us about their commitment to equity and inclusion. (Which, to be clear, were always just that: stories.) It’s right there in the tech companies that suppress pro-Palestine perspectives, either by shadow banning accounts posting this content or actively deleting these posts. It’s our jobs monitoring our communications—and straight-up deleting emails that mention Palestine, as Microsoft did earlier this year following company-wide protests against its IDF contracts. It’s newsroom decision makers bowing to the Israeli military’s demands not to show aerial views of Gaza, which CBC did over the summer. It’s all of the journalists that parroted Israeli propaganda, dehumanized Palestinians, refused to fairly, accurately and compassionately cover the conflict—I mean, many outlets won’t even use the word Palestine. 

It's people like Van Jones, who was a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday, where he said the reason young people are pro-Palestine is because Iran and Qatar are running a disinformation campaign on social media, an argument he illustrated with an ugly, dehumanizing joke about “dead Gaza babies.” This was already a truly galaxy-brained take, but it became even more obvious when news broke this week that he’s one of 16 American journalists mentoring young reporters through a fellowship specifically intended to “shift some of the narrative” around Israel and help the country win an “information war.” 

On a purely human level, this type of casual cruelty was disturbing to watch. But it’s also revealing. This is what Western pundits think about Palestine. As Ziyad Motala, professor of law at Howard University School of Law, wrote for Al Jazeera this week, “Jones’s remark reflects a deeper pathology. For decades, much of the US media establishment has treated Palestinian death as a matter of optics rather than ethics. It prefers to interrogate imagery rather than investigate accountability… The question of genocide becomes not a crime to expose and punish but a branding problem to manage. The obsession with disinformation also betrays a certain arrogance. It assumes that young people who recoil at the carnage must have been duped by malignant foreign actors. They could not possibly have arrived at outrage through independent moral reasoning. Their compassion must be manufactured, their empathy the product of an algorithm. Such condescension mirrors the colonial logic that denies agency to the colonised and authenticity to those who stand with them.”

It's also important to understand that this perspective is not limited to Palestinians. It can—and is—applicable to all people, everywhere who belong to one, or more, marginalized groups. Palestine is the litmus test that exposes the hypocrisy of politicians, media, companies and individuals, and highlights the ways they are each beholden to, and complicit in, systems of oppression, even if they are oppressed themselves. So, we have to understand that we can all run afoul of that duplicity. That’s what has shaken me so much, I think—that I keep seeing people who claimed to care so deeply about racism, misogyny and other forms of oppression tell me that in this case, oppression is okay. Actually, it's justified! 

At the same time, despite the best efforts of the Israeli government and its Western allies, despite the complacency and complicity, there is a ceasefire deal. On Thursday, Bisan Owda posted a TikTok using her now-famous opening line: “Hi everyone, this is Bisan from Gaza. I am still alive.” She went on to say, “And finally, I’m saying this sentence not as an update, but as a result. I am still alive. It’s the 9th of October, 2025 and today is the official announcement day of the ceasefire.” I know this whole newsletter has been about what’s changed since Oct. 7 in myself and my understanding of the world. And I know it hasn’t exactly been a hopeful one! But if there is something to ground us, and to motivate us, and to reassure us that our words and our work are not in vain, I think it’s that: it has been 734 days (plus 75 years) of genocide, but Palestine, and Palestinians, are still here.

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Politics, MediaStacy Lee KongPalestine, Israel, Gaza, Gaza Strip, Bisan Owda