You're Not Really Palestinian

A few weeks ago, Claire made a comment that caught me completely off guard.

"I would never vote for Mélenchon because he's too pro-Palestine and anti-Israel."

It was one of those moments where you almost wonder whether you've heard somebody correctly.

Not because I expected her to vote for Jean-Luc Mélenchon. I honestly would have preferred to avoid the debate entirely, as I'm aware that I'm likely not changing anyone's political views over lunch.

But because, of all the possible reasons to dislike a politician, that was the one she chose to express.

To me.

A Palestinian woman.

Someone she's known for several years, who has been very vocal about Palestine, my family's circumstances, and my convictions about what's happening in Gaza.

It wasn't as though we were having a particularly heated political debate.

The comment just appeared... out of nowhere.

And I remember wondering what exactly she expected me to say.

Was I supposed to agree? Laugh? Nod politely and move on?

Did she simply forget who she was talking to?

Or did she know perfectly well and not consider that it might be hurtful?

I genuinely couldn't tell.

And perhaps that's why it stayed with me.

Because what I heard wasn't simply a criticism of a French politician.

I heard someone describing support for Palestine as a reason to reject somebody.

And I couldn't help wondering what that said about how she understood my own convictions, whether she'd ever really taken them seriously, or whether she held any empathy for me and, more importantly, for the Palestinians being maimed, r*ped, tortured, displaced, killed...

Around this same period, I'd been reading about public opinion in Israel.

One survey, reported by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in May 2025, found that 82% of Jewish Israeli respondents supported expelling Palestinians from Gaza.

The methodology of that poll was subsequently challenged by other researchers, whose own survey found a lower, though still substantial, level of support for population transfer.

Another survey, published by the Israel Democracy Institute in August 2025, found that 79% of Jewish Israeli respondents said they were not particularly troubled, or not troubled at all, by reports of famine and suffering among Palestinians in Gaza.

Seventy-nine percent.

Not a question about which political party someone preferred or which military strategy they believed would be effective.

A question about whether reports of human suffering troubled them personally.

Of course, these surveys don't speak for every Israeli. There are Israelis who have opposed the violence, challenged their government, and spoken publicly for Palestinian rights.

But this reminds me of something women hear all the time when discussing sexism, misogyny, or sexual violence.

"Not all men."

Well, obviously.

Not all men are sexist, misogynistic, or rapists. Nobody is suggesting otherwise.

But does acknowledging that suddenly make sexism, misogyny, or violence against women any less real? Does the existence of decent men mean we should stop examining the attitudes, behaviors, and systems that allow these problems to persist?

Of course not.

And I think the same principle applies here.

Recognizing that some Israelis oppose the violence doesn't erase the troubling attitudes reflected in these surveys. But invoking those exceptions as a counterargument is a logical fallacy: it shifts attention away from the broader pattern and, more importantly, the very issue being discussed.

The existence of exceptions doesn't invalidate a pattern. And pointing to those exceptions shouldn't become a convenient way to avoid confronting it.

Especially when the pattern concerns something as fundamental as our willingness to recognize another person's humanity.

And surveys deserve to be examined critically.

But even allowing for those distinctions, the reported levels of support for displacement and indifference to suffering is deeply disturbing.

So when somebody casually announces to me that a politician is too supportive of Palestine, I can't help thinking about the broader reality behind those words.

About the suffering that so many people are apparently prepared to accept, minimize, or ignore.

And about how strange it feels to be expected to receive such a comment as though it were just another harmless political preference.

But I didn't turn that first remark into a confrontation.

I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe she'd expressed herself poorly.

Maybe I was misunderstanding what she meant.

Maybe an actual conversation would help us understand each other.

And so, when the subject came up again several weeks later, I was willing to talk.

I wish I could say that helped.

During this more recent conversation, Claire expressed that she didn't understand why she had to be careful about what she said regarding Palestine around me.

Her reasoning?

I apparently "didn't even know anyone there."

Which, for the record, isn't true.

And then there was the observation that my family doesn't even live in Palestine.

As though that somehow made the whole thing less relevant to me.

As though the geographical location of my relatives determined the legitimacy of my identity.

As though I was being a little unreasonable for caring so much.

She didn't actually say, "You're not really Palestinian."

But that was the message I heard.

And I think that's what hurt the most.

Because what began weeks earlier as an uncomfortable remark about a politician had now become a conversation about whether I had enough of a connection to Palestine to justify caring about it.

I tried to engage.

I tried to explain.

I gave the conversation the chance I had originally hoped it deserved.

But what followed felt like a cascade of inflammatory accusations, assumptions, and statements that went far beyond the original comments.

Instead of finding some common understanding, I felt as though I was watching somebody pull apart my identity, my convictions, and the very reasons I care about something so deeply.

And suddenly, I wasn't simply discussing Palestine.

I was defending my right to identify with it.

To care about it.

To be affected by it.

To have convictions about it.

I was being asked, implicitly or otherwise, to justify an entire part of myself to someone who had known me for almost three years.

And all I could think was:

How are we still here?

Perhaps we should start with why: Because my family is part of a history of Palestinian ethnic cleansing, dispossession, and forced displacement that began with the Nakba in 1948, and whose consequences continue to shape lives more than 75 years later.

And yes, you guessed it: that includes my own family - my own father, to be exact. Not some distant, abstract group of people whose suffering I've simply decided to take an interest in.

Most of my family lives in Saudi Arabia, where their refugee status has had enormous consequences for their lives.

For many of them, the ability to work, study, or travel is severely restricted by their circumstances and legal status.

Things that some of us barely think twice about can become enormous obstacles.

And these aren't simply historical inconveniences.

They're realities that shape people's futures, determine their opportunities, and follow families across generations.

Poverty doesn't disappear because someone crossed a border.

Neither does discrimination.

Neither does the loss of a home, the inability to return to it, or the complicated experience of growing up belonging to a place you've never been able to fully call your own.

Displacement doesn't necessarily end when somebody finds somewhere else to live.

Sometimes, that's just where the next chapter of it begins.

And when a family spends generations navigating uncertain legal status, economic limitations, discrimination, and questions of belonging, those experiences become part of the family story.

Even for the generations who grow up somewhere else.

So when somebody tells me that my family doesn't even live in Palestine, as though that's evidence that my connection to the place is somehow weaker, I find myself wondering whether they understand what they're saying.

Because the very thing being used to question my Palestinian identity is one of the defining experiences of my family's Palestinian history.

First, people are displaced. Then, their displacement is used as evidence that they no longer belong.

How does that make sense?

Is it having an address in Ramallah?

Knowing a certain number of people in Gaza?

Having visited a certain number of times?

Speaking the language perfectly?

Being able to trace every branch of your family tree back to a particular village?

Or perhaps it's suffering enough to satisfy somebody else's idea of what an authentic Palestinian should look like.

I ask these questions somewhat sarcastically, but there's something deeply uncomfortable beneath them.

Because when you're part of a diaspora, your identity is often complicated enough without having other people weigh in on its legitimacy.

I know that my experience is not the same as that of someone living in Gaza or the West Bank.

Of course it isn't.

I don't claim otherwise.

I have a life in France. I have opportunities and freedoms that some members of my own family don't have.

I'm aware that my relationship with Palestine is shaped by distance, circumstance, and the particular life I've lived.

But why should recognizing those differences require me to diminish my own identity?

Why should I have to choose between acknowledging my privilege and acknowledging my heritage?

Both can be true.

I can be removed from the daily realities of living in Palestine and still be affected by what happens there.

I can have questions about my identity and still know that it is mine.

I can build a life somewhere else without my history ceasing to exist.

In fact, I think one of the most difficult parts of belonging to a diaspora is precisely that tension.

Feeling connected to a place that has shaped your family, your opportunities, your relationships, and your understanding of yourself, while simultaneously feeling that you have to justify your connection to it.

Sometimes to other people.

Sometimes even to yourself.

And honestly, that can be exhausting.

And I think that's the part I'm struggling with most.

I've encountered plenty of comments online questioning Palestinian identity, dismissing Palestinian suffering, or suggesting that people living outside Palestine have no particular reason to care about it.

Social media is full of people who are remarkably comfortable making sweeping statements about histories they know very little about.

At some point, you learn not to take every comment personally.

But this was different.

This was someone who knows me.

Someone who has heard me talk about my family.

Someone who knows that my Palestinian heritage is important to me, even when I struggle to articulate exactly what that identity means.

Someone who has been part of my life for years. Someone I had every reason to believe knew me beyond the surface.

And after all that time, I was left wondering whether any of those conversations had actually registered.

Had she heard me?

Had she understood even a fraction of what I was trying to explain?

Or had she quietly decided that my connection to Palestine simply wasn't substantial enough to deserve that level of consideration?

I don't know.

And I can't pretend to know exactly what she intended.

But I do know how it felt.

It felt like discovering that something deeply personal to me had been treated as something relatively unimportant by someone I thought would care.

And there's a particular kind of hurt in that.

Because we often think of empathy as a quality people either have or don't have.

We describe someone as kind, generous, caring, helpful.

A good person.

But I'm starting to think empathy is more complicated than that.

Someone can be helpful in a hundred ordinary ways and still fail to recognize something deeply painful in another person's experience.

Someone can consider themselves open-minded and compassionate while remaining surprisingly unwilling to examine an assumption that hurts somebody close to them.

And maybe that's what makes these moments so unsettling.

It's easier to dismiss an unkind remark from someone who has never pretended to care about you.

It's much harder when it comes from someone whose kindness you've been encouraged to trust.

Because then the question becomes less about what they believe politically and more about whether they can see you as a whole person.

And I find myself asking a question that feels almost embarrassingly simple.

If you can't find empathy for a Palestinian woman you actually know, whose stories you've heard and whose experiences you've had the opportunity to understand, then who exactly is that empathy for?

Here's something I want to make very clear.

I don't need everyone to agree with me about everything.

I can appreciate different perspectives. I enjoy a good debate. I think questioning our own assumptions is important, and I certainly don't believe that my opinions are automatically correct simply because they're mine.

But I have convictions.

And this is one I will say with my whole chest.

What has happened and is currently happening to Palestinians is genocide. In Gaza and surroundings, where entire city blocks have been razed, and in the West Bank, where settlers are threatening, kidnapping, harassing, harming and displacing Palestinians from their homes.

That isn't a word I use lightly, nor is it one I've chosen simply because of my Palestinian heritage.

Amnesty International has concluded that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. A United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry has reached the same conclusion. Human Rights Watch has documented acts of genocide.

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against Israeli leaders concerning alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, while a separate genocide case remains before the International Court of Justice.

These are not simply opinions circulating on social media.

They are the findings, investigations, and legal actions of international human rights organizations and judicial institutions.

Israel disputes allegations of genocide, and the ICJ has not yet issued a final ruling on the case.

But I don't need to wait for that final judgment to know where I stand morally.

And even beyond the legal terminology, there are things that simply aren't up for debate in my mind.

Palestinian suffering is real.

Palestinian displacement is real.

The resistance to that displacement and dispossession is real.

The stories, the families, the histories, the lives that have been lost or irreversibly changed.

All of it is real.

And perhaps the one thing I've managed to hold on to throughout my own complicated relationship with my identity is that.

I haven't always known exactly what being Palestinian means for me.

I've questioned whether I'm Palestinian enough, whether I know enough, whether I've maintained enough of my culture, whether my experience even compares to that of other Palestinians.

I've had to work through the strange feeling of belonging to somewhere I'm also disconnected from.

But I've never questioned the reality of what has happened to my people.

And I refuse to start now.

Not for a stranger on the internet.

Not for the sake of keeping a conversation pleasant.

And not even for someone I know personally.

I keep coming back to this because I don't think it's an insignificant detail.

I didn't hear that first remark about Mélenchon and immediately decide there was no point engaging.

I didn't assume that one sentence told me everything I needed to know about another person's beliefs.

I wondered whether there was room for a conversation.

Whether something that sounded hurtful might have come from misunderstanding rather than a deliberate lack of empathy.

I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

And when the opportunity came, I tried to discuss it.

But there's a difference between entering a conversation to understand another person's perspective and finding yourself expected to defend the legitimacy of your own identity.

At some point, I felt the conversation had stopped being an exchange of ideas.

It had become a series of things I was expected to absorb, explain away, or defend myself against.

And somewhere in that experience, I realized something.

I was once again being put in a position where I was expected to make myself smaller so that somebody else wouldn't feel uncomfortable.

I was supposed to be understanding.

Patient.

Diplomatic.

Careful not to offend.

But what about me?

What about the fact that these things were being said directly to a Palestinian woman by someone who has known her for almost three years?

What about the fact that this wasn't an abstract discussion for me?

What about the fact that the person being asked to remain calm and accommodating was also the person whose identity was being questioned?

At what point does maintaining the peace become an expectation that one person simply absorbs the harm?

And why, exactly, was that person supposed to be me?

I don't want to spend my time around Zionists simply to keep the peace.

I don't want to be expected to smile politely, make small talk, and pretend I'm comfortable with beliefs that I find fundamentally incompatible with my own moral convictions.

And I don't want to be made to feel unreasonable because I choose not to put myself in those situations.

That doesn't mean I need to insult anyone, attack anyone, or turn every social occasion into a confrontation... Even if I can't promise this will never be the case.

It does mean, though, that I get to decide who I spend my time with.

It means I can establish boundaries around conversations that I find dehumanizing or dismissive of Palestinian suffering.

It means I don't owe endless patience to someone who wants to repeatedly challenge something so fundamental to how I understand the world.

And it means I don't have to be cordial at the expense of my own dignity.

People are entitled to their beliefs.

But they're not entitled to my time, my emotional energy, or my willingness to sit through those beliefs being expressed at my expense.

And that distinction matters.

Because somewhere along the way, I think we've confused being open-minded with being endlessly accommodating.

As though respecting someone's right to hold an opinion means you're obligated to listen to it indefinitely.

As though setting boundaries around what you're willing to entertain makes you intolerant.

As though refusing to engage in a particular conversation somehow means you're afraid of being challenged.

I'm not afraid of being challenged.

I've spent years challenging my own identity, my assumptions, my worldview, and my understanding of where I belong.

But I'm no longer interested in debates that require me to first establish that Palestinian lives, histories, and suffering deserve to be taken seriously.

You can disagree with me.

That's your prerogative.

But I don't need to hear it again and again.

I heard you the first time.

And in this particular case, I even gave the conversation another chance.

Once was enough.

There's something else I think is important to explain.

My convictions about Palestine aren't simply a product of my personal identity struggles.

They're not a matter of me feeling personally offended whenever someone says something about the place my family comes from.

They exist beyond me.

They are part of my moral compass.

And they're also convictions shared by my partner and the people I call my friends.

This isn't simply about me or my heritage, or expecting the people around me to accommodate my it.

It's about values that matter to all of us.

About the kind of people we want to be.

About what we're willing to accept, overlook, or normalize in the relationships we maintain.

And about the distinction between keeping the peace and compromising something that matters deeply to us.

I find it strange that the expectation so often seems to fall on the person who is hurt to be the bigger person.

To understand the other side.

To keep things civil.

To recognize that people have different opinions.

Of course people have different opinions.

But surely there's a difference between disagreeing about economic policy or how a government should operate and dismissing the lived realities of people who have experienced generations of displacement, violence, and discrimination.

Surely there's a point at which we're allowed to say that we don't want to continue a conversation.

Not because we're incapable of having it.

But because we've heard enough.

Because a boundary doesn't become unreasonable simply because someone else doesn't like it.

And because for me, this isn't merely a political position I happen to hold.

It's human.

It's about whether I can look at another person's suffering and recognize it for what it is.

It's about empathy that isn't conditional on nationality, religion, proximity, or whether the person suffering happens to be someone I know.

And it's about the kind of humanity I want to share with the people I spend my time with.

I keep thinking about those comments.

That I don't know anyone there.

That my family doesn't live there.

That somehow, these things should make me less invested, less affected, less Palestinian.

And I can't help noticing how neatly this logic fits into something much larger.

A people are displaced.

Their descendants grow up elsewhere.

Those descendants inherit the social, economic, cultural, and psychological consequences of that displacement.

And then, somewhere down the line, someone tells them they no longer have a legitimate connection to the place their family came from.

Because they weren't born there.

Because they haven't visited.

Because their relatives live somewhere else.

Because enough time has passed.

How convenient.

And how deeply disturbing.

The erasure of a people doesn't happen exclusively through the destruction of their homes or the removal of their communities.

It can also be reinforced through the narratives that follow.

Through the suggestion that their history is irrelevant.

That their identity has an expiration date.

That the consequences of their displacement are somehow evidence that they no longer belong.

I'm not suggesting that one hurtful conversation around a table is equivalent to the violence of forced displacement.

But I am suggesting that the assumptions we make about who belongs, whose history counts, and whose suffering deserves recognition are not inconsequential.

They shape how we understand other people.

They influence what we're prepared to dismiss.

And they can help normalize the idea that a displaced people's identity is less legitimate simply because they've been displaced.

You cannot use the consequences of someone's displacement as evidence that their displacement no longer matters.

And you certainly cannot use those consequences to tell their descendants who they are allowed to be.

I think one of the things I've learned over the years is that identity isn't always a comfortable, straightforward experience.

Sometimes it's something you grow into.

Sometimes it's something you question.

Sometimes it's something you feel deeply connected to and strangely distant from at the same time.

And sometimes it's something you spend years trying to understand, only to realize that other people have been perfectly comfortable making up their minds about it on your behalf.

I'm still figuring out what being Palestinian means in the context of my own life.

I probably always will be.

But that process belongs to me.

Not to strangers online.

Not to people who think proximity determines legitimacy.

And not to people who decide that my connection to Palestine isn't substantial enough to deserve consideration.

I'm allowed to have a complicated relationship with my identity without having that identity questioned by everyone else.

I'm allowed to acknowledge that my experiences are different from those of Palestinians living under occupation or experiencing the devastation in Gaza, without being told that those differences make me less Palestinian.

I'm allowed to feel grateful for the life I've built while recognizing the suffering and limitations that have shaped the lives of people in my own family.

And I'm allowed to have convictions that I will not compromise simply because they make other people uncomfortable.

I spent enough of my younger years worrying about how other people perceived me.

I'm not particularly interested in spending the next thirty doing the same thing.

Especially not when it comes to this.

Because I know what my family has experienced.

I know what their circumstances have meant for their lives.

I know that Palestinian history didn't begin when the world started paying attention to it, and that it doesn't disappear when Palestinians are forced to build lives elsewhere.

I know that their stories deserve to be told, remembered, and believed.

And I know that I am entitled to build a life around these values, without constantly having to justify them to people who would rather I kept quiet.

I don't need everyone to agree with me.

But I do need to be able to look at myself in the mirror and know that I haven't abandoned my convictions for the sake of somebody else's comfort.

And maybe, after years of questioning where I belong, there's something almost reassuring about that.

Because for all the things I'm still figuring out about my identity, there's at least one thing I know.

I don't need anyone else's permission to be Palestinian.

And I don't need to make myself smaller to make that identity easier for someone else to accept.

xoxo, Noelle in Nantes