How to Answer the Stupidest Questions About Palestinians

In the Zionist imagination, we are the aggressors, the invaders. And while Ben-Gurion can say to his disciples, “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves…politically, we are the aggressors and they defend themselves…. The country is theirs,” most Israelis, raised on a different chorus, do ignore the truth among themselves. They believe Palestine is theirs by divine decree and we, “the children of darkness,” have stolen it from them. This aphorism, absurd and ahistorical as it may be, is not weakened by the truth—it exists despite it.

Palestinians were invented in the 1960s by Yasser Arafat to be a thorn in Jews’ side, or so the saying goes. Israel is defending itself is another mythological parable. While such a claim is silly to me, it is sacred to many. Thus, it would seem unwise to smirk. Mocking false convictions often strengthens them, some argue. When you tell a believer that their idol is inanimate, the stone of the idol turns to flesh before their eyes. What is suppressed festers; what is silenced grows louder; psychological reactance, and so on. But there are two holes in this argument: One, even with the best will, belief is far less deterministic and impartial and far more malleable than we would like it to be. Two, this argument assumes that the person hurling such aspersions is the intended audience of my response. But such individuals, whose telepathic abilities entitle them to call me genocidal, who believe that I am part of a fake, invented people, are not going to have a change of heart if proven wrong. Certainly not in the auditorium where his enemy is speaking. Certainly not when their goal is chaos, not reconciliation.

Even if we take into consideration the possibility that the provocateurs in the crowd genuinely believe the bullshit they are spewing, we drastically underestimate how personal incredulity, cherry-picking, and confirmation bias distort how the indoctrinated receive, classify, and retain information. We forget that belief has little to do with truth. People tend to believe the powerful, the compelling, not the sincere. The truth, that which is factual and historically accurate, is irrelevant in the face of the dominant, institutionally mainstreamed narratives that forge their truth. “Conquerors, my son, consider as true history only what they have themselves fabricated.”

When confronting leading or loaded questions on a public stage, it is imperative to remember that there is an audience to address: all kinds of people—curious, sympathetic, skeptical, receptive, on-the-fence—people whom you need to speak to with both words and body language. One option is to accept that you have been charged and stand trial. Plead your case before this self-appointed judge, gesturing at the dossiers of exonerating evidence you have prepared, hoping for acquittal. Another option is to reject his jurisdiction and to reject the premise that you are a defendant, to refuse to live any more of your life in cross-examination.

Again, I am often asked if I want to “throw Israelis into the sea.” My answer has become increasingly facetious, even flippant. “If they are so afraid of drowning why don’t they learn how to swim?” Sometimes I get gasps, occasionally a muffled snicker, and other times, unabridged laughter. After the joke comes the thesis: Such questions are red herrings and straw man fallacies asked in bad faith. I obviously believe in freedom and dignity for all, etcetera. Those asking, What happens to the settlers? have not once thought about the fate of the 6 million Palestinian refugees agonizing in exile. This is not so much a polemic but a fatigued observation, reiterated incessantly. Such distracting questions feed the discursive loop that prioritizes the settlers’ theoretical future over our material present that is already marked with extermination.

As Steven Salaita writes, “The question ‘but what about the Israelis?’ presents itself as innocent, perhaps even crucial, but its underlying rhetoric is insidious…. It informs the audience that Zionism must be affirmed before the Palestinian can speak of liberation.” As such, the decision to answer a derailing question becomes a political act: Should I take the bait? Should I skip over the tanks that set our neighborhoods ablaze, the fires engulfing Khan Yunis to extinguish hypothetical flames? Should I forget about the wells they have poisoned, the waters they have arrogated to quench an imaginary thirst? Lately, I just scoff at the question.

But why laugh at a flammable question when I know my words will be twisted and turned upside down? Why make snarky remarks in front of thousands, many of whom might, on a subconscious level, already be suspicious of me? Because, most important, it is funny. It feels good to laugh, to ridicule the ridiculous. I could cite Freud, but my grandmother said it more eloquently: “If we don’t laugh, we cry.” If we move beyond the reductive idea that the humor of the oppressed is merely a “defense mechanism,” we can reveal its strategic advantage and transformative potential.

On stage, on television, whenever I talk about the brutality of Zionism and the genocide it is waging against Palestinians, I routinely come across assertions like, A second Holocaust is afoot and the Jews are afraid. Such postulations act as a gag order, a muzzle, and conversations become whispers. Although there are numerous people who experience profound cognitive dissonance in the face of brazen colonial projection, most feel that they lack the language or necessary audacity for rebuttal. After all, no one wants to be accused of “blood libel.” Here, facetious or flippant responses—irreverence at large, really—become pedagogical.

So deride liars who throw rocks and hide their hands; deride manipulators who exploit taboos and tragedies to maintain a monopoly on violence, who craft their words to extract an urgent, penitent reverence out of you. Derision, in this context, teaches those who share your frustrations that they should not be shamed into accepting an upside-down world. It acts as a catalyst for critical thinking and intellectual autonomy, empowering the audience to question the status quo, to satirize it, to strip it naked before its yes-men and sycophants.

Irreverence subverts the terms of engagement and rearranges the topics of discussion in accordance with their moral or political weight. It does more than merely disrupt the flow of conversation; it actively reconfigures the hierarchy of what deserves outrage—the serious, the consequential—forcing a reevaluation of priorities. Or, in other words, irreverence “functions at the level of unseating previously established patterns of power—it works to move the morally trivial from equal status with the truly serious.”

Some of my friends, particularly the upwardly mobile Palestinians among them, are often dismayed with my caustic approach. It is not as amusing to them but terrifying, and I can understand why. As Palestinians, our every civic engagement becomes a public trial. Our every utterance is a test of character. We are always one error away from transforming into terrorists. I misspoke at a march in London some time ago and that simple slip-up spawned tabloid headlines and led to the Metropolitan police investigating me for terrorism. Vague and broadly defined “anti-terror” laws have translated into a far-reaching crackdown on political advocacy, nationalist expression, and anticolonial speech, so much so that virtually anything can be interpreted as “incitement” or “material support for terrorism.”

For the Arab in the West, the task is to carefully detonate presumptions or suffer their explosions. We must measurably show, before all else, our distance from the charges lodged at us. We need to prove, in the face of preposterous hostility, that we are respectable civilians, journalists, medics, and professors who “are not like Hamas.” One blunder is enough to give credence to the rumors that haunt us. The numbers of casualties we report? Inflated. Our tragedies? Orchestrated in “Pallywood.” Our mutilated children, incinerated by Israeli warplanes? Dolls used as war propaganda.

So we write our books and make our films knowing that anything we say—seriously or in jest, even anything we imply—can and will be used against us in the courts of law and public opinion. We talk to each other as if the sniper is standing over our shoulder. And I understand the impulse to self-censor. I know that as Palestinians our notoriety precedes us; we are guilty until proven otherwise and otherwise is often impossible. I know that I probably do not resemble myself in most people’s imaginations. But there are vast universes outside of the sniper’s gaze, worlds beyond the colonizer’s field of vision. What matters more than how we will be viewed by our enemies or our allies is how we view one another and what we inspire in one another. Is it self-respect or self-reproach?

To be irreverent at the podium is to remind yourself that you are part of a collective, a scrutinized people whose psychic and affective allowances are shrinking endlessly; the working classes, the exhausted, the under-resourced, those who do not have access to Ivy Leagues or a knack for doublespeak. And in that performance of irreverence, you enmesh yourself in their complexities, you make room for them in the public discourse, no matter how they articulate themselves, and you reassign the blame from the victim to the perpetrator. Otherwise, we would be punching down—we would save ourselves and ascend in our careers by throwing others under the bus. For one to be described as genteel, someone else needs to be viewed as savage.

Who among our enemies is given the microphone? Government officials, whose remarks, by virtue of their positions, are often featured in the introductory paragraphs of news articles. And who among us is allowed to speak? Most of the time, it is the bereaved, the dispossessed, and the vulnerable, those who are thrust into the domain of advocacy in spite of themselves and individually transformed into one-person media ministries, without perfect scripts or institutional backing.

I am not flippant because of contrarian tendencies or for the entertainment value. I am flippant because I realize that the majority of the Palestinian people do not possess the capacity or desire to coddle ethnocentric values and racist attitudes. Where, in the war zone, would I find the space to alter our vocabulary? And why should I want to? Why would I want to search in our dreams for an indicting lucidity? Or comb through our colloquialisms looking to filter out the uncouth? Again, why should I bypass the fires engulfing our cities to extinguish hypothetical flames?