Palestinians have long been expected to perform their defeat, embodying restraint while rehearsing moderation and denouncing violence selectively. Yet time and again, these roles are declined. The prisoner who chooses silence over confession; the hunger striker who displaces the temporality of domination by submitting his body to time itself; the mother who insists on naming her dead child not as a victim, but as a martyr; the camp that refuses to dissolve into the dust of humanitarianism—these are not just acts of resistance, but refusals of capture.
It is precisely this refusal that breaks open the false binary that Israel now offers the world: between extermination and containment — “Gideon’s Chariots” and the Egyptian plan.
They aren’t alternatives to one another, but rather structural co-conspirators. One would eliminate Palestinians as subjects through military sterilization, and the other would disarm and administer them through international bureaucracy. One is an open genocide, and the other is a managed disappearance.
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