On Palestine, propaganda, and the lies we're told.
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I. Despair
I never had to defend my hatred of the Empire.
When Alderaan was destroyed, we knew almost nothing about it. We didn't know its songs or its rivers, who it elected or who it buried. We never needed to. A world was there, and then it was light scattered across a dead sky, and every soul in the theater knew what to feel. Our ignorance never became an argument against mourning it, and that wasn’t an oversight of judgment; it was judgment, working.
Leia stood within arm’s reach of the men who’d condemned her people, bargaining with an authority that would accept her submission but spare them no mercy. Tarkin wanted the people across the galaxy to learn the cost of defiance, and he had an entire world at his disposal to make that point understood. We watched as he turned the slaughter of millions into a lesson of obedience, and his composure only deepened the cruelty: he considered himself entitled to teach it.
Now imagine an audience that needs a second film before coming to a conclusion. They'll hear out the man at the console, weigh his necessity, comb Leia’s testimony for inconsistencies. We have a word for such an audience, and it isn't neutral.
As a child, I didn’t need persuading. I trusted the people who told me America would’ve stood with Leia. I wanted to belong to a country I could admire, and I accepted far more than I questioned because I’d already been given a version of history in which that admiration was deserved. By the time I thought to ask whose suffering had been cut from the telling, I’d already spent years defending the omissions.
Even now, admitting how readily I believed it leaves a bitter taste.
Because I have seen the Palestinian people endure an indignity many would have opposed if it were fiction: their bereavement treated as unfinished testimony, subject to examination by people who’ve already accepted the perpetrator’s explanation. The government I trusted to stand against crimes like genocide now supplies the excuses. And I've come to find that I'm surrounded by people who have to be persuaded just to even consider that a Palestinian should have the same claim to tomorrow as their own. They’ll scrutinize and cross-examine a grieving parent’s beliefs while granting the state responsible endless opportunities to explain itself.
What Israel has done to Palestinians in Gaza is irrefutably a genocide.
But my condemnation doesn’t rest on a movie. It rests on the record. In December 2024, Amnesty International concluded that Israel’s conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide. In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry reached its own genocide finding. Both weighed what the Israeli state did and the evidence of intent behind it. The record runs further back: in 1948 the Nakba uprooted over 750,000 Palestinians, and in July 2024 the International Court of Justice found Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful. Generations of lives live between those dates. No one can understand them by starting the story wherever an occupier finds the opening most convenient, as an account that begins after the dispossession asks us to judge its consequences while withholding their origins.
A writer knows what omission can do. Cut the dispossession out of an account of resistance and the reader meets a rage with no origin. Start with the response, and the violence that summoned it turns to an inherited condition nobody’s expected to explain.
I refuse to keep reading history on those terms.
I won’t grant a government that much authority over the story of the people it governs.
But even documenting the crime can leave the people themselves obscured. Palestinians have lives that precede our attention. A child had interests we'll never get to learn about, and the freedom to grow into a person nobody could yet imagine. I keep returning to that stolen duration: the years in which they could’ve contradicted our expectations, changed their mind, become an adult with an account of the world wholly their own.
Who gave anyone, let alone a government, the right to confiscate that?
A future shouldn’t have to be defended before it’s been lived.
Under the 2016 agreement, the United States pledged $38 billion in military assistance to Israel over fiscal years 2019–2028, subject to congressional appropriations; Congress approved additional military assistance in 2024. The relationship has a material cost, borne far past the people signing the agreements. It implicates even us, average United States citizens, who have no choice but to fund these weapons and bombs with our tax dollars, all while the 1% make their fifth billion and the rest of us are stuck living paycheck-to-paycheck.
I can draw all the parallels I want to the Empire, but we also need to account for the documents. A fictional comparison can bring recognition within reach; recognition has to carry us toward the people whose lives are being taken.
Superman was another hero of my childhood. A baby launched from a dying world by parents who staked everything on a life elsewhere. His whole myth is a request that we honor what they were trying to save. I can’t understand how a person can love that story and still treat the slaughter of children as a matter for debate.
Once I began questioning my country’s account of Palestine, I couldn’t keep backing its lies.
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II. Neutrality
Every empire has its Omelas: a shining city whose joy rests on a suffering it has agreed not to look at. Le Guin wrote about the ones who see the cost and walk away from it. But I've come to fear the ones who never do. They stay, and they know, and they call it complexity.
I don't want to be one of them. So I dug deeper.
Cuba. On April 6, 1960, State Department official Lester Mallory proposed squeezing Cuba's economy until it broke, describing the denial of money and supplies to bring about "hunger, desperation and overthrow of government." Those words are preserved in our own archives. In April 2026, UN experts warned that the U.S. fuel blockade was harming health care, water, and food provision on the island, and asked Washington to explain how that squared with its human rights obligations. We can all oppose repression by Cuba's government while still demanding an end to American policies that punish the people living under it. A patient waiting for treatment owes Washington no political conversion, and the right to medicine can't depend on whether a government approves of the country in which that patient lives.
Sudan. In January 2025, the United States determined that the Rapid Support Forces and allied militias had committed genocide, and imposed sanctions. In February 2026, a UN fact-finding report documented further atrocities around El Fasher, describing hallmarks of genocide against the Zaghawa and Fur communities. On May 8, 2025, Amnesty reported that Chinese weapons used by the RSF had almost certainly been re-exported by the United Arab Emirates in breach of the Darfur arms embargo. Eight days later, Washington announced a comprehensive defense partnership with the UAE.
Picture a thriller where the hero learns who is arming the villain, then shakes that supplier's hand. We'd call it a betrayal, the twist that makes us turn on the protagonist. Here it's deemed policy. A Sudanese family should be worth more than the convenience of an alliance.
Congo. I don't even have to invent American interference. Our own records describe a covert U.S. program to remove Patrice Lumumba, with plans to assassinate him, and covert funding for the government installed after Mobutu's 1960 coup. And today's atrocities have perpetrators. Amnesty's September 2026 investigation documented killings, torture, and forced labor by Rwanda-backed M23 fighters at Congolese mines, with gold and coltan trafficked into Rwanda. One miner described his brother beaten to death and buried in a mine shaft. That testimony should travel with the minerals, through every contract and supply chain, all the way to the hand that finally holds them.
What binds these histories is a refusal of accountability.
Cuba’s civilians bear the consequences of economic coercion. Sudan’s genocide demands consequences for its perpetrators and those supplying them. Congo’s people deserve protection from armed violence and exploitation, with American intervention and commercial interests examined alongside the responsibility of other governments.
I will not accept the presumption that American interests confer absolution. Expose the perpetrators. Examine our own complicity. Make every alliance answer for the atrocities it sustains.
I grew up reading about Nazi Germany, and learning how dehumanization prepares a public to tolerate persecution. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum documents how Nazi propaganda cultivated hatred and, just as dangerously, indifference toward Europe’s Jews. That history demands fidelity to its victims. It also demands that we recognize the system wherever it reassembles, and an ally’s status can't be allowed to blind us to it. Human dignity has to outlast our loyalties.
I oppose a political project that makes Palestinian dispossession the price of security. Jewish people deserve safety, and Palestinians deserve freedom; both belong within the same commitment to human dignity. My condemnation is aimed at a state's violence and the policies that enable it. Calling that condemnation antisemitic doesn't refute the evidence, while actual antisemitism endangers people whose humanity I am equally bound to defend.
Palestinians have written their own accounts of the lives and futures at stake. The poet and teacher Refaat Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023. In “If I Must Die,” he wrote:
you must live
to tell my story."
"If I must die,
let it bring hope,
let it be a tale."
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III. Hope
As an author, I can't read that request and return comfortably to worrying about whether speaking up might cost me an audience. His words ask for a life to be legible after the person living it has been killed. They leave work for those of us who still get to write.
I've put years into the lives I invent, hoping readers will carry them past the final page. There’s a responsibility in making that request. I can’t ask people to accompany characters through the uncertainty of a lost family or characters through the loss of their autonomy, then let concern for my audience govern my response to people enduring dispossession outside of my books.
If they leave, they leave.
I'll keep speaking against Israel's genocide and demanding an end to American military support that enables atrocities. I'll oppose policies that deprive Cuban civilians of necessities, demand accountability for Sudan's perpetrators and their suppliers, and refuse the exploitation consuming Congolese lives.
That commitment asks more from us than just publishing posts like this. It asks us to keep reading the investigations. To fund relief where we can. To demand answers from the officials who act in our name. To keep looking long after familiarity has made the headlines easier to scroll past and ignore.
Whatever hope those childhood stories instilled in me is still here, although it's grown harder to carry. I'm holding on to the possibility that people can change because I've had to change, and because resignation would leave the decisions with people who've already shown us what they're willing to sacrifice.
I want Palestinians to look toward futures that assume they'll be alive to live. I want peace to give back the freedom to expect tomorrow. That wish belongs equally to a Sudanese family hiding from the men hunting them, a Cuban patient waiting for treatment, a Palestinian child stuck amidst the rubble, and a Congolese miner entitled to walk home alive.
I want Palestinians to look toward futures that presume they’ll be alive to inhabit them. I want peace to give them back the freedom to expect tomorrow. That desire extends to a Sudanese family trying to survive the men targeting them, a Cuban patient waiting for treatment, and a Congolese miner entitled to come home alive. Each deserves a future beyond the suffering that finally drew the world’s attention.
I will keep writing toward that future until my last breath, tired, bogged down in despair, for the hope of a world where a Palestinian child grows old and free beside the rest of us, with decades to become whoever they choose.
And that's why I will never stop saying: