The stories you've been given about Palestinians are not lies. They are something more structurally insidious than lies: accurate about events and silent about causes. The news tells you what happened on a given Tuesday. It cannot tell you, bound by its own form and the professional architecture of both-sides framing, what logic produced Tuesday. That requires a different kind of honesty.
Fiction doesn't have that obligation.
I grew up Palestinian in America, consuming the same pop culture as everyone around me: comics, sci-fi, the founding documents from social studies. In those stories, I found the clearest structural account of what was happening to my people. More precise than the news. More honest than politics. Not because the writers intended it, but because fiction that takes its own stakes seriously has no obligation to split the difference.
"All Men Are Created Equal" Was Written for Someone Else
I know who the authors meant when they wrote "men." I know what institution they were willing to preserve while asserting that claim. The tension is real.
But the sentence doesn't belong to them anymore.
A Palestinian kid reading it learns something about how language works: that a claim, once made publicly, belongs to everyone it was never intended for. The words say what they say. When the world acts otherwise — when you are told structurally and explicitly that you are less-than — you have something to point at. Not a guarantee. A counter-claim that the world has to keep answering for.
When pressure doesn't have a face, you go looking for things that do. Oppression can feel like air: everywhere, hard to point to. You need something structural to lean against. Not comfort. Architecture. For anyone the world has told is less-than, that sentence in the Declaration can still function as a claim the world has to answer.
What Fiction Let Me See
In the stories I grew up with, control does not always arrive with spectacle. It arrives with administrators, forms, permits, and a slow rewrite of what counts as normal. Something temporary hardens into daily life, and people inside it make a thousand small decisions about what they can accept and what acceptance costs.
I recognized in that pattern the feeling of life managed from above: resistance becoming part of identity because ordinary accommodation starts to look like surrender.
Balance between a structure and the people inside it is not honest. It's management.
The hovering ship scene stayed with me for years. It does not need to fire to do its work. If you have lived with a non-neutral sky, it is not spectacle. It is recognition.
When Survival Becomes Doctrine
One recurring story in modern fiction goes like this: a persecuted people decide they will never again be vulnerable, and from that wound they build a nation at full intensity. The logic is coherent. The cost can be devastating.
As a Palestinian, I cannot read that logic as abstraction. I read it as lived structure: survival pursued without reciprocal safety for the people already there.
Another line from another story cracked something open in me: a nation can live inside a people when place is taken away.
Palestinians built the same structure without a comic book. The key is not a museum artifact. It is a documented title to a specific house on a specific street, passed to children who have never seen the door. The flag is not decoration. It is a claim that memory can carry territorial meaning across generations. These are not only symbols of loss. They are portable claims of belonging.
A Nation Interrupted
Look at what Palestinians have produced under the actual conditions of the last seventy-five years. The doctors, engineers, writers, mathematicians, artists. Built in refugee camps, under siege, in diaspora, against the systematic dismantling of every institution designed to ensure continuity. That is documented record. The capacity was never the constraint.
That story is not only fantasy to me. It is a thought experiment about interruption: what might a people become if their institutions were allowed to persist, their resources protected, and their future not repeatedly broken from outside?
Many people read that as fantasy. I read it as diagnosis: what was interrupted, what might have continued, and how the theft of future can matter more than the theft of past.
Why Fiction Told the Truth
The news gave you events. Fiction gave me the logic.
They were trying to be true to the hardest version of the problem they could construct. The truth turned out to be general enough to be mine.
Palestinians live in the gap between what stories say is possible and what the world has decided to permit. The stories were more honest about that gap than anything produced by the institutions responsible for managing it.
I still believe the stories. That's the only honest position.