You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
We are in late March of 2025. Bombs keep falling on people who have been starved, maimed and displaced before being incinerated. The missiles are lobbed by drones and airplanes from the sky. The people burn, the ones who “make it” gather their children’s body parts. We are watching it live. Those of us who speak up are met with violence. Mahmood Khalil, a legal U.S resident, is languishing in a jail for speaking up. This is the land of the free where we can speak our minds and live our lives in difference. That is except if you are a Palestinian or if you speak the obvious – Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza and the U.S is aiding and abetting it. When you speak some version of these words, you are met with violence on a bad day and a deafening silence on every other day.
One of my patients is a wealthy Palestinian-American man with young children. He cannot understand how his children are worth so much less that his wealthy Christian and Jewish neighbors. He scrolls down his Instagram page to witness the death of thousands of children in Gaza who were starved and maimed before being incinerated. He tells his neighbors what he is seeing. He is met with silence. A silence that tells him to be quiet, to stop seeing and feeling because it might disturb our enjoyment of the many luxuries that define our life.
The assault on free speech as it relates to Palestine is not confined to Palestine, it is systemic. It is now an assault on trans individuals and trans care, it is an assault on women’s bodies (abortion restrictions), it is an assault on immigrants (millions of people are slated for deportation and the people at the borders are being imprisoned, caged, and harmed), it is an assault on the institutions of democracy (the education department, the Kennedy center, the FBI, CIA, and the justice department are all being gutted and reshaped along ideological lines), it is an assault on the media (Maggie Haberman a Pulitzer prize NYT reporter was just referred to by the