“Courage is a heavy gift to carry, Francisca Albanese UN Special Repertoire says, “but not as heavy as 13,000 small coffins weighing on our conscience”.

Do the colonizers with settler-colonial project in mind have any conscience? However, for the colonized the question poses itself differently.

When “to be or not to be” is the choice, “It is nobler,” says Shakespeare, “not to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” but “to take arms against a sea of troubles” by mustering all the strength and courage the colonized have.

Pushed to the wall the Palestinians fought back. Had it been possible, by now they would have been thrown into the sea to be drowned and perished. Unlike the Zionists, the Palestinians decided to die fighting gracefully on their land rather than accepting Haavara to flee or accepting “Bakshish”, the amount of charitable money that Roosevelt wrongly assumed and suggested to Weizman to offer them.

After meeting with Abdul Aziz on Quincy, with his goats and concubines, Roosevelt developed an imaginary conception of Arabs. For the Western world, the Hashemites have helped to maintain the illusory stereotypical image of Arabs even today, which Palestinians have proven wrong.

Resistance is contagious. Once it starts at a certain place, it spreads like wildfire. An objective analyst who watched the armed struggle unfolding in Algeria, Vietnam, and lately in Palestine can see why Rosa Luxemburg was convinced that “The masses are in reality their own leaders, dialectically creating their own development process…They are rocks on which the final victory of the revolution will be built”.

Wherever resistance against oppression rears its head and solidifies by inflicting painful blows to the oppressor, through the frontal attack the bourgeois intellectual or Gramsci’s organic intellectuals engage themselves in condemning the violence and supporting a dialogue or negotiations to solve the unsolvable conflict.

How can there be a negotiation between an oppressor who knows no other language but that of violence, and the oppressed tired of receiving lashes on its back? There cannot be any negotiations between a sword and a neck, Ghassan Kanafani succinctly replies.

The word negotiation always comes into play when the balance of force begins to tilt in favour of the oppressed. No word is neutral, and so is negotiation, which is normally offered by the hegemonic class from the position of........

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