Gaza, Apartheid, and the Price of Dignity

By Nancy O'Brien Simpson

Photo: wikidata.org by Ali Hamad of APAimages, for Wafa, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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There is a grief I carry in my chest like a stone, and it grows heavier every time I hear someone say, “Israel has a right to defend itself,” as if that sentence erases the history that came before the rockets and the rubble.

Let me say this plainly: The displacement of the Palestinian people in 1948 was wrong.

It was wrong then, and it is wrong now. It was not a necessary evil, or a tragic footnote to statehood. It was theft—brutal, unrelenting, and enforced at gunpoint. More than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled during what is known in Arabic as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Over 400 villages were razed, their names vanished from maps, their histories denied. And those who remained were left to live as second-class citizens in what was once their homeland.

That should have been the outrage.

Instead, the world looked away. And for seventy-five years, Palestinians have been asked to endure the unendurable, to suffer silently under occupation, to remain docile in their dispossession.

 
What Would You Have Them Do?
Critics are quick to condemn Hamas—and yes, their tactics are horrifying. Civilians should never be targets. But when the oppressed strike back, even brutally, we must ask: what other door was open to them?

What would you have them do, when diplomacy brings only further subjugation?

History is full of the same question.

What did it take to end slavery in the United States? Words? Petitions? Or a war that tore the country apart?

Was John Brown—a man who raided a federal armory to arm enslaved people—a madman, or a prophet?

What broke the back of white rule in South Africa? Was it silence? Was it asking politely?

No. It was resistance. Sometimes violent, often condemned, always born of desperation.

And yet we have the gall to demand that Palestinians resist politely. That they ask for freedom in a language their oppressors never needed to understand.

 
The Crime of Hamas Is Not Greater Than the Crime of Apartheid
This is not a justification of terrorism. It is a recognition of proportionality.

Hamas did not invent this violence. They inherited it.

They were born in refugee camps under blockade, in a Gaza Strip that is among the most densely populated places on Earth. Over two million people live in an area roughly the size of Detroit, half of them children. Israel controls the borders, airspace, sea, and even the electromagnetic spectrum. The UN has repeatedly described Gaza as “unlivable”, citing water that is 97% undrinkable, electricity limited to a few hours a day, and mass unemployment nearing 45%.

This is the setting into which rockets are fired. This is where Hamas builds tunnels. This is where children sleep in rubble and wake to drones.

Violence is horror. But endless, grinding injustice is also violence.
And the slow, daily strangulation of a people often leaves them with nothing but the scream.

 
Who Gets to Be Human?
This is the real question underneath it all.

When Israeli children die, we mourn them. When Palestinian children die, we rationalize. “Collateral damage.” “Human shields.” “Unfortunate, but Hamas started it.”

No. A child is not a shield. A child is not a soldier. A child is a life.

As of this writing, more than 14,000 Palestinian children have been killed since October 2023. Thousands more are buried under the rubble. If that number doesn’t break your heart—or shake your certainty—you aren’t defending democracy. You’re defending hierarchy.

 
Peace Without Justice Is Just a Pause
If we truly want peace, we must stop asking the oppressed to carry the moral burden alone.
There will never be lasting peace in Palestine until there is justice. And justice begins with recognition: of the Nakba, of the occupation, of apartheid.

Without that reckoning, calls for peace ring hollow. They are not solutions. They are silencing.

And if we cannot stomach the resistance that rises in response to that silencing—then perhaps the problem isn’t the method. Perhaps it’s the truth that resistance refuses to let us ignore.