Palestinians are showing that they will not be erased

For decades, Israel, aided and abetted by the American empire, has sought to politically erase Palestine from the map. Over the past few days, Palestinians have proved, once again, that they won’t easily give up their indigenous claim to and sovereignty over the land stolen from them.

I do not use “sovereignty” here to mean “the authority to govern a land” in the narrow Euro-American sense. Rather, I’m speaking of an authority to govern that stems from the deep, non-utilitarian connection between a people and their ancestral land – a...