Everyone loves the myth that we have progressed,
that tyranny was buried with the bones of old empires
and the past taught us something not to repeat.
The lie we tell ourselves,
that the world became more humane,
more moral,
more evolved.
But nothing changes too much.
It just becomes repackaged
and sold to the world as progress,
while the foundations of oppression remain untouched.
Genocide puts on a clean shirt.
Colonialism learns to speak at press conferences.
Apartheid smiles for the camera.
War crimes come with subtitles, disclaimers, excuses, hashtags, and justifications.
They hide well in the solid structures
they had time to build.
Now the bombs are “precision.”
The siege is “containment.”
The victims are “human shields.”
And the occupied, including their children, are “terrorists.”
Colonialism wears a suit this century.
It sits in conference rooms, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
It signs deals with oil-soaked hands.
It builds walls in the name of peace.
It drops white phosphorus in the name of security.
It withholds food, water, and medicine and calls it “policy.”
It starves people and calls it strategy.
It erases culture and uses AI videos to promote real estate development.
You call it civilisation.
Does being civil in this age mean conquest with better branding?
Occupation becomes “border protection.”
Apartheid becomes “national security.”
Ethnic cleansing becomes “demographic engineering.”
And tyranny?
Tyranny writes statements of concern
while shipping more weapons
and storing rewards in the bank accounts of the wealthy.
You say the world has changed,
but Gaza still burns.
Bulldozers still crawl through the West Bank.
Snipers still aim for kneecaps, reproductive organs, and headshots.
Mothers and fathers dig through rubble with their bare hands,
screaming the names of missing children the world has lost.
You ask us to prove our humanity
in a language we were forced to learn for dialogue and diplomacy,
to plead and beg and thank you for the crumbs you throw.
You want our grief palatable,
our pain calm,
our anger polite.
But we do not owe you that.
We have always known the land,
the soil and the ocean that remembers our footsteps,
the olive harvests, the wind, the dust,
the sacred stillness before the calls to prayer at sunset.
You see broken buildings.
We see broken promises.
You call it a conflict.
We call it what it is,
a 77-year campaign of erasure,
rebranded as self-defence.
A slow, cruel, high-tech genocide,
watched in high-definition
and justified in your media
by people who have never smelled tear gas
or tasted grief with every meal.
We told you.
We told you this was never about religion,
never about two sides,
never about ancient hatred.
This was about land.
Power.
Erasure.
All dressed up in Western talking points
and funded by nations who claim to stand for human rights.
But now,
now your silence is cracking.
Now you cannot unsee the mass graves,
the flattened schools,
the children wrapped in white,
like angels turned to ash.
And you panic in your complicity,
not out of care,
but out of fear of what you support being exposed.
Now you scroll slower.
Now you hesitate before reposting the lie.
Now you whisper, “They told us so.”
Yes.
We told you so.
So too did our elders before us.
You refused to listen.
And we are still here,
still rising from rubble,
still naming our dead,
still holding the keys of return,
still planting seeds in soil soaked with memory.
Because we are not just surviving,
we are exposing,
we are witnessing,
we are the echo that refuses to die.
This is why we laugh
when people say, “it’s [insert year here], get with the times”,
as if humans have learnt to stop all genocides.
But no worries for your discomfort.
We will do the work, with or without you.
For we, the custodians of the land,
remember the original name: Falasteen.
Yasmeen Hussein
From Letters to Palestine
https://substack.com/@yaffameen