POSTSCRIPT

THE CONTRIBUTORS to Our Vision for Liberation have offered herein their own vision of how to advance the Palestinian struggle, each in their own respective area of study and work. Their rich experiential insights have been further embellished by the proud legacies they have shared that, in some cases, span several generations. In light of the lessons we will have hopefully gleaned, a compelling question remains: where do we go from here?

This book is not, and was never intended to be, an alternative to a centralized Palestinian vision, one that originates from a cohesive Palestinian body politic, itself an outcome of a fair and representative democratic process. Instead, our goal has been to communicate several important messages, leading amongst them that Palestinians can and surely must speak for themselves, that their insights into the many levels of Palestinian struggle provide invaluable operational instruction to inform future efforts, and that united Palestinian political, cultural and historical discourses are achievable despite the factionalism of internal Palestinian politics and the deliberate marginalization of Palestinians regionally—whether through official Arab normalization with Israel or internationally through the disproportionate focus Israel has succeeded in bringing to bear on its “security” and its historical narrative, even as Palestinians are still denied their most basic human rights.

Our great hope is that future researchers and writers on Palestine can now appreciate the centrality of the Palestinian view in the so-called “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” or, more accurately, in the ongoing Israeli colonial project in Palestine. Telling the story of Palestine and the Palestinian people without Palestinian voices being at its core simply cannot be done. Period. Not only is denying the Palestinians a claim to their own narrative unethical, but impractical as well.

It must be emphasized that the 30 intellectuals who have contributed to this volume are but a microcosm of a much greater Palestinian intellectual phenomenon, one that can be witnessed in Palestine, throughout the Arab world and, indeed, around the globe. When Palestinian poet, Rafeef Ziadah, wrote her seminal poem: “We Teach Life Sir,” the meaning is applicable in both the realms of symbolism and tangible experience, as well. The fact that Palestinian teacher Hanan al-Hroub won the Global Teacher Prize in 2016 is but one of numerous examples of how Palestinians can extract hope from pain, and use that hope for the benefit of humanity. It is telling that al-Hroub’s well-deserved award was in recognition for supporting Palestinian children traumatized by Israeli violence.

So, where do we go from here? We use this book as the beginning of a forward-thinking conversation on Palestine, led by engaged Palestinian intellectuals, whose allegiance is not to a political party or to a rigid ideology, but to the Palestinian people themselves. After all, as “Che” Guevara said many years ago, “liberators do not exist. It is the peoples who liberate themselves.”

—Ramzy Baroud
November 2021