What Makes Life Richer: Notes on Season of Migration to the North

Gender, Human nature, Individualism, Intimacy, connection, justice, narratives, Supremacy, The patriarchy, Western hypocrisy, women

Between Warmth and Coldness

On Culture, Power, and the Texture of Life

I have been reading Season of Migration to the North as part of our Arab Women in Switzerland (AWIS) book club, where we are exploring literature from across the Arab world. I didn’t expect it to land as deeply as it did.

I decided to spare my book club group the enormous amount of things I wanted to say and put them here instead.

This book is a masterpiece.

Tayeb Salih unravels colonialism—what it is, and the abuse at its core. He shows how it operates, how it embeds itself, how it sustains itself. He exposes the fraud at the center of the Western narrative.

Reading it felt like coming full circle.

It also helped me articulate something I have been trying to express for a long time.

There is a common belief that subscribing to collectivistic values must mean you accept forgoing your individual autonomy – that the feeling of obligation that is at the heart of these cultural values necessarily comes at the expense of individual freedom. 

I have often found it difficult to explain that these are not mutually exclusive.

How deeply I value my parents’ approval, how much I want to meet their expectations—
and at the same time, how firmly I hold on to my right to make my own decisions, to pursue my own aspirations.

It is not a contradiction.

It is something that has to be constantly negotiated—especially when those expectations and personal desires pull in different directions.

And it is not always easy.

It does not always work.

Not everyone experiences this as a choice. For some, these obligations are freely embraced; for others, they are enforced.

And many do not have the power to break free from them.

Let me start from the beginning.

Shortly after I began the book, I had to pause.

A Familiar Feeling I Couldn’t Articulate

There was something in the way Tayeb Salih writes about the village—about people, about relationships—that felt deeply familiar.

A kind of rootedness. Something I don’t find everywhere else.
A way of living that is less transactional, less mediated, more present.

The narrator describes feeling as if “ice had melted inside him”—a return to warmth after time spent in “countries where whales die from coldness.”

And then, more precisely:

“Not like a feather in the wind, but like a palm tree, a creature that has an origin, roots, and purpose.”

And later in the novel, Salih gives language to something even deeper than belonging:

  • continuity
  • wholeness
  • a sense of mattering

You see it again in how he describes his grandfather—fixed, continuous, almost immovable in a world that keeps shifting.

And in the Nile:
a presence without which there is no beginning and no end.

I found myself thinking:

this is what I’ve always felt but never fully articulated about the lived experience in places like Egypt—and what seems to be shared with places like Sudan.

The texture of life in these cultures.

So I wrote, mid-reading:

“I find it beautiful in capturing feelings of our culture and how it differs from Northern European or Western culture. Something about rootedness and how less transactional, less functional it is. It also feels as if he sees the relationship between colonizer and colonized in the same gendered way I do.”

Later, I realized that this gendered reading is not marginal—it’s central to the novel.

Mustafa Sa’eed’s sexual conquests of European women (as I found out when I researched it) are often read as an inversion and mirror of colonial violence—the colonized body “conquering” the colonizer’s women, turning the imperial gaze back on itself. 

Salih frames the colonial encounter as inherently sexual and penetrative, and Mustafa makes this explicit in how he understands himself.

Power, Gender, and Colonialism

This is a connection that Tayeb Salih depicts masterfully.

Mustafa Sa’eed’s relationships with European women are not about desire. They are about:

  • control
  • domination
  • exploitation

They follow the same logic as colonialism—only on a personal scale.

At first glance, it may look like a reversal: the colonized man “conquering” the colonizer’s women.

But it isn’t.

It is a personal form of revenge.

Nothing structural is reversed. Europe remains intact. The system—and its hierarchy—remain intact.

What Mustafa reveals is something deeper:

how profoundly the logic of colonization can be internalized—and how far its effects reach.

Even in resisting it, one continues to operate within its terms.
It dictates the operating system one ends up using—even in resistance.

It is at the very end, in Chapter 9, that Tayeb Salih makes this explicit.

Mustafa does not simply describe colonialism—we hear him declare how he becomes it.

He presents himself as:

  • “the cross”
  • “gunpowder”
  • the “rape of Africa”

as if he carries within him the entire machinery of Western expansion and violence—not opposing it, but embodying it.

In his trial speech, he does not defend himself—he indicts.

He traces a long lineage of violence:

“جرثومة العنف الأوروبي” — a germ of European violence, carried for over a thousand years.

What he brings, he says, is nothing new:

“قطرة من السم” — only a drop of the poison you Europeans injected into history.

And then the logic of revenge becomes explicit:

“أتيتكم غازياً” — I came to you as a conqueror.

He ends by dismantling the myth:

“Othello was a lie.”

In his lectures, he speaks of using “inventions”—fabrications designed to seduce. In doing so, he mirrors something deeper: how entire narratives are constructed, repeated, and eventually accepted as truth.

There is a moment where he reflects on how blatant lies transform into truths—how history itself becomes something that serves power, packaging and selling illusion.

This same logic governs his relationships.

With Ann, domination is disguised as desire. She appears to choose submission, even to worship him—but this “choice” is constructed. Manufactured. She is made to believe in the illusion he builds around himself.

This is where domination succeeds.

But with Jane, it fails.

She does not believe. She does not submit. She resists, provokes, destabilizes. For the first time, he encounters a limit—someone who does not enter the illusion.

And it breaks him.

Everything then collapses inward.

At that moment, he describes what he feels:

  • humiliation
  • loneliness
  • being lost

“الذلة… الوحدة… الضياع”

And so not randomly Saleh brings us to the mother.

Her voice returns to Mustafa:

“إنها حياتك وأنت حر فيها”
It is your life, and you are free in it.

What sounds like freedom reveals itself as something else:

not grounding,
but absence.

Not rootedness,
but detachment.

This is where it begins:

a self without anchor,
a life without embeddedness.

And from there, a pull toward the “north”—

toward coldness, distance, and abstraction.

This contrast—between rootedness and detachment, warmth and coldness— that Saleh implies is the principal difference between the narrator and Mustafa, points to something deeper.

It points beyond the individual.

To something more fundamental.

It brings us to the other question that runs alongside power, gender, and colonialism:

culture.

The texture of life—and how profoundly it differs across cultures.

Two Ways of Living — Cultures

As I kept reading, I found myself reflecting less on characters and more on ways of living—a subject at the center of my own inquiries: what is shaped by culture, and what is not.

Very broadly—and imperfectly—we can recognize patterns.

Some cultures tend to organize life around:

  • the individual
  • autonomy
  • systems and institutions

Others organize life around:

  • relationships
  • kinship
  • interconnectedness

The first often produces strong individual freedom—but also isolation.
The second produces connection—but also constraint.

And this is where Tayeb Salih is especially powerful: he doesn’t explain these differences—he shows them, through the lived experiences of the narrator and those around him.

What Is Culture Responsible For?

These different cultures—understood as historically shaped systems of living—can appear, in especially those dimensions, almost like opposites.

Many writers have highlighted this polarity– mostly as cold and hot.

I think Trevor Noah used ice and fire to describe his european father and south african mother. 

They produce different ways of organizing life—and ultimately, of living it.

But

Neither culture can eliminate all violence, injustice, or cruelty. These are part of the human condition and what it can produce. 

Culture alone cannot do that. These can only be mediated through systems of organization—whether state-based or communal—that structure and enforce the rules by which opportunity and freedom are distributed equally. By which hate and harm can be restrained. The ideal system organizes and regulates power fairly. 

Even then:

  • no system eliminates greed or malice
  • no structure prevents all abuse

There will always be individuals who exploit or bypass whatever rules or laws are in place.

So even in the most just system imaginable:

hardship, pain and suffering, and even violence remain part of the human condition. 

Which means the question changes.

A Different Question

If no culture can eliminate harm—though it may reduce it—then what actually matters?

The novel helped me reframe the question:

not whether life can be free of hardship… or even abuse,
but how that hardship is lived.

This is precisely where culture matters most.

Chapter 7 — The Moment It Clicked

There’s a sequence in Chapter 7 that stayed with me:

  • the oppressive heat of the day 
  • the passing mention of violence
  • the gathering at night—cars forming a circle, people dancing, staying up together

Nothing dramatic happens. And yet everything is there.

Life is hard. The heat is relentless. Violence exists, almost casually.

And still—people gather.

They laugh. They dance. They endure the night together.
(even in something as small as sharing a cigarette)

That chapter, for me, contained the whole idea:

Can we experience joy despite hardship—even brutality?
And perhaps more importantly:
does that determine which way of life feels more livable?

What becomes clear is this:

Life is undoubtedly harsh. Violence is ever-present.
But what matters is how we live through it.

More precisely:

Community does not eliminate hardship—but it mediates it, absorbs it, and makes it survivable.

This goes beyond “warmth.”

It suggests that:

a life rooted in togetherness prevents hardship from becoming something worse—isolating, corrosive, and ultimately hollowing life of its essence.

And this brings me to another question—one I have been thinking about for a long time.

Not really grappling with it, because I’ve always had an answer.
But searching for the evidence to support it.

Are cultures rooted in collectivism—in kinship, in tribal structures—incompatible with democratic or liberal values?

Can a socially just system emerge and grow within them?

I think the answer is unequivocally yes.

These cultural foundations are not fundamentally opposed to social justice.

Yes, they place greater value on the community than on the individual.
But that does not mean they are inherently opposed to a just distribution of freedom, power and authority.

Oppression is not, in itself, a cultural trait.

So the question becomes:

are oppressive outcomes produced by culture—or by something else?

It seems to me that the answer lies in the factors shaping how the organization of power:
where it resides,
how it is structured,
whether it is concentrated or shared.

Social justice, then, is not a product of culture at all, but of the systems that organize and distribute power—systems that can exist within any culture.

Bint Majzoub

Image created by ChatGPT

The Paradox

Then there is Bint Majzoub.

She is unforgettable.

She speaks openly about sex. She laughs. She is bold—at times even profane—and yet she is not shunned. She is respected.

She does not fit the image of a rigid, conservative society.

Instead, she reveals something else:

that this culture already contains—or at least can tolerate—

  • female independence and assertiveness
  • openness
  • ease with female sexuality

So the issue is not absence.

The issue is distribution.

Her freedom is:

  • conditional
  • tied to status
  • ultimately granted by men

And then there is Hosna—denied even the most basic autonomy.

What Do We Make of This?

Bint Majzoub reveals something powerful:

this culture already embodies a deeply human and rich way of living.

It also contains the ingredients for a more equal society—one in which freedoms and opportunities could be more justly distributed.

But these possibilities have not been cultivated. These capacities exist, yet they have not been fully realized or extended.

The limitation, then, is not cultural.

There is a tendency to look at the oppression of women in many of our societies and treat it as evidence of something inherent to the culture itself.

But this overlooks a broader historical reality.

Across time and place, most human societies—including Western ones—have been deeply patriarchal: hierarchical, with power unevenly distributed.

What we are observing is not a cultural exception, but a historical pattern.

What we are observing is not a cultural defect, but a recurring stage in human social organization.

It is only relatively recently that many Western societies have begun to move along this spectrum—challenging inherited beliefs through education and redefining ideas about gender, equality, and universal human rights.

In fact, research supports this:

Many precolonial societies, including some Indigenous American societies and ancient Egypt, afforded women significantly greater autonomy, authority, and participation in social and economic life than what later European Christian colonial systems brought.

Although colonialism did not introduce patriarchy everywhere, it often reshaped gender relations into more rigid, centralized, and exclusionary forms of male dominance.

The same applies more broadly to questions of social justice.

Some Illustrations

In parts of North America, many Indigenous societies were:

  • matrilineal (descent traced through women)
  • matrilocal (men moved into women’s households)
  • structured around complementary gender roles rather than strict hierarchy

A strong example is the Haudenosaunee Confederacy:

Women—especially clan mothers:

  • selected and removed male chiefs
  • controlled land use and agricultural production
  • held authority over kinship and lineage

Power was not absent—it was distributed, and often not concentrated exclusively in men.

European settler colonialism introduced:

  • patrilineal property systems
  • Christian doctrines of male authority
  • state legal systems that excluded women from political power

The effect was not only political domination, but a restructuring of gender relations toward more rigid forms of male dominance.

If we go further back, we see a similar pattern of variation.

In Ancient Egypt:

Women had:

  • full legal personhood
  • equal rights in inheritance and property ownership
  • the ability to:
    • own, buy, and sell property
    • initiate divorce
    • engage in contracts and litigation

They could act independently in economic and legal life, without requiring a male guardian.

Women also occupied significant symbolic and political roles: they ruled as pharaohs, were represented among the highest deities, and, as queens and royal women, held substantial influence within the court and the state.

They were not confined in the same way as:

  • classical Greek women
  • later Roman women
  • many medieval European women

This was exceptional not only for the ancient world, but even in comparison with much later European societies, such as the Victorian era, where women’s legal, economic, and social autonomy was significantly more constrained.

Even though:

  • political power—especially kingship—remained overwhelmingly male
  • social norms still placed men as heads of households

these systems still allowed for unusually high levels of female autonomy and status.

We can even look to the early Islamic period and its golden ages and find indications of comparatively stronger female economic and legal participation than in many later historical contexts.

And this extends beyond gender relations to systems of governance and social organization more broadly—but that is a discussion for another time.

A Clarifying Point

The broader pattern becomes clearer:

precolonial societies were often less rigidly patriarchal in structure and practice than the systems later imposed or reinforced under European colonial rule.

This does not mean they were egalitarian.

But it does mean that patriarchy has taken different forms across time and place—and has been present in almost all societies.

And it also means that the West is not the origin of gender justice, nor its inherent champion, but a context that has only relatively recently begun to move in that direction, after long periods of deeply entrenched patriarchy.

This extends beyond gender—to social inequalities in all their forms.

Many societies have developed their own ways of organizing life, their own systems and rules.

So the question arises:

are some cultures inherently aligned with social justice and democracy, while others are not?

I don’t think so.

At its core, this is not a question of culture.

This leads to a thought I have carried for a long time:

What if this warmth, this rootedness, this richness of life could be preserved—
without the coercion that often accompanies it?

What if we could keep:

  • closeness
  • interconnectedness
  • belonging

while also:

  • distributing freedom equally
  • restraining power
  • removing the conditions that allow coercion

What would that look like?

It would not be cold, isolated freedom. Not hyper-independence.

And it would not be a warm but restrictive community.

It would be something else:

a form of life that combines social richness with justice.
Perhaps—
one of the most humane ways of living possible.

The Difficulty

But the novel does not present this as simple.

Because the same structures that create closeness can also be used—and are used—to create control.

So the real question becomes:

Can we preserve the forces that create interconnectedness and community without reproducing coercion?

Final Reflection — Where I Landed

The novel ultimately leaves us with this:

No culture prevents evil.
No system eliminates suffering.

The real question is:

Which way of organizing life makes existence more rich, more human, more joyful—even in the presence of unavoidable hardship?

And perhaps more importantly:

Can we build a form of life that preserves human interconnectedness—without sacrificing freedom?

I believe the answer is yes.

And I don’t think it is theoretical.

We already see glimpses of it—in people and communities across different parts of the world.

People who carry:

  • deep roots in kinship and shared life, with obligations and loyalties they choose to uphold

while also:

  • insisting on equality
  • practicing freedom
  • rejecting domination

Because what this novel makes clear is that:

hardship alone does not hollow life—
it is the absence of connection that does

It is in isolation that life freezes.
It is in detachment that it loses meaning.

And it is in shared life—in rootedness—that it becomes something worth living.

Perhaps the goal, then, is not to eliminate the harshness of the world—that may be impossible—

but to prevent it from turning into something colder.

To ensure that what we build does not reproduce that “drop of poison,”
does not carry forward that same logic of domination—
even in new forms.

That, to me, feels like the right direction.

Perhaps the only one worth pursuing:

toward a way of living that preserves connection, expands freedom, and refuses domination.

The future should not lie in choosing between freedom and belonging,

but in learning how to hold both—

without allowing either to become a form of coldness.

A final clarification (on Colonialism)

When I draw a parallel between colonialism and sexual violence, I am not reducing colonialism to sexuality, nor replacing economic or racial analyses.

I am pointing to a shared structure.

Colonial power does not simply use sexual violence as a tool—it operates through the same logic: the assumption that certain bodies are inherently accessible to power, available to be taken, used, and violated without consent.

This is the same logic that underpins economic extraction.

Whether it is land, labor, resources, or bodies, the foundational claim is the same:

that those subjected to power have no sovereignty over what is taken from them.

We All Need to Defend Our Stories — But Not All the Stakes Are Equal

Gender, happiness, Human nature, justice, motherhood, narratives, prejudices, Switzerland, The case of women, women

The Kinder Story Is the Truer One

Disclosure

This essay was written by me.
I used ChatGPT to help revise and edit the language.

I was advised to remove the long dashes — because they are often associated with AI-generated text. I chose not to. This is simply how I have always written.

We all defend our stories.
Sometimes to the point of blindness — blindness to other people’s stories, and to other people’s stakes.

Am I to blame for linking so much unpleasantness to Switzerland?

This came up at Christmas lunch.

I don’t remember what started it. It was about how I am not a fan of Swiss life. I was retelling one of my earliest experiences after moving here — an incident with a Swiss Bademeister. I was using it as an example of the kind of aggressive, unpleasant, intimidating behavior I encountered in those first years.

It was my son’s very first swimming lesson. He was four, maybe five.

I was supposed to bring him to his teacher at the Wädenswil indoor swimming pool. After helping him into his swim trunks, I took him by the hand and walked him through the door from the changing rooms into the pool hall.

I wanted to bring him myself — to make sure he actually found his teacher, Ms. Elena. He couldn’t swim yet. I wasn’t going to send him across the pool hall alone, especially not on the very first day, when we hadn’t even made proper handing-over arrangements.

This was my first time in an indoor Swiss swimming pool.

At the entrance, I noticed a sign. It said something like:

Entry to the pool area only permitted in swimwear.
Street clothes prohibited.

I didn’t think much of it for two reasons.
First, I wasn’t staying. I was literally walking my child to his teacher and leaving.
Second, it was summer and I was wearing a light beach dress and flip-flops — nothing that even remotely looked like “street clothes.”

As soon as we stepped into the pool hall, the Bademeister approached me.

He looked at me and said, in German:

“Do you know how to read?”

I understood exactly what he meant. Instead of answering yes or no, I began to explain, in German:

“I’m not staying, I’m just accompanying my son until he finds his teacher—”

He cut me off.

“Do you or do you not know how to read?”

I said yes, but that I was trying to explain—

He interrupted again:

“If you know how to read, then you know you’re not allowed to be here dressed like this.”

I changed my tone and said there was no need to be aggressive, and repeated that I would leave immediately once my son was handed over.

He said:

“Should I call the police?”

I said:

“Maybe you should, if the police have nothing better to do.”

Then he bent down to my son — who was holding my hand — looked him straight in the eyes and asked if he spoke German, and whether he could tell his mother that he would call the police if she didn’t leave.

My son was mortified, of course.

I kept my calm — at least outwardly — and told him not to speak to my child and to go ahead and call the police if he wished.

My son began pleading with me. He said he didn’t want me to go to prison.

I told him not to worry.

At that exact moment, Ms. Elena arrived. The whole ridiculous situation dissolved. I left.

At Christmas lunch, after I finished the story, my husband said:

“That’s not a Swiss thing. That’s just an asshole.”

Fair enough, I said. Maybe it’s a Bademeister thing. Maybe — as I’ve been told — assholes are more common among Bademeisters in some countries. That is a possibility. But I encountered this attitude in many other domains, too — not just at the pool.

My other son, listening to the story, said I should have punched him right at the start.

I told him that at the time I was still new in Switzerland — insecure, easily intimidated, always feeling at fault, never knowing what the expectations were, what the rules were, what I was doing wrong.

Today — or even ten years ago — I would handle that situation very differently. It wouldn’t even reach that point anymore. It took me years to grow into that confidence. I am no longer intimidated by such behavior, and it has not affected me in a profound way for a long time.

Then I continued:

“But do you know how many of these I encountered in those early years?”

For at least the first five years of my life in Switzerland after becoming a mother, I had daily experiences like this.

Daily.

I was told off.
Reprimanded.
Shouted at.
Corrected condescendingly.
Instructed how to behave.
Told what I had done wrong.
That I should have planned better.
That I shouldn’t have parked here.
That I should have checked.
That I didn’t have the right information.
That I should have known.

I felt lonely.
I felt like a loser.
I felt inadequate. Unprepared. Unorganized. Unequipped.

And I made sense of it by telling myself:

That Swiss society is harsh.
That it lacks tenderness.
That it has little kindness for a young, overwhelmed, first-time mother who clearly makes many mistakes.

Paperback – September 20, 2010 

by  Flo Regina  (Author)

Am I really so wrong for linking this to Switzerland?

If my daily life as a mother of small children was made so much harder by so many ‘assholes’ like that Bademeister — and by pathetic women like the one who stepped out of her way to tell me I was disturbing everyone else because I stopped on the pavement to turn my crying baby’s bassinet —

is it really so unreasonable that I speak critically of Swiss society, even if I don’t always add polite disclaimers about personal experience, bad luck, and individual exceptions?

Is it fair to make me feel that I am being unfair?

Because if Switzerland is generally wonderful,
and we experienced this constantly,
then it must have been me.

Not the environment.
Not the culture.
Not the system.
Me.

And that is the part that hurts.

As I made friends with many women who shared my feelings, we bonded over our experiences and spoke about a pattern we all recognized:

While we were living those days — while this was our daily emotional reality — our partners were building their careers. Advancing. Growing. Achieving. Being challenged. Being recognized. Fulfilling themselves.

Were they working hard? Yes.
Was it stressful at times? Of course.
Did we benefit? Certainly.

But they would have done it anyway.
For themselves.
For their growth.
For their sense of purpose.
For their self-actualization.

And so, I started rationalizing that, when we tell our stories — about how hard those years were, about how painful “Swissness” felt — it makes their stories less beautiful.

It is a nicer story if Switzerland is perfect.
If they brought their families to the best country in the world.
If everything was wonderful.

Everyone wants a nice story. I get that.

The problem is —

that leaves us with an ugly one.

Because if Switzerland is wonderful, then the cost of that beauty is carried by us.

It means the problem was not the environment.
Not the culture.
Not the system.

It means the problem was us.

Our inadequacy.
Our oversensitivity.
Our failure to adapt.
Our inability to cope.

If Switzerland is perfect, then our struggling…our suffering must be a personal flaw.

But if Switzerland is not perfect —
if the culture is sometimes harsh, rigid, unkind, unforgiving —
their story does not collapse.

It only becomes more honest.

They still worked hard.
They still provided.
They still built lives for their families.

But our pain no longer has to be explained away as personal failure.

So the stakes are not equal.

A perfect Switzerland improves their story and costs them nothing.
But it costs us much more.

Because if Switzerland is perfect —
then it must have been me.

Not the environment.
Not the culture.
Not the constant correction.

Just me.

And even back then, every time I told one of these stories, I was gently corrected:

“Well, people like that are everywhere. Not just here.”

And the story thus changed from my life was hard because of the culture of my host country
and it became I was simply ill-prepared to be a mother in a foreign place.

I resisted that shift with all my resources, especially because I was lucky enough to have the generous support of friends and family back home, and later by the godsent community of immigrant mothers I found in Switzerland, especially after my son joined an international school.

I am no longer in that place. I haven’t been for a long time. It doesn’t hurt anymore — it only irritates me.
I am not telling these stories now because of pain.
I am telling them because this truth matters for many others.

I feel so strongly about this today because I thought about it quite a bit after it was all behind me. And I realized:

I was enormously privileged.

I had a comfortable home.
I had help.
I had time.
I could travel home.
I learned the language quickly.
I was not financially trapped.

And still — I struggled.
And still — this is how it felt.

So I couldn’t help but wonder:

What about all the others?

The other women.
The other immigrants.
Those with fewer resources.
Those who look less white.
Those less confident.
Those less fluent.
Those less protected.
Single mothers.
Single working mothers.

If this story is already “so uncomfortable” when it is mine —
what happens to the women whose stakes are higher?

Is it really more important to preserve the beautiful story of how good Switzerland is
than to validate the experiences of those who paid the price for its awful rigidity?

Does it truly hurt more to hear this critique
than it hurts to live under it?

Doesn’t it serve a better purpose to shatter that myth  —
so a society can look at itself honestly, revise itself, and perhaps become kinder?

At the very least, to begin by asking why so many people behave this way
toward people who are new, struggling, and trying to do the right thing. Where does this latent aggression stem from? What is the underlying root of this symptom?

The kinder story is not the prettier one.
The kinder story is the truer one.
Because it does not assign blame to those who already carry the most.

The Many Reasons What’s Happening to Palestinians Should Keep Us All Up at Night

Human nature, Individualism, Intimacy, connection, justice, morality and immorality, palestine, prejudices, universal values, Western hypocrisy, Western values

What’s Being Done to Palestinians — And What It’s Doing to Us

So many people have asked me over the years why I lose sleep over Palestine. Why this issue — out of all the world’s tragedies and injustices — haunts me most. They point to other enormous threats like climate change and ask, why not that?

For a long time, I struggled to explain it — even to myself. Until one night, when my son asked me the same question. I told him:
It’s the cruelty part. That’s what makes it a moral issue above all.

Climate change is a terrifying and urgent threat. It will deepen inequalities, displace millions, and upend life as we know it. But it is not, at its core, a deliberate act of cruelty. It is the byproduct of systems — economic, industrial, political — that were allowed to run rampant.

What is happening to Palestinians is something else entirely. It is not accidental. It is not abstract. It is targeted. Planned. Intentional. It is the willful infliction of suffering by those with power on those without — for gain, for control, for domination.

That difference matters.

And it matters not just morally, but psychologically. Countless studies show that humans recoil — instinctively, emotionally — from cruelty when it is intentional. We make a basic distinction between harm that’s a regrettable byproduct of doing good, and harm that’s used as a means to do good. The first we can sometimes accept. The second we almost universally reject.

This isn’t abstract philosophy. It’s how our brains work. In making moral judgments, both our prefrontal cortex (where we reason) and emotional centers (where we feel conflict and disgust) are engaged. And when we’re asked whether it’s okay to push a man to his death to save five others — we don’t say no because of abstract reasoning.
We say no because it feels wrong.
Because our bodies revolt.
Because cruelty is supposed to trigger us in a visceral way.

And yet — that natural, human recoil seems strangely absent when it comes to watching Palestinians being stripped of their dignity, starved, bombed, and blamed.
How?
How is this not setting off every moral alarm we are evolutionarily wired to have?

Screenshot

Two Kinds of Failure

The West — and Europe in particular — prides itself on having learned the moral lessons of history. It sees itself as the champion of international law, human rights, and reasoned discourse. But in the case of Palestine, I see two kinds of failure. One is intellectual. The other is human.

First, from a purely pragmatic perspective, this should matter to anyone invested in the global order. An occupation this long, this destabilizing, this lawless — should set off every alarm. And yet it doesn’t.

That reveals a surprising weakness of intellectual judgment. Disappointing — but not repelling.

The second failure is more serious: the collapse of basic compassion. That is the one I can’t stop thinking about.

Yes, I had always suspected that many in the West — especially among the so-called “enlightened” classes — had learned to sever emotion from moral judgment. That they prized detachment as a virtue. But I never imagined the emotional paralysis ran this deep. That the gut itself — the place where empathy lives — could be so atrophied from disuse.

But even that doesn’t explain it fully — because this isn’t just about emotion fading. It’s about a specifically human response to cruelty that seems to be missing. If people recoil at the thought of pushing a stranger to his death to save others, how do they not recoil at what’s happening every day in Gaza?

Like a Scream I Can’t Suppress

What breaks me isn’t just the violence. It’s the world’s reaction to it.

I’ve met many people — especially in Europe — who see themselves as morally evolved. Rational. Progressive. They are educated, thoughtful, often committed to justice.

And yet, when faced with unimaginable human suffering, they remain cool. Detached. Analytical. As if empathy must pass through a filter of logic before it’s allowed to speak.

They believe this makes them better human beings. More just. More objective.

I believe it makes them hollow.

What Keeps You Up at Night

I’ve come to believe that what keeps you up at night says a lot about you.

For many in the West — particularly among progressives — that worry is climate change. And they’re not wrong. It is a massive, terrifying threat. It will reshape our future in catastrophic ways.

But what keeps me up at night isn’t only fear of the future. It’s heartbreak for the present. It’s watching, in real time, the dehumanization of an entire people — while the world not only watches, but justifies, enables, and funds it.

These are both existential threats.
One threatens our survival.
The other threatens every principle the “rules-based order” is supposedly built on —
And more profoundly, it threatens our moral instincts — the universal human recoil from cruelty that psychology shows we all share. It threatens our Soul!

The Limits of the Rational Mind

There’s a moral culture in the West — especially among self-declared progressives — that worships reason. Emotion is suspect. Empathy is messy. Detachment is a virtue. Anything that can’t be quantified is quietly dismissed.

But that’s not moral clarity. That’s moral deadness.

Their idea of justice is procedural. Their empathy has clauses. Their enlightenment has sterilized their humanity.

Moral psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have shown that most of our moral judgments do not come from reasoning at all. They come from gut reactions — and reasoning kicks in after, to justify what we already feel.

So what happens when the gut stops working?

We become the kind of people who can watch a genocide in real time and rationalize it. 

And in the face of that, detachment is not a strength.
It is the most dangerous kind of failure. It is a failure of the highest order.

A Genocide With an Audience

What’s happening to Palestinians isn’t hidden. It isn’t denied. It’s live-streamed. Documented. Replayed in real time.

Imagine the Holocaust — but with smartphones and drones. Imagine families live-tweeting their own extermination. Now imagine the world not responding with horror, but with weapons shipments and PR strategies. Calls for restraint!

Imagine the victims knowing they’re being watched — and knowing that no one will stop it.

This isn’t just violence. It’s witnessed violence.
Sanctioned violence.
And that makes it a wound not just to its victims, but to the conscience of the entire world.

A Personal Reckoning

A close friend of mine recently spoke with two people who care deeply about justice — racial, climate, social. But they couldn’t understand why Palestine felt so central to her.

She gave them the usual answers — and every single one of them matters:

  • It’s the longest-running military occupation in modern history.
    Over 75 years of dispossession, displacement, and control — with no end in sight — supported, funded, and normalized by the most powerful nations on Earth.
  • It is a settler-colonial, ethno-supremacist project.
    Not a border dispute. Not a religious war. A political system built on demographic engineering, land theft, apartheid laws, and the logic of ethnic purity.
  • It threatens the post-WWII legal and moral order that the West claims to cherish.
    The very framework of international law — created after the Holocaust to prevent “never again” — is being violated in plain sight. And the world’s most powerful democracies are helping make those violations permanent.
  • It has triggered crackdowns on democracy and free speech even in Europe and North America.
    People are losing jobs, students are expelled, and politicians are censored simply for expressing solidarity with Palestinians or criticizing Israel. This isn’t just about Palestine — it’s about what kind of speech, dissent, and political thought is allowed in so-called liberal societies.
  • It has normalized a language of dehumanization we swore never to use again.
    The same tropes once used against Jews — infestation, human animals, human shields, terrorism as identity — are now deployed with impunity against Palestinians. The moral taboos that once protected human dignity are eroding.
  • The world grants Israel the right to “defend itself” — a claim not even enshrined in international law in this context.
    There is no legal right to “self-defense” against people under your full military occupation and control.
    Meanwhile, Palestinians do have a legal right to resist occupation — including armed resistance — under international law. And yet they are denied even the vocabulary of legitimacy.
  • It exposes every double standard in Western foreign policy.
    From Ukraine to Iran, from South Africa to Palestine, the West’s moral compass is not guided by universal values, but by geopolitical interest. The myth of a consistent rules-based order collapses under the weight of this one exception.

She was right about all of it. This shows a clear distinction with something like climate change – But even that didn’t capture the full truth.  And also what about Sudan?

Others have asked,  Isn’t there genocide there too?

Yes — Sudan is a moral catastrophe. The suffering is real and unthinkable. But there are critical differences in both visibility and power distribution — and those differences matter.

First, as I mentioned above, Palestine is a holocaust with an audience.
It’s relentlessly documented — not only by victims but often by the perpetrators themselves. These atrocities are not hidden in forests or deserts. They are filmed, photographed, live-streamed. Even when mainstream media fails to amplify it, the truth is everywhere for anyone willing to look.

That changes how complicit we all are.
We can see it.
And still, some people look away.

Second — and most crucially — this is not a conflict between two brutal factions backed by peripheral actors, as is the case in Sudan.
This is a genocide backed by the full force of the global establishment.
The most powerful nations on Earth — militarily, economically, ideologically — are aligned with the perpetrators. The global machinery of finance, media, academia, and diplomacy is actively working to obscure, excuse, and normalize the horror.

That changes everything.

It means the violence isn’t confined in space or only physical. It’s institutional. It’s systemic. It’s made possible by the very structures that claim to uphold justice and human rights. And that level of betrayal is what makes this particular cruelty feel so unbearable — not just for what it is, but for what it reveals about us.

A Mirror to History

Let me put it this way:

Imagine we’re living during the Second World War.
We know what the Nazis are doing.
They aren’t hiding it. They’re showing it off.

Now imagine the wealthiest, most powerful countries in the world are helping them — sending weapons, offering diplomatic protection, funding their war machine.

Now imagine the people in the concentration camps know this.
They know we’re watching.
They know we’re helping their torturers.

That is what’s happening now.

We are not just complicit through silence.
We are complicit through witnessing too –  and states are helping Israel in carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. 

That’s what strips people even more of their human dignity.
And that’s what strips us of our humanity.

We Are Not the Same

Some people lie awake fearing the collapse of civilization.
I lie awake mourning the collapse of compassion — the loss of our collective soul.

If you can watch what’s happening to Palestinians and treat it as just another tragedy —
If you can witness this – the stripping of human dignity in real time – and your first instinct is to remain neutral, measured, detached…
If your greatest concern is being “unbalanced” in how you distribute your outrage, rather than being morally absent —
Then something vital has already died in you.

And yes — that truth is making me sick.

Why Has Dehumanizing Palestinians Worked So Well In The Western World?

Hegemony, Human nature, justice, morality and immorality, palestine, prejudices, Supremacy, universal values, Western hypocrisy, Western values

Why it landed so effectively, why it stuck, and why it’s so hard to undo.

May 6, 2025

The answer I’ve found says more about Western values than it does about Palestinians or Arabs— and that answer is sickening.

It reveals those values to be hollow — an illusion.
Something Western societies tell themselves so they can live freely, enjoy the opportunities and prosperity available to them, exercise their rights and liberties — without ever feeling obliged to look inward or backward.
To ask: What did it take to build this world?
And what does it take to maintain it?

The illusion allows them to keep telling themselves they deserve it.
That they’ve earned their superior status and advantages over the so-called less civilized, less humane peoples of the Global South.

But the truth I’ve come to is this: Western ideals never stood for anything at all.

Omar El Akkad says it plainly in his searing new book, One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This.

“The most resonant question asked by El Akkad is what does the term ‘Western values’ mean in the face of such a sustained, brutal and vengeful obliteration of human life?…
It has created what he calls ‘a severance’ — not just between those who speak out and those who remain silent or collude in the carnage, but with the very idea that such an ideal as ‘Western values’ actually exists. Or ever truly did.”
(from The Guardian’s review)

Read the full review here →

But it’s James Baldwin who captures it with terrifying clarity:

“Try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.”

It’s not just racism I’m appalled by.
It’s something far more frightening.
Something for which I haven’t yet found the right word.

Because racism — as brutal as it is — still implies a certain twisted recognition: You are a human being, but you are inferior to me.

What we are witnessing is beyond that.
It is the absence of recognition altogether.

A vast and chilling inability among so many Westerners to feel the appropriate — proportionate — amount of outrage at the staggering cruelty Palestinians have been enduring.

Selective Humanity

Why was Europe ready to go to war for Ukraine — and yet can’t even speak up for Gaza?

If Europeans’ empathy has borders — racial, religious, geopolitical — then it’s not empathy.
It’s nationalism.
And nationalism disguised as compassion is how genocides are allowed to happen.

One Saturday some weeks ago, a group of friends — we gathered for dinner at Ibrahim’s.

“Friends” isn’t quite the right word — we are something else.
People brought together over the past two years by a shared need to do something, anything, in the face of unbearable injustice. We’ve protested. We’ve written. We’ve stood in the cold handing out flyers. We’ve organized campaigns, and we’ve shouted into microphones with breaking voices.

We’ve watched as the violence escalated beyond what any of us could have imagined.

And still — people around us look away.

So that night, over food and small comforts, the conversation turned — as it always does — to the same ache:
The near-impossibility of continuing relationships with people who have not shown even the faintest sign of distress at what is unfolding.

Not strangers. Not casual acquaintances.
Close people.
Family. Colleagues. Lovers.
People who, by all accounts, should be devastated.

And yet… silence.
Muted responses.
“It’s complicated.”

Even now.
Even after the masks have come off.
Even now — after everything — they still find ways to look away.

The Dehumanization We Know

One of us said it again, as we always do:
“It’s the dehumanization. That’s always been the problem.”

And we nodded. We always nod. As if saying: yes, yes, this is the explanation.
Zionist propaganda.
A campaign going on for nearly a century.
A relentless apparatus — depicting Palestinians only as threats, as terrorists, as extremists.
Never as parents. Never as lovers. Never as dreamers. Never as children who want to play in the sun.

But then I asked something that stopped the nodding:

“Why did it work so well?”

We all know the machinery.
But what I want to understand — what truly terrifies me — is why it was so effective.

Is it colonial residue?

The way Middle Eastern and Muslim lives have always been seen as less-than in the Western imagination — making Palestinian erasure feel almost like a “tolerable” outcome, acceptable collateral, as if living in peace, free from fear, is a birthright reserved for Europeans, but not for us.
As if a life of permanent threat and instability is simply what we were made for — part of the natural order.

I remember how mortified people were when scenes of Ukrainians fleeing their homes were first broadcast.
And what I remember more clearly were the reporters — dozens of them — remarking on how shocking it was becausethese were Europeans.
White, Christian Europeans.

They said it explicitly:
“This is not Iraq or Afghanistan… this is a civilized country.”
And I thought then — do they think Middle Easterners, Africans, anyone non-white or non-Western is just… built differently?

That our bodies, our minds, our feelings are somehow wired for suffering?
That we expect it, are prepared for it, and experience it less traumatically?
That we are not human in the same way Europeans are?

What is it about the Western consciousness that made it so easy to accept the erasure of Palestinian humanity?

It’s not that we didn’t know the narrative was controlled.
We did.
It’s that we didn’t fully grasp what that narrative led to — beyond the historical lies and fabricated facts.

That even now, with the horror fully visible —
With children’s names scrolling past in real-time obituaries,
With horrific statistics of maimed children and slaughtered medics,
With evidence of tortured children in Israeli prisons and raped doctors,
With Israeli officials openly calling for ethnic cleansing —
So many people still don’t care.

Yes, the media and institutions play a role.
But what about everyday people?
Friends. Colleagues. Neighbours.
The ones who still won’t look.

It takes so much effort to prove that Palestinians are human beings.
So much emotional labor.
So much curating of suffering.
As if we have to audition for empathy.

We try so hard to paint a picture of Palestinians as ordinary people —
who, when they are not trying to survive Israeli strikes,
fall in love, want to dance, go to the cinema, argue with their parents or partners —
so that maybe, just maybe, their deaths will matter a little more.

Why should we have to do this?
Why is the default assumption that they are not like us?

That night at Ibrahim’s, we also talked about Trump’s openly genocidal statements — his unfiltered, sickening calls for ethnic cleansing. And that perhaps, somehow, this caused a hint of a wake-up call. Because we noticed, for once, some people recoiled.

As is common, we were all commenting on how the masks are off now — and how that, in a strange way, is a good thing.

Because no one can deny anymore what Israel is doing — and has always done — since the beginning.

This, we told ourselves, might be a gift in disguise: Trump removing the filters, the pretenses, and laying bare their intentions and alliances. Their vested interest in this region.

We were comforting ourselves, of course.
Trying to find some respite.
Some reason to be hopeful in the middle of the horror unfolding in front of our eyes daily.

And after the comfort of shared sorrow, I found myself staring at that question like an open wound.
I said it aloud, 

“Why did it take Trump to get Europeans to finally see what was happening to Palestinians?”

Why did it take that much moral rupture?

Why have all our efforts — decades of organizing, writing, reporting, truth-telling — been so easily dismissed, overwritten, drowned?

Someone said, again: “It’s because they never saw Palestinians as human. Not really.”

More nodding. But this time, I felt no comfort in it.

Because I realized how easy that explanation had become for us. How we say it as a kind of balm.

It’s not malice, we tell ourselves.
It’s just that they were taught not to see us.

But I’m no longer satisfied with that answer.

Because how was that even possible?
Why did it work so well — and stick in such a way that no amount of gruesome images, no degree of Israeli confessions, no international laws, no mountain of corpses could change it?

What does it say about Europe — about the West — that it was so receptive to this campaign of erasure?

What lives in the European habitus that made it so effortless to adopt this blindness?

Is it their colonial past? Their missionary impulse? Their need to believe in moral superiority?

What does it say about them now?

Are they still, deep down, convinced of their own superiority — and of our inferiority?

Why is it not a scandal that millions of people are unable to recognize others as human?

And when we say, “Europeans don’t see Palestinians as equally human,” we speak as if that’s a minor oversight.
A footnote. A cultural quirk. Something regrettable, but not urgent.

But what if it’s something deeper?

What if it’s not just about Palestinians?

What if it’s about all of us who come from this region?

I look around and think:
They must not see me as equal to them either.
Not just unsettling — infuriating.
It doesn’t just disturb me — it changes how I see everything.

It is not racism – It is something far more disturbing

Some call it racism.
But I don’t think that word goes far enough.

Racism, at least, implies a kind of twisted recognition:
“You are an inferior human being to me.”

But this?

This feels like something else entirely.

If that sounds terrifying, imagine this:
“You are not a human being like me — not in the same way I am.”

This is not a hierarchy.
This is absence.

And so I’ve come to believe that this does not testify to our inferiority —
but to what Western societies are lacking.
Something essential.
Something critical.

James Baldwin was right:
It is they who are devoid of humanity.

Why Every Fight Against Entitled Aggression Is A Feminist Issue.

Hegemony, justice, morality and immorality, palestine, Supremacy, The case of women, The patriarchy

Her siblings have fled—David chased each one of them out violently.
Her mother died of her wounds.
One of her sisters fled with her baby, trying to bring her to safety. David isn’t going anywhere. He says this is his home now. He says he will decide which doors she may enter, how much space she is allowed. She is told she can leave—but she won’t be allowed to return.