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Invasion, Occupation and Mass Murder Can’t be Covered up with a Fucking Hyphen

6 min readFeb 28, 2025

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She symbolizes Palestine itself, strangled behind barbed wire, which represents the military occupation that even cuts through the moon. The image reminded me of the hyphen that has been normalized to gnaw at our existence. Of course, Handala, the little boy, has his back turned against the reader because the world turned their backs on him— Art by Naji Al Ali, Palestinian Political Cartoonist

Inspired by the incredible Palestinian writer Rasha Abudlhadi my thoughts took shape as I absorbed the significance of her words:

“You can just say Palestine. You’ll very quickly notice who doesn’t, who won’t. You’ll notice how often some non-Palestinian folks who claim to be “allies” or “advocates” will slash and hyphenate in increasingly bizarre variations to avoid simply saying Palestine.”

Apartheid Hyphen

I long for the day when the hyphen in between the Jewish Supremacist Entity carrying out a holocaust and Palestine no longer exists.

The “—” standing in the middle of Europe’s Biblical Barbarian and us, like a separation wall, a checkpoint, a jail bar, a baton, will be wielded to stab the eye across to the L, carving it out to be buried in the pages of history books that start with ‘once upon a time’…

We’ll give classes on all the bizarre variations of the floating horizontal line they call a hyphen used by hegemonists to avoid just saying Palestine and all the words that followed Palestine to whitewash Jewish Manifest Destiny, like conflict—or even worse, peace.

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Liberation Works
Liberation Works

Published in Liberation Works

Let us transform and grow into defying, derailing and decolonising the elitist trains of thought carrying us daily into the gas chambers of conformity. Let’s connect through stories, book, film and music reviews. Liberation Works is where we the marginalised take centre stage.

Nada Chehade
Nada Chehade

Written by Nada Chehade

I finally grew the ovaries to speak up.🥚🥚

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