By Omar Silva – Editor/Publisher

National Perspective Belize-Digital 2025

www.nationalperspectivebz.com

Belize City: Tuesday, 25th March 2025

EDITORIAL

In a world where borders are drawn and redrawn by power, money, and faith, there exists a people without a country, a nation without recognition, and a history too inconvenient to be told. The Palestinian struggle is not just about land — it is about identity, humanity, and the deliberate erasure of both by a global system that claims moral high ground while denying justice.

Israel, the self-proclaimed “Jewish State,” was born out of trauma — a refuge for a persecuted people long scattered across the globe. But in its effort to become a homeland for Jews, it became a state that denies the homeland of others. With laws that define Jewishness as the basis for nationality — not merely religion — Israel has built an ethnocratic system where citizenship and national belonging are not the same for all.

This internal contradiction has become more exposed in recent years, as Israelis themselves ask: What does it mean to be Israeli? Is Judaism a religion, an ethnicity, a nation — or all three? Massive protests flood Israeli streets over judicial overreach, minority rights, and secular versus religious law. Yet, one voice remains consistently absent in this conversation — the Palestinian.

While Israelis debate the soul of their democracy, over five million Palestinians live under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, or as second-class citizens within Israel’s borders. Millions more languish in refugee camps across Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan — stateless and silenced. And yet, the world rarely asks: What does it mean to be Palestinian? Who speaks for them?

The answer lies not only in Tel Aviv or Ramallah, but in Washington, where U.S. foreign policy — shaped by a complex alliance of pro-Israel lobbying groups, evangelical Christian Zionists, and geopolitical strategists — treats the Israeli state as an extension of its own interests. This is the machinery many now refer to as the “deep state” — an entrenched, bipartisan system that ensures Israel’s impunity and silences its critics.

In this framework, Palestinians are not seen as a people with rights, culture, or aspirations — but as problems to be managed, security threats to be contained, or statistics on a humanitarian spreadsheet. They are denied not only land, but narrative — not only freedom, but identity.

And the global public, lulled by media that echoes official lines and omits uncomfortable truths, watches in silence. The question must be asked: How can a world that condemns apartheid, racism, and occupation in other contexts accept it when it comes to Israel?

To be clear, this is not a rejection of Jewish existence, nor of Israel’s right to peace and security. But peace built on silencing the other is not peace — it is control. Security that requires checkpoints, walls, and statelessness is not security — it is domination.

It is time to recognize the Palestinian identity as a full and equal identity — not a footnote in someone else’s history. It is time for the international community to stop enabling policies that treat one people as chosen and the other as disposable. And it is time for media, especially in the Global South, to rise above inherited scripts and speak the truth as it is.

As Belizeans, we understand colonial legacy and the cost of silence. We know what it means to be overlooked by the architects of global power. And so, we must speak — because justice, to be justice, must be for all.

Only when both Israelis and Palestinians can stand side by side, as equals, with their identities honoured and their rights respected, will the region — and the world — know true peace.