Sohail Ahmad

Imagine the storm if she was a registered Russian agent. Imagine if they had changed loyalties because their party’s candidate was critical of Russia’s annexation of Ukraine?

Put your hand on your heart and answer honestly: If the roles were reversed; If Palestinians had established a powerful state that militarily occupied the indigenous Jewish people, hundreds of thousands of whom had been expelled from their homes before and during that state’s creation; if Palestinian settlers, invoking divine promises and ancient religious claims, seized Jewish homes and land; if Jewish families were forcibly displaced, confined behind walls and checkpoints, and denied equal rights; if millions of Jews were compressed into a tiny, blockaded strip of land from which they could not freely leave; if Palestinians controlled their borders, movement, airspace, coastline, water, food, electricity, and future; if a mass Jewish protest demanding freedom and the right to return to their homes were met with live ammunition, leaving protesters dead, maimed, and disabled; if every act of Jewish armed resistance were used to portray the entire Jewish population as a “terrorist people” and to justify collective punishment against them; if Palestinian politicians openly discussed permanently removing the Jewish population or resettling their territory; if nearly the entire Jewish population had been repeatedly driven from one part of that territory to another, only to be bombed again in places they had been told were safe; if Jewish civilians were deprived of food, medicine, clean water, shelter, and electricity while political leaders debated how much aid they should be allowed to receive; if Jewish doctors were operating without adequate anesthesia, equipment, fuel, or medicine; if Jewish journalists, physicians, aid workers, academics, and entire families were being killed; if Jewish prisoners were detained without trial and reports emerged of torture, humiliation, and abuse; if Jewish synagogues, hospitals, schools, universities, libraries, cemeteries, and cultural institutions were damaged or destroyed; if explosives amounting to the force of several Hiroshima bombs had been dropped on the tiny, densely populated territory in which those Jews were confined; if more than 20,000 Jewish children had been killed while tens of thousands more were injured, orphaned, or buried beneath the rubble; and if the world continued debating whether their lives mattered; would you speak for those oppressed Jews with the same passion with which you speak for Palestinians today? Would you defend their right to safety, dignity, freedom, equality, and self-determination? Would you condemn collective punishment, forced displacement, occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide just as clearly? Can you place your hand on your heart and say that your position is rooted not in tribal loyalty, religious identity, ethnic allegiance, or inherited prejudice—but in principle? If you can, then know that you are part of my tribe. My tribe is not Muslim, Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, Pakistani, or American. My tribe is principled humanity. My tribe is anyone who stands with the oppressed, whoever they are—and against the oppressor, whoever they are, no matter the identity of either and no matter the price of speaking up! If I am your tribe too, share this and let us find more of our kind. #HumanityFirst #FreePalestine

Imagine urging the world to normalize relations with Germany while the genocide of the Jews was underway. I support normal relations between Arab countries and Israel. But not at the expense of Palestinian self-determination. Not while Israel denies Palestine its right to exist as a free and sovereign people. And certainly not while Israel maintains a brutal occupation and perpetrates genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Under current conditions, I strongly oppose signing or expanding the Abraham Accords with Israel. To normalize relations while Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza is a betrayal of our shared humanity. It is a betrayal of our shared Abrahamic values. It is an insult to Abraham. It rewards impunity, abandons justice, and sets a dangerous precedent: that normalization can proceed even in the face of mass atrocity and the denial of a people’s fundamental rights.