Abdaljawad Omar on the decade of youth movements that attempted to reshape Palestinian politics: “I choose to believe that despite all that has passed, and all that remains impassable, the relics of an obscure ‘we’ endures. There is at least a ‘we’ that lives within me, until perhaps another ‘we’ emerges yet again.”

When Palestinians use terminologies not of their own making to describe their experiences, all in the name of gaining legitimacy in the eyes of a white liberal (and sometimes Zionist) audience, they become divorced from their own reality. This includes centering the discourse of international law, the apartheid analogy, and retractions of official Palestinian statements after pressure from the Israel lobby.