A resistance fighter killed in Jenin left one instruction in his will: do not bury him in the flag of Sykes-Picot. Bury him with the flag of the Shahada.
That one sentence is clearer than all UN resolutions on Palestine in the past seventy years. It reveals what the cause is and what it is not. It is not a national struggle for a postage-stamp state carved out by powers that already failed this region once. It is a cause that was for all Muslims who ever wondered why Rohingya do not have the hashtag, why Kashmir is bleeding without a hashtag, why Sudan is fracturing without a march.
The question to ask is this: How many marched for Sudan when more than half a million marched for Gaza? How many gave a single Friday sermon for the Uyghurs? How many attended one protest for the Rohingya, a population of nearly two and a half million people who were ethnically cleansed so completely that the genocide is now finished, not ongoing? Gaza was a livestream genocide. Rakhine State was not. That is the only difference. And it is a message that is uncomfortable about the motive of the Ummah: visibility, and not principle.
The Regimes Are the First Line of Defense for the Occupation
The conventional argument about why the Arabs do nothing centers on a lack of interest. But this is an understatement. Arab regimes are not passive bystanders. They are active defenders of occupation.
Jordan intercepted missiles that were targeting Israeli territory. Its own civilian population had to deal with missile fragments falling on their heads. Egypt will not move an inch. The Gulf states trade, maintain diplomatic relations, and persecute their own citizens who stand in solidarity with Palestinians. In Jordan, people have been murdered by the regime for attending pro-Palestine demonstrations. In Egypt, activists are locked up. These are not failures of leadership but are policy choices.
It is important to recognize that this is a difference between the people and the governments. The peoples of the Arab and Muslim world are not apathetic. They are outraged. But the regimes, as the first line of defense for occupation, ensure that outrage has no political consequence. They are doing what they have been told, keeping an order in the region that does not benefit their people or their own religious duties.
Iran, Pragmatism, and Real Brotherhood
Iran supported Hamas for many years. That is acknowledged. But when the genocide began, Iran did not act to stop it. It was aggressive only if it was directly threatened. A country that can strike at the regime committing genocide, but chooses to do so only in self-defense, is not practicing brotherhood. It’s playing the game of geopolitics.
There are Iranians who feel this conflict deeply. There are ordinary people in Lebanon, in Iran, in Pakistan, who understand what is at stake. One woman, filmed during the bombing of Iran, asked what her children’s lives were compared to what Palestinians had sacrificed over two and a half years. Some people feel this way, and it’s quite common. However, sentiment alone won’t change anything if it is not backed up by state-level action.
All Muslim nations in the region, including those that have powerful military strengths and substantial resources, are mediators of Western interests, not defenders of their Ummah. Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan; none of them sees themselves in a position of leadership. That is not weakness imposed from outside, but a choice made from inside.
The ICJ Cannot Remove an Occupier
The International Court of Justice ruled the occupation of Palestine illegal. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. Both decisions were met with relief in some quarters. That relief is a trap.
States with the power to enforce an ICJ ruling must have the political will to do so. The United States sanctioned the very judges who issued the ICC ruling. Celebrating a legal judgment while the occupation continues is not a small victory. It is a distraction. It calms down the need to take real action. It provides symbolic advances instead of material ones.
The UN has passed dozens of resolutions on Palestine and on Kashmir. Not one has been implemented. None have been enforced. Nuremberg trials occurred after Hitler’s death. The justification for seeking justice from institutions that are controlled by the powers that allow the crime should not be called logic. It is displacement activity.
Armed Resistance Is Not the Ceiling
There was real moral weight to armed resistance in Palestine, in Kashmir and wherever there is occupation. The honesty of those who sacrificed their lives for this cause should not be belied. What resistance has done is remarkable: not surrender but hold on and rebuild a sense of confidence in the Ummah that had been lost for decades.
But resistance is not the solution. Resistance may allow a people to continue their fight. It will not evict the occupant. That has never happened through guerrilla campaigns alone. Occupation ends when states act. The last defenders of Palestine were not resistance fighters with homemade rockets. They were army units equipped with guns. The Ottomans sent naval ships to the Far East to support Muslims against Portuguese invaders. That is the historic norm – a country whose military realized that its Ummah had boundaries that were considerably broader than its own borders.
A resistance aspirant is not a fighter in a tunnel with a Kalashnikov. The aspiration is for Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan to move to support their Ummah. Not as a dream, but as the reality that endured until the Muslim world was divided into weak, contending national pieces by outsiders.
The Narrative Has Shifted, Not the Responsibility
More than 200 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 2023. There were some reports of more than 250. In Lebanon, at least fourteen journalists were murdered. One was explicitly assassinated because she was carrying a narrative against the occupation.
Those journalists reported so that others could be their mouthpieces. The mainstream media suppressed it, but social media spread it. Opinion polls in the United States now show more than sixty percent of Americans view Israel as detrimental to US interests. It’s a huge change from two and a half years ago. The needle has moved.
Changing the narrative doesn’t mean the end of the occupation. The narrative battle is being won on social media, and the ground battle is being lost in the rubble of Jenin, Khan Younis and Gaza. The diaspora is bearing a message. It does not yet carry power. The responsibility is to continue to act as the messenger and to be clear about what the message is.
The Qadiyyah, the cause, is not Palestine. It is the deen. Palestine is one consequence of abandoning that cause. Kashmir is another. Sudan is another. Rakhine State is another. If the cause is clearly understood, the Rohingya are as pressing as the Palestinian. When it is understood incorrectly, half a million march for one genocide while another completes in silence.
The resistance fighter in Jenin understood the cause. He wrote his instructions before he died. Bury him in the flag of Shahada, not in the borders drawn by people who never intended him to be free.
