The Question Does Not End: Let the Note Speak

The Question Does Not End: Let the Note Speak 

Let the note speak. 

Let it speak not with slogans or soundbites, but with the clarity that comes from generations of memory, oppression, and resistance. Let it speak in the language of the Bund, in the tongue of the exile, the refugee, the dissenter. Let it be a note carried in the coat of a partisan, a folded flyer in a café window, a cry that knows no border. 

Whether Jew or Arab — the Palestinian question does not end. 

Because it never began as merely a question of land. It is a question of justice without hierarchy, dignity without condition, and freedom without erasure. It is not a “conflict” between equal sides — it is a sustained imbalance, a structured injustice that persists beneath the rubble, the rhetoric, and the red lines. 

The world sees fire and ash, and asks, “When will it end?”

But the note asks instead, “When will it begin — the real reckoning?”

Recent events only deepen the truth. 

In July 2025, Israeli authorities proposed building a “humanitarian city” in the south of Gaza — a zone to hold displaced civilians under surveillance and control. Critics — including international jurists — compared it to a modern-day concentration camp (Washington Post, July 11, 2025). 

Since the end of May, nearly 800 Palestinians have been shot dead — not while fighting, but while trying to access food aid. U.N. agencies have documented the deaths of hundreds in what were supposed to be humanitarian corridors, where bullets replaced bread (The Guardian, July 11, 2025). 

The U.S. and Israel now face accusations of deliberately weaponizing famine, targeting civilian infrastructure, and destroying the conditions for Palestinian life itself. Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territories — who called these policies genocidal — was sanctioned by the U.S. government, silenced for naming what so many already see (AP News, July 10, 2025). 

Still, the dominant powers urge “calm,” demand “ceasefires,” but never ask the deeper question: What is peace without justice? What is calm without liberation? 

Let the note remind the world: 

The Nakba did not end in 1948. It is ongoing.
It is Rafah, today, as the skies burn.
It is Nuseirat, in the hunger lines.
It is the ghost homes of Haifa and Lydd,
and the walls of Dheisheh and Balata. 

To many Jews, the trauma of persecution lives in blood and bone. Pogroms, ghettos, gas chambers — none of this is forgotten. But safety for one people cannot be built on the erasure of another. This is not liberation. It is trauma transposed into policy. 

The note, from the diasporic Jewish tradition, refuses the nationalism that betrays the very ethics that Jewish history has taught. The Bund once declared: “We are not strangers here. Our rights are not conditional.” And the note says this must also be true — for Palestinians. For they too are not strangers in their land. 

The note does not deny Jewish pain. But it will not be weaponized to justify occupation, siege, or apartheid.

The note sees solidarity alive in the streets: Jews and Palestinians marching together in New York, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Manila. It sees hunger strikers, Muslim and Jewish, in Chicago and London. It sees the children of the Nakba and the Shoah weeping not just for their own, but for each other. 

The note sees the lie of equivalence — that two sides simply “cannot get along.” It knows one side holds the army, the blockade, the air force, the UN veto. The other holds memory, stone, hope, and the right to return. 

The note says: Do not ask for silence. Ask for courage. Do not seek a “solution” that leaves power untouched. Do not confuse normalization with reconciliation. 

The note calls for:
An end to occupation.
An end to apartheid laws.
A return for the displaced.
Reparations for the erased.
And dignity — for all. Not just for some. 

It is not too much to ask. It is too much to ignore. 

And so, the question does not end. Because the refugee still waits. Because the olive tree still grows beside a wall. Because the checkpoint still chokes a child’s morning. Because the map still bleeds. Because power still lies. 

 And because some of us still remember what it means to be hunted, silenced, turned away. The note speaks not from vengeance, but from memory. Not from faith, but from justice. Not from nationalism, but from solidarity. 

 Let the note speak, and let those with ears — finally — listen.