Are you suggesting Palestinians aren't a race?
I'm not suggesting it, I'm stating it clearly as indesputable fact.
Palestinians are an ethnonational group under the ethnic umbrella of "Arabs."
Again: Words mean things. Specific things.
Ethnicity is based on shared culture, language, heritage, religion, and geographic ancestry. Palestinians are an ethnic group bound by a shared history, culture, and national identity...making them an ethnonational group.
Race is traditionally a classification based on physical traits (phenotype) like skin color or hair texture. However, modern science agrees that race has no biological basis; it is a category societies create to group people.
It's been bizarre watching supposedly well-educated and "anti-racist" far left white folks racialize Palestinians.
In order to try to wrap their brains around a topic where thay have no knowledge and lots of emotional resonance, they superimpose the falsely oversimplified domestic dynamic they mistakenly think they understand and superimpose it on peoples they don't understand in a place they've never been stteped in cultures they've never studied.
The reason Western leftists keep insisting Palestinians are a race has less to do with Middle Eastern reality and more to do with Western optics.
By framing Palestinians as a "race," they try to drag a complex, century-old ethnonational conflict into the familiar American binary of color politics. If they can categorize this as a simple issue of racial phenotype, they don't have to do the hard work of understanding borders, history, religion, or specific cultural heritage...they can just superimpose their own domestic map onto a territory they know nothing about.
Think you can reliably tell Israelis from Palestinians on sight? Think again.
If one actually cares about the people involved, one owes them the respect of seeing them as they define themselves, not as stand-in characters in one's own political play.
Recognizing that difference is the first step toward actual understanding.
