(RNS) — Last year, as I arrived in Ireland, the airport customs officer asked me where I was originally from. I told her, “Palestine.” She looked at me, smiled, and said, “Every true Irish person is Palestinian at heart as well.” And with that, she stamped my passport and let me in.
On Wednesday (March 12) in Washington, President Donald Trump, sitting beside Irish Prime Minister Michael Martin in the Oval Office, used the word “Palestinian” as a slur to talk down Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned. He’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian,” Trump said, responding to a reporter’s question about Schumer’s views on corporate taxes.
The contrast is striking. The Irish, a people who understand colonialism and occupation in their bones, see Palestinians as their kin. The American political class treats “Palestinian” as something shameful.
The Irish aren’t the only ones who talk about Palestinians with respect. This week, meeting with a displaced Gazan family, Mohammad Tahir, the Iraqi doctor who spent seven months in Gaza saving lives while the world looked away, turned to the refugees with tears in his eyes and said, “My heart is Palestinian.”
I have heard this sentiment echoed over and over again. A doctor from Pakistan who had just returned from Gaza looked at me and said, “I am from Pakistan, but my blood is Palestinian.” In almost every part of the Muslim world, in refugee camps, in war zones, in gatherings of activists and scholars, I have heard, “Anaa damee Falasteeni” — “My blood is Palestinian.”
As the sun sets, Palestinians sit at a large table surrounded by the rubble of destroyed homes and buildings as they gather for iftar, the fast-breaking meal, on the first day of Ramadan in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Saturday, March 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Beyond the Muslim world, too, Palestine is a rallying cry for justice, a cause embraced by people who recognize the struggle against oppression as universal. Latin Americans, who have fought their own battles against imperialism, proudly wave the Palestinian flag. South Africans, who lived under apartheid, see their struggle mirrored in Palestine and have lodged formal complaints against the conduct of the war in Gaza in the International Court of Justice. Indigenous peoples of North America, whose lands were stolen and history erased, march with Palestinians because they know what it means to survive colonial violence.
Outside of America, it is a source of pride, a badge of honor, a reflection of resilience in the face of one of the most brutal and documented injustices of our time.
But to be Palestinian in the eyes of Trump, and in the eyes of much of the American political establishment, is to be something lesser. It is to be cast as an enemy, a threat, a people whose very existence is seen as suspect. In America, to say “I am Palestinian” is to invite suspicion, hostility and punishment. Students are blacklisted for supporting Palestine. Workers are fired for posting about it. Mosques are attacked for standing in solidarity.
And now, critiquing Israel on behalf of Palestinians can land you in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency detention center. Trump’s insult comes as civil liberties organizations, Muslim, Jewish and secular, are expressing outrage over the federal government’s abduction of Mahmoud Khalil after he regularly protested Israel during campus demonstrations at Columbia University.
Khalil is married to an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, holds a green card, or Permanent Resident Card. Yet that did not stop ICE from targeting him outside his home and wreaking horror on an expecting mother. It is stunning that this happened under a so-called “America First” president, who claims to reject foreign influence yet bends over backward to punish anyone who criticizes Israel.
Protesters gather for a demonstration in support of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, Monday, March 10, 2025, outside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
This is the reality of being Palestinian in America: your very existence is a political liability, and your right to speak can be stripped away in an instant. People can speak of you in the most dehumanizing of ways with zero political consequence.
Imagine that Trump had instead dismissed Schumer on Wednesday by calling him a Jew. The outrage would be swift, bipartisan and absolute. But Islamophobia has long been normalized in America, and anti-Palestinian bigotry is its most acceptable form.
The reason Trump can throw out “Palestinian” as a slur without consequence is because Palestinians have already been dehumanized to the extent that their oppression is all but invisible to the elites in Washington, their suffering dismissed and their very existence questioned. This is how the American government enables a genocide while pretending to be neutral. This is how tens of thousands of Palestinian children can be slaughtered with American bombs, and the political class barely blinks.
But here is what Trump, and those who share his bigotry, do not understand: To be Palestinian is not an insult. It is an honor. It is to be the child who stands in the rubble of his home and still finds the strength to smile. It is to be the mother who fasts in Ramadan, not knowing if she will have food to break her fast. It is to be the people who are not supposed to exist, yet continue to survive.
Palestinians do not need America’s approval to exist. The world has already chosen. The world has already embraced Palestine. More importantly, Palestinians themselves have embraced themselves and refused to stop being Palestinians in their land despite all the odds. Their resilience is putting the world to shame, and Palestinians’ nobility grows even as the American political arena abandons all decency.