There is a specific performance that happens now at conferences and universities. I have become familiar with it because I am the object of it.

An event is organized — usually in haste, usually in response to whatever news cycle has made Palestinians briefly visible. A panel is assembled. The organizers want what they call “balance”, which means they have invited someone like me: a researcher from Palestine, someone who can speak with what sounds like authority about Palestinian politics, someone who has what universities call “lived experience”.

The invitation usually comes with language designed to make me feel valued. They say my perspective is essential. They say they want to centre Palestinian voices. They ask if I would be willing to share my knowledge with their students or their audience. The honorarium is modest but respectful. The questions they send in advance are thoughtful. It feels, in the moment of acceptance, like they are taking this seriously.

What they are actually doing is extracting value from my position while maintaining the very distance that makes my position possible. They are converting my loss into intellectual credibility. They are using my family’s destruction as a credential that makes their conversation seem legitimate.

The premise is that my presence makes the event more rigorous. That having a Palestinian in the room doing the intellectual work transforms what would otherwise be distant analysis into informed commentary. That my body, my accent, my specific knowledge of how things actually work on the ground gives substance to what might otherwise seem mere speculation.

But here’s what’s actually happening: they have created a market in which my trauma is a commodity. And I have become, incrementally and almost without noticing, a seller in that market.

*

My mother was killed on 5 December 2023 in Khan Younis. An airstrike hit our home around 3 pm. The building collapsed. I learned she was dead while I was in Taiwan, working on research about how political systems function. The irony is so complete it circles back with precision: I was analysing systems of state power at the exact moment one of those systems was destroying my family.

She died from internal bleeding that the medical system couldn’t treat because the hospitals were overwhelmed and the infrastructure had collapsed. A doctor couldn’t see what was killing her. The system designed to keep people alive had failed so completely that a survivable injury became fatal. That’s not a metaphor. That’s not theory. That’s what happened in Khan Younis in December 2023 to thousands of people.

I know this specifically because it happened to my mother. But I also know it systematically because I have spent years studying exactly this kind of institutional failure. I understand the mechanisms: what happens when you have too many casualties and not enough beds. How triage decisions get made. Why some people die from injuries that would have been minor in a functioning system. Why the absence of ultrasound machines, the shortage of blood products, the lack of fuel for generators — why these things aren’t just inconveniences but lethal. I know the research on surge capacity. I know how institutions collapse. I know what happens to care standards when systems break.

This dual knowledge — the specific loss and the systematic understanding — is what makes me useful to universities now. They want both. They want me to sound credible, which means trained and analytical. But they also want me to carry the weight of personal loss, which makes the analysis seem urgent rather than abstract. They have learned that audiences respond to this combination. That people listen more carefully when they know the person speaking has been destroyed by what she’s analysing.

What they don’t want is for me to name what’s happening in that arrangement.

What’s happening is extraction. It’s not dramatic or violent in the way that airstrikes are violent. It’s quieter. It happens in the form of invitations, honorariums, publication opportunities. It happens because universities have learned that audiences respond to authenticity, that people want to hear from people who have “been there”, that lived experience makes scholarship seem more real. So they have created a market for it. And I have become a commodity in that market because my lived experience is attached to research credentials.

The transaction works like this: I provide expertise. I provide the specific knowledge that comes from having studied these systems while living inside one. I provide the emotional weight of loss. In exchange, I get to publish. I get to speak. I get to maintain my career. And the institution gets to feel that it is taking Palestine seriously without actually having to change anything.

Because the key to this arrangement is that the distance is maintained. I am invited to explain how systems fail, how institutions collapse under pressure, how medical infrastructure becomes insufficient when there’s no fuel and no supplies and too many injured people. But I am invited to explain this from a particular position: as someone analysing systems, not as someone implicated in them.

The university wants me to be inside and outside at the same time. Inside enough to have credibility. Outside enough to maintain the professional distance that allows the room full of people to feel like they are engaging with difficult ideas rather than confronting complicity. This is the structure that has to be maintained for the transaction to work.

The complicity is structural: everyone in those rooms has benefited from systems that make my family’s destruction possible. Not individually, not intentionally, but structurally. The university itself is part of the apparatus. It produces the knowledge that legitimises distance. It teaches students that you can study oppression without your voice being shaped by it. It creates the conditions under which someone like me can stand in front of people and explain state capacity while my mother is bleeding internally in a hospital that doesn’t have enough of anything.

*

In the months after my mother died, I discovered that I could not maintain the distance anymore. Not because I didn’t have the intellectual capacity to do it — I could still produce the analysis, still cite the sources, still sound credible. But because I could not do it without lying.

The lie is subtle but total. It’s not that the analysis is false. The analysis is sound. The research is rigorous. The mechanisms I describe are real.

The lie is in the form. The lie is that you can study a system that has destroyed you from a position of neutrality. The lie is that expertise means distance. The lie is that I can explain how institutions fail without acknowledging that I have watched institutions fail my family specifically. The lie is that there is a view from nowhere, and that academic training means learning to access it.

For years, I maintained that lie. It was what my training demanded. It was what the institution required of me to maintain credibility. I learned early that if I let my voice shake, if I let the loss show, if I refused to flatten my experience into analysis, people would dismiss me as emotional. They would say I was too close to it. They would suggest that perhaps I wasn’t objective enough to do this work. So I learned to maintain distance. I learned to be the kind of scholar who could explain oppression without her voice being shaped by it.

But I watched my mother die. And I watched that death be absorbed into the statistics. I watched it become a number in a death toll that people discussed over coffee without any sense of what that number meant. I watched it become available for analysis, for distant commentary, for the kind of sophisticated discussion that maintains distance from actual suffering.

And I could not do that anymore.

*

A university invited me to speak several months after my mother’s death. They had read my research. They thought my perspective would be valuable on a panel about Middle Eastern politics. I almost didn’t go. The idea of standing in front of people and explaining political systems felt obscene. But I went. And I refused the distance.

I told them that I had spent years studying how political systems work. That I had been trained to analyse them with objectivity and rigour. That I had become quite good at it. Then I told them that my mother had been killed by one of those systems while I was explaining another one in a classroom in Taiwan. I told them that I could not maintain the pretence of distance anymore. That my accepting their inviting me to speak, while also maintaining the institutional structures that enabled my family’s destruction, was a form of complicity that I was no longer willing to perform.

I could see the discomfort ripple through the room. Some people shifted in their seats. Some looked at each other. Some looked angry. Some looked confused. Because what I had done was refuse the role they had written for me. I had refused to be the Palestinian scholar who makes them feel sophisticated. I had refused to flatten my experience into analysis that maintains their comfort. I had made it impossible for them to believe that understanding oppression was the same as refusing it.

After the event, several people approached me. Some were upset. They said I should focus on the research because that’s what’s compelling. What they meant was: maintain the distance. Be the kind of Palestinian who can explain oppression without it touching you. Be the kind of scholar who doesn’t make people feel implicated. Give us the knowledge without the refusal.

I know exactly what refusing the distance costs. The invitations stop coming. Journals I thought were interested suddenly go quiet. Funding committees that seemed promising don’t return emails. Colleagues distance themselves — not dramatically, but noticeably. They stop asking for my input. They stop including me in conversations. It’s professional erasure delivered through silence rather than explicit rejection. All the more effective because it’s harder to name.

A journal that had been receptive to my work suddenly said my latest piece was “too personal”. A conference organiser told me my “approach had shifted” and they were going in a different direction. A university that had discussed hiring me went with someone “less specialised” on Gaza — which meant someone who could talk about it without lived connection to it, which meant someone who could maintain distance. I understand the pattern. Maintain distance and you’re credible. Refuse distance and you’re compromised.

But I also know what maintaining the distance costs, and that price is higher. It costs my voice. It costs the ability to say what I actually think about the systems I’m studying. It costs the integrity of refusing to let my family’s destruction be absorbed into abstract analysis. It costs pretending that I can study oppression without being shaped by it, which is a lie that corrodes everything else.

So I’m refusing the distance. And yes, it means that some institutions won’t invite me back. Some journals won’t publish me. Some funding opportunities will dry up. Some colleagues will say I’ve become too political, too emotional, too willing to let personal experience distort analysis. What they’re really saying is: you’ve become useless to us in the way we wanted you to be useful. You’ve refused to perform the role we wrote for you.

I’ve made a calculation: the cost of professional rejection is lower than the cost of maintaining a lie.

*

Here’s what I understand now about how this works.

Universities don’t actually need Palestinians to tell them about Palestinian politics. They have plenty of people who can do that — international relations experts, political scientists, historians. What they need is for someone like me to stand in the room and make the analysis seem legitimate. My presence is supposed to authorise the discussion.

But they only want that legitimacy if it comes without challenge. They want me to perform authenticity while maintaining the distance that allows them to not feel implicated. They want to feel like they’re taking this seriously, like they’re centering Palestinian voices, like they’re doing the intellectual work to understand what’s happening. But they don’t want that understanding to actually change anything about how they operate. They don’t want it to change what they publish, what they fund, who they hire, what they teach.

I’ve watched this play out specifically. A university in Australia invited me to speak about institutional failure and medical systems. They were excited about my research. They wanted me to present to their medical students. It felt important — future doctors should understand this. But when I said I wanted to talk about my mother’s death as an example, the tone shifted. They said it might be “too heavy” for the students. They suggested I focus more on the “general mechanisms” and less on the “particular case”. What they meant was: give them the analysis without the reminder that real people die when systems fail. Give them the knowledge without the obligation it creates.

This is the transaction: I trade specificity for credibility. I trade my voice for access. I trade my family’s destruction for the right to speak about systems. And universities get to feel like they’re engaging with Palestine while maintaining the structures that make Palestinian destruction possible.

*

The market for Palestinian expertise has exploded since my mother’s death. Universities want to hire Palestinians. Publishers want Palestinian voices. Funding suddenly exists for research on Gaza. There are jobs now for people who can explain what’s happening there. And I could have benefited from this. I could have positioned myself carefully, maintained my professional distance, published widely, built a career on explaining my own family’s destruction to people who wanted to feel informed about it without feeling implicated in it.

But I watched my mother die from injuries a functioning medical system could have treated. I watched that happen because systems failed. And then I watched those same institutions invite me to explain how systems fail, as long as I maintained the distance that allowed them to believe those failures were abstract, structural, not their responsibility.

I’m not maintaining that distance anymore.

It means that when I do research now, when I write, when I speak — I’m doing it from a specific place. Not from outside. Not from the view that distances me. But from inside the system I’m studying, broken by it, still trying to explain it to people who want the explanation without the implication.

My research is sound. My analysis is rigorous. I still have the credentials and the training. But it comes from a place. It comes from Khan Younis in December 2023. It comes from a hospital overwhelmed past the point of function. It comes from injuries that should have been survivable but weren’t because the system had broken. It comes from my mother’s voice fading over the phone because my brother was calling me to tell me she was dead.

That’s where the knowledge lives now. Not in the view from nowhere. But in the specific place where systems fail people you love. And if that makes you uncomfortable when I’m speaking, that’s not a flaw in my analysis. That’s the point.

What this demands of institutions is a choice. You can continue to invite Palestinian scholars only if they maintain distance, which means you’ll keep hearing analysis that sounds credible because it sounds uninvested. Or you can actually listen to what Palestinians are saying, which is often that distance is a luxury we can’t afford, that expertise is shaped by loss because loss is what we’re analysing, that refusing the distance is not unprofessional — it’s the only honest way to do this work.

You can continue to feel like you’re engaging with Palestine through panels and seminars and lectures, while keeping the structures that enabled Palestinian destruction. Or you can actually reckon with your own role in those structures. You can actually let Palestinian scholars tell you what needs to change, not just explain to you how things work from a distance.

I’m not interested in being useful to institutions that want to profit from my loss while maintaining distance from their own complicity. I’m not interested in maintaining the lie that expertise means neutrality, or that you can study your own family’s death and still sound uninvested.

*

My mother died on December 5th, 2023. She was conscious when they pulled her from the rubble. She was speaking. But the internal bleeding was invisible and the system couldn’t treat it because the system had broken.

I know this specifically. I know it in the way you know something when it’s happened to your family. And I also know it systematically. And I’m not maintaining the distance between those two kinds of knowledge anymore.

That’s where the analysis lives now. That’s where the refusal lives now. Not in a separate space from the personal, but integrated with it. Inseparable. This is what rigorous scholarship looks like when you refuse to extract yourself from it.