COMMENTARY: By Layth Malhis
You, the reader, are the public intellectual. Unfortunately, this message carries immense weight: those who engage with Palestine bear a collective responsibility to confront and end the carnage, the bloodshed, and the ever-mounting rubble.
Yet, in doing so, you will find yourself in the crossfire of a relentless defamation machine — one that thrives, operates, and feeds off the energy of Palestinian blood.
During her tour across college campuses in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, was the target of egregious criticism and mischaracterisations.
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The Wall Street Journal is among the many media outlets that have taken part in this defaming effort. On October 30, its own editorial board brandished her as a “Hamas apologist” who has a “long record of trivialising the Holocaust”.
This concerted effort by the WSJ and other established media outlets in the US and UK to attack the Special Rapporteur was yet another reminder that to publically stand up for Palestine is to endure a process of vilification where character and integrity are defamed and systematically undermined — all to dismantle any semblance of credibility of the message and more importantly its orator.
In 1993, the Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said delivered a series of thought-provoking lectures for the BBC’s Reith Lecture series, exploring the role of the public intellectual through the lens of literature, his personal experiences, and his critical insights.
These lectures were later compiled into a book where Said defined the intellectual as an “individual with a specific public role in society that cannot be reduced simply to being a faceless professional… endowed with a faculty to representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public.”
Said emphasises that the intellectual bears a profound responsibility: to “raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.”
This is why Francesca Albanese is feared: She knows not only the law but has visceral understanding of trauma of displacement: “a people is like a body: You chop one arm the whole body suffers. For indigenous people the land is not just where they live. The land is who they are!” pic.twitter.com/NHII59VJ0v
— Maria Aristodemou (@maariaris) November 8, 2024
The intellectual as a dissenter and advocate
His framing of the intellectual as a dissenter and advocate for the marginalised challenges individuals to embody courage and integrity in the face of power and complacency.
This article explores the dual roles of public intellectuals: those forced into the role amidst genocide and those who choose to engage from the outside, both vital in resisting erasure.
Since October 7, 2023, two distinct types of public intellectuals have emerged:
The first type of public intellectual is the everyday individual in Gaza — the teachers, doctors, photographers, journalists, nurses, grocery clerks, and all who carry the will to document, report, and speak truth to power. Ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, where life itself has been reduced to a desperate game of survival.
Over the past year, Israel’s systematic decimation of Gaza’s medical, educational, and sanitation infrastructure has severed Palestinians from the most basic metrics of life.
Yet, those with the skill and capacity to provide care, knowledge, and dignity have been forced into a cruel and precarious existence. Their resilience has made them public intellectuals by necessity, embodying both survival and resistance in the face of erasure.
These intellectuals serve the people of Palestine not only by merely providing essential services to ensure survival but also by resisting the occupation’s disinformation war.
Breaking through the fog of Israeli propaganda
They have achieved this through the dissemination of pictures, videos, and oral testimonies from the victims of Israel’s genocidal campaign, breaking through the fog of propaganda to communicate the truth to the outside world.
Among those who have assumed this role are Bisan Owda, Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, Refaat Alareer, Dr Husam Abu Safia, Anas al-Sharif, Wael Al-Dahdouh, and many others, some still alive, countless now martyred.
Public intellectuals in Gaza have been systematically targeted by the Israeli war machine. Just this week, we learned of the agonising and distressing circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Adnan Al Bursh.
Revered as a leader and a hero for his unyielding presence during crises in the besieged strip, Dr Al Bursh took it upon himself to document and disseminate footage of life inside Al-Shifa Hospital during the early weeks of the genocide. His courageous efforts to expose the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s medical sector by the Israeli army have been instrumental in bringing attention to the mounting war crimes.
Dr Al Bursh’s work flagged the systematic targeting of healthcare infrastructure, a grim pattern that has been substantiated by the World Health Organisation, which reports 516 Israeli attacks on Gaza’s healthcare sector.
His detainment and life-ending brutalisation were yet another harrowing reminder of Israel’s relentless campaign against those who dare to heal, resist, and speak out.
His life and death exemplify the extraordinary sacrifices made by Gaza’s public intellectuals in the face of Israel’s genocidal and urbicidal project, where the destruction of human life and urban fabric are employed as tools of erasure and domination.
Rebelling and agitating against normalisation
The second type of public intellectual — you, me, and those whose love and passion, borrowing from James Baldwin, holds the world intact — are the ones who possess absolute choice and freedom to address Palestine and its profound injustices.
This group exists on the outside, rebelling and agitating against the normalisation of Palestinian blood. It wakes to videos filled with carnage and despair, and it sleeps to the haunting pleas of those trapped in the besieged land.
The primary condition of the public intellectual during genocide is to transform into a state of agitation, to ensure that fatigue does not set in and that the endless cycle of destruction and outrage does not dull the sharpness of the convictions held by those who stand in solidarity with Palestinians.
Their task is monumental: to end the suffering, to give those screaming for help a moment to breathe, to grieve, and to mourn what little remains amidst the rubble.
I remind those who hold Palestine close to their hearts — the ones who see, who know, who have the faces and screams of Sidra Hassouna, Hind Rajab, and countless other children, mothers, and fathers etched into their memory — that you must shoulder the burden of responsibility required to end this once and for all. You must tear apart the veil of normalisation, where moral apathy supersedes humanity.
The role of the public intellectual on the outside is to persistently challenge the system working in overdrive to normalise the mass death and territorial expropriation unfolding in real-time on our social media feeds.
This role is not without risks; it inevitably marks the orator, the fighter for justice, as an enemy of the established order and its orthodoxy. It will take a piece of their heart and box it into a state of discomfort, where the feeling of contempt is replaced by melancholy.
The risks of speaking truth about Palestine
In an illuminating episode of the Makdisi Street Podcast featuring Saree, Osama, and Karim Makdisi — each embodying the role of the public intellectual on Palestine — the acclaimed writer and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates reflected on the risks of speaking truth about Palestine.
He argued that when your work authentically captures the reality of Palestinian suffering and successfully communicates this pain to the world, it provokes a backlash.
Racism and efforts to silence you will emerge, calibrated to inflict just enough harm to deter you from continuing on your path. Yet, Coates emphasised, the path of amplifying the Palestinian struggle for freedom must be walked, regardless of the obstacles.
When addressing Palestine, the public intellectual must embody an unyielding commitment to dismantling the narratives and mechanisms designed to erase and dehumanise the oppressed.
A striking example of this is Francesca Albanese’s masterful intervention during a press briefing on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on November 5, where she effectively dismantled the concept of a state’s “right to exist.”
Recognising the bad faith in which the question was posed, Albanese redirected the discussion to the framework of international law, emphasising its role in safeguarding the rights of people, not states.
She underscored the absurdity of such narratives by drawing a parallel to her native Italy, illustrating how inconceivable such a question would be if applied to any other country.
Unwavering clarity is essential
This unwavering clarity is essential; any quivering or half-measure approach risks greater harm to Palestinians, as it inadvertently feeds into the machinery of normalisation.
To falter in conviction is to risk legitimising propaganda that perpetuates oppression, enabling the powerful to cloak their violence in a veneer of legitimacy. For the public intellectual, there is no room for compromise in confronting these narratives — their mission is to illuminate truth and uphold justice without equivocation.
One of the primary reasons Zionist interest groups have gone into overdrive to skew and tarnish Francesca Albanese’s reputation is her unapologetic stance, not only in support of the Palestinians but in defence of their right to resist oppression.
It is evident when one hears her speak that she does not hold back; she refuses to dilute her convictions or entertain any ambiguity about her stance. Her words leave no room for speculation or the comfort of moderation, forcing her audience, and her opponents, to confront the harsh realities of colonial violence and occupation on her terms, terms based exclusively on truth and humanist principles.
Albanese’s refusal to placate those who seek to police the boundaries of acceptable discourse on Palestine is precisely what makes her a target.
She exemplifies the essence of the public intellectual: a voice of resistance that remains unsilenced and unyielding, boldly challenging the orthodoxy of power and its enablers. Albanese, alongside others across various sectors and disciplines, provides a vital blueprint for embodying the role of the public intellectual in the context of Palestine.
While their methods and areas of influence may differ, they share an unabashed, unapologetic commitment to confronting the enablers of genocide with relentless determination. They recognise that what is at stake — the lives and futures of Palestinians in Gaza and the normalisation of systemic violence — demands untiring commitment, and it is precisely because of the significant personal cost involved that they persist in their fight.
No system that relies on defamation and character assassination as a form of policing speech that seeks to humanise the incarcerated and mutilated should continue.
Their sole adversary is that violent system
For the public intellectual, their sole adversary is that system, a system that is weaker today than it was yesterday, as the collective pursuit for truth is making serious ground to eroding its foundations.
Be that public intellectual who speaks and writes on Palestine with courage and conviction, unafraid to be unabashedly proud in their stance.
Approach Palestine not as an abstract cause but as part of your kin, allowing your sense of justice and humanity to guide your voice.
In a world desensitised to the pain and suffering it perpetuates, Palestine offers a rare, transformative opportunity — a “once in a generation” moment to mobilise and redefine the structures of power and ideals that shape our global reality.
Layth Malhis is at the Center of Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. He writes on settler colonialism and necropolitics in Palestine and the broader Arab world.This article was first published by The New Arab.
