Palestine Letter: Reporting our lives, not your ideology
Qassam Muaddi writes in Mondoweiss on 9 September 2026:
One day, a colleague who worked in a Catholic magazine for which I had written, and who was writing an article about Palestinian Christians, wanted to interview me as an average Palestinian Christian. At one point, this journalist who came from a European country, asked me if I identified first as Christian or as Palestinian. I asked her back if she had ever had to answer that same question, and choose between her faith or religious heritage, and her nationality to put before the other. She said that she hadn’t, and when I asked her why, she said that in her case, the question wasn’t relevant, because it wasn’t political.
Somehow, my identity, which is, like the identity of any person anywhere, multi-layered, became a political issue. Not political in the sense that my answer would say something about my values or ideas, no. It is political in the sense that my answer, whatever it would be, would be a contribution to a controversial debate, between extensive, clashing world views, none of which is necessarily mine. In other words, the way I identify would be an ideological statement for somebody else.
This is deeply disturbing, because I didn’t choose it. It is the situation of my country, and the fate that has been that of my people for the last century, that has made anything coming from us, Palestinians, ideologically consequential for others, and therefore controversial. This makes my work, and that of all Palestinian journalists who spend our time telling the world about our country and our people, by definition a risky one, as our perspective, and the narrative that we offer will be and have been understood as ideology, and therefore as less valuable, less serious, and less credible.
This is the result of power dynamics; the conqueror, the stronger party gets to define what the conventional wisdom and the objective reality are, and what is labeled as ideological and political. This definition is made based on the ideology of the stronger party. It is so much about power dynamics that the weaker part is pressed to believe that the simplest opinion about themselves is ideological.