Palestinian resistance: “We are history”
JVL Introduction
This is a report of Dr. Ramzy Baroud presentation at a Palestine Day event in Belfast; he talked of history and the importance of sharing stories. “We tell stories because memory is our primary defense,” he said. “I grew up in a household in Gaza where stories about the village we had never seen, about the homeland we had never lived in, were told almost daily.”
He speaks of how Israel tried to erase a people as well as places but has failed. Dr. Baroud has written a new book “After the Flood” that tells the story of his own family but that has, of course, resonance for thousands of others. (I recommend it by the way, LL). He has lost over 100 members of his own family since October 2023, including his sister.
He speaks of resistance and of how “Sumud” is much more than steadfastness and of how resistance is not only armed resistance but the resistance of insisting on living, recalling how so many Palestinians walked back to the sites of their damaged and even destroyed homes.
This article was originally published by Palestine Chronicle on Sun 9 Aug 2026. Read the original here.
‘We Are History’: Baroud on Memory, Resistance, Palestinian Narrative in Belfast
In Belfast, Ramzy Baroud explored Palestinian memory, resistance and narrative sovereignty, arguing that storytelling remains essential to survival and liberation.
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The Israeli educational curriculum (see “Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education”, Nutrit-Peled Elhanan, 2012) teaches all children an understanding of Jewish Israeli “history”, “geography” and their place in today’s world that underpins the ideology of the Israeli state, denies the Nakba and uses the horrors of the Holocaust to subdue them into believing what they’re told. It’s much closer to state propaganda than to education. One of its weapons is to completely ignore inconvenient facts such as the indigenous Palestinian population’s history, culture and archaeological monuments.
Safeguarding the Palestinians’ history, experiences and culture against the determined efforts of the Israeli state to destroy it forever really matters. As George Orwell knew.
The opening chapters of “1984” explain Winston Smith’s role on behalf of the totalitarian state of removing all the references showing “history” proves today’s propagandists to be lying toads.