The hardest thing I have learned this past year in Japan is about people I thought I knew very well. To them I was never really an equal. I was a tool for their own virtue, someone to look down on with sympathy. Let us be honest, it is pity towards Palestinians. They use that virtue twice. Once to hide their own ugliness behind the mask of the sympathizer, and once to keep us in check, to show they are better, to control our culture and our behaviour, to always appear on top and us below.

As Edward Said beautifully opens Orientalism:

Handala has never meant more to me. His turned back is the answer. Not meeting their gaze with another gaze, but refusing the exchange entirely, by withholding his face, denying that eye its spectacle and its borrowed virtue.