You Belong to Nobody? A Second Thought on Smashing the Patriarchy

Savio SALDANHA

10.5281/zenodo.22121594

27 August 2026

 

    There is a verse in the Manusmriti, chapter 9, verse 3, that reads:

‘pitā rakṣati kaumāre bhartā rakṣati yauvane, rakṣanti sthavire putrā na strī svātantryam arhati’

            Which literally means that, "The father guards her in childhood, the husband guards her in youth and the sons guard her in old age. The woman is never fit for independence." It is not a stray line. The verse before it says women must be kept under control by the men of the family. The verses after it treat guarding a wife as the highest duty a husband has, and treat a widow's chastity after her husband's death as her defining virtue for the rest of her life. Read this slowly and you see what it actually does. A woman never becomes her own person. She is handed from one male guardian to the next. Protection, in this text, is another word for custody.

            This is the background against which Rahul Gandhi spoke to a crowd of young women in Pune last week, in the middle of a charged political season where Manusmriti gets thrown at the BJP and RSS almost as often as it gets read on its own terms. He quoted that verse, called it the Manusmriti mindset, and told the women they do not belong to their father, their husband, or their son. You belong to yourself, he said. Smash the patriarchy. Be loud, be proud.

            I agree with the diagnosis. What I want to sit with here is the line he offered as the cure. A rally is not a treatise, and it is worth engaging the sentence Rahul actually said, in full, rather than the shortened version of it that will end up on placards or circulated as memes. I have already come across several such photos with tagline, you do not belong to anybody but yourself. This is the better one than another shortened version which reads, you do not belong to anybody. This is where I see the danger. When Rahul spoke he addressed a real socio-political reality of the oppression of women. He spoke from this particular context. The photo memes take the tagline while ignoring the context, presuming readers already know it. I reflect on this phenomenon as a Jesuit, a teacher and a counselor who has some experience of working with the youth, women, tribals and the dalits.

What the slogan gets right

            Rahul was not making things up. The verse says what he said it says. And what it prescribes is not protection in any ordinary sense as some have claimed. A father who genuinely protects his daughter wants her safe and also wants her to grow into someone who can stand on her own. The Manusmriti does not want that. It wants the transfer of custody to never end. That is worth naming clearly, and smashing it is the right instinct. So when Rahul says a woman does not belong to her father or her husband or her son, he is right. Nobody owns another person. That much is not in question for me.

This was never only an Indian problem

    It is worth saying plainly that Manusmriti was not some isolated case of one culture getting this wrong. Aristotle, writing in Greece in the fourth century before Christ, said something with the same structure in his book on biology, Generation of Animals, book two, chapter three. He wrote that the female is, in effect, a deformed male, and that menstrual fluid is semen in an incomplete form, lacking what he called the principle of soul. In his Politics, book one, chapter thirteen, he goes further and says the woman has the capacity to reason but not the authority that reason needs to rule, which for him settles her place under the man's authority in the household.

    Two civilizations, arriving at the same idea: women are a lesser, incomplete version of men and that incompleteness justifies permanent male authority over them. That should tell us something. This is not a defect of one text or one region. It is a pattern in how men in power have thought about women across most of human history, dressed up differently depending on where you stood, biology in Athens, dharma in India.

    Neither tradition stayed frozen there. Bhakti poets and later reformers pushed back against verses like this one from inside Indian religious life. The Greek and Roman thought moved past Aristotle's biology too. So both traditions were larger than their worst verse, and it would be its own kind of unfairness to treat one line of thought as the whole of either.

 

Where I got uneasy

            Rahul's actual sentence was "you belong to nobody except yourself." That is a complete claim, not a fragment, and it deserves to be read on its own terms rather than as loose talk that happened to leave a phrase dangling. I have already explained the shortened versions making rounds and how I look at them.

            If I or someone read on its own terms, here is what it says: there is exactly one legitimate owner of you, and it is you. Not your father. Not your husband. Not your son, just yourself. That is a real position, not a slip of the tongue. It is close to what a great deal of modern liberal thought says about the person, that I am self-possessed, and self-possession is the ground of my dignity.

            I still get uneasy here, but for a more precise reason than I started with. If the self is the last and only owner of the self, the self also becomes the last court of appeal. Nobody has a claim on you, which sounds exactly right against Manusmriti's father-husband-son chain. But it also means, followed all the way through, that nobody's judgment of you can ever outrank your own. I have sat with enough people in distress, students back in India buckling under exam pressure or being torn apart by what strangers said about them online, or going through serious relationship breakups to know that a self answerable only to itself is not always a self at peace. Sometimes it is a self with nobody left to check it, and nobody left to catch it either.

    To be fair to the other side of this, traditional embeddedness has its own well documented costs. Restricted mobility, restricted schooling and no real way out of a bad marriage to name a few. Nobody sane wants to trade freedom for those. The real question is not whether the old bonds were worth keeping. They were not. It is whether the right alternative to being owned by others is being owned only by yourself, or something else again.

What I would say instead

    As a Jesuit I would put it differently, and the difference sits exactly where Rahul's sentence ends. His sentence ends at yourself. I want to press on past that. Kindly be patient with me as I say that we all belong to God. This belief does not undo anything that Rahul said about not being owned by fathers, husbands, or sons. It agrees with all of it. But at the same time it does not let the self be the final resting place either. It means we are accountable, all of us, for what we do, and nobody, not even the self, gets the last word on that just by being the self.

    And next to it, morally, I say we are accountable to the society we live in. That is Gaudium et Spes speaking, the Second Vatican Council's document on the Church in the modern world, paragraph 24, which says a person cannot fully find himself/herself except through a sincere gift of himself/herself. Not through detachment from others but through gift. A self that belongs only to itself has nothing left to give and nobody left to answer to but its own judgment. That is not what any of us, man or woman, was made for.

    I say this as a Catholic, and I know the language is not available to everyone who was standing in that crowd in Pune. Most of those women were not going to walk home wondering what a Vatican council said forty years before they were born. A Hindu, a Muslim, an atheist woman in that stadium has her own ground to stand on for saying the same thing without needing mine, human dignity, equal citizenship, the plain constitutional fact that she is protected under the law regardless of what any dharmaśāstra says about her. I am not claiming my language is the only door into this argument. I am saying every version of it needs some floor under autonomy, whatever name a person gives that floor, or autonomy on its own will not hold the weight being put on it.

 

The harder question

    But there is a real problem hiding in what I just said, and I do not want to dodge it. What happens when the society you are supposed to be accountable to is itself the Manusmriti society? What happens when the accountability structure is the oppression? This is not a hypothetical for the women Rahul was addressing. Their families, their neighbourhoods, sometimes their own religious world, are shaped by exactly the mindset that the verse encodes. Telling them to be accountable to that society is not a moral answer. It is just handing the custody back to the oppressors. So accountability to society as it currently stands cannot be the last word. But that does not mean the answer is no accountability. It means the accountability moves. It moves from the society that exists now to the society that should exist.

    Mary's song in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 1, verses 51 to 52, does exactly this: "He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly." She does not say she belongs to nobody. She names an order that is currently in power, the proud, the powerful on their thrones, and says God is against it. That is not a rejection of accountability. It is a redirection of it, away from an order that crushes people and toward one that does not yet fully exist but is being called into being.

    As stated earlier that redirection needs a floor of its own, or it becomes whatever the speaker wants it to be. Here is mine: no person handed to another as property, and each person treated with the dignity that is theirs by right. Every person answerable and every person answered to in turn. Dignity that does not depend on whose household you were born into. This is not an empty standard. It is exactly the standard the Manusmriti fails, and it is a standard anyone can check an order against, mine or Rahul's or anyone else's.

 

What Ignatius adds

    There is one more piece I want to bring in, because it is the tradition I was formed in. Ignatius of Loyola, in the Principle and Foundation that opens the Spiritual Exercises, paragraph 23, has a concept he calls indifference. It does not mean not caring. It means being free enough from disordered attachment to anything created that you are available to what God actually wants. He says we should not be more inclined to health than to sickness, to riches than to poverty, to a long life than a short one, but should desire and choose only what leads to the end for which we are made.

    Notice what indifference is not. It is not detachment from every relationship. It is detachment from whatever attachment gets in the way of the right one. Manusmriti's structure, where a woman exists to serve her father's household and then her husband's line, is a disordered attachment, a woman held not for her own sake but for what she secures for the men around her. Ignatian indifference would cut that attachment loose in a heartbeat. But it would not then leave a person attached to nothing. It frees a person for the deepest attachment there is, to God, and from that, to other people rightly. Rahul's slogan, read as opposition to a disordered custody, fits inside this. Read out of context, as opposition to belonging as such, it does not.

Where this leaves me

    So here is where I land. Liberation from an unjust structure and freedom from every accountability but your own are two different things, and it is easy to slide from the first into the second without noticing. The right-wing does this constantly when it defends structures like Manusmriti's in the name of tradition and order. But the language of liberation can do it too, when the self quietly becomes the only authority left standing.

    The correction Manusmriti needs is not "you belong to nobody except yourself." It is "you do not belong to your father, your husband, or your son, because you belong to God, and answerable to God, not just to your own judgment of yourself, is what makes you a person and not property in the first place." That is a harder sentence to fit on a banner. I do not blame Rahul for this; he made a statement from a different perspective than mine. I also do not say that my perspective is the only right one or the only one there is. There are several concepts on which we can base this argument rather than a Christian understanding of God, particularly in a pluralist nation like India. To the large number of Indian women who are Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh or other religions, or atheist, or agnostic, the Manusmriti critique can be a part of a broader secular or reformist project of individual rights and constitutional equality, or a call to re-center on their understanding of God.

    I worked with women outside the classroom too. Before I became a Jesuit, I spent nine years as a bank officer, and part of that work was helping set up self-help groups for women, many of whom had never held a bank account of their own before that. Since then, I have addressed rural women entrepreneurs, assisting in building small businesses, with no capital behind them and no one behind them either, except themselves. Almost every one of those women had spent years being told, in one form or another, whose she was before anyone thought to ask who she wanted to be. That is what this argument is actually about, underneath the theology. Not detachment from everyone who ever had power over her. A different, truer accountability altogether, one that starts with God, or with whatever floor she stands on, and does not stop at whoever currently holds power over her life.

 

 

From Chariot to Crossroads: Discernment lessons from Plato, Krishna and Ignatius.

Savio Saldanha

DOI- 10.5281/zenodo.22083353

Date – 24 August 2026

                After all these years as a Jesuit, I still consider myself a student of discernment. I sometimes find myself thinking almost desiring that I too receive this grace like Solomon. But experience and history teaches it is not always so simple. As I keep reflecting on this I take recourse to different traditions and cultures which have searched for the solution to this problem(?). I delve into the Greek, Indian and Western philosophies and theologies that show a probable way. I think of a chariot pulled by two horses, one obedient and one unruly. I read about a prince who lays down his weapons and hands the reins to his chariot to God. I walk with a pilgrim who lets his mule choose the road so that a stranger might live or die depending on which direction it takes. Three images, separated by centuries and continents, all asking the same question: who is driving?

Plato's horses

                In the Phaedrus, Plato pictures the soul as a charioteer holding the reins of two horses (246a–254e). One horse is noble and responds to command; the other pulls toward appetite and has to be fought. The charioteer is reason. Left alone, either horse would wreck the chariot — the noble one through excess of spirit, the unruly one through raw appetite. The soul only moves well when reason holds both.

                In the Republic, Plato gives the same structure a different shape: reason, spirit, and appetite (Book IV, 434d–441c). Justice in a person is reason ruling, with spirit as its ally, over appetite. He then maps this onto the city — guardians, auxiliaries, and producers — because for Plato the well-run soul and the well-run city are the same pattern at different scales. The charioteer image and the tripartite soul are really one argument: order is not the absence of conflicting forces, it's their right ranking under something higher.

Krishna, and a bow that still has to be drawn

                The Bhagavad Gita opens with Arjuna setting down his bow on the battlefield, paralysed by the prospect of killing his own kin. He asks Krishna to be his charioteer — and Krishna agrees, but not by taking over the fight. He drives, counsels, and clarifies, while Arjuna is the one who has to fire the arrow. By chapter 18, Krishna's counsel is still the same: act, but act without grasping at the fruit of the act (18.63 and surrounding verses). This is worth sitting with, because it's easy to read "Krishna is the charioteer" as "Krishna took the wheel and Arjuna went along for the ride." That's not what happens. The clearest statement of what Krishna is actually offering comes earlier, in chapter 2:

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन। मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि॥ (2.47)

"Your right is to the action alone, never to its fruits. Let the fruit of action never be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction."

                That's not permission to step back or a passive surrender as is generally presumed. It's the opposite — a command to act, stripped of the grasping that makes action anxious. Krishna restores Arjuna's clarity about what he's already committed to doing. The guidance is real, but the war is still fought with Arjuna's own arms.

Ignatius and the mule — a false start, not a smaller version of discernment

                There's a well-known story from Ignatius's own account of his early life (Autobiography, no.14-15). Riding toward Montserrat not long after his conversion, he falls into an argument with a Moor about the perpetual virginity of Mary. The man rides on ahead. Ignatius, furious, can't decide whether to catch up and kill him for the insult or let it go. Unable to settle it himself, he lets his mule choose: if it turns onto the Moor's road, he'll follow and kill him; if it stays on the highway, he'll let the man live. The mule stays on the highway.

                   It's tempting to read the slackened reins as an early flicker of trust in providence, and there's something to that — Ignatius includes the story precisely to show, in his own words, how God was working on a soul that was "still blind." But the scholarship on the Autobiography is blunt about what this episode actually is. Reviewing the text's context and rhetoric, John McManamon notes that in letting the mule decide, Ignatius was abandoning the knightly code of honor that would have obligated him to avenge the insult himself — a move the Autobiography itself frames as immaturity, not wisdom (McManamon, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 2016; drawing on Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle's Loyola's Acts, 1997). Ignatius was outsourcing a moral decision to chance because he hadn't yet learned how to test what's actually moving in him.

            By the time he came to write his own guidance for others, decades later, that had changed completely. What he eventually taught was not "wait for a sign," but the far harder discipline of paying attention to your own interior movements before you act — a discipline he'd had no access to on that road. That according to me is much closer to what Krishna does for Arjun than the mule ever was: not removing the choice, but clarifying the ground it's made on.

                Read in that order, the arc isn't Plato to Krishna to Ignatius as three points on a rising line, or three versions improving on each other. Krishna and the mature Ignatius stand together as two versions of the same claim: guidance sharpens the one who still has to act. The mule is the cautionary case of what happens when that guidance is skipped and chance is asked to stand in for it. I mean this at the level of the claim only, not their stature. A divine avatar and a canonized saint don't occupy the same order of being, and I'm not putting them on a scale against each other. What I'm saying is narrower: they're teaching the same thing about action. Arjuna's despair and Ignatius's rage at the insult are both impulses that have to be tested and cleared before they can be trusted. Only then does the action go forward. Krishna clears Arjuna's sight through counsel before he lifts the bow. The mature Ignatius teaches clearing your own interior movements before you choose. Neither says stop acting. Both say don't act on the first impulse.

What's left when the analogies run out

                None of these images, read carefully, license passivity. Arjuna still draws the bow. Ignatius, once he's past the mule, still has to sit with a decision and choose. Plato's reason doesn't get to retire once it's in charge — governing the horses is a permanent job, not a one-time victory. The chariot doesn't move on its own even with the reins in the right hands. It moves because someone is still driving and someone is still fighting.

                I kept coming back to this during my annual retreat — the same movement, on different days, in different prayer periods, refusing to resolve into either extreme. Not "I will handle this myself," and not "I will step back and let God handle it." Something narrower than both: hand over the direction, keep your hands on the work. I'd sit down expecting to have finished with the question and find it waiting for me again the next day, in a different disguise. That repetition was the point, I think. Surrender that only has to happen once isn't surrender, it is relief. The kind that has to be renewed each time you sit down is closer to what Arjuna is doing with the bow still in his hands, and closer to what Ignatius was still learning on that road to Montserrat. That's the whole of it, really. Not a single act of letting go, but a grip you keep adjusting — loosened where you were gripping out of fear, tightened where you'd let it go slack out of avoidance.

                As I bring this reflection to the story of Solomon, I find that even the wise king had to keep discerning and growing. He did make mistakes along the way, like his extravagant lifestyle and the increased taxation which led to the future splitting of the kingdom of Israel.

                So I feel that I will never be able to call myself a master of discernment. I shall be a student throughout my life, praying, reflecting and growing in this grace. My chariot may be driven by God, but at the same time I will be driving and choosing my way ahead.

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What the Oppressed Owe Their Own Liberation: On Standing With Palestine Without Losing the Ground to Stand On

What the Oppressed Owe Their Own Liberation: 

On Standing With Palestine Without Losing the Ground to Stand On

Savio SALDANHA

10.5281/zenodo.21922181

13 August 2026

I watched the film The Voice of Hind Rajab not as a spectator but as a man forced to reckon with what "magnitude" actually means when it stops being a statistic. A six-year-old girl, trapped in a car, pleading on a recorded line while the world listened and did nothing fast enough. That is not an abstraction. That is a name, a voice, a last conversation. It broke something open in me that statistics never had — and it forced me to ask why I had allowed myself, for however long, to process this conflict in numbers rather than names, or why I preferred to remain neutral when a people suffered.

But this reflection did not begin with a film, and it will not end with one. It sits on ground I have been building for years — as an Indian, as a Jesuit, and as someone who has spent a working life, before formation, among people for whom oppression was not a headline but a Monday.

Not a Religious Case

Let me be precise about what this is not. I do not support the Palestinian cause because of a theological commitment, and I have no patience for those — on any side — who fight in the name of religion rather than justice. Hamas does not speak for Palestinians any more than any single armed faction speaks for an entire people's grief — just as Hindutva does not speak for all Hindus, religious-nationalist Zionism does not speak for all Jews, and fundamentalist Christianity does not speak for all Christians. My objection is not to a religion, a people, or a state's right to exist. It is to occupation, blockade, and the killing of unarmed civilians and children — wherever and by whomever it is done. That distinction matters, and I hold to it deliberately, because a solidarity that cannot state its own limits is not solidarity — it is tribalism borrowing humanitarian language.

I also want to name the accusation directly rather than let it hover unanswered: that criticism of Israeli state policy is antisemitic. It is not, and there is a simple test for the difference. Antisemitism targets Jewish people or Judaism as such. My argument targets a state's conduct — occupation, blockade, the killing of civilians — the same category of critique I would apply, and do apply, to any state committing the same acts, including my own country in Kashmir. If the argument would stand unchanged were the state in question not Jewish, it is a policy critique, not prejudice. That is a test I am willing to be held to.

Gandhi's Ground: A Colonized People Recognizes Another

India's instinct here is not new, and it is not imported. We fought colonial rule ourselves, and Gandhi's method of resistance — satyagraha (truth-force) and ahimsa (non-violence) — was not a tactic of weakness but a claim that the means of resistance must be as just as the cause. Gandhi never asked the oppressed to submit; he asked them to resist without becoming what they resisted. That is not naïve idealism — it is the sharpest form of moral seriousness, because it refuses the shortcut of saying the ends justify any means.

I want to be honest about the limits of this ground rather than borrow Gandhi's authority without his record attached. Gandhi's own writing on the Jewish situation in the 1930s was, by most serious accounts, wrong — he opposed a Jewish national home in Palestine and, notoriously, suggested German Jews meet Nazi persecution with satyagraha, a position that treated a campaign of extermination as if it were a colonial grievance amenable to the same method that worked against the British Raj. It was not a small misjudgment. I invoke Gandhi here for the principle — that the means of resistance must be as disciplined as the cause is just — not for his verdict on that particular catastrophe, which does not hold up and which I do not defend.

This is also why India's foreign policy — decades before it built any strategic partnership with Israel — stood consistently for Palestinian statehood, for a negotiated two-state solution, for a people's right to a home of their own. That position has real ideological roots in India's own anti-colonial memory, but it is not pure inheritance; it has shifted over decades alongside strategic interest, energy security, and India's evolving relationship with both Israel and the Gulf states. I state the fuller picture rather than the cleaner one, because a nation's foreign policy, like a man's philosophy, is rarely as tidy as the story we tell about it — and a nation that itself endured partition, displacement, and colonial violence does not need religion, or a simple story, to recognize the same wound in another people.

Catholic Social Teaching: Justice Is Not an Afterthought

As a Jesuit, my tradition gives me a second, independent ground — one that does not rely on Gandhi or on India at all. The 32nd General Congregation of the Society of Jesus declared that the promotion of justice is a constitutive part of preaching the Gospel, not an optional humanitarian add-on for the sentimental. Pedro Arrupe's writing on structural sin gave the Church language for something Scripture already knew: that sin can be embedded in systems — in checkpoints, blockades, demolitions, in the daily architecture of humiliation — not only in individual cruelty. A structure can grind a people down long before a single bullet is fired.

And Catholic just war thinking gives me the tool to hold both halves of this without contradiction. The tradition recognizes a right to resist unjust occupation — it does not counsel simple submission to injustice. But it separates the justice of a cause from the justice of the means used to pursue it, and non-combatant immunity does not bend, ever, no matter how legitimate the underlying grievance. This holds even when an adversary makes distinction harder — embedding fighters or infrastructure among civilians is itself a grave violation, and I do not excuse it. But that violation does not transfer the resulting deaths onto a ledger where they stop counting; it does not convert a child's death into a legitimate military outcome, whichever side creates the conditions that made the strike difficult to avoid. The doctrine is not conditional on the enemy fighting fairly — if it were, it would cease to be a moral constraint and become a bargaining chip. This is the same principle that lets me grieve Hind Rajab and, in the same breath, condemn the killing of Israeli civilians on October 7. If the principle only runs in one direction, it was never a principle. It was a loyalty pretending to be one.

The Test I Hold Myself To

I have had to ask myself, honestly, whether my outrage is principled or selective — whether I speak because a people are oppressed, or because it has become fashionable, safe, or emotionally satisfying to speak about this particular oppression. The only honest answer is to widen the frame and see if it still holds: the Rohingya driven from Myanmar, the Armenians who carry a century of unacknowledged genocide, Kashmiri Pandits displaced from their own valley, the Baloch under a state that treats them as expendable, Tibetans under decades of occupation, Coptic Christians facing periodic violence in Egypt, Hindu minorities attacked amid political upheaval in Bangladesh and Pakistan, Jews murdered by the millions under Nazi Germany. If my solidarity does not travel to all of them with the same weight, it was never solidarity. It was politics wearing solidarity's clothes.

This is also where I part ways, sharply, with any movement — religious or political, on any side — whose compassion activates only when the oppressor is convenient to condemn: voice for a Gazan child but silence for a Coptic one, or the reverse. A consistent ethic cannot be redrawn depending on who benefits from the world's attention that week.

What Oppression Feeds, Without Excusing It

I have also had to be careful with a claim I believe is true but easily misused: that prolonged oppression is fertile ground for extremism. Research on suicide terrorism has found military occupation to be among the strongest common threads across cases, and structural violence — humiliation, deprivation, statelessness — measurably lowers a population's resistance to the narratives that recruit it. But the evidence is not simple: many who take up arms come from stable, educated backgrounds, and ideological movements like Salafi-jihadism have an autonomous life that predates and outlives any single occupation. Education does not manufacture terrorists; it does what Paulo Freire said education should do — it builds critical consciousness, the capacity to name one's own oppression and refuse to accept it as natural. That capacity has, throughout history, produced far more strikes, boycotts, and civil resistance than it has produced violence. The First Intifada proved that. Gandhi proved that against an empire crueler than most modern occupiers. To say oppressed people had "no other option" but arms erases the far larger number who chose otherwise, often at great cost to themselves.

So: oppression explains without excusing. It is accelerant, not cause. And the moment explanation curdles into justification for killing a child, I have left the ground I claim to stand on.

The Warning Inside Every Liberation Struggle

There is a harder thing I have come to believe, and I do not say it to score a point against either side: in the absence of a firm moral discipline, the oppressed do not automatically become just once they hold power. They can become mirror images of what oppressed them. This is not a claim about one people or one state — it is a pattern history keeps producing, and it comes from within the very traditions of liberation I draw on, not from outside critics of them. Paulo Freire named it directly: the oppressed, in seizing power without transforming the structure itself, risk becoming what he called sub-oppressors rather than liberators. Gustavo Gutiérrez, the father of liberation theology, made the same point from within faith — he distinguished political liberation from liberation from sin, insisting that the first without the second guarantees nothing, since only genuine conversion prevents the freed from repeating what freed them. Gandhi reached the identical conclusion from a different tradition entirely, insisting, against enormous pressure from his own movement, that the means of resistance had to be as disciplined as the cause was just. He understood something easy to forget in the heat of grievance: a freedom won by the oppressor's own methods tends to produce, eventually, a new oppressor wearing the old one's methods. That is the warning built into every liberation struggle I have named in this piece — including the ones I support, and including any state, anywhere, that was itself born of persecution and now governs others.

A Path That Runs Through Neither Extreme

I cannot, in good faith, stand with either pole of this argument. On one side sits rhetoric like the Swedish protest song 'Leve Palestina', whose chorus calls not only to support Palestine but to "crush Zionism" outright — language that slides from opposing occupation into denying any Jewish claim to self-determination at all, which is a different and darker thing than the position I hold. On the other side sits the view that treats every act of the Israeli military as self-defense beyond question, absorbing civilian deaths as an acceptable cost rather than a moral fact requiring scrutiny. And I will name, without hesitation, the version of this I find most cynical: a Hindutva politics that backs Israel not out of any real solidarity but out of contempt for Muslims, using a foreign conflict to launder a domestic prejudice.

I do not believe this war ends by force, because if force could end it, it would have ended already, on one side or the other, decades ago. It ends, if it ends, at a negotiating table — not imposed by any outside power but among the actual stakeholders: Israelis and Palestinians themselves, the neighbouring states, and representatives of the three Abrahamic faiths whose claims to this land are entangled with each other. I find real hope in a two-state framework, with borders both sides accept and guarantees both sides trust — not because this is untested, but because the precedent already exists. Postwar Europe, whose nations spent the first half of the twentieth century trying to exterminate one another, built exactly this kind of peace: shared institutions, defined borders, and mutual guarantees strong enough that France and Germany have not seriously contemplated war in eighty years. Egypt and Jordan reached comparable peace with Israel directly, and both have held for decades. This is not an idealistic thought built in an academic's ivory tower. It is a documented method, tried and proven elsewhere, and I believe it is the only realistic way ahead. I hold onto a smaller, stranger piece of evidence that coexistence is not merely theoretical, either: Neve Shalom–Wahat al-Salam, a village in Israel where Jewish, Muslim, and Christian families have chosen, for decades, to live as neighbours rather than as combatants.

Why I Cannot Stay Silent

I do not carry the fear that keeps some people quiet on this question. But that was never really the reason to speak. Hind Rajab was where this reflection began, not where it ends — I cannot let one filmed, named death matter more than the thousands who died the same week without a camera, a voice recording, or a name the world ever learned. That would be its own kind of selective outrage, the very thing I have tried to hold myself against throughout this piece. She is not the point. She is the door through which the point became impossible to avoid.

On the other side of that door are children and innocent people whose names I will never know — Palestinian, Israeli, Rohingya, Armenian, Kashmiri, Baloch, Tibetan, Coptic, Yazidi, Jewish — killed in wars fought, in every case, by those who called their violence necessary. A faith, or a nation, or a conscience that can hear of all of them and say nothing has already decided what kind of silence it is willing to live with. I am not willing to live with that silence. The name changes. The obligation does not.