Your Boundaries of the debate, or my boundaries of Humanity?

​In January 2017, after the Jerusalem truck attack, I stated on social media that Palestinians have the right to liberate their occupied land by any means necessary. The pro-Israel lobby immediately pounced, twisting my words into an endorsement of terrorism and launching a pressure campaign to have me silenced. De Standaard caved to the outrage machine and terminated my column, proving once again that the boundaries of “acceptable” debate are drawn by those who fear any challenge to their narrative.

The first political conversation I ever had was at the age of four. I remember sitting on the porch of our village house in Hanine, South Lebanon, with my mother. It was a sunny day, and we were resting in the shade of our fig tree. The peaceful flow of natural sounds and warm sunlight was only interrupted by the distant thrumming of helicopters emerging from behind the surrounding hills.
My mother wanted us to go back inside, but I resisted. She then said, “Dyab, the Israeli helicopters are coming nearby. It’s safer to be inside.” I remember asking her why—why was it safer? My mother replied, “Because these are wicked men, and they might shoot at us.”
A few months later, the wicked men did shoot at us.

​ After blockading our little village for more than 50 days, the Israelis and their local collaborators launched an attack and occupied it. I remember that we had to flee for our lives—my mother carrying my six-month-old baby brother in her arms as we ran. Together with our neighbors, we scrambled uphill, desperately trying to reach safety. But the soldiers spotted us and opened fire.
Bullets whizzed above our heads. I saw people getting hit just centimeters away from me. I saw them falling. I remember the sheer terror that gripped me, and I recall telling my mother how afraid I was—while also feeling ashamed of my fear.
The occupiers then committed a massacre, killing around 20 civilians before forcibly expelling the rest of us. They ethnically cleansed us.

In my book Between Two Worlds, published in 2003, I extensively recounted the hardships we endured—not only during the occupation of our village but also during the many times we had to flee for our lives to escape Israeli bombs and snipers. Three times, our house was burned, plundered, or both. Three times, we lost everything—our home, our life—and became refugees in our own country.
Between 1982 and 1985, I lived under Israeli occupation as a teenage student. I was systematically stopped, harassed, and beaten by Israeli soldiers. But thankfully, the Lebanese people resisted the occupation and ultimately defeated it. We did not negotiate, we did not beg, and we had no illusions. As a people, we fought back and made the price of occupation unbearable for the occupier. Eventually, this struggle led to the liberation of our country in May 2000.
After 24 years, we returned to our destroyed village and rebuilt our home on the same spot. We even planted a new fig tree on the porch. If you visit us today, you might think none of these events ever took place. Everything appears so idyllic, so eternally calm. But we know better.
A deep understanding of what Israeli occupation means—and of the tactics and strategies it employs—is something that remains with me and with an entire generation who lived through it. This experience is not something you simply move on from. Of course, you rationalize parts of it, channeling the emotions it carries into awareness rather than perpetual torment. And in that process, you grow. But it remains an inextricable part of who you are.
So when I speak about Israel, I am not voicing some ideological prejudice based on faulty information. I am not expressing a dogmatic worldview. My views on Israeli occupation—whether in Palestine or elsewhere—are rooted in firsthand experience of that occupation and the violence it entails. And considering that the occupation of Palestine is colonial in nature, and therefore much more extreme in its methods and dynamics than the occupation of Lebanon, I fully understand that what I endured under Israeli rule pales in comparison to what Palestinians experience today.
If resistance was legitimate in Lebanon, then it is even more so in Palestine.
Yet, De Standaard attempts to impose an abstract notion of "the limits of the debate," a notion inconsistent with international law, which explicitly guarantees the right of occupied peoples to resist occupation by all means available to them, including armed struggle. This same newspaper, on its own pages, has consistently provided a platform for apologists of illegal violence against the Iraqi and Palestinian people. Apparently, justifying large-scale, illegal warfare that caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq in 2003 falls within the boundaries of debate. But defending the right of occupied peoples to resist illegal occupation does not. De Standaard might as well call itself The Double Standard.
What is even more disturbing, however, is that my right—as a victim of Israeli violence and of crimes against humanity, because ethnic cleansing is precisely that—to take a firm stance against the regime responsible for those crimes is not even acknowledged.
It takes a great deal of effort for me to speak or write openly about this. I understand the vulnerability that comes with exposing the victimization that is part of my history in relation to Israel. This is not easy—especially when Arabs are often accused of having a "victim mentality," as if our experiences are unreal or fabricated, as if our memory is invented. But how can we have a meaningful debate without acknowledging the human and emotional dimensions of these events? How is it even moral to erase this aspect from the discussion?
Reducing this debate to purely political or legal arguments is not just intellectually dishonest—it is an assault on our humanity and on the collective memory of those who have suffered and continue to suffer under Israeli violence, occupation, and oppression. Within this logic, my narrative—even when it aligns with international law—is considered inferior to that of the oppressor, who blatantly violates international law.
My solidarity with a people enduring the same fate at the hands of the same oppressor is not recognized for its human dimension. Instead, it is dismissed as dogma, as ideological predisposition, or even as racial bias.
I am not only excluded from what De Standaard defines as "the boundaries of the debate"—by claiming that I violated these boundaries, the newspaper actively contributes to the criminalization of my stance. They portray it as blind support for violence, or worse, as an expression of racial hatred. I am labeled anti-Semitic, and therefore racist, as Marie-Cécile Royen claimed in Le Vif, when in reality, I am defending the right to resist a racist, colonial occupation.
This is not neutrality. It is not intellectual integrity. It is the deliberate choice to side with the oppressor while disregarding my humanity and my legitimate right—both under international law and as a victim of occupation—to defend resistance. It is the refusal to acknowledge my right to express my emotions and my lived experience, not as a perpetrator of violence, but as a survivor of it.
This is not just politically disputable—it is morally indefensible. Because it does not only dismiss me as an opinion maker; it dismisses me as a human being.
At a time when the dehumanization of people who look like me is becoming mainstream—when it is building momentum toward yet another historical tragedy—I cannot help but feel that De Standaard's decision to cut ties with me is part of this very same historical dynamic. And that makes it far more dangerous than it appears.