When Resilience Becomes a Burden: Reflections from Gazan Palestinian Scholars

In this essay, Palestinian scholars from Gaza reflect on how Gaza is brought into Western academic spaces since the beginning of the genocide. Over the last two years, academic engagement with Gaza has increased, often highlighting Palestinian resilience. While this attention is essential and needed, the authors argue that framing Palestinians as resilient obscures the toll of genocidal, settler-colonial violence. This narrative not only clouds grief, exhaustion, and fragmentation, but also reassures external observers and absolves them of the responsibility to act to stop the genocide. Drawing on their lived experiences, the authors show how resilience discourse romanticizes suffering, aestheticizes sumud, and dismisses Palestinian voices as too emotional for credibility. Instead, they call for an ethical approach in academic settings that situates survival within its violent conditions, resists reductive binaries of heroism or victimhood, and centers Gaza’s lived realities in order to confirm Palestinian humanity beyond the rhetoric of resilience.