When I was growing up, my father told me that democracy is like a cage.
“We are birds in this cage,” he said. “We can spread our wings, and that’s good. Our wings barely touch the cage, so we feel free.”
For most of my life, I thought I understood what he meant but today, as wars, walls, and mass surveillance redefine our world, I understand it differently. The cage is not the same for everyone. And the fact that some of us can still move freely within it doesn’t make it any less of a cage.Nowhere makes this clearer than Palestine.
A Century in the Making
To understand why Palestine will not be free — at least not under the system we live in — we must look backward.
In 1917, the Balfour Declaration set in motion one of the most consequential political projects of the 20th century. Britain, then the imperial power controlling Palestine under the League of Nations Mandate (1922–1948), promised to establish a “national home for the Jewish people” — in a land already inhabited by a Palestinian Arab majority.
By 1947, the newly formed United Nations voted on Resolution 181, partitioning the land into two states: one Jewish, one Arab. Palestinians, who made up around two-thirds of the population and owned over 90% of the land, rejected the plan. The following year, 1948, the state of Israel was declared, and more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled — an event known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”
Since then, the story has been one of relentless expansion. The 1967 Six-Day War saw Israel occupy the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Golan Heights — territories that remain under varying degrees of control to this day. Despite UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called for Israel’s withdrawal from occupied territories, settlements grew. In 1993, the Oslo Accords offered hope of a “two-state solution,” but that hope was systematically eroded by continued settlement building, fragmentation of Palestinian land, and the normalization of occupation as status quo.
Over a century, what began as a promise of coexistence evolved into one of the most sustained systems of control in modern history.
The Global Cage
When I say “Palestine will not be free,” I am not singling it out as unique. I am naming it as a mirror. The structures that maintain occupation there — surveillance, militarization, propaganda, economic dependency — are the same forces shaping our so-called democracies. We are all Palestine.
Western nations speak of freedom and democracy, yet they finance, arm, and defend oppression abroad. They trade in surveillance technologies tested in occupied territories. They criminalize dissent and silence journalists who expose these contradictions.
We are told we live in free societies, but our freedom depends on the suffering of others — and on our collective blindness to it.
We are in cages of our own: comfortable, digital, invisible. We mistake mobility for liberty, consumption for choice, distraction for peace. Some cages are wide enough that we don’t see the bars. Others, like Palestine’s, are visible, suffocating, and brutal. But the structure — the logic — is the same.
The Mask Is Slipping
The rise of fascism is not sudden; it is the natural evolution of systems that were never truly democratic. The surveillance state, corporate consolidation, and militarized control are all symptoms of a deeper truth: that “freedom” has always been conditional, controlled, and rationed.
And as crises multiply — wars, inequality, climate collapse — the mask slips further. The mechanisms of control become less ashamed of showing themselves. We are seeing power in its purest form: unmasked, unrepentant, unbothered by appearances.
Palestine shows us not only the cruelty of occupation, but the honesty of empire.
What Now?
What are we to do with this knowledge?
Though Palestine Will Not Be Free (like others before it), we can't stop trying.
To see the bars of the cage is not liberation in itself — it is a burden. Once you’ve seen it, you can never again unsee it. Every headline, every government statement, every “peace process” becomes part of a pattern. You begin to realize how power maintains itself — not through chaos, but through order; not through violence alone, but through the quiet consent of the comfortable.
It’s easy to feel powerless before such a vast machine. And perhaps, in the scale of things, we are. But to acknowledge that truth is not surrender. Awareness, if lived consciously, becomes a form of resistance.
Because the first act of freedom is to see clearly. The second is to refuse to look away. And the third is to live accordingly.
That means refusing to let dehumanization become normal — anywhere. It means speaking when silence serves power, and questioning narratives that justify cruelty in the name of safety. It means protecting truth, art, and memory — the things that authoritarian systems fear most. It means creating community in an age designed to isolate us.
We chip away not only by protesting or demanding change from distant institutions — though that matters too — but by living differently in the small spaces of our own lives. By raising children who can tell truth from propaganda. By consuming consciously and questioning the myths that convenience sells us. By recognizing that every act of empathy is political, every refusal to dehumanize is a blow against the machinery that profits from division.
The cage may be vast, but it cannot contain awareness. It cannot contain imagination.
Real freedom may not come in our lifetime. Perhaps the point is not to believe that it will, but to live as though it could. That tension — between despair and defiance — is where humanity still breathes.
We cannot dismantle the system in one act. But we can refuse to pretend it isn’t there. We can teach our children what the cage looks like, and what flight feels like — even if only in brief moments of truth and courage.
The Final Question
My father told me democracy is a cage and it was never meant to set us free.
The question is not whether Palestine will be free. The question is whether we will ever dare to be.
And perhaps, the only answer is to keep daring — courageously, insistently, by changing our tactics — until one day we find a way to live together without a cage.
Notes & References
- 1. The Balfour Declaration (1917): British government statement expressing support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
- 2. League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (1922–1948): Granted Britain administrative control over Palestine following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
- 3. UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (1947): Recommended the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, leading to the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
- 4. The Nakba (1948): The mass displacement of approximately 700,000 Palestinians following the creation of the State of Israel.
- 5. UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967): Called for the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the Six-Day War.
- 6. The Oslo Accords (1993 & 1995): Agreements between Israel and the PLO aiming to achieve a two-state solution — never fully implemented.
