The Dialogical Deceit: Unmasking America’s Forked Tongue in the Palestinian Question

 

By Isaac Christopher Lubogo

To understand the United States’ position on Palestine—particularly President Donald Trump’s statement that “Hamas should not be rewarded with a Palestinian state”—one must dissect the deeper moral and political schizophrenia that characterizes America’s foreign policy. It is a policy marked by double standards, ideological gymnastics, and what Frantz Fanon would call the coloniality of power, where one empire determines which people deserve statehood and which do not, based on its own strategic interests rather than universal principles of justice.

 

I. The False Binary: Hamas ≠ Palestine

Trump’s statement, on the surface, appears rational to the untrained mind. Who wants to reward a group that uses violence? But this logic collapses under scrutiny. Hamas, though controversial and militant, is not the sum total of the Palestinian people. The same America that justifies Israel’s right to exist—despite its settler-colonial foundations and its own disproportionate violence—refuses to see Palestinians as a people distinct from Hamas.

This conflation of a militant group with an entire civilian population is a deliberate rhetorical weapon. It allows Washington to shift the conversation from occupation and dispossession to security and terrorism, conveniently avoiding uncomfortable truths about decades of apartheid, land theft, and siege. It is akin to saying Black South Africans should not have received a state under Mandela because the ANC once had an armed wing.

II. America’s Dialogical Mind: Two Tongues, One Empire

America speaks in two voices—one for the oppressed, another for the oppressor. The dialogical mind of the USA in the Palestinian issue is not a mind of dialogue, but of diplomatic ventriloquism. On one hand, it claims to uphold human rights, international law, and self-determination. On the other hand, it funds, arms, and politically shields Israel—the very state accused by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN of committing crimes against humanity.

This is the same America that:

Recognized Kosovo’s independence in the name of human rights,

Backed South Sudan’s statehood for “freedom”,

Celebrated Ukraine’s territorial integrity with billions of dollars,

Yet refuses to even recognize the occupied territories of Palestine as occupied, let alone a legitimate basis for statehood.

Why?

Because the Palestinian struggle disrupts the American mythos of being the liberator, the peacemaker, the light unto nations. It exposes a nation complicit in starvation, blockades, demolitions, and dispossession. Thus, it must demonize Palestinian resistance and deflect from Palestinian humanity.

III. Reward and Punishment: Who Gets to Decide?

Trump’s language of “rewarding” a statehood implies a feudal logic of imperial benevolence. It suggests that Palestinians are subjects of American mercy, not rights-bearing people under international law. But who is the USA to grant or withhold the natural right of a people to govern themselves?

Was Israel “rewarded” with statehood despite Zionist militias like the Irgun bombing the King David Hotel and executing British officers?

Was America “punished” with a state after slaughtering Native peoples and enslaving Africans?

When nations are born through blood, the USA calls it destiny if it aligns with its interests—and terrorism if it does not.

IV. Strategic Hypocrisy and Weaponized Morality

The US-Israel relationship is not moral; it is strategic. It is built on shared imperial values: frontier conquest, exceptionalism, and racialized domination. The invocation of Hamas as a barrier to peace is a propaganda firewall—used to hide the real obstacle: Israel’s unrelenting expansionism and America’s geopolitical addiction to Israeli dominance in the Middle East.

This is the same America that:

Vetoes almost every UN resolution on Palestine,

Moves its embassy to Jerusalem in violation of international consensus,

Helps normalize ties with Arab states while Gaza starves,

Yet speaks of “peace” and “two states” when the political cost is low, and elections are near.

V. Philosophical Irony: The Reward of Suffering

In biblical irony, Israel itself was “rewarded” after centuries of Jewish suffering. The world justified the creation of the Jewish state after the Holocaust, as a response to historic injustice. But when the Palestinian people suffer—through displacement, massacre, siege, and statelessness—they are told they must first behave to be considered for humanity.

This perverse inversion turns suffering into a crime and resistance into terrorism, while privilege is masked as victimhood. It is an Orwellian rewriting of moral logic, where power determines who the villain is.

VI. The Fear Behind the Mask

Ultimately, what Trump and much of the American political elite fear is not Hamas. It is not terrorism. It is accountability. It is the fear that if Palestine is recognized as a state, it will gain access to the International Criminal Court, to international forums, and to the moral high ground. It is the fear that Israel’s occupation will be delegitimized—not by war—but by law, history, and truth.

Final Reflection: Whose Humanity Counts?

As we listen to the bombings of Gaza, the screams of mothers, the crumbling of homes, and the choking of children under blockade, we must ask not whether Hamas deserves a state, but whether a people under occupation have the right to live with dignity.

And if we truly believe that statehood is not a reward but a right, then Palestine’s existence should not depend on American permission—but on the unshakable fact that its people are human too.

> “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” – Desmond Tutu

And history, unlike America’s double-speak, will remember clearly.

About the author:

Isaac Christopher Lubogo

Scholar | Philosopher | Son of the Red Earth

 

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