The Final Betrayal

Testing Palestinian Authenticity By Running Their Writing Through AI-Detection Software and Condemning the Results

People are using machine intelligence to test the authenticity of Palestinian writing because, for some reason, it is too inconvenient for us to use our own intuition, experience, or relational knowledge to evaluate human writing. By itself, the act is a betrayal. Accepting the results at face value with no further inquiry, even worse.

Writers can no longer be trusted to write, and readers cannot evaluate the work without running it through a mechanical testing device. Gone is our trust, and gone are the days of human language systems. The writer that writes with AI and the reader that tests the work’s authenticity with software truly deserve each other, but this article isn’t about writers and readers in general. It’s about Palestinian writers in Gaza, whose work is being shoved to the side over suspicions that they may have used AI to produce it.

I’ve been volunteering as an editor for Coastal Lines Press, an initiative that services and promotes writers in Gaza in the midst of the ongoing genocide. It’s a natural fit for me, a person long acquainted with Palestinian society. Several decades of cultural relationship has allowed me to absorb an understanding of their speech patterns, the concepts they love to explore, and the strength of their argument style, both in speech and writing.

By being in proximity of Palestinians, I also learned their love and respect for education. Families work hard for academic achievement in an educational system whose standards are almost impossible to attain. Students living in Palestinian refugee camps can be some of the most motivated to excel in education. They go to UNRWA schools, learn English, speak to foreigners, and receive high marks on government exams, despite the dehumanizing condition of life in the camps. They become doctors, nurses, engineers, journalists, and learn to speak and write with a high level of professionalism.

You know this kind of person, the excellently educated Palestinian, by their speech patterns alone. Their English is beautiful, polished to perfection. My ear delights in the harmony of soul, sense, and sound. I LOVE Palestinian English. It is authentic, hospitable, and sincere. Trustworthy. But also funny and playful in a way that makes you think about things in a new light.

One year, we were visiting family in the camp near Bethlehem when tawjihi scores were being announced. Tawjihi is a national exam that students in the Arab world must take in order to graduate high school. Its standards are rigorous, unfair even. Only the best-of-the-best excel. A young girl in the camp had received 96 percent on one or more of the sections. It was cause to celebrate. The whole camp was invited. My mother-in-law brought me along.

To my recollection, the party was held in a squishy room in the basement of the refugee center. Kids and their mothers sat almost on top of each other for lack of space. The young girl wore a fancy purple dress, similar to something you’d wear to a prom. She danced to music with her mother and sisters before her brothers came to offer her garlands made of American 100-dollar bills. They were clearly the type of Palestinian men who work themselves to the bone, the wear-and-tear of intense labour written into the lines of their faces and hands. The honour they gave their sister for her academic success was touching. She lit up their lives, their hopes, their dreams of a better life with her achievement. A person cannot fake their way into a great tawjihi score. Success requires hours and hours of study and strong nerves on the day of the exam. It’s one of the ways Palestinian society tests academic authenticity.

Tawjihi is no joke, and I’m sure that I would fail if I were required to take it, yet I still have the arrogance to work as an editor for writers in Gaza, who scored excellently on their exams, studied English Literature at leading universities in Gaza, and achieved degrees in journalism, translation, etc. Many of them were raised by parents with doctorate degrees. They are second, third, fourth generation Palestinian scholars. They know themselves and the value of their mindsets and learning, but the scholasticide and genocide in Gaza has reduced decades of academic achievement to dust and ash.

In spite of the destruction, these young scholars and professionals still write. They speak. They document their lives in Gaza for “the world.” Their speaking voices match their writing. Their personalities and perspectives match everything I know about Palestinian society. They are articulate and poised in real life, real time, live on your screens. And yet—after two-and-a-half years of us witnessing Palestinians narrate their experiences live-stream under rocket fire, providing testimony in clear and direct English without video edits or stable internet connection—some people have the audacity to question the authenticity of Palestinian intelligence by running their words through AI-detection software. I can’t even stomach this level of betrayal from the international community. Now, it’s not “Do you support Hamas?” but “Do you use AI to produce your work?”

How. Dare. You.

How dare you? Have you no shame?

Let me be clear (don’t you hate this robotic phrase used by every Western politician?), I’m not writing this piece to argue that Palestinians are not using AI or should not use AI following the scholasticide, epistemicide, and genocide in Gaza. It should be obvious by now that Palestinians will use whatever tools are at their disposal to resist their annihilation. Such mechanical ingenuity has kept them alive through siege, starvation, bombardment, displacement, and disease. Time and time again, they have proven their brilliance, defeating the occupation’s best laid plans with simple tools and despite a lack of fuel, water, food, internet, electricity, institutional support, or global solidarity. So sit yourself down, Jennifer, and save Palestinians the lectures on the dangers of AI, the potential for social and environmental destruction. Excelling under threat of industrial annihilation happens to be a Palestinian’s forte.

It’s great that people are suspicious of AI. Honestly, I’m happy. For once, citizens of the industrial world are having inklings of doubt over the capacity of the machine to deliver on its promises of human progress. That’s a good thing. Keep going with that. Your society requires your interest and efforts outside the confines of the wearisome machine. Unfortunately, our inattention has been prevalent for far too long. As we were busy testing the limits of independence, provided to us by a range of cutting-edge innovations, our industrial war machines were mowing down civilian populations abroad, creating humanitarian catastrophes that are now coalescing into the collapse of global social architecture.

It’s time to pay attention, get sober, take things seriously, but please when it comes to the oppressed, save your lectures. If it weren’t for their extraordinary efforts to survive in a dignified manner, the collapse would have come much sooner and all at once, providing little room for the growth of your mindset. You should be grateful to Palestinians for sharing their struggle for human freedom with you. Instead, you condemn them for maybe-or-maybe-not using AI though they are already denied the most basic elements of existence like food, water, medicine, and shelter. Shame on you.

Readers might remember, although attention spans and memory are short these days, the engineered famine in Gaza that still persists. After using starvation as a weapon of war for months, Israel was pressured by the global community to stop dropping so many bombs on Gaza’s famished population and allow a bit more food through the tightly controlled belt of borders that encloses the enclave. Begrudgingly, the occupation allowed more food in, but only junk food, not vegetables, meats, grains, and so on. The population has been forced to subsist off this diet, unable to refuse because they are starving. They miss their gardens, traditional foods, and ability to feed themselves. Do you think they are happy with boxes of junk food or “humanitarian aid” dropped on their heads from the sky?

The use of AI by Palestinian society, a people who have long valued high education and scholarship, mirrors the situation with starvation and a lack of appropriate foods or nutrition. When your ability to refuse substandard conditions is destroyed, you will use what’s available or what has been provided by this cynical world. Palestinians in Gaza are in a state of deep mourning over the loss of their universities, their classrooms, their teachers, professors, and mentors. Do you think they are happy to use AI? At the same time, with little remaining educational infrastructure, do you think they will have much opportunity to refuse its advances?

It has been a year since Mohammed Al-Kurd’s book Perfect Victims was released. I fear the English-speaking masses of the globe still have not understood this book. Is it not shameless to expect narrative perfection from people who are literally being shredded and incinerated by industrial war machines that are funded by our tax dollars and labour? If Palestinians under siege and occupation have a violent thought, does it cancel their right to exist? If Palestinians under scholasticide and genocide must use AI, does it cancel their right to be trusted and believed when everything they relate matches what we have seen with our own eyes? Must we betray them with yet another “Do you condemn” narrative routine?

Please, people, use your reason and intellect, your capacity to think. Stop falling for these purity or virginity tests that the occupation keeps manufacturing to silence their rape victims.

P.S.

My only worry about Palestinians using AI is that their genius will be harvested and rebranded by the very people subjugating them. At the same time, I am aware that refusing AI is a luxury that many cannot afford. Rather than condemn them for it, we should condemn ourselves for failing to stop the industrial war machine and economy that funnel the voices of the oppressed into the Machine, training it on their human suffering and intelligence. The long-term damage to humanity that the genocide in Gaza will inflict on the world is our fault, not the fault of the victims. Stop trying to keep the suffering or moral injury contained within Palestinian society. Doing so is spiritual apartheid.

Every language tells the same story—the human story of survival on this planet. We are now entering the age of Machine Story/History that services The Empire of the Machine and threatens our survival on this planet.