This is a picture of a railroad bridge in my hometown.

A few months ago, someone spray painted FREE PALESTINE on this bridge, in green and red paint. Not long after, someone — the city? the railroad? — had someone go up on the catwalk with a bucket of brown paint and a roller, and paint over PALESTINE. Those blocks of lighter brown paint are where the letters used to be. (To see this picture at full resolution, click here.)

They did not paint over FREE — you can still see it at the left side of the photo. Also, if they were interested in keeping graffiti to a minimum they would have painted over the graffiti that has been put there since they painted over PALESTINE, but they have not.

They only painted over the word PALESTINE, as if to say that there is something inherently wrong about Palestine.

This makes me wonder why.

Palestine, or more clearly Palestinians, are a people without a state. In this respect they are akin to other stateless people in the world, such as the Kurds and the Roma. While there is a team of athletes at the 2024 summer Olympic Games in Paris representing Palestine, Palestine is not a member state of the United Nations.

Yet they are an ethnicity who share a cultural identity. Millions of people in the Middle East and various countries around the world self-identify as Palestinian. Even people with Jordanian or Israeli citizenship identify ethnically as Palestinian.

Importantly, they are doctors and teachers and businesspeople. They are mothers and fathers. They are people hoping to end over 75 years of statelessness, occupation, and exile.

Perhaps those who painted over PALESTINE on the bridge truly are under the impression that there is something inherently wrong with Palestine. But it would be an ignorant mistake to think that being Palestinian equals being a terrorist and that all support of Palestinian human rights is anti-Israel.

This would be like saying that in the 1930s and 1940s, being German equals being a Nazi. (There were in fact Germans who opposed the policies of the Nazi party.)

This would be like saying being Muslim equals being a terrorist. (There are millions of Muslims worldwide who are peaceful, law-abiding people.)

This would be like saying being Black equals being enslaved. (This, of course, is unequivocally not true.)

Imagine a reverse situation: the spray painter instead painted FREE AMERICA, and then someone was offended by the word AMERICA and painted over only that word. What does that say? Does it say that the word is itself offensive? Does it say that those who identify as American do not have a right to say so? Does it mean just by asserting an American identity you are somehow threatening others?

I would like to think that in this modern era, humanity has moved beyond the idea that one nationality or ethnicity is naturally (or divinely) better than another. I would like to think that we don’t try to dehumanize people who we think are different from us. The United Nations was formed in 1945 under the idea that (with the somewhat questionable exception of the Security Council Permanent Members) all nations on Planet Earth have an equal seat at the table, have an equal stake in the outcome of international decisions, and are capable of cooperation rather than animosity.

Sadly, reality is much more complicated and less optimistic. Nationalism — the idea that nations of the world cannot work together and in fact are and ought to be kept separate — is on the rise in many parts of the world, including the United States.

And with nationalism comes the desire to define who is “us” and who is “them,” and who gets to stay, and who gets erased.

But it should not be for a town in Maryland, United States to decide whether Palestinians exist.