Our reliance on maps and borders as the primary frame for thinking about Palestine and for imagining solutions narrows what we believe the true meaning of liberation can be. In the history of mapping this land, maps have never been neutral; they have been instruments of dispossession and part of a global history of colonialism. To see Palestine only through the lens of cartography is to remain bound by the very logic that is designed to contain us, and to an ever-shrinking Palestine.

Two points follow. The first is at the level of space: mapping renders the land into an object of control from above, something to be divided, surveilled, and possessed. The second is at the level of power: the production of space as sovereign territory installs a relation of domination, one in which sovereignty is not collective self-determination, but a hierarchy of rulers and ruled. The very grammar of sovereignty traps us in the paradigm of obedience and domination, rendering us unable to imagine ourselves as creative actors beyond being victims who are acted upon, or as protestors who act against.

Believing in liberation otherwise is to step outside the borders altogether, not only the borders drawn around Palestine, but those imposed by nation-states and imperial orders everywhere. It is to see the Palestinian struggle not as an isolated question of territory, but as part of a wider confrontation with colonialism, racial capitalism, and Western imperialism. Our liberation must be unbound from the cartographic imagination that fragments the world into sovereignties and instead connect to struggles that envision life beyond dispossession altogether. A free Palestine, then, is not only a redrawn map; it is new forms of relation that no longer reduce us to rulers and ruled, limit us to victims or resistors, but imagine us as communities that create, live, and determine life together.

If Gaza today is the most brutal expression of containment, it is because the Strip is the map taken to its logical extreme. Two million people, hemmed in behind walls and watchtowers, rendered as a population to be managed rather than as a people who belong. Since 2008, Israeli officials have literally calculated the daily caloric intake allowed for Gaza’s residents, reducing life to numbers and spreadsheets. Food itself becomes a weapon.

This is not only a local tragedy; it is a global logic. The partitioning of life into enclaves and territories, the sealing off of populations, the calculation of who may live and who must die are the operations of colonial mapping across the world.

Africa carries the deepest scars of this logic. The Berlin Conference of 1884 divided a living continent with rulers and ink, transforming histories of belonging into abstract lines of possession. Communities were split apart, nations were forced into existence, and sovereignties were fabricated for empire. The violence did not end with independence because the borders themselves remained in place, and with them, the economic dependency, extraction, and militarized policing that colonialism required.

To connect Palestine with Africa is not metaphorical; it is recognition. Gaza and the continent share the same cartographic wound: the conversion of land into an object of imperial ownership, and of people into populations to be controlled. The border, whether as a wall in Rafah or as a line across Africa, is not simply a marker of separation. It is a weapon that organizes dispossession and forces movement to install domination.

Liberation, then, cannot be limited to the redrawing of maps or the recognition of sovereignties. It must mean dismantling the entire order that made borders the condition of political life. A free Palestine, like a free Africa, must refuse the colonial cartography that sought to erase them and instead build relations that are uncontainable: relations of belonging, creation, and collective determination.

This is the difference between the indigenous relation to land and the colonial one. The indigenous person says: I belong to the land. The colonizer insists: the land belongs to me. This is the fundamental difference. To forcibly remove a people from their land is to sever that belonging and to attempt to make life unlivable until they depart.

Although the critique of sovereignty and borders is essential, it does not mean ignoring the immediate and material needs of people living under siege. For Palestinians in Gaza, the struggle for survival—for food under the manmade famine by Israel, for water, for freedom of movement, for medical care and safety—is not abstract. These demands for tangible political rights are urgent, and they are a form of resistance in themselves. But we must not confuse the tools of survival with the full vision of liberation. In fact, imagining a life beyond containment is not a luxury; it is a necessity born from the conditions of siege.

The deeper critique of colonial borders strengthens, rather than undermines, the demand for dignity and justice in the present.