Whose side are you on?

People often ask: whose side are you on?

My answer is: I am with the oppressed — with Palestinians, with the Rohingya, with Sahrawis, with every people whose right to exist has been turned into a question mark. Not because of politics. Not because of religion. But because they deserve a life with dignity as fellow human beings, just as we do.

Is it not strange that millions of people still live in this world without a state to call home — their most basic rights stripped away simply because they lack the documents to prove who they are?

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), the Roman statesman and philosopher, defined justice over two thousand years ago as “the disposition to give each person their due.” If justice is the most fundamental of virtues, then we must confront an uncomfortable truth: the resources of this Earth belong to all of us equally. That creates a universal moral obligation to ensure that every person on this planet has the right to live with dignity.

Palestinians, Rohingya, and Sahrawis are not refugees waiting to go home. They are stateless — not by accident, but by design. This is not a conflict with two equal sides; it is the slow, deliberate erasure of a people. And silence, in the face of erasure, is not neutrality — it is complicity.