Sony Thang
I’m Vietnamese.
IN 1954, Western powers decided to split Vietnam in two. Not because we asked for it. Not because it was just. But because it served their imperial interests. The South was handed to a US-backed regime we never chose, and this foreign-imposed division was packaged as a “solution.” We were told to accept it, and there would be peace. That half a country was better than none.
But we refused.
Vietnam is not a bargaining chip. We are not a piece of land to be divided and labeled “free” by strangers. When we stood against partition, they called us unreasonable. They called us terrorists. They said we were the problem.
Sound familiar?
Just a few years earlier, in 1947, the same powers had pushed a partition plan for Palestine. Not because the Palestinians agreed, but because foreign powers demanded it. More than 77 years later, the same script is still being used.
Palestinians are told to accept foreign-imposed divisions. To settle for “solutions” written by others. To be grateful for the fragments of their homeland they’re allowed to keep. They’re expected to forget the villages destroyed, the graves of their ancestors, the keys to their stolen homes, and the olive trees they once nurtured.
Vietnam was told to settle for half. We refused. So did Palestine.
They were told to accept UN Resolution 181, just as we were told to accept the Geneva Accords. But we knew that real peace cannot be forced. And it certainly isn’t peace if it begins with erasure. There’s no justice in a deal that demands surrender.
We fought not because we hated peace, but because peace without freedom is a lie. Half a land means half a people. And we proved them wrong. Today, Vietnam is whole. Not North. Not South. But united.
Palestinians understood this too. That’s why they rejected partition. That’s why they continue to resist.
People often claim that Palestine was never a state. But neither were many other colonized nations. Algeria. Kenya. Ireland. Apartheid-era South Africa. None had internationally recognized statehood, yet no one suggests they should have accepted colonial rule for that reason alone.
Colonialism doesn’t ask whether you had embassies or a parliament. It only asks whether it can get away with taking your land.
Palestinians had land. They had memory. They lived lives rooted in soil long before anyone came to redraw their borders. Denying them statehood simply holds them to a standard no colonized people could ever meet.
Vietnam prevailed because we remembered who we were.
Palestinians remember too.
And that memory threatens those whose power depends on historical amnesia.
In 1973, Lê Đức Thọ became the only person in history to refuse the Nobel Peace Prize. He did not reject it out of pride, but because he understood there could be no peace while US bombs were still falling. Peace cannot be awarded by the same hands that drop napalm. By walking away from global applause, he kept his dignity and reminded the world that peace without justice is nothing but theater.
Today, Palestinians are once again being told to accept less, to surrender more, and to thank their occupiers for whatever remains.
But like Vietnam, they refuse.
They refuse to disappear quietly.
And they will not trade their freedom for silence.
One day, like us, they too will be whole again.
Because the land remembers.
And so do the people.
C. QNN
