The Song Shall Outlive the Siege

What The Hobbit Reveals About Exile, Colonialism, and Palestinian Resistance

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“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home.”

— Edward Said

Fiction casts a gentle mirror on our world, reflecting truths that reality alone can’t always bear to say. It’s why literature lives on as an eternal gift to humanity, and why some stories linger even decades and centuries after they were written. More than 80 years later, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series lives in the hearts of millions as a beloved tale revered not only for its unforgettable characters but for its moral vision: that courage, humility, and hope can triumph even in the shadow of overwhelming darkness. But if we look closer at the heart of its prequel, The Hobbit, we see that beyond a fantasy tale of mythical creatures, there lies a story of exile — one that refuses to fade into myth, because it is still being written in blood and fire today.

The story follows the voyage of thirteen dwarves, dispossessed of their homeland by the fire-breathing dragon Smaug, as they set out on a long and perilous journey to reclaim what was stolen from them. They are not noble kings or powerful armies, just scattered survivors, holding onto memory, song, and the keys to doors that no longer exist. What begins as a fantasy becomes, upon closer reading, a parable of displacement and resistance. And today, as the skies over Gaza blaze red and the world looks away, this tale of longing and return finds uncanny resonance with another real, brutal, and unfinished story: the Palestinian liberation struggle.

As the dwarves sing songs of a homeland lost to fire and greed, their voices carry across decades of exile, each note a thread binding them to stone halls they may never see again. In that melody lives the heartbreak of every people torn from their ancestral soil, a heartbreak Palestinians have harmonized with for 76 years, singing their own songs of return across refugee camps and scattered diaspora.

Tolkien's dwarves were not mere fantasy archetypes but echoes of a universal human experience: the agony of displacement, the dream of return, and the terrible dynamics of power that determine who gets to call a place home. Today, as Gaza burns under the weight of modern siege engines and colonial cruelty, as Palestinian children learn the geography of their grandparents' villages through stories rather than soil, the tale of Thorin Oakenshield's company resonates with devastating clarity.

Architects of Oppression: Dragons and Occupying Powers

At its deepest level, The Hobbit reveals itself as a meditation on the structures of oppression that displace entire peoples. Of course, no fantasy tale can convey the full horror or complexity of modern colonial violence, but the archetypes still resonate. Tolkien’s dragon, like all mythic beasts, transcends a single historical parallel. Yet, Smaug’s hoarding of wealth and deliberate desolation of the land mirrors not just classic colonial extraction, but the specific logic of settler-colonialism: a system that requires the replacement of indigenous life with a new societal order. In Erebor as in Palestine, the dragon’s fire is both literal and ideological, burning away the past to justify its own dominion. Smaug’s occupation mirrors the colonial seizure of Palestine as a violent appropriation that transforms thriving communities into wastelands. The dragon’s presence creates what we might recognize as a colonial economy: wealth extracted and hoarded while surrounding populations like Lake-town’s inhabitants struggle in manufactured poverty, their prosperity chained to the whims of the occupying power.

Just as Smaug’s fire turned the prosperous kingdom under the mountain into desolation, the ongoing siege of Gaza by the Zionist entity has transformed what was once fertile land into a ground desecrated by what Israeli officials themselves have called ‘mowing the grass’: a calculated policy of periodic destruction to prevent any real development, prosperity, or hope. The people of Lake-town, limited by Smaug’s whims, echo the position of Palestinians whose every movement, calorie, and breath is rationed by military decree.

This is not mere fantasy but the documented reality of colonial occupation: the systematic impoverishment of indigenous populations to ensure dependence and prevent resistance. When Tolkien writes of the desolation of Smaug, he names the essence of imperial violence: not just fire and blood, but the slow suffocation of a people’s future.

To Remember is to Resist

In the laments of Thorin’s company lives the DNA of displacement. The dwarves carry their mountain in their hearts because they can no longer carry it in their hands, just as Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and as far as Ecuador carry house keys that unlock doors now occupied by strange settlers.

Today, beneath the rubble of shattered homes and bombed hospitals in Gaza, this revolution presses on not through tanks or guns, but through memory itself. It lives in the clinging to keys and maps, the sharing of stories in tented classrooms, and the handing down of histories in flickering shelters. Memory transcends preservation to become resistance made manifest. The dwarves’ laments, sung in exile, reverberate across generations of Palestinians who clutch keys to homes inhabited by others and remember cities they have never seen except through the voices of their elders. What Tolkien imagined as myth is, in Palestine, a relentless present. Every day they endure bombardment, deprivation, and dispossession, and yet each breath and each heartbeat is an act of defiant hope and refusal to be erased.

This parallel runs deeper than nostalgia. Tolkien’s tales reveal how displaced people resurrect what was lost into liturgy, how remembering becomes an act of preservation and resistance intertwined. Every Palestinian grandmother describing Jaffa’s oranges and every child sketching erased villages participates in the same sacred defiance. Even the spiders of Mirkwood echo the occupation’s bureaucracy of control: the web of checkpoints, permits, and legal traps designed to entangle Palestinians in a slow suffocation. Where Tolkien imagined monsters, the occupation manufactures them in courtrooms and concrete. Thus, in resisting both literal and metaphorical erasure, Palestinians maintain identity out of memory and longing. The fight continues not only through might, but through the quiet power of remembrance and the stubborn refusal to surrender dreams of justice. Across Palestine, suffering persists, yet so too does the will to endure — to remember, to resist, to return.

The Logic of Resistance

Let us examine, as the dwarves had to, the mathematics of liberation that every oppressed people must calculate: How do you measure hope against hopelessness? How do you weigh the impossible against the unbearable?

Bilbo Baggins, the smallest of the small, questions his place in a company of warriors marching toward a dragon. Yet he is also a hobbit of the Shire, a land untouched by dragons or war, where breakfast is a right and safety a given. With its pantries and peace, it exists in stark contrast to the dwarves’ exile, a reminder that solidarity often begins with recognizing that danger is more than a tale told over tea. Thus, his doubt is not just that of an underdog, but of an outsider waking to the privilege of unearned safety. This mirrors the dual crisis haunting all liberation movements: what can we — the small, the dispossessed, the forgotten, possibly do against such overwhelming force? And what will those who live in Shires do once they see the dragon’s shadow fall on others? Sadly, we have seen the answer to that. Not enough.

Yet Bilbo’s journey reveals something profound about resistance: it takes many forms, and even the smallest acts, too, can have great consequences. His experiences on his adventure are not epic battles in and of themselves, but acts of individual resistance that collectively enable the larger liberation struggle. This mirrors the Palestinian experience, where resistance operates on multiple levels simultaneously. The obvious we recognize, but equally important are the daily acts of steadfastness by ordinary Palestinians who simply refuse to disappear. Gaza’s poets and paramedics endure the most horrific of circumstances beneath daily bombardment and still offer courage, wisdom, and light. Truthfully, for the past 75 years, each and every Palestinian has given a new meaning to the word hero. Take, for example, the grandmother who made headlines for turning tear gas canisters into plant pots, the farmers who tend olive groves despite settler violence, or the artists who paint murals on the apartheid wall. These are all acts of resistance against forces designed to erase Palestinian existence.

The Israeli military machine, like Smaug in his desolation, seems to possess every advantage: firepower, international backing, the luxury of continuous funding and undeserved empathy. Yet the dwarves march and the Palestinians resist, not from folly but out of necessity. The siege of Gaza reveals this arithmetic in its starkest form. Against one of the world’s most advanced militaries, against the complete blockade of land, sea, and air, against the complicity of regional powers and the calculated blindness of international institutions, the Palestinians of Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, etc., continue to exist. Their very survival is a form of resistance, their persistence a rejection of the logic that says might makes right. Gandalf’s words to Bilbo: ‘There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West’ hint at the fragile hope that sustains resistance: the belief that those insulated from fire might still choose to fight it. Perhaps this is what sustains all liberation movements: the stubborn insistence that there is more in humanity than the powerful believe, more capacity for justice than the comfortable assume, more possibility for change than the cynical can imagine. And perhaps that’s the question for those of us reading from the ‘kindly West’ — what will we choose to do with the good in us? Will we let it matter?

The Burden of Betrayal

But no story of liberation is complete without reckoning with the ache of abandonment, the bitter silence of those who should have stood beside you. Here, then, the parallel grows more heartwrenching. While the dwarves journey in isolation, abandoned by those that should have stood with them, the Palestinians have watched their own ‘brothers’ (the Arab states that once proclaimed solidarity) choose comfort over conscience and stability over justice, alongside the rest of the world. They have brought new meaning to the word betrayal; rather, they have created the need for a new word altogether, such is the nature of their crime. Despite suffering from the dragon’s fire themselves, they have chosen to be its keepers, leaving Gaza to face the dragon alone.

The quiet normalization deals, the closed borders, and diplomatic silence speak for themselves. The UAE’s gleaming towers rise higher while Gaza’s buildings fall onto starving children; Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 soars while the Palestinian vision is crushed beneath the weight of siege and occupation. The gates of Rafah are rusted shut by Sisi’s complicit, blood-stained hands. The amputee children of Gaza are deported from Jordan’s hospitals back to the concentration camp waiting to kill them. All this is occurring because this dragonfire is not a solitary terror; it is a system. The dragon’s wings are upheld by American steel and European silence, his gold counted in billions sent yearly to bankroll the desolation. The governments funding the war machine, those who trade with the occupiers, and the media that calls genocidal apartheid ‘complex’, are all the dragon’s bodyguards.

The Songs We Sing While the World Burns

As I write these words, Gaza burns, starves, and weeps loud enough for us all to hear. As you read them, the siege continues. The dragon’s fire falls on hospitals and schools, on children who have never known a world without walls, and beg us now for crumbs we somehow still can not provide. The international community offers thoughts and prayers and goes into a frenzy over hurt feelings while people starve. Politicians seemingly can not express sympathy without a ‘but’ at the end, somehow always needing to mention “proportionality” — as if there could be proportionality between the occupied and the occupier, the starved and the fattened, the children digging graves and the leaders posing for pictures at Bezos’ wedding.

But the dwarves teach us something about the long arc of justice: that the impossible becomes possible not necessarily through the intervention of the powerful, but through the persistence of the powerless. The Palestinians, like Thorin’s company, know the mountain can be reclaimed. It is not for those who look away to declare what is possible. If they can not see in this moment, they most certainly can not see ahead.

The story suggests that liberation will require both armed struggle and moral awakening, both individual courage and collective action. It will demand that those of us in the “kindly West” recognize that our own liberation is bound up with that of the oppressed, that we cannot remain hobbits in our comfortable holes while dragons lay waste to other people’s mountains.

What Will You Do While the Fire Falls?

In the end, the journey was not from the Shire to the Mountain, but from despair to action, from exile to home, from the world as it is to the world as it should be. Palestinians continue to walk that road now, step by impossible step, even as the dragon’s fire falls around them, even as the world looks away. Their song continues, even if we close our ears to it. When the dust settles and the dragon falls, history will ask: did you sing, or did you sell your voice for comfort?

Ultimately, liberation doesn’t come from fantasy; it comes from fists raised, funds sent, borders stormed, lies torn like spider-silk. So let us be the ones who refused to let the song die, who demand an end to the siege, the complicity, and the silence, refusing to treat this genocide as background noise. Let us mourn, but let us also move toward a just world, one where no child learns their homeland only through ruins and lullabies.

Our failure to act has already cost too many their dream of return. Let us not fail those who remain. Our task now is to listen, to remember, and to ensure that when the dragon finally falls, we are not counted among those who chose silence over the song of liberation that echoes from every mountain, every camp, and every heart that refuses to surrender the dream of home.

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Cover photo depicts a family near Ramallah, Palestine, in 1992 — credit: Esaias Baitel.

Further Reading:

The Hundred Years War on Palestine, Rashid Khalidi

Perfect Victims, Muhammad El Kurd

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If you are able, consider donating to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund here.

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