Open letters to a former friend who seriously believes Palestine deserves what Israel has been doing to its people
Two transcriptions of two videos I made earlier in 2024 to address the monstrous beliefs of someone I once thought I knew.
The person in question shall remain unnamed here, even though she is technically a public figure who has proudly added her name to such profoundly stupid, nigh-on censorial open letters as the one denouncing Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars speech, or the one that tried to get the Emmys to rescind their award nomination for Bisan Owda, and her invaluable daily journalism on the ground in Gaza. (That last letter failed miserably and hilariously, especially when Bisan deservedly won the award anyway.)
While these open letters/fury-fuelled rants of mine were written and spoken back in May, and so much more horror has happened to Gaza and beyond since then, most of what I said still applies, because unfortunately, as ever, very little has changed…
Open Letter #1 - May 28th, 2024:
I need to vent. Vent about how I’ve seen people reacting to what’s happening to Palestine. Forgive me, I have to read from preprepared words I’ve written, in order to be as coherent and relatively calm as I can, because otherwise I think I’ll just become so overwhelmed with anger and sadness that I’ll just stare off into space in a silent rage. So here goes.
Another horrifying, blood-boiling tactic that crops up from those who minimise or outright deny Israel’s genocide of Gaza is the sociopathic argument of: “Well, that’s what they get for starting it! They made Israel do it! Look what they made them do! Shouldn’t have played with fire if they didn’t want to get burned! It’s not Israel’s fault that Israel is massacring Palestine’s children! That’s just war!”
The sheer apoplectic, impotent fury instilled in me by seeing this logical-fallacy-riddled, genocide-justifying, nihilistically cruel mindset play out on social media and the news with every passing day, and every passing atrocity by the IDF - (“world’s most ethical army” my arse) - that’s wrought on the displaced and dying Gazans who are endlessly starved and bombed by the inhumane bastards aided and abetted by our Western governments complicit in this barbarity… I just feel so sickened by all of it.
And to those certain salient few who are still clinging to the party line that “Israel will end their assault and end the war when Hamas finally gives back the hostages (at least the ones who are left after all the ones the IDF killed in their haphazard scattergun approach to bombing everything first, asking questions never)” and that “Palestine and Israel can return to a coexisting peace just as soon as the hostages are returned”…
…HOW DO YOU EXPECT PALESTINE TO RETURN TO NORMAL IF THERE WON’T BE ANY PEOPLE OR SCHOOLS OR HOSPITALS OR LIBRARIES OR CULTURE OR BUILDINGS OR LAND TO RETURN TO IN THE FIRST PLACE? ISRAEL IS DESTROYING ALL OF IT, AND ENSURING NOTHING REMAINS, AND THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN GOVERNMENTS ARE BANKROLLING AND WEAPONISING IT EVERY GODDAMN DAY. ARE YOU BLIND? DO YOUR ALGORITHMS KEEP YOU FROM SEEING THE PHOTOS AND VIDEOS OF APOCALYPTIC DESTRUCTION, BURNT CORPSES, BLINDED AND DEAD CHILDREN, CRYING PARENTS, AND ENDLESS FIRE AND BLOOD? OR DO YOU SEE THESE PEOPLE AS LESS DESERVING OF LIFE THAN YOU?
If this is the price you’re willing others to pay for your precious Zionist ideology, your imagined Zion sanctuary paradise isn’t worth the blood spilled in creating it. No country in history has ever been worth the genocides implemented to birth them into being. No eradications of entire races of people have ever been worth it. Period. That should be plainly fucking obvious to anyone and everyone with at least two brain cells to rub together. But if your beliefs rely on your existence being worth the subtraction of the existence of others, your brain must be terminally smooth. Whether that shortsightedness is a consequence of your upbringing teaching you something that subtly contravenes the sanctity of life for everyone, or it’s a deliberate ideological choice that illuminates a rotten core you may or may not know is within you, the world cannot wait for you to hurry up and properly educate yourself into extending baseline recognition of the humanity in EVERYONE. It would be nice to think that maybe one day, it’ll click for you as to why most people at this moment in time emphatically don’t agree with you over something you seem to think has been fundamentally on the side of right, and if/when that happens, perhaps you’ll understand just how horrific the views you once so firmly held actually were. Naive as it may be for me to hope as such, maybe you’ll actually change your mind for the better.
Until then, a few points of order:
1. Let’s stop saying “Palestine” and “Hamas” interchangeably, conflating them with one another as if every Palestinian person is automatically part of Hamas because they’re Palestinian. It should be obvious why this rhetoric is dangerous, which is exactly why it’s utilised. It’s the language of dehumanisation.
2. If you only get your perspectives and opinions on what’s happening in Israel and Palestine from flagrantly propagandist social media accounts like “The Persian Jewess” or Ben Shapiro or PragerU or Daniel-Ryan Spaulding, you’re looking at the world through a hugely deceptive keyhole. A staggeringly queerphobic, misogynistic, and Islamophobically racist keyhole, specifically. So if you like and share these people’s content, yet say that you’re a progressive ally, don’t be surprised when people think you’re a hypocrite or a liar. Because how progressive and accepting can you really be when you’re so enamoured by people like Spaulding dressing up in a purple wig to play a mocking caricature of a liberal American woman he can straw-man argue against with his pro-Israel apologia masquerading as common sense? Or like “The Persian Jewess”, with their Gal-Gadot-as-Wonder-Woman profile picture, reposting a “satirical” “comedy” “skit” from an Israeli “comedian” who partakes in Birth of a Nation levels of racist minstrelsy by donning a fake unibrow and mocking Arabian accent, to depict Palestinians as uniformly terrorist monsters that Western liberals are too stupid to see are out to kill them all, so why should you support them in the first place? If you don’t see these “sketches” as mocking you, a self-described progressive, then are you seriously as progressive as you think you are?
And 3. Most importantly, ask yourself:
Do you believe every protestor - from the scores of people on the streets around the world, to the students on all those college campuses - over the past several months are all antisemitic? Are they all brainwashed puppets of Hamas propaganda seeking to destroy the Western world? Do you think every news story of Gazans being slaughtered or starved is an exaggeration or a lie? Do you think every video of death and despair coming out of Gaza, that reflects poorly on Israel, is just staged by actors? Do you genuinely believe that Gaza is actually getting too much aid, and all the refugees are actually being overfed? Do you ever ask yourself why it is that every time you see something that crystal clearly shows that Israel’s destructive actions far outweigh any supposed justifiable reason to commit them, you always have to find someone, anyone, who will tell you that that’s all made up, they’re all liars, it’s us against the world as it’s always been, don’t listen to anyone else, there is no war in Ba Sing Se, and so on and so on?
Think.
Just… THINK.
Open Letter #2 - May 30th, 2024:
To the person I know who was compelled to cross out “All Eyes on Rafah”, and replace it with “All Eyes on Hamas”: this message goes out to you.
As of the time of recording, this reshareable story template on Instagram has been shared by OVER 30 MILLION PEOPLE. By any metric, that’s a monumental number of people to come together for a single cause, even though I’m sure by your estimation, it’s just another example of slacktivism at its finest. For the vast majority of those who’ve shared this image, the clear intent behind doing so - even in spite of it being an image made with AI, which certainly isn’t ideal - is to show solidarity in huge numbers with the message itself; the message that people around the world are not oblivious to what’s happening, that they bear witness to the horrors unjustly inflicted on the Palestinian people, and they see and know with absolute unambiguous clarity that the bombings and killings of the civilians in Rafah is emphatically, obviously WRONG.
But you just couldn’t help but take that message, and slap your own agenda on top of it to serve your continued insistence on misunderstanding why most people aren’t on Israel’s side here.
Some hours before you shared that altered version of the “All Eyes on Rafah” image, you shared to your stories a quote from a post by Jameela Jamil, who was quoting a post from Adam Eli, who was quoting a tweet originally by a user named @benFranklin2Ø18, who wrote:
“You are allowed to say, at any point, I can’t support this. Even if you did. Even if you were unsure. You can at any point say “this has gone too far.” And while the best time to say that was earlier, second best time is now.”
From the person who wrote it, to the people who quoted it, all of them were doing so as a means of expressing that Israel’s killings of the people in Rafah is an unsupportable act, and if anyone might have been on the fence about it before, now is better than never to acknowledge you were in the wrong, accept and learn from it, and truly realise who’s the clear aggressor, and who’s the clear victim in this situation.
And for a moment, I wondered if this was the turning point for you in finally recognising Israel’s actions for what they are.
But then your following story posts made it clear that you’re still as stubbornly committed to the bit of seeing Hamas and Palestine as the sole problem to solve, to the exclusion of any inconvenient reality that negates that notion.
You read that quote shared by Jameela, and rather than gleaning the spirit of the words that were intended, you instead saw it as a message meant for everyone but you! And in the context of your reality-bending justifications for Israel’s indefensible actions, you took the words “I can’t support this”, “this has gone too far”, and “while the best time to say it was earlier, the second best time is now” to be referring to those who are pro-Palestine, which in your view equates to being pro-Hamas, pro-terrorism, and pro-antisemitism! YOU’RE STILL REFUSING TO GET IT! You’re using the open-minded vagaries of that quote to morph it into fitting your ideology, even when the people you took that quote from are all vehemently opposed to what you want that quote to mean!
Honestly, I’m surprised you still follow and like and share Jameela Jamil’s posts, because she’s been quite vocally in favour of a ceasefire, and supporting Palestine, and all the things I’ve seen you spend all these months since October 7th being vocally against. You only ever seem to cherrypick the things she says that can be misconstrued as supporting your beliefs, while ignoring the stuff she says that don’t align with what you would want her to say. Then again, you’ve also spent all these months cherrypicking the “facts” and information that adhere to what you want to hear, then disregarding the rest. Confirmation bias at its finest.
To be honest, your beliefs have continually confounded me with how often different parts of what you say contradict one another. You are, as you’ve often mentioned, a woman who is Lebanese-Syrian by birth, Jewish by marriage*—
*(FACT CHECK: This was an error I didn’t catch until months afterwards, so to rectify it, I’ll add here that she later clarified she’s Lebanese-Syrian and Jewish from birth, which would indicate she’s likely been indoctrinated into Zionist thinking since she was a child, and therefore for far longer than I’d first thought.)
—and as an Arab Jew, you say your heart goes out to everyone on both sides of the conflict. Yet you also seem to believe that all Arab people are inhuman monsters who want you and everyone dead, made particularly clear by when you shared that clip from that film where Ingrid Bergman played Golda Mier, and in response to a child character’s question of “When will there be peace?”, she replies - and you highlighted the quote - “When the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.”
You also frequently say that you love America for the freedoms it grants you, and hate Hamas (and/or Palestine and Palestinians, because you often use each word interchangeably to mean the same thing) for how they would subjugate and oppress and kill you for merely existing as a Jewish woman; yet when countless college students of America used their freedom of speech to protest America’s support of Israel in their genocidal efforts, you made a heavy insinuation that you wanted to see these students get assaulted and shot and killed for what you deemed them speaking out of line, like would happen to them in another more openly fascist country.
You once passive-aggressive sarcastically said to me, when I attempted to talk to you privately about your worrying stance on Israel and Palestine, that, quote: “I care about all innocent lives. Heart emoji. I’m sorry if I incorrectly assumed you did too. Blind see-no-evil monkey emoji.”
If you think you’ve been acting or talking like someone who cares about all innocent lives this whole time, your perception has a glitch.
If you think that people in the LGBTQ community must be stupid and/or outright suicidal for supporting Palestine, as you repeatedly suggest, your allyship is built on condescension.
If you think the countless other Jewish people around the world who disown Zionism and Israel’s actions, and don’t want the genocide of Palestine to be carried out in the name of Jewish people’s history of being persecuted, are all self-hating traitors to their people, akin to Jews who pledged allegiance to, and collaborated with, the Nazis before being murdered themselves… if you think protestors around the world, protesting the thing you believe is too sacrosanct for anyone to criticise, should at best all keep their mouths shut, or should at worst all be silenced by force via the police and military acting on behalf of the government… what does that make you? What is this, “Freedom of speech for me, but not for thee”? Is that the doctrine you live by?
I don’t know if you’ve always thought this way, or if you’ve been taught to think this way over time. To be especially personal and specific: Back when you and your husband and I and so many others we know were all collaborators on the site HitRECord, and we all made art out of remixing each other’s works for so many years, I could never have foreseen that people I knew, whom I once thought decent, would turn out to have such an unfathomable blind spot in their humanity. In most other facets of your personal and professional lives that I’ve seen, you appear so reasonable and kind and cool. Has this ugliness been lurking beneath the surface all along? Did I ever really truly know you?
Through you, and your stated beliefs and behaviours, you act as a window into the parallel reality inhabited by those who still follow the notion that Zionism is somehow a net good thing. No matter what historical facts you could easily find that would disprove such a concept… no matter who worryingly shares your Zionist beliefs (be they fundamentalist evangelical Christians trying to bring about the second coming of Christ, or literal white nationalists who, because of their hate-filled antisemitism, actively want all the Jews of the world to be congregated into a single state separated away from the rest of society)… no matter what pictorial or video evidence you may see that ought to pierce the veil in the illusion of Israel being some flawed utopia that those pesky, unprovoked Palestinians just won’t leave alone in peace… none of it gets through. And none of what I’ve said here will get through, either. You’ll only hear what you want to hear, fixate on the few bullet points you can spin into confirming your biases, dismiss the nuances, and retrofit your mind to repel and block out the substance of what I, or anyone else, may say.
The overwhelming majority of those who want an end to Israel and Zionism are - and I cannot stress this enough - NOT TALKING ABOUT ENDING THE LIVES OF PEOPLE, BUT PUTTING AN END TO THE PHILOSOPHY THAT THE PLACE WAS BUILT ON. You’re a fan of Marvel movies, you’ve seen Thor: Ragnarok, so you know the idea: “Asgard is not a place, it’s a people.”
(There’s also a fitting analogy there about how, canonically, Asgard was built on a long and bloody history of colonialism, but I know, you don’t like any comparisons that would paint Israel as a colonising force of any kind, even if it’s true.)
There is so much more to say, but I’m only one guy, and it’s not my responsibility to try and get someone to teach themselves something they don’t want to be taught. My only hope here is that, within the specificity of what I’m talking about, and who I’m directly addressing, something bigger and more important than any of us can be learned from all this.
In the meantime: fuck Benjamin Netanyahu, fuck the IDF, fuck the UK and US governments who sell them the weapons they use to murder civilians en masse, and free Palestine.
Cheers.