October 7th

As I am writing this, we are approaching the two year anniversary of the October 7th attacks on Israel. In many ways, the events of this day are defining the 2020s as a decade. I do not really believe that Israel and Palestine were all that common topics of interest to most people, aside from those who like to keep up to date on the Middle East. I have always been fascinated by this subject, and by Israel itself as a nation. I have been following, in some ways, this conflict since I was in third grade. I was and still am a weird dude. What I want to do here is give my thoughts on the events that occurred that day, how they have affected my life, and how they continue to affect the world. This will mostly be my opinions. I am not intending this to be a go-to resource for what has transpired so far. I am nowhere near qualified to write something like that. I am not Jewish or Israeli, and I am not Arab or Palestinian. I am just a guy with a vested intrest in the Middle East, and someone who has always cared deeply about Jewish issues. This is one of the most divisive issues of our time. I feel as if the loudest voices talking about it severely misunderstand and spread misinformation, whether by ignorance or malice. I want to present my view about everything that has happened in Israel and Palestine and how the only way forward is letting go of our emotions and being open to the fact that we can be wrong. Nuance is everything. Please do not take my word for anything. As I said, I have no personal connections to the region or conflict. Listen to actual Palestinian and Israeli sources who have actual knowledge and experience, NOT WESTERN CELEBRITIES WHO PROBABLY CAN’T POINT OUT THE REGION ON A MAP.

A few basics

I think it is prudent to point out a few things. Jewish people are NOT synonymous with the Israeli government. In addition to that, NOT ALL ISRAELIS ARE JEWS. While the majority population of Israel is Jewish, Israel is a very diverse society. The population as of right now is around 78.5 percent Israeli Jewish, and 21.5 Arab. While it isn’t perfect, Israeli law provides equal rights under the law for all Israeli citizens. Arabs and non Jews participate in government, in the IDF, and in law enforcement. Not all Arabs are Palestinian, and not all Muslims are Arab.

Jews themselves are indigenous to the region as proven by DNA tests. Furthermore, Jews predated modern western notions of religion and ethnicity. The best word I have heard to describe them are an “ethnoreligious group”. They are an ethnicity with shared ancient spiritual practices that go back millennia. They are the only ones who decide who is and isn’t Jewish. Modern conspiracy theories about how “European Jews are converts with no genetic connection to the Middle East”, are wrong, once again as proven by DNA tests. That is a common and highly antisemitic conspiracy theory that must be opposed.

Zionism is a complicated ideology with numerous variants, no two Zionists agree on one thing. As I have heard before, if you put two Jews in a room together, you get three different opinions. To put it simply, Zionism is the Jewish movement for self-determination, in their ancestral homeland. Self-determination being the right of a people group to determine their own fate, free of being overruled or influenced by an overarching foreign power. This is a right backed and upheld by the UN, the Jewish nation is indigenous to the region as confirmed by DNA tests, archaeology, and written sources both scriptural and beyond. Israel has a legal right to exist. Getting that out of the way because if you do not recognize Israel (or Palestine for that matter)’s right to exist, you are not serious about this issue at all and should be disregarded. Arabs have also been living in the region for hundreds of years and have a right to live there. Palestine also has a right to exist, and they both have a right to exist peacefully, prosperously, and safely as neighbors.

October 7th, 2023

Ok. I am going to explain what happened that day, and how I remember reacting to it. I had woken up pretty early to get ready for a convention I was going to later in the day when I read a news headline of rockets being fired into Israel. Anyone who is Israeli can tell you that rockets being fired into their airspace is not an uncommon occurrence. It was not until later at the convention that I learned of the truly evil and horrific actions that had taken place besides rockets.

Around 6:30 AM, a terrorist organization known as Hamas, which currently controls the Gaza strip, fired rockets at numerous locations within southern Israel. In addition to this, roving bands of armed militants rolled across the border in trucks and motorcycles and invaded the southern part of the country. They attacked numerous small communities along the border, massacring entire families, including pets, raping men, women, and children on a horrifically massive scale, and kidnapping people to bring back as hostages. Men would fly into the country by air on paragliders and shoot at civilians and soldiers alike on the ground. Perhaps the most horrific single attack that day was on an open-air trance music festival near the community of Re’im. It was full of innocent party-goers from around the world and was billed as a celebration of “friends, love, and infinite freedom”. It fell on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. 378 human beings of all nationalities, faiths, and creeds were murdered at the festival, and 44 of them were taken hostage. What really had struck me about this particular attack was the fact that it was at an event meant to make people happy. Things like this have always affected me in this way, I remember feeling incredibly sad about the 2015 attacks at the Bataclan concert venue in Paris for the same reason. Innocent people, many of them my age, who just wanted to forget about their worries, and dance under the desert moon. I was horrified by what was going on, around 2,000 people were murdered across southern Israel that day. I have heard it described as “Israel’s 9/11”. This had been an unprecedented escalation in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Make no mistake, this was not an attack by another nation, this was an attack by a terrorist group that is fundamentally no different from ISIS or Al-Qaeda. Hamas is a terrorist organization that occupies and subjects the people of the Gaza strip to horrors that we in the west cannot imagine. It is a fundamentalist Islamic organization that seeks to implement a theocratic government based on it’s interpretation of Islamic law. It clearly ignores crucial parts of Islamic scripture such as 5:32 Quran, as do all terrorist groups who misuse their stated religion to justify unfathomable acts of evil.

I was hardly able to focus on the convention I was at. My mind kept crawling back to the tragedy that was unfolding. It was not even a day later that I already saw westerners celebrating it. Prominent western influencers were praising the “resistance fighters”. Washington Post columnist, Karen Attiah, posted this horrifically vile statement on Twitter, “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers,” in response to people being raped, kidnapped, and murdered en masse. So called “Left wing” groups and individuals immediately started expressing their support for the “freedom fighters in Gaza”. Describing the people who were murdered as “settlers”. This view is still held among many on the left who, at the very least, are sympathetic to “the cause”. I remember Mia Khalifa (Who, as of me writing this, has 27 million followers on Instagram), specifically asking “Can someone please tell the freedom fighters in Palestine to flip their phones and film horizontal”. I am never going to forget how sick and disturbed I was at reading that. I’m sorry Mia, I am sorry that your biggest problem here is the fact that the murderers were recording vertically. Just another rich western celebrity who is either extremely ignorant or downright evil. That’s an evil thing to say. No amount of bullshit buzzwords will change that. Campus protests for Palestine popped up days after the attack, before Israel’s response. I distinctly remember one protest at the University of Wisconsin where a crowd waving Palestinian flags chanted “Glory to the martyrs!”, and “We will liberate the land!”. Your “martyrs” murdered civilians, your “martyrs” raped and murdered hundreds of people. Hundreds of college campuses had similar events. “Activists”, so hungry for moral superiority try to shove a foreign conflict into their limited western worldview. People at these protests did Nazi salutes, displayed swastikas, and openly mocked the families of those who lost their lives and those who were kidnapped. People try to deny this, they try to deny it because they know that what happened that day was not “liberation”, it has not “freed Palestine”. No, the evil deeds perpetrated that day have led to nothing but misery for the people of Gaza. This is not liberation, this is evil, and so, so, so many people are apparently too blind to see that. “By any means necessary” is and always will be an extremely slippery slope. The Holy Land has been subjected to terror for 70 years by Arab governments, and what do they have to show for it? There is no free Palestine, there is no prosperous Gaza. There has only been mountains of dead bodies, both Jew and Arab. This despicable war would have never happened were it not for your so-called “freedom-fighters”. These innocent civilians in Gaza that you claim to care about would still be alive if it weren’t for “by any means necessary”. I will never defend or excuse the actions of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. But he did not start this war. He is responsible for horrible war crimes, that cannot be denied. But the blame for these two years of war can only fall on Hamas.

What came next

Both the attacks themselves, and the fact that so many people were justifying them and openly mocking their victims made me incredibly sick. I had never felt so alone. I had never felt so disturbed by my peers. I didn’t really know how to have faith in anyone anymore, I would have lost my faith in humanity altogether if I didn’t have people in my life who pulled me away from that dark place. But the pain I had felt is absolutely nothing compared to what those who were murdered and taken hostage felt, and are feeling. It is nothing compared to the families of those who were lost, who’s cries for empathy and compassion fell on deaf ears. Attacks on Jews have skyrocketed the last two years. People seem unable to distinguish Jewish and/or Israeli civilians from the Israeli government. Every Israeli is somehow responsible for all this bloodshed. Antisemitism rots your mind, it erodes your critical thinking.

Just a few months ago, a couple who both worked at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, were shot and killed outside of a Jewish museum in DC. They were there attending an event when a man shouting “Free Palestine” walked up to them and shot them. Yaron was a Christian Israeli and Sarah was an American Jew. They were recently engaged and were excited about their future together. They were both advocates for peace and for ending the war. The man who murdered them knew none of that, all he knew is that they were outside of a Jewish museum. Leftists across the nation celebrated this act of terror as “legitimate resistance against the Zionist state”. And of course, nobody cares. Nobody talks about this. The discourse is dominated by terroristic, trigger happy, “activists”. Why is it that people are so silent about this issue? Why is it that it is not ok (It isn’t) to shout “All lives matter” in response to BLM, but it is ok to shout “Free Palestine” in response to Jews sounding the alarm about antisemitism, (Or Jewish people just openly being Jewish at all)? Are we as a society collectively that dense? Is our desire for liberation and justice that hollow, that somehow, terrorism is “justice?”

There seems to be, judging from what I have seen online, a pervasive belief that Israel is a uniquely evil nation. I will never deny that the Israeli government has done, and is doing, horrible things. But this attitude that terminally online leftists, have about Israel is extremely disturbing, and honestly very xenophobic. They treat Israel, and anyone they deem as supportive of Israel, which almost always includes Jewish people in general, as an “omnicause”. Israel to them is at the heart of the “imperial core”. Every, very real and evil, act of exploitation and oppression committed by western governments is somehow tied back to Israel. This absolutely reeks of the classic, antisemitic, trope of Jews controlling the world and being behind every disaster from the Titanic to 9/11. This is something leftist extremists share with those on the right. It’s rather obvious if you are familiar with far-right terminology and dog-whistles. You will often see left-wing extremists using the term “Zio” to describe people who support Israel. Where does this term come from? It comes from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Left-wing extremists are literally using terms coined by far-right leaders to harass and label people. “Zio” was created in order to harass and other Jews. The Jews, err sorry, the “Zios”, are supposedly pushing for the “New World Order”. Whether they accept it or not, this is what many left-wing extremists believe. They may honestly think that they do not hate Jews or think that Jewish people are the big bad of our planet. But their actions say otherwise.

Ever since this war began, Jews have been attacked world wide. I mentioned the double homicide of those two embassy workers. But within just a few months of that, a parade raising awareness of the Israeli hostages was firebombed in Boulder, Colorado by a man yelling “Free Palestine”. This specific group was called “Run for their Lives” and had made no statement supporting Netanyahu, or any of his actions in Gaza. They were simply trying to raise awareness of people who had been kidnapped by terrorists. They had been harassed by people accusing them of genocide, and of being Nazis. Why does a simple run to raise awareness of hostages create such a visceral reaction?

I think one of the biggest driving factors, again from my own observations online, is that many western leftists do not see this conflict as a nuanced story full of complex history with good and evil on both sides. They, from their western lenses, see it as a story of oppressor vs. oppressed. Many lack nuance when discussing this, many are completely unaware of the history or background of this region, which is crucial to actually forming educated opinions on this issue. Many instead treat this almost as if it is a sports team rivalry. They endlessly repeat slogans, they endlessly protest and argue with people online. And they increasingly turn to violence as a way to express their intense hatred of Israel, or anyone who they deem as responsible for the current actions of it’s government.

People are far more interested in having a side to root for rather than actually having nuanced discussions about what can be done to solve this, or how you can actually give aid to those who are suffering. It is far too easy to be swept up in the hype of a conflict this intense.

Naive westerners, who have probably never experienced the kind of fear that has gripped this region for decades, are doing a huge disservice to both Israelis and Palestinians. They shout their accusations of genocide, they protest and protest, they post obsessively on social media and they aggressively, and violently, attempt to shut down anyone who they believe opposes them. Jewish college students are harassed on campus by these people because they assume that they support everything Netanyahu does because they wear a Star of David necklace. Jewish businesses are boycotted because they assume that by buying from them, the money goes towards Israeli bombs. Jews in general are beaten and murdered in the streets. Does this not horrify you? Even if they are Israeli, I was raised to believe targeting someone for their nationality was wrong. Why is it being treated as a crime to be Israeli, or Jewish? Why does no one speak up when posters of kidnapped children are torn down and defaced in the name of Palestine? Why is it so difficult for people to understand that the actions of Netanyahu do not define the beliefs of an entire nation of 10 million people? Why do people not care when Jews are targeted? Why, Why, Why, do peoples empathy and critical thinking skills turn off here?

What can be done?

I think a good first step towards creating a healthier dialogue around this issue would be getting off of social media, or at least thinking before you share something about this issue. We need to do actual research and listen to people directly affected by this conflict, both Jew and Arab, before we form our opinions. Quick knee-jerk reactions only serve to inflame the tension and lead to people getting killed. In addition to that, we cannot let celebrities and “influencers” control what we think about this topic. Many of them very likely do not know the history, such as the #Artists4Ceasefire people, who wore pins with red hands on them to show their support for the Palestinian cause. Did they know that that red hand symbol in relation to this conflict comes from a lynching that was perpetrated against 2 Israeli Jews in 2000? Probably not, but they should have. If people with influence are going to talk about this conflict, they NEED to be aware of the weight and meaning of it all. People with platforms cannot be involved in this discussion if they do not know the history.

The same goes for the Palestine protest crowd. Every time I see one of those protests or rallies, I hear chants of “There is only one solution! Intifada Revolution!”. Do these westerners know of the first and second intifadas? Where militants launched brutal attacks on Israeli civilians and thousands of Israelis and Palestinians were killed in the crossfire? Again, they probably are not aware of it, because they probably did not care enough to do any research into what they are saying. Those words that are being chanted, those symbols being used, they have actual meanings. They are not catchy slogans or trendy symbols, they are celebrations of violence against innocent people. This conflict, the innocent people on both sides, they deserve better than our apathy and trivialization of their suffering. This is not a goddamned social media trend or fan rivalry, this is a REAL war where REAL people are ACTUALLY dying on both sides.

I do believe that the vast majority of westerners posting about Palestine are ignorant about this issue. They simply do not understand, or care to understand, the nuance and intricacies at play here. But at the core of this movement, their are people who are aware of the truth here, and they choose to manipulate people for their own ends. The people leading these campus protests, groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, have been accused of having connections to Hamas operatives. Multiple families of people who were held hostage by Hamas in Gaza are suing Pro-Palestine activist groups operating on the Columbia University campus in federal court. They claim that groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine, Within Our Lifetime, and Jewish Voice for Peace have acted as the “American propaganda arm” of Hamas. They specifically point out an Instagram post from the Columbia SJP account. The post said that “We are back” and encouraged followers to “stay tuned”, they had been inactive for months. When was it posted? About 3 minutes before the attack on Israel began on October 7th.

One of the plaintiffs suing, Shlomi Ziv, who had been held hostage for 246 days after being kidnapped from the Nova festival, is claiming that his captor, a Palestinian journalist named Abdallah Aljamal mentioned that groups active at Columbia University were receiving “financial, organizational, and other support” from multiple terrorist organizations in the Middle East, including Hamas. The cased ended up being dismissed because the judge claimed that there was insufficient evidence that the campus groups knew that Aljamal was working with Hamas. At 5:43 AM on October 7th, 2023 mere minutes before the attacks began, Aljamal posted on TikTok saying, “O God, guide us.. O God, grant us the victory that you promised. O God, acceptance, acceptance, acceptance.. Your victory, O God”. He had since posted frequently in support of the attack on Facebook. It strikes me as suspicious that they would not know he was a Hamas operative if he had posted frequently in support of the attacks. Aljamal was killed in the raid that rescued the three men who he held hostage.

The biggest thing I think that can be done to improve the situation here is to actually have dialogue between both sides. From what I have seen, far too many in the pro-Palestine camp are quick to outrage and moralizing. I have seen far too many posts online where people posting in support of Israel or the hostages are told to kill themselves and called names like the aforementioned “Zio” a white supremacist slur. This will not free Palestine, mocking those who were kidnapped and murdered will not free Palestine, acting like petulant children online who are fundamentally opposed to nuance will not free Palestine. And it is disappointing that this has to be said, but violence of any sort will not and has not freed Palestine. I would think that the majority of people posting in support of Palestine are simply people who are disturbed by the suffering going on in Gaza and want to find ways of supporting them. But the Free Palestine movement as a whole has not done much to actually support Gazans. Everyone is hyping up Greta Thunberg’s “freedom flotilla” but I feel like the fact that they refused to allow the Vatican to deliver the minuscule amounts of aid they had onboard after Pope Leo offered, and instead chose to sail illegally into Israeli waters and be deported shows that this is nothing more than a stunt meant to drum up support against Israel. We in the west do not control the world, we can not simply protest and magically expect Gaza to be free. What needs to happen is the Free Palestine movement needs to study the history of the conflict, think critically before posting, and not let grifters or people with obvious connections to actual terrorist organizations lead there movement. There are tons of great organizations out there staffed by actual Israelis and Palestinians who are working towards peace together. I highly recommend checking out Realign For Palestine, a group founded by a Gazan-American man named Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib that works with Israelis to advocate for peace in the region. There must be no violence, no “by any means necessary”, and no more intifada if there is to be peace. There needs to be healing, dialogue, and unity if there is to be peace. I am not Israeli or Palestinian, and I do not want anyone to read this and think they have all the answers. I am just someone who wants peace in the region. Go listen to actual Palestinians and Israelis, not westerners who tell you to shout hateful slogans and harass Jews.

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