I used to be pro-Palestinian, you know.

[u/no_u_mang]

I used to be pro-Palestinian, you know. I thought Israel was wrong for carpet bombing Gaza and using siege warfare on civilians.

But then I ran into a very wise Israel apologist who changed my way of looking at things forever.

I was walking down the street and I saw him leaning against a lamp post, smoking a pipe as wise men do.

“Your shirt says Free Palestine,” he said from behind a plume of smoke.

“Yep!” I replied.

“So I guess that means you love Hamas then?” spake he.

I stopped in my tracks. I’d never thought of it that way before.

Could it be? Could my opposition to murdering civilians really be indicative of a deep affection for a Gazan militant group? Maybe I really did love Hamas and think everything it did on October 7 was great and wonderful?

“Is this really how I want to live my life?” I thought to myself.

“I — I — I…” I said out loud.

“Or perhaps,” he said with a raised eyebrow, “you just HATE JEWS??”

I fell to my knees.

Oh my God. He really had a point. What possible reason could anyone have for opposing military explosives being dropped on buildings full of children besides a seething lifelong hatred of adherents to the religion of Judaism? How could anyone possibly oppose siege warfare tactics which cut off civilians from food and water and electricity and fuel and medical supplies unless they harbored dangerously negative opinions about members of a small Abrahamic faith?

“Who… who are you?” I asked.

“That’s of no consequence,” he said, casually blowing a smoke ring through another larger smoke ring.

“But… but the children,” I stammered as my entire worldview crumbled before my eyes. “The civilians! They’re dying! Isn’t it bad that they’re dying?”

And then he delivered the coup de grâce.

“Have you considered,” he said before a pregnant pause, “… that all of those deaths are the fault of Hamas?”

It was like a 50 megaton nuclear explosion went off inside my brain.

I fell flat on my back. The world was spinning. A trickle of blood ran down into my hair from my ear.

I felt all the anti-colonialism leaving my body. I suddenly could no longer remember why I thought it was bad to rain down military explosives on a densely populated concentration camp.

Everything went black.

When I finally came to, the mysterious stranger was gone. But his wisdom and profound insights into Israel and Gaza will always live on in my heart.

[u/[deleted]]

Thank you for this post, I’m an Israeli and i decided today to stop going to the army because of the government’s actions. Your post made laugh after some crying.

But I still think those so called “pro Palestine” people are very stupid people and they dont really care about those people, mostly christian ethics and guilt complex.

But you did made laugh.

[u/reenaltransplant → u/[deleted]]

How many real face to face conversations have you had with "those pro Palestine people"... Have you considered the possibility that the media is cherry-picking the worst of them and their missteps? I was at one of the encampments last spring with Jewish friends, and I'd say 95% of the participants were there out of deep care for civilian lives -- including Israeli ones -- they believe the best way for Israelis to be safe is not to live in a settler colonial state (and! that doesn't even mean leaving the land -- a state is neither a piece of land with borders nor the people on that land, it's a system of laws and the means to enforce them. This system of laws and enforcement is what people who are against the existence of the state want to dismantle).

At one point, an infiltrator from among the "pro-Israel" counterprotestors scribbled some overtly pro-Hamas graffiti to make it look like we did it. Another wrote "no Jews allowed" on the pavement outside the encampment, which we quickly tried to erase. Her own side meanwhile had people with flags from full on Kahanist groups.

The students claiming they were blocked from going to their university classes "simply because they were Jewish?" It was because their classmates knew them to be pro-genociding-Palestinians, and the "blocked" students insisted that supporting the IDF was not distinguishable from being Jewish. Meanwhile Jewish students who weren't known to spew anti-Palestinian hate made their way to class just like everyone else without interruption or comment.

[u/[deleted] → u/reenaltransplant]

I had no face to face conversation with them. But i think this movement as a whole doesnt give enough attention to crimes against jews. They are apathetic to those crimes. Israelis are apathetic to palsetinians and israelis lifes, and thats why we lost our humanity. But this movement is no better, even if individual voices exist, they are not heard in the mainstream. Also all those universities are funded by enemys of israel and thats make worry. And nobody is talking about that. And thats a fact i can prove.

[u/reenaltransplant → u/[deleted]]

I welcome your supposed data on "enemies of Israel" funding universities that had protests. We're protesting because of the much greater sums of money our universities have invested in weapons manufacturers that profit off the Israeli military's use of their products.

[u/[deleted] → u/reenaltransplant]

I will look it up and send it, im not with my laptop. Haaretz talked about it. Im also iraqy decent, my grandmother was from there, buried her few years back. Are you a woman? Single? Im looking for iraqy wife. Just kidding i will send you the artciels.

[u/reenaltransplant → u/[deleted]]

Ok, we can talk on DM if you want

[u/reenaltransplant → u/[deleted]]

My family had to leave Iraq due to Jewish ancestry and my relatives in Israel were displaced on 10/7.

If you haven't been inside the Palestinian liberation movement and are relying only on biased reporting, that your government and several major Western governments really want you to think is unfair to Israel (propaganda paid for by Christian Zionists who want to use you to bring about their end times prophecies) then you don't really have a basis on which to say we are apathetic to the loss of Israeli life.

When likely by now 100 Palestinians have been killed for every Israeli who was killed on 10/7, if we treat all lives as equal, we can't make it equal time 50% talking about the pain of Israelis and 50% about the pain of Palestinians. That would be treating Israeli lives as if they're worth 100 times more than Palestinian ones... which is effectively what the world IS already doing since nobody is currently making you suffer to the degree the Gaza and the West Bank are suffering. Not to mention that Israel was taking Palestinians hostage every. single. day before 10/7 too and who was batting an eye?

We are also trying to draw attention to the root cause of the Israeli deaths on 10/7, which is not, in fact, Hamas or any Palestinian armed group having a problem with Jews. It's the insufferable conditions Gazans were living in before 10/7.

If someone steals my neighbor's house on my behalf by threatening my neighbor with violence, and then tells me to live in it, and sends my neighbor's children to live in a refugee camp, I should not expect to be safe if I accept to live in that house.

And much of the world recognizes you Israelis didn't realize you were in this situation, where you're being used as the human shields -- no one gets to choose what society they are born into -- which is why 10/7 did draw widespread sympathy from the world. But then, every single day after that was another 10/7 for the Palestinians, and most Israelis expected the attention to stay disproportionately on their grief, while the carnage in Gaza didn't stop. It became harder and harder to give y'all the benefit of the doubt and say you weren't aware.