An open letter to you all

And I do have a small request.

To be completely honest, if after fourteen months, after watching what has transpired in the Middle East, you still have any notion that what Israel have endured has anything to do with land or anything to do with a two state solution — I’m sorry to break it to you — but you are a bit of a moron.

I will however, be generous, and assume that before Palestine became the biggest fad since the Tamagotchi¹ that you weren’t particularly educated on the history of the region. You have been bombarded with emotionally charged image after image of suffering women and children in woeful conditions. I can understand your shock and horror, and I can empathise with the feelings of sadness that welled up in you, as you sat in the comfort of your privileged life. The images are shocking — that much is true. Never mind that many of those images — that have been algorithmically targeted to your feed — are not fact checked or verified. And it matters not that many of those images were not even of Gaza, but previous conflicts. Semantics my dear, semantics.

Fake news uncovered by student volunteers at the IDC Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, central Israel. (Courtesy IDC)

You boarded that bandwagon with gusto, and nothing is going to stop you. Annoying little facts are easy to sweep under the rug. Such as the ‘Palestinians’ were offered their own state numerous times and rejecting every one of them.² Regardless of these uncomfortable contradictions, you have held firm to your position, after all, you have bought a tee shirt and a keffiyeh! You are far too busy attending protests and hunting down Israeli products for your Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) WhatsApp group to do any real research. I get it. I don’t blame you. You don’t know what you don’t know.

I mean your friends told you to follow Motaz Azaiza and Bisan Owda on Instagram, and you have — Voila! Middle Eastern research done! I do wonder though if they told you the reason why the ‘Palestinians’ keep refusing Statehood? Did you know that it’s because they flat out refuse to recognise Israel, and have said time and time again that they want the whole lot — one State, with not one single Jew in it? That they have refused over and over to live in peace with Israel? I guess those pesky Israelis can just piss right off to wherever they came from — well actually many of them have had their indigenous roots in the land of Israel for over 3,000 years³ — but I digress. Lets not get hung up on the minor details.

I do admit though, if it was me, I probably would have started questioning my sources once I realised that Israel had been continuously attacked since its inception in 1948, not just from the Gaza border, but the Lebanon border, the Syrian border, the Jordanian border and the Egyptian border. And when I discovered that Israel had not initiated even one of those conflicts, I would have wanted to know why?

I would have questioned why that tiny little sliver of land — akin to a few grains of rice on a world map, the single democratic and free country in the region, surrounded by countries that are known for their terrible human rights abuses, subjugation of women, and terrorist militia — could somehow be considered the aggressor. These inconsistencies would probably would have raised a few red flags. But hey, that’s just me.

See if you can find Israel, in amongst the surrounding countries of the Middle East.

But unfortunately my friend, that is where my patience runs out. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is no defence in a court of law, and while I can forgive a certain lack of awareness, your callousness regarding the rape and mutilation of Israeli women is something I can’t move past. And the hostages. My God, the hostages. When you started tearing down and defacing hostage posters of babies, I realised that you were lost.

A serious question though, when Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets into Israel every single day for over a year⁴ after October 7, displacing up to 80,000 Israeli civilians⁵ — many of whom were still reeling from horrific losses — did you not start to put two and two together and realise that this has nothing to do with occupation or apartheid? How about the 12 Druze children⁶ that were killed from a Hezbollah missile strike? How did you reconcile that with the ‘oppression’ of the ‘Palestinians’?

And what about the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI)? A reprehensible theocratic government run by religious madmen that beat up and kill women via the morality police⁷, kill anyone who whispers a bad word about the IRI, and effectively holds close to 90 million people hostage under their repressive regime. When Iran — which by the way is 79 times larger than Israel — launched around 200 ballistic missiles at targets in Israel⁸, how did that make sense to you? How did you connect the IRI, Hezbollah and the Houthis (who were fighting and killing each other not that long ago), who have no legitimate beef with Israel, and care nought for the people of Gaza, to the ‘ethnostate’ of Israel? Are you for real? The Middle Eastern countries surrounding Israel are a thousand times more of an ethnostate than Israel. Israel is the only country in the region that has equal rights for all citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion. I’m confused as to why you would call Israel an ethnostate yet ignore the issues with their neighbours?

When you started regurgitating that bullshit, which laughs in the face of any kind of reality, I gave up on you. And don’t even get me started on the word genocide. If I had a dollar for every time I have seen you post the word genocide, I certainly wouldn’t need to be writing on Substack.

Not the genocide of the Assad regime in Syria⁹, who has murdered an estimated 300,000-400,000 of their own people, you didn’t seem to care about them. Or the Sudanese, that have been suffering a massacre of horrific proportions over the past eighteen months to the tune of an estimated 150,000, along with systematic rape and human trafficking¹⁰. That doesn’t appear to warrant your attention.

Yet a precision targeted response to the October 7 apocalypse — that multiple warfare experts have deemed to be one of the lowest in modern warfare¹¹, as far as civilian to combatant ratios go — and under the most extreme urban geographic difficulties imaginable, has you voraciously touting your geopolitical and military expertise from the mountain tops! What do those experts know? You saw your favourite influencer post an unverified claim regarding a woman and child suffering in Gaza! You are now an expert level Middle Eastern correspondent!

I’m not antisemitic you cry, I am anti-ZIONIST! To hell with all those Zionist Israelis just trying to live a peaceful existence without being murdered and slaughtered. To hell with the Iron Dome that the government invested billions into developing to protect its citizens from daily missile attacks from their innocent and friendly neighbours. To hell with all the ground-breaking technological and medical advances that have come directly from Israel to make the world a better place. To hell with them all!

And to hell with those actual Palestinians like Mosab Hassan Yousef and Hamza Howidy, who have lived through decades of violence and oppression in Gaza, who tell you that you are not helping their people with your ignorance. That your activism is lengthening the war, emboldening the terrorists. They try to explain to you that the problem is Hamas, not Israel. But you know better. You read it on Al Jazeera!

So my dear friend, I know that you think your heart is in the right place, but your feelings are based on a lie. You have been manipulated. Manipulated by the idea of the people of Gaza, who are not as stupid, not as simple, and many not as innocent as you make them out to be. Manipulated by the IRI and their gang of merry proxies, who understand you all too well, and know that they can bomb the shit out of Israel with impunity, but as soon as the IDF responds, you will be pouring over the images of rubble that was once the loving homes of a Hezbollah operative.

They know that the more of their own people they hide behind, the more hostages they withhold and the more children that die as a result of a war that they started, the more that you will be there, in the bleachers, cheering them on and pointing the finger at Israel. I mean seriously, Hamas accidentally bomb their own hospital¹² and blamed it on Israel and you believed them, with no verification and no evidence. You took the word of terrorists.

But I do have a small request. Though I know through my own attempts at civilised discourse on social media that you are busting to call me a genocidal baby killer, but please, try to refrain for a minute. Because I do very much care about the innocent civilians in Gaza that have become caught up in this Islamic war. Not so much the ones that were celebrating and handing out sweets when the contorted and bloody bodies of Israeli women were paraded through the streets of Gaza — those monsters deserve to reap what they have sown.

Palestinians celebrate after gunmen infiltrated areas of southern Israel and rocket barrages were launched towards Israel from Gaza, in the southern Gaza Strip, October 7, 2023. (Bassam Masoud/Reuters)

But the ones that want peace, who want to be free from the oppressive, corrupt and violent control of Hamas and the Jihadists. Those who just want to live — I weep for them. I weep for the children that have been indoctrinated into hating their neighbours by UNRWA and grow up to want to kill a people they have never met. Children that are taught to expect to return to a land that now belongs to another. I hope for a better future for Gaza, free from the extremist ideologies that destroy and contaminate every single thing they touch. Every single country that has been infected with the scourge of Islamism is a shambles, a mess. I wish for better for the people of Gaza.

So here is my request. I implore you to open your hearts and see that this conflict is so much more than you have been led to believe. The people of Israel are real — just like you — trying to live their lives in peace, but under constant threat. Don’t dehumanise them. Zionism is not a dirty word, it is simply the belief that the Jews have the right to self-determination in their ancestral land. It’s exactly the same thing you are fighting for, for the people of Gaza. Don’t be a hypocrite, it’s okay to acknowledge this.

So please, stop with the slogans. Put down the placards and research some history from the other side, from the Jewish perspective. I’m not asking for you to change sides, but at least be informed on what you are fighting for.

And who knows, you just may realise that we are fighting for the same thing.

People look at a memorial for victims of the October 7 massacre by Hamas terrorists in southern Israel on the one-year anniversary of the attack, in Tel Aviv, on October 7, 2024. (Oded Balilty/AP)

1. https://tamagotchi-official.com/gb/

2. https://honestreporting.com/in-depth-arafat-rejected-peace-in-2000/

3. https://www.hoover.org/research/jewish-roots-land-israelpalestine

4. https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-war-between-israel-hezbollah-and-iran

5. https://unwatch.org/report-un-silent-on-israeli-idps/

6. https://apnews.com/article/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-war-druze-iran-hamas-cd1005be55b3893f0852e431643899bd

7. https://www.state.gov/designating-irans-morality-police-and-seven-officials-for-human-rights-abuses-in-iran/

8. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70w1j0l488o

9. https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/blog/syria-the-impunity-of-the-assad-regime-must-never-be-normalized

10. https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/05/09/sudan-ethnic-cleansing-west-darfur

11. https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urban-warfare-why-will-no-one-admit-it-opinion-1883286#:~:text=That%20would%20mean%20some%2018%2C000,low%20for%20modern%20urban%20warfare.

12. https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/26/gaza-findings-october-17-al-ahli-hospital-explosion