I wish I didn’t give a damn. So many of us whose communities are hurting wish we didn’t give a damn.  Due to the latest round in a long series of failures by both Palestinian AND Israeli leadership who have repeatedly prioritized their own lust for power and sowing seeds of hatred over living, breathing, multi-dimensional human beings, we who are being forced to watch in horror at what is happening to our communities and loved ones in Israel-Palestine have no choice but to give a damn.  

We are tired, scared, and angry.  We are allowed to be, we’re holding so much at once.  We are allowed to want to safely bring our relatives who are being held hostage, raped, tortured, and murdered by Hamas home to safety AND we are allowed to mourn for the innocent people who had nothing to do with what Hamas has done that are needlessly dying after having already suffered so much at the hands of both occupation AS WELL AS their own leadership.  We also need to recognize that many of us are understandably going to have a hard time holding all of those truths even when we know we must.

Yet so many of you who are not Jewish, Israeli, or Palestinian are demanding emotional labor from us that we did not sign up for.  Frankly, there’s also a lot of people who are in those communities and not as informed as they want to think they are who are doing the same.  So many of you in the non-Jewish world are joining the ranks of the war hawks, writing un-nuanced and ill-informed hot takes, and picking teams like this is all some sick game without ever considering that your own biases and your ancestor’s many grave sins against my people are a huge part of what brought us here.

You forcibly displaced the majority (some of us never left, but the majority) of my people from our ancestral home.  Scattered us to the four winds and enslaved many of us.  Stole our peoples’ tribal charter and appropriated it for yourselves. Weaponized the things you took out of context against us and used them as excuses to violate, discriminate, and repeatedly genocide us across the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, Central Asia, and many other places under the banners of Christianity and Islam for ages.  I don’t care how mad people get at me for pointing out that multiple universalizing religions (and new-agey spiritual spaces too but that’s for another day) are guilty of this because it’s the truth.

You made it damn near impossible for us to safely live in your societies that we did not choose to be in.  You told us to leave even though you were the reason we were forced to be there and at the same time tried for centuries to prevent us from going home to rejoin our siblings who had never left (siblings who, by the way have always considered those of us who’d been forced into exile lost members of the same tribe. What right does anyone else have to try to tell them they’re wrong?).  But I never hear any of you in the non-jewish world acknowledge those things or ask yourselves how your own actions have contributed to the legacies of antisemitism, anti-arabism, orientalism, colonization, sexual violence, and repeated genocide that helped create this whole mess.  The reality that none of you want to hear is this: none of this would even be happening if you had just left my people alone.

You want to pretend like you and your ancestors didn’t have a hand in all this and act like you are morally superior while Jews, Israelis, and Palestinians pay the price.  Sit there, unaffected by everything that’s going on, with no clue what it’s like to actually have to live through something like this firsthand while justifying and intellectualizing our pain.  

Spare me your un-nuanced and ill-informed hot takes.  Label me a “bad Jew” or a “bad leftist” if you want, I do not care what your personal opinion of me is.  If just wanting my Jewish relatives and Palestinian friends to be okay makes me a “both sider,” or “not ideologically pure enough” for you, then so be it.  I’d rather be those things then any of you ghouls lacking empathy, critical thinking, and humility in both the modern political zionist and antizionist spheres who are either bending over backwards to justify rape, kidnapping, and murder or screaming for vigilante violence and collective punishment in revenge.  I’d rather be those things than a part of the endless extremism that brings our peoples in our SHARED ancestral home father away from a just end to this nightmare.