An Open Letter to My 'Pro-Palestine' Friends

I am struggling to see any good in the “pro-Palestine” “woke” “activist” crowd anymore.

A “pro-Palestinian” rally (photo: Hugo Breyer/Unsplash)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay written by Meghan Bell, a Canadian writer.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

Dear “Pro-Palestine” Friends,

I have been thinking of writing to you for a while, but words keep failing me. My husband Zach says there is no point, you won’t listen, you are in too deep.

He is probably right. My previous attempts to talk to other “pro-Palestine” friends and acquaintances have been utter failures.

At a recent plant medicine ceremony, Zach realized that antisemitism often stems from an inability or unwillingness to face one’s own shadow. This shadow is then projected, often onto Jewish people, who, for a variety of reasons, are an easy target.

I understand the darkness. I’ve also been deep in The Great Empty, that black space between authentic self-expression and the “mask” or “persona” that one feels compelled to put on for acceptance — the character we play in order to feel loved. It is like being trapped within yourself, looking through the world through a periscope.

When I was deepest in my chronic illness, I became more “woke,” more extreme. My brain was inflamed and so I acted in inflammatory ways. Zach says the same thing about his addiction — the deeper he sunk into it, the more “woke” he became. We both had to heal our brain-guts and our nervous systems in order to clear our heads, to begin to think more critically. To wake up from “woke.”

A few nights ago, Zach and I were talking about our shadow sides. I am still embarrassed by mine; that monster inside of me that is easily drawn to the darkness in other people, who falls easily into playing the “flying monkey,” who hurts others by playing the apologist, who seeks evidence that I am uniquely loveable by trying to be loved by the misanthrope.

I had an “angry” moment a few days ago, when I saw one of you share this poster on your Instagram stories.

I looked at the event. It is a celebration. A goddamn celebration of the hundreds of murders, rapes, and kidnappings of mostly civilians, including many women, children, and seniors, that happened on October 7th. Organized by a group with “intifada” in its name.

What the hell is wrong with you?

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?

Zach and I asked each other whether this is the too far point, something we will not be able to forgive. He said: “They’ll never apologize or admit they were wrong, so the question is irrelevant.”

Someone I know, who is far older, more experienced, and cynical than me, warned me a few months ago: “The are capable of killing you and your family. The ones who aren’t capable of violence are capable of watching and doing nothing. You need to accept this.”

I have had nightmares about this, I will admit. Another Holocaust comes, and people I used to care about are working or cheering for the new Nazis. That what happened in the Iranian Revolution could happen here, in some form. But I am so stupid, my friend, so naive, that even if I can intellectualize it and recognize it as true, my stupid heart can’t accept it.

---

There are many things that disturb me about the “pro-Palestine” / ”pro-Hamas” activist crowd.

On social media, I see people sharing memes with blood libels against Israelis that are easily proven to be untrue, distorted, or removed from important context. Making claims that are just mind-boggling stupid. (One woman wrote to my husband that what was happening in the Palestinian Territories was “the biggest atrocity that has happened to land and children in the history of the world.”)

Others have shared “facts” with links to sources that, when checked, very clearly did not say what they claimed they said. I don’t know if this is dishonesty and manipulation, or, as Jordan Peterson has suggested, a result of poor reading comprehension and low verbal intelligence.

One man on my Facebook feed has posted several times bragging about tearing down posters of kidnapped children and signs that say: “There’s Nothing Peaceful About Dehumanizing Israel.”

But what I cannot wrap my head around is the callous way they disregard and ignore the voices of Palestinians and other people from Muslim backgrounds who speak out against Hamas and Islamic extremism and/or in support of Israel.

When I point that out to the activists freaking out at me, they ignore this. Every single one refused to read any of the articles I linked to. When I sent videos of podcasts and Instagram podcasts to several of these people, most did not respond at all. A couple responded with laugh emojis on a podcast by Yasmine Mohammed (a Palestinian-Egyptian woman) interviewing Elica Le Bon, an Iranian activist. Laughing at two women who have suffered became of Islamic extremism, and are bravely speaking out and sharing their stories.

I get that these people are antisemitic. It is hard for me to accept, but I get it. They claim to care about Palestinians and Muslims, and yet ignore the insanely brave people who are risking their lives, risking rape, risking imprisonment, being forced to flee their homes and their countries for their safety to write or speak what they believe is truth and right, to stand up to the extremists running and ruining their countries and oppressing their people. Not only ignore, but actively dismiss, disregard, disrespect. Even insult.

It is unbelievably evil. Unbelievably narcissistic. They really do not care about anyone other than themselves and their own deluded narratives. This is known as “moral narcissism.” There is no convincing you. You are so far gone. It is heartbreaking. In many cases, these are people I believed were “good” people, or at least people I saw some “good” in.

I am struggling to see any good in the “pro-Palestine” “woke” “activist” crowd anymore.

---

Fine, maybe you hate the Jews. You might not realize that you do, but if you shout “From the River to the Sea!” and “Globalize the Intifada!” and condemn all “Zionists,” you effectively hate the Jewish People, and hate that they have an incredibly small, democratic, independent state in their ancestral homeland (where Muslims, Christians, Druze, Jews and other faiths live in peace and enjoy equal rights).

Did you know Israeli Arabs serve in parliament there? Did you know an Arab judge once sent a former (Jewish) Israeli prime minister to jail and later served on the Supreme Court? Did you know that even though they have no obligation to join the IDF, many Arabs choose to do so anyway?

Did you know that while he was in prison in Israel, doctors operated on Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to save his life from a brain tumor? Did you know that many Jewish Israelis used to volunteer to drive into Gaza to bring people into Israel for medical treatment?

Did you know thousands of Palestinians were permitted to travel across the border daily to work in Israel for significantly higher wages than they could have earned in Gaza? Did you know that some of these people used this opportunity to collect information, that some Palestinians pretended to befriend Israelis to help plan the October 7th attacks? Did you know that Palestinians who escape to Israel from Gaza are allowed to convert to Judaism if they wish?

Wow. So evil. So apartheid. So genocidal.

---

Why do you ignore all the Palestinian voices who speak out against Hamas (and against the activist protests you love to attend?). Why do you ignore people like Yasmine Mohammed, Hamza Howidy, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, Ala Mohammed Mushtaha, and Mosab Hassan Yousef?

They risk their lives, while you and your “activist” friends hide your faces behind keffiyehs bought from China and blot out your identities with cute watermelon emojis.

So brave!

A couple of days ago, a Muslim woman I know lowered her voice to tell me that she is glad the IDF is wiping out Hezbollah — and so is her family members back home — but she is scared that they keep saying so on the phone, because they could get killed for saying such things if they are caught.

Remarkable is putting it mildly.

The harshest criticisms I have heard of the “pro-Palestine” activists have come out of the mouths of Iranians. Good God, they think your “movement” is, well, sh*t.

While you were weeping for Hezbollah members getting their eyes blown out in an incredible, targeted attack, deliberately designed to minimize civilian casualties, The Free Press released a video of a former Hezbollah sex slave telling her story. Does her story matter to you?

What about this Yazidi woman, who was recently rescued by the IDF after spending a decade as a sex slave in Gaza?

You are supposedly an anti-violence activist, you claim to care about violence against women and children.

“The Internet is full of YouTube videos of children being viciously attacked in madrasas. Girls getting grabbed by the hair and being pulled to the ground for not wearing hijab, boys being whipped and kicked as they fall to the ground. The abuse I endured, as barbaric as it was, is light in comparison to stories I have heard. A girl in Somalia told me of how her mother poured hot oil down her brother’s throat (as he was tied to a bed) and siblings were forced to watch,” said Canadian university instructor Yasmine Mohammed

“According to a recent report, in the Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa, more than 70 percent of children aged 2 to 14 years are disciplined in a violent manner. In some countries — like Yemen, Tunisia, Palestine, and Egypt — more than 90 percent of children report being violently abused. What is the reason for this? Why do those countries have such incidences of violence against children? The common thread is that they all follow the same religion,” Mohammed added.¹

Or the increasing violence and repression of women in Iran, which even the United Nations admits to.

The women of Iran are a million times braver than you and your activist friends. They are a million times braver than me, than most of us. Where is your support for them?

You also claim to care about Black people. Did you know that a common word for Black people in Arabic means “slave”? Did you know that there is a Black neighborhood in the Palestinian Territories colloquially known as “the Slave Area”?

I recommend you Google “Arab slave trade.” The Arabs, under Islam, were a colonial power in North Africa and the Middle East, just as the Aryans were a colonial power, under Christianity, in Europe, the Americas, and other parts of the world. That is why there are so many Muslim- and Arab-majority countries now!

Holy crap, learn some history from more than 100 years ago!

---

I have tried sharing some of this stuff with other “pro-Palestine” activists. Exactly zero responded to me. (I have no idea whether they bothered to watch the videos or not.)

Will you read these articles, check out these social media accounts, and watch these videos? Will you read the comments from the thousands of people grateful for them? Or will you shut them out too, dismiss all these voices, and so many more, and accuse me, as one man did, of falling for “Zionist propaganda”?

I am not asking you to become pro-Israel or pro-Zionist, to like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or to pretend that there is no extremism among the Jewish People. (There is.) I think it is fine to criticize Israel, the Jewish People, and individual Jews — although, radically, I think these criticisms should be accurate, a standard that it seems the vast majority of “pro-Palestine” activists fail to achieve.

However, if you are going to spout off about how much you care about Muslims, Middle Easterners, “brown” people, and Arabs, I strongly suggest you listen to more of them when they are trying to tell you that your “movement” is not helping anyone, and is probably prolonging the war by empowering Hamas and the Iranian regime, thus resulting in more death and destruction.

Obviously, there are many innocent Palestinians, many good people among the Palestinian people, among the Arab people, many wonderful Muslims out there. And there are many God-awful Jewish people. There are heroes and villains, sinners and saints, murderers and peaceniks, rapists and women’s rights activists, good parents and abusive ones among every people in the world, of every skin color, of every race and religion.

I שצ asking you to please exit your echo chamber and listen to stories that challenge your narrative, to stop thinking about this in such black and white terms, to ask yourself whether you are really, as you so clearly believe, standing on the right side of history.

I have become obsessed with this quote recently: “The louder the abuse, the bigger the lie.”² I have started to note how people respond to criticism, how they treat their ideological opponents. If truth and justice are on your side, then why do so many of you jump to insults, unfounded allegations, smear campaigns, exaggerations, blacklisting, silencing, or condemnations when challenged?

In my experience, very few of the “pro-Palestine” activists can write more than three sentences to someone who disagrees with them without including a lie, insult, or unfounded accusation, such as: “You support genocide!”

Why is that?

Do you have any idea how many people are afraid to stand up to “pro-Palestine” or “woke” activists because of their intolerance for any opinion or fact that violates their rigid worldview, and of the loudness of their abuse?

Unfortunately, the more evidence presented, the greater the narcissistic injury, the more fragile the activists’ egos become. The louder their abuse.

Is your moral narcissism so rigid, your need to see yourself as Good Person so intense, the darkness inside you so unfaceable? Is your need for community among your fellow activists so desperate that you cannot face any criticism of the cult? (After all, once belief falls, the other dogmas of the “woke” cult may tumble like dominos).

Can you still see the humanity in people who disagree with, challenge, or contradict one or more of your beliefs? Are you capable of admitting that you might have misunderstood, been fooled by propaganda, gotten some things wrong?

Can you hear our prayers?

With sadness, anger, and love —
Meghan

---

1. Yasmine Mohammed, “Unveiled” (2019), pages 9-10

2. Paul Johnson, “A History of Christianity” (1976), pages 51-52