You do not need to have an opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Your opinion is not going to save more lives, achieve peace in the Middle East, or save the Palestinians from their dreadful, oppressive, antisemitic leadership spanning decades.

illustration by Future of Jewish

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It boggles my mind how there are travesties occurring every day, all over the world, to tons of disadvantaged and underprivileged groups of people — and yet so many folks get so wrapped up in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

There are many reasons for this: First, as the saying goes, “No Jews, no news.” Jews make for lucrative headlines, and as writer Dara Horn reminded us with her 2021 book, many people love dead Jews especially.

Hence why a disproportionate number of films have been made about the Holocaust, even though the 4,000 or so years of Jewish history are filled with Hollywood-worthy storylines and subjects. Thus, in some circles, “show business” is known as “Shoah business.” (“Shoah” is Hebrew for Holocaust.)

The media, which includes but is not limited to the news media and social media, also over-indexes on Israel. Certainly, this plays a part in why so many people feel compelled to have an opinion or viewpoint about the Jewish state: They are over-exposed to it, but in obnoxiously oversimplified ways.

If your main source of information about Israel is some combination of social media, few-minute news clips, headline-reading, and/or arbitrary articles and videos, I am sorry to break it to you but: You are the problem, not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Contrary to places like the United States, Canada and Australia, the Middle East and Israel specifically are steeped in thousands of years of history, going back at least 2,000 years (and really, much further). Opining about this region and the Jewish state with erratic bits of information as your premise is like judging a restaurant by one of its side dishes.

There are also what today’s cool kids call “narratives” — versions of facts that both the Palestinians and Israelis have. Parts of these narratives can (and should) be fact-checked, while other aspects are a random concoction of revisionist history, cherry-picking facts, propaganda, and vantage points.

Everyone is entitled to their version of facts, I guess, but if we are going to give one side the benefit of the doubt, then we must afford it to all sides — which means both narratives effectively cancel each other out. If you are giving more time, attention, and energy to, for example, the Palestinian narrative — while not being open to hearing and equally contemplating the Israeli one — then, again, you are the problem, not Israel or even the Palestinians.

What’s more, there are those who use what is essentially gaslighting ploys to justify their strong-headed quasi-quips like, “I care because people are dying!” and “My tax dollars are being used to fund this war!” and “But what about the women and children?!”

These statements are all valid in and of themselves, but for those who levy them, the hypocrisy shines overwhelmingly bright through their two front teeth: There are people dying all the time, everywhere, yet they have nothing much to say about all those suffering not named “the Palestinians.”

Meanwhile, your tax dollars are used for literally thousands of things; if you really care about how they are spent, please go do a detailed breakdown of every one of these things, then highlight in yellow which ones you object to, and finally send this document along with a detailed letter to your political representatives.

For shits and giggles, consider publishing said breakdown and letter on your choice of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and/or X to rally more folks for your cause. Case closed.

Now, with the regard to “the women and children” — no one wants women and children to suffer, needless to say.

But there are also women and children in Israel, and if you are effectively implying that Palestinian women and children are more important or worthy than Israeli ones, well then, excuse my French but, f*ck off. Israeli women and children deserve the same amount security and safety that any other group of women and children deserves.

And let’s not confuse philosophical hypotheticals with the obvious need for real-world, real-time self-defense, as in: When they come to kill your women and children, you stand by ready to defend them at all costs. If that is not your cup of tea, best of luck to you and yours.

The knee-jerk rebuttal to this standpoint usually includes the word “proportionality” — a wartime term whose meaning is completely lost on many people. “Proportionality” has nothing to do with war and combat as a whole; it is used to describe the rules of engagement regarding specific attacks, such as an attack on a military target that is adjoined to a kindergarten — because, you know, Palestinian terrorists have a knack for embedding their “military assets” within civilian infrastructure.

To be fair, there is the reasonable question of what one considers adequate “self-defense” which, at least from Israel’s vantage point, includes instituting deterrence against future attacks. If you ask 10 people to answer this question, you will probably get 10 different answers — but the only answer that I care about right now, relating to this Israel-Hamas war, is the one that Israelis have — because we were the ones attacked on October 7th.

If you think that your answer to this question of what self-defense should and should not entail is somehow superior to what the majority of Israelis think, mazal tov. Other than that, we do not care. We live here, you don’t. Our children were kidnapped and killed; our women were gang-raped and mutilated; our citizens were abducted; our communities were pillaged; and our soldiers are fighting and dying in a war that we did not start. Pardon our chutzpah, but you and your surface-level opinions are irrelevant to us.

Then there are the non-Israeli Jews who, for better or worse, also feel compelled to say something about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Forget the fact that most of these folks have next-to-no understanding of its history (which did not start in 1948, by the way). The more pressing point is that most non-Israeli Jews have never lived in Israel, which means that they have never experienced the conflict firsthand, no less that they have never met and conversed with Palestinians.

That said, one does not necessarily need to live in Israel and/or converse with Palestinians to have a nuanced, educated set of opinions surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The alternative is to consume dozens of books, documentaries, and other types of long-form content that represent all sides of every argument — and then do some serious critical thinking — which we know the vast majority of people have not and will never do.

And then there are the non-Israeli Jews who are genuinely interested in learning more about Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, yet only decide to engage when Israel is in some sort of war. That is like a person who only chooses to exercise or watch their diet when they become dangerously obese.

And do not get me started about the non-Israeli Jews who “know better” than the 10 million Israelis about what is best for Israel and Israeli society. The first word that comes to my mind is pompous; the second is a few more words: How arrogant and self-righteous can you possibly be to think that you know better about a country and a conflict far away while you sit in your proverbial ivory tower and virtue signal about this, that, and the other?

As we say in Hebrew, and this is a direct translation: You are living in a movie. At Disney amusement parks they call it “Fantasyland.”

Israelis can play these same games, too. We can randomly decide to recognize the state of Catalonia after terrorists rampage through Madrid. We can march in Tel Aviv, chanting: “Death to Germany!”

And we can demand that Americans, Canadians, South Africans, and Australians return their “stolen land” to the so-called natives, or else we will boycott their foreign investment in Israeli startups; we will demand that companies like McDonald’s, Zara, Heineken, and Burberry get the hell out of Israel; and we will do whatever we can to ensure that the Israeli government does not provide the wide variety of life-saving intelligence, medicine, technology, and other support to these countries.

Is this the world that we want to live in, where we are all just boycotting and holding each other to ridiculous double standards that ultimately divide us and lead to more reckless, extremist nationalism? Is this not what led, at least in part, to two world wars and the U.S. dropping nuclear bombs on Japan?

I thought that so many people who have such animated opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are calling for a “ceasefire” and “peace.” Do they not realize that their naive, ignorant, superficial positions are actually leading to more chaos and violence for all parties involved?

Hamas will be able to remain in power in Gaza at least in part because people around the world are pressuring their governments to pressure Israel to halt this war before the terror group is eradicated from the Strip. Hamas is a self-stated genocidal terrorist organization, while Israel is the Jewish state designed to be a refuge for the Jewish People. One of these things is not like the other — and you do not even need to look so closely.

Of course, some folks are explicitly or implicitly rooting for Hamas because, for whatever reasons, they loathe or hate Jews. Israelis, do I mean? The differentiation is meaningless. If you are one of these folks, then come out and say it. Do not be a coward, hiding behind “anti-Zionism” like it is not so astoundingly obvious that so many “anti-Zionists” are Jew-haters, if not in intention then certainly in outcome.

And yes, Jews can be Jew-haters too. It is called “internalized antisemitism.” Google it.

To everyone else who, according to whatever justification, feels ever-compelled to say something, somehow, some way about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I am here to remind you that, despite your emotional instincts, psychological triggers, and best of intentions: You do not need to.

Sure, you might appear a tad less cool, interesting, in-the-know, humanitarian, or whatever other label you hold dear to yourself. But more importantly, it is better to stay in your lane, because your opinion — no matter how well-intentioned and both-sided — is not going to save more lives, achieve peace in the Middle East, or save the Palestinians from their dreadful, oppressive, antisemitic leadership spanning decades.

When we really get down to first principles, the problem is not even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (for there are many unsolved conflicts in the world at any given point in time).

Instead, the problem is all the people who pretend to know about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, broadcast their opinions about it, and/or manipulate it for their own sociopolitical advantage (or even worse, fame and fortune).

From my vantage point, the world does not need more of these people.

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