An Open Letter to the 'Pro-Palestinian' Friends I Have Lost
Never did I think that you would choose a group of people whom you have zero connection with over our friendship, but as they say: When it comes to the Palestinians, you can do no wrong.
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.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Dear Former Friends,
It seems we have reached the parting of our ways, a fork in the road where you veered extremely Left, and I was left, well, without a friend.
Remember when our biggest debate was whether “Friends” or "Seinfeld” was the better sitcom? Ah, those were the days. Little did I know, lurking beneath those casual exchanges, was a fervent Palestinian activist ready to burst forth like a volcano of virtue-signaling.
Your transformation was swift and dramatic. One moment, you were posting selfies with your dog, and the next, you were a Nobel-prize winning expert on Middle Eastern history and geopolitics.
As the political climate intensified, so did your activism. It was clear that your commitment to the Palestinian cause was more than a passing phase; it was a central tenet of your identity.
Never did I think that you would choose a group of people whom you have zero connection with over our friendship, but as they say: When it comes to the Palestinians, you can do no wrong.
At first, I tried to understand your passion for the Palestinians. I thought: “You’re right, who doesn’t love an underdog?” But then I remembered that Jews are the ultimate underdog and many minorities (the Palestinians notwithstanding) envy us for being a successful minority.
One of you even told me that you support the Palestinians because you “don’t believe in borders” — which is ironic because you incessantly wail and scream about Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Another one of you said that you are taking the Palestinians’ side because “they don’t have an army” — even though Iran just announced that another one of its terror tentacles (Hezbollah) has a million rockets in its arsenal.
Still another one of you claimed that your Israel-Hamas war opinions are justified because you have “relatives buried” in Israel. I could not help but think of Dara Horn’s instant-classic book, “People Love Dead Jews.”
As the distance between us grew, the irony became immense. Here you were, advocating for “peace” in the Middle East, yet unable to maintain peace in your own social circles. You unfriended me for not being sufficiently aligned with your views, for daring to see shades of gray in a world you insisted is black and white. The Israelis are oppressors, the Palestinians are oppressed, end of story.
At a certain point, I started to wonder if it was really about “Palestine” — or something deeper. Perhaps it was about identity, about being part of a movement, about finding a sense of purpose in a chaotic world. You had chosen your “side” and, in doing so, required absolute loyalty from those around you.
Sure, the echo chamber is a comforting place, but it is also a dangerous one. It fosters a sense of moral superiority and insulates us from the complexities of reality, including character-building dissent and exposure to uncomfortable truths.
Our divergence became apparent when I dared to express a different viewpoint. I tried to highlight the complexity of the conflict, the historical context, and the perspectives of both sides. I hoped for a constructive dialogue, a space where we could explore solutions together. Instead, I was met with accusations of being uninformed, insensitive, and even complicit in genocide, ethnic cleansing, and oppression.
The space for dialogue and understanding was replaced by a rigid adherence to a singular narrative (and one that reeks of Marxism). In unfriending me, you may have preserved the purity of your ideological stance, but you lost a friend who valued diversity of thought and the richness of multiple perspectives.
Our falling out wasn’t just about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it was emblematic of a larger trend. In today’s world, the personal has become deeply political. Friendships are judged not by shared experiences or mutual respect but by ideological conformity. Every opinion is scrutinized, every relationship a potential casualty of the culture wars. We judge each other by our conformity to ideological dogmas.
It is exhausting, isn’t it? This constant vigilance, this need to police not just your own thoughts but the thoughts of those around you. We have turned our social networks into battlegrounds, where deviation is met with excommunication. It is a zero-sum game where everyone loses.
Your selective activism for the Palestinian cause is strange. Never mind that it speaks to your profound lack of knowledge about international politics and history. And never mind that the actual Palestinians share nothing in common with you — not your values, not your religion, not your customs. This is not a temporary condition; it is woven into the fabric of Arab and Muslim societies.
I certainly do not think I have all the answers, and I enjoy exploring our differences. You care, as do I, about the world we are leaving the next generations. But somewhere along the way, our dialogues turned into your monologues, and for some odd reason “the Palestinians” prompt you to forgo any semblance of logic, reason, justice, intellectual honesty, and human decency.
You keep throwing around accusations of “war crimes” by Israel as if war is suddenly supposed to be kind, gentle, and pleasant. I don’t think most people in Israel are advocating for indiscriminately killing civilians, but c’mon now, war is war. You don’t get to butcher our people and then lecture us about “proportionality” and “restraint” when we respond.
Speaking of war crimes, more than 19,000 rockets have been indiscriminately fired at Israel since the start of this war. In other words, that’s more than 19,000 war crimes committed by folks who claim to represent the Palestinians.
Palestinian terrorists broke a ceasefire on October 7th when they attacked Israel in the most sadistic, barbaric ways the modern world has ever seen. Now you want a ceasefire because the Palestinians are getting their asses kicked. That’s not how it works.
What’s more, we Jews are not mad that people like you are advocating for Palestinian freedom and safety. We are mad at your hypocrisy. We are mad that, after our deadliest day since the Holocaust, we have once again been excluded from your activism.
If someone has to explain to you that some of the Israeli hostages are “black” and “brown” for you to sympathize with Israel, you are the “color consumed” that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us about.
Knowing you as I do, I know that you are troubled by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian terror groups. But to compare these factions with the State of Israel is to indulge in some deranged false equivalency. Rationalizing Palestinian pathology by responding with a tit-for-tat is not adequate to the circumstances.
The sins you perceive in others not named “the Palestinians” — misguided policies, ill-chosen means for dubious ends, and the normal complement of rhetorical dishonesty and political squalor — are those you ignore in the Palestinians.
However mistaken you may find the State of Israel, their debate is addressed to the world as it exists and therefore open to a sensible critique. The squalor to which the Palestinians have sunk, an alternate reality rooted in antisemitism and mendacity, transcends mere differences in policy, while threatening the State of Israel with profound, perhaps irreparable, damage.
The Palestinians have become a Frankenstein monster, assembled from dysfunction, demagoguery, myopia, and myth — and nurtured in a fever swamp where lies and hysteria kill off reason. Nothing better will arise until you help drive a stake through its heart.
Long since, the Palestinians killed their moderates. On issue after issue, they have embraced an orthodoxy rooted in terrorism and divorced from fact. If you think the Israeli government is run by Far-Right-wingers, the Palestinians make them seem ultra-Left.
How did this happen? With people like you infantilizing the Palestinians for decades and encouraging your governments to dump billions of dollars into the pockets of Palestinian kleptocrats, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority notwithstanding.
Barren of helping its people, Palestinian “leaders” resort to blame-shifting and scapegoating — of Israel and Jews. Instead of looking forward, the Palestinians are obsessed with a primal nostalgia for pre-Israel times, an imaginary “Palestine” paradise which can never be resurrected (because it never existed).
These are the people you would rather root for, at the expense of our friendship.
So, former friend, keep fighting the good fight. Hopefully you will make a Palestinian friend or two along the way.
Sincerely,
A Friend You Unfriended
Well written letter and unfortunately very true. Todah Rabah.
The world it seems still hasn't learned what is right and what is wrong...
My late parents were a Shoah survivor/and a Nazi refugee - due to my aliyah to Israel 53 years ago they also purchased an apartment in Israel they were happy to have sabarim grandchidren - I have seen and lived the gamut of terrorism against Israelis (and Jews) and wars, my first war was the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, I was pregnant with my oldest son in Bat Yam, when the siren went off at 2 PM. The night before October 7, 2023, I lit a yizkor candle for the soldiers and family members who died in October 1973.
All we Israelis want is peace, we gave up the entire sinai for peace with Egypt, we left Gaza in 2005 and pulled out Israelis by force to comply - we hired Gazans in Israel for work (permits granted) in agriculture and construction, 43,000 Gazans crossed into Israel daily per month. Their salaries in Israel were much higher then Gaza, it enabled them to properly house and feed their families. In addition so many Israelis who lived in the Gaza Envelope worked and volunteered with Gazans assisting them and shutteling them to Israeli hospitals - since 2001 the rockets aimed at Israel from Gaza have not ceased...
Egypt? Here we are 42 years later uncovering underground tunnels from Raffa into Egypt... imagine that!
We will prevail, despite the backlash from the so called western progressive countries - who sit in their lazy boys in their countries with large landmass and criticize Israel, using Jews as pawns for their diaspora politics - their cries of apartheid and genocide is all Judenhaas (Jew hatred) propaganda .
Is any of this new? No.
As I often point out there are numerous countries that have a state Church (Christian) and numerous countries with Islam as their state religion - we have one small state which is a Jewish State, our minorities which include Christians, Muslims, Bahais and others... are Israeli citizens with full rights. This weekend one IDF Capt. Wassem Mahmoud ( rest in peace) was killed in a blast in Gaza, with his fellow IDF brothers in arms, Jewish Israeli soldiers. z"l
We will prevail and we will win this war at a great cost yet again. Am Yisrael Chai.
It's a great letter. It saddened me immensely to read it. It reminded me of stories I read about Germans who worked for Jewish businesses in the late 1930s and how they, too, turned against all their Jewish colleagues and neighbours. This time, though, we have Israel, and Israel will prevail against this madness. Am Israel chai.