Reflections on Conversations with Zionists

My dad has often said I have “the gift of gab.” I can talk circles around just about anyone on just about any topic. Sometimes, I think arguing is the only thing I’m any good at. 

So, since around October 8th, keeping my skill set in mind, I’ve been having conversations.  I’ve talked to “friends,” family, the family of friends, friends of friends, random ass people, and anyone who is willing to listen to me, even if they draw the line at giving a shit about what actual Palestinians have to say. It feels like I have heard every zionist argument under the sun, every convoluted justification for colonialism, every flimsy excuse for staying silent. As a white person in the US who, by simple upbringing and privilege, has never been forced to reckon with the moral apathy of the white middle class (at least as it pertains to the current situation), the last many months have felt like a crash course in intersectionality. While I am not the most qualified by a long shot to be having these conversations, I believe firmly that the burden of these conversations should not fall solely on Palestinians, who have, for their entire lives, been pleading for the Western world to see them as human. No, this is a genocide built on Western imperialism; we are complicit in this; it is our mess, and we must be active participants in cleaning it up. I will never be an authority on the Palestinian experience, and I am not trying to be. I am trying to understand and dissect the American experience, the parts of my culture that have allowed this to happen, the evils of our own apathy. 

I have talked to people who are fundamentally ignorant, people whose extremely sheltered lives have made them believe that they are entitled to “peace” at the expense of justice. I have talked to people who are conflicted, who are having trouble holding onto both their attachment to Israel and their horror at what they are witnessing, and as a result, have become simple parrots of propaganda, slinging around catchphrases like “But do you condemn Hamas?!” to distract themselves from their cognitive dissonance. It is fascinating to watch someone I had always thought of as intelligent suddenly have trouble stringing sentences together because of the sheer energy it now takes them to justify their position. Many are too lazy to lie, so they revert to screaming and threats of violence, but blind rage and bigotry are things that I already understand, so no further research is required. 

I don’t think I understood, and I’m sure I still don’t, the degree to which a population can be dehumanized. It is a bone-chilling experience to bring up dead Palestinian children in a debate and have them wave it away like it’s nothing, an inconvenience, a “necessary evil.” Necessary for what? What do we need so much that genocide is excusable? For the US empire to be on top? For Israel to be an ethnostate? For white supremacy to reign supreme? How can the same people, white American liberals who go to Pride every year, whose email signatures sport land acknowledgments, who have read White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, be the same people calling me antisemitic for asking the simple question: How can you justify this?                   

I am no longer sure that liberalism can produce anything besides performative activism. How can you say that you’re a feminist if you don’t mind Palestinian women having C-sections without anesthesia? How can you claim to be a disability advocate if you do not care about the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians with broken bodies and missing limbs? How can you be a queer ally if you buy into Israel’s pink-washing propaganda? If there are exceptions to your activism, you are not an activist; you are a distraction from real change. 

When I conjure a mental image of a white supremacist, I no longer immediately think of a white-robed lunatic with a tiki torch; I think of an upper-middle-class white woman who “isn’t very political.” 

I was talking to a family friend a couple of months ago, and I casually called what was happening in Palestine a genocide, and he laughed it off and said it wasn’t a genocide; I was just being “sensationalist.” I asked him why he said that, and he told me, with a disturbing lack of shame, that “he would recognize a genocide if he saw it” and that “this didn’t feel like a genocide.” I asked him if he had been looking at the pictures. He said no. I asked him if he had been following the news. He said no. I asked him if he had talked to any Palestinians. He said no. I asked him how he could possibly recognize something that he refused to look at. He decided the conversation was over. 

An acquaintance texted me in April to let me know that she had seen one of my Instagram story rants about Gaza, and she wanted me to know that she truly did care about Palestinians and that she wasn’t a bad person, but that she still supported Israel. I asked her if secretly “caring” about Palestinians while supporting their mass murder was maybe a tad hypocritical. She said no because she was “on the side of peace.” I asked her if that meant she supported a ceasefire. She said no because peace could only happen if all of the hostages were returned.  I asked her if that included the thousands of Palestinians arrested and held indefinitely without trial by the IDF. She said no because they were all terrorists. 

So many of these fuckers begin or end the conversation by insisting that they are “good people.” I find it both fascinating and infuriating. First of all, how can you possibly claim to be a good person with one breath and then claim that “sometimes killing babies is legal” with the next? And second of all, why the fuck are you telling me?! Why do you need me to think that you are a good person? Why do you feel comfortable posting about how Palestinians are born terrorists but are so afraid of another white woman thinking poorly of you? Is being “nice” to white people a greater indicator of “civilized behavior” than caring about the lives of brown people? If only all the energy we put towards our performance of altruism was redirected towards creating actual change, even if blatantly in our own self-interest, the world would be a substantially better place. 

I read something a while ago about how important it is to acknowledge that we all are capable of doing harm. There is this assumption of white innocence, and that all it takes to be a “good person” is to be nice, polite, and to cause no trouble. We are conditioned to believe that a “normal” person is, by default, a “good” person, and then we define “normal” as a white middle-class apolitical moron. Was the average Nazi a good person? What if they were nice to their neighbors or supportive of their gay son? What if they really cared about the environment? Or worked for a non-profit? Or had a Black friend? The holocaust wasn’t their idea, of course; they were just going with the flow, following orders, prioritizing their family. And what about all the apolitical German citizens who weren’t paying attention? All the people who could have said something, done something, but chose not to? At what point did it begin to “feel like a genocide?” 

I’ve noticed that the more a person has confronted their own complicity, the more likely they are to take action. We are made to believe that guilt and shame are feelings that we need to avoid at all costs and that it is our right as white people to live free of the burden of knowing whose suffering our comfort relies on. Because of this, many of us feel perfectly justified in our neutrality. I have been guilty of this myself quite a few times, and I am sure I will be again. But what I’ve realized is that taking accountability, while certainly a painful process, is fundamentally a liberating one. We must move through the guilt, not linger on it, but recognize it for what it is, our latent human ability to recognize that something is deeply deeply wrong with our society. Ignorance and indifference do not protect us; they protect the institutions that benefit from our complicity, and those bloodthirsty institutions sooner or later will turn on all of us because they don’t care if we are “good people.”