My family attended an Evangelical Lutheran church every Sunday for over twenty years. I attended First Communion, Confirmation, served as an acolyte, and watched my two younger siblings follow suit. My father served as treasurer, and my mother worked in fundraising there for several years.
There was a word I heard often: Israel. It was the land of God’s supposedly chosen people, the setting of many Bible stories, the backdrop to Jesus’s life and teachings. Whenever I’d study with my Geo Safari Talking Globe Junior, Israel was always there, a tiny little country in the Mediterranean. I felt pride whenever I saw it — and maybe even a pang of longing.
I didn’t know much about modern Israel as a child. I assumed it was like Egypt or China: one of the few ancient civilizations that survived to become modern-day states. In my mind, it was the same Israel the Bible talked about, as if it had always been there, an unchanging stone in a river while the rest of the world transformed around it.
I loved the idea of Israel. I wanted to visit and walk the paths Jesus once walked. In seventh grade, my school participated in a program called Young International Towne, an “education program that helps middle school students learn about global economics through fun, hands-on techniques.” Everyone had to choose a country to belong to for the experience, and I told my teacher that I wanted that country to be srael.
It was during that geography class with the same teacher that I heard the word “Palestine” for the first time. He played a video where a journalist visited the West Bank and asked a young woman what it was like to grow up in Israel. “No, Palestine,” she corrected him. How rude, I thought. What a silly disagreement over land — it was clearly Israel, which I was certain had been there the entire time.
The unit didn’t dive into the Palestine/Israel conflict much further. I remained only vaguely aware that the Middle East was a place of turmoil, a bit like the eye of Jupiter in its eternal storm. Whatever was going on between and around Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and other West Asian countries was beyond me; they were lands of perpetual violence that, as a twelve year old, I didn’t feel I had the capacity to explore.
My feelings toward Israel remained unchanged for years. A son of my mother’s friend claimed “birthright” and played college basketball in Israel for a while, and in one conversation, he recounted the missile sirens that would occur from time to time. I didn’t ask any details — it was a conflict that I was sure would be too difficult to understand in a day. All I told him was, “That’s awesome,” because to me, Israel was cool.
I did, however, absorb new information here and there without seeking it out. I learned more about Palestine through platforms like Tumblr, where Palestinians weren’t censored as much. It was there that I encountered the BDS movement and learned why some people boycott TripAdvisor for its complicity in apartheid. I learned about Palestinians living in valleys too close to the Israeli villages above and how they would have to put nets over their streets to protect themselves from trash thrown at them.
Still, those were the actions of a few, right? They did not represent the entire population of Israel, just as the Westboro Baptist Church does not represent all Christians and ISIS does not represent all Muslims.
As a “digital nomad” in my twenties, I travelled the world; post-pandemic I decided to travel to places like Rome, Barcelona, Cairo, Buenos Aires — and Tel Aviv.
On my first extended “nomad” trip with the vaccine, I visited Cape Town with a digital nomad program called Hacker Paradise. One of my fellow program members was Aliza. Aliza was of Indian descent, raised in Canada, with parents from Tanzania. Hacker Paradise had a chapter planned in Tel Aviv I was interested in joining, but she was the first person I heard voice objections to the company going there. How could they endorse apartheid? How could we spend our money there knowing what was going on?
I don’t think most of us actually knew what she meant, though. Earlier that same year, 2021, I reshared an Instagram post with a bright blue background and white text saying “I STAND AGAINST ANTISEMITISM” when Israel bombed Gaza. My own added caption said, “Jewish people around the world are not responsible for the atrocities of the Israeli government against Palestinians. Do not conflate the two.” I stand by this statement (which I wrote before I heard the term Zionism), but I didn’t look into the supposed uptick in antisemitic incidents and the Internet’s swift addressal of them, nor how the Internet broadly failed to care about the Palestinians who actually died. I, regretfully, did not post anything about Palestinians themselves, either.
Again, separating governments from their people was essential (not that Israel governs all Jewish people, but I of course applied the logic to Israeli civilians) — so this moment with Aliza was the first time I was confronted with the notion that visiting Tel Aviv could be a bad idea. I had visited many places with policies I did not agree with, but in this case, did my views toward the relationship between tourism and endorsement require adjusting?
That’s when I began delving deeper in the history of the region and the conflict and discovered Israel illegally occupied Palestine. I decided I did not want to support the Israeli government in anyway including with my tourism dollars and cancelled my plan to visit Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
And then October 7th happened. And my social media was filled with posts about how Israel was the victim of a terrorist attack that had killed the largest number of Jews since the holocaust and that it needed global support as it defended itself.
But then Israel retaliated twice over. Then more. Then tenfold. And still, even more. To my shock, it wasn’t just Israel’s government that was committing atrocity after atrocity with complete disregard for the safety of either Israeli hostages or Palestinian civilians — much of Israeli society was cheering them on. When I started pointing out that not every Palestinian civilian was part of Hamas, and that they did not deserve this collective punishment, I — and anyone who agreed with me — was immediately accused of antisemitism: Israel had a right to defend itself, and there are casualties in war.
At that point, the training I had acquired from the Black Lives Matter movement kicked in.
I needed to separate the truth from the noise; to discern what was propaganda: who controlled this narrative? Who had the most power in this dynamic? What Hamas did was atrocious, of course, but it was becoming increasingly clear that Israel wasn’t an innocent victim of an evil terrorist organization that had launched an attack out of the blue due to their hatred of Jews.
So I kept learning, listening to Palestinian voices and Jewish scholars like Gabor Maté and Norman Finkelstein. Following Palestinian journalists on the ground in Gaza — including Bisan Owda and Motaz Azaiza — was invaluable because they provided first-hand viewpoints rather than obscured and filtered narratives that mainstream news was broadcasting.
I began to research the context of Hamas’s attack.
And discovered that the truth was the opposite of what I had been taught as a child: the Israel of today is not the Israel of the Bible. Israel as we know it has only existed since 1948, after the British took control over land that was for a time part of the Ottoman Empire and promised to establish a Jewish “homeland” there. The Jews who were settled there as part of this project, or the settlers as they are now known, enacted the Nakba (“Catastrophe” in Arabic) expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, people who had nothing to do with the Holocaust in Europe.
You can find a detailed description of the timeline of Israel’s establishment here, but the end result was the development of an apartheid state akin to South Africa in the 20th century, where the indigenous inhabitants of the land are treated as lesser citizens, some forced to live in an open-air prison where a foreign power controls everything down to their water usage.
It became clear to me that the formation of a Palestinian resistance group was inevitable in such circumstances. In all of the discussion about Israel’s right to defend itself, there was the bigger question: didn’t Palestine have the right to defend itself? The Geneva Convention dictates that people have a right to resist occupation, and occupying powers are responsible for the safety and well-being of the people they occupy.
Under this logic — not to conflate legality with morality, but in this case, I believe they do align — how could the world judge Palestine for fighting back?
Images of violence, eviscerated children, crushed families, and mourning parents imprinted themselves in my mind. In the first few months of the genocide, there were two pieces of non-violent media that stood out to me as context for the whole catastrophe.
One was a short video of an Israeli settler arguing with a Palestinian woman in occupied East Jerusalem: “You are stealing my house,” she says. “And if I don’t steal it, someone else is gonna steal it,” he replies. Her family had lived in that Sheikh Jarrah house for generations — and here was this settler deciding he was more entitled to both the land and her literal house than she was.
Another was the documentary Israelism. Produced by two American Jews, Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen (Erin was Bernie Sanders’ former liaison to the Jewish community during his presidential campaign), Israelism chronicles how they grew up in Hebrew school and learned that the state of Israel was intertwined with their Jewish identities. They never even heard of Palestinians until they were older. Their visit to the West Bank where they witnessed apartheid conditions for themselves, encouraged them to deconstruct their Zionist upbringings and recognize that American Jewish institutions rarely portray the Israel-Palestine conflict accurately.
That documentary helped me put a word to the real problem: Zionism.
Judaism is a beautiful religion of peace, but Zionism has turned into something akin to white supremacy. It has normalized apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. It has become the true force of antisemitism around the world, the very word it uses as a shield to protect itself from criticism. I’ve never been persecuted for my religion the way Jewish people have, but as a progressive Christian, I know what it’s like to have people committing vile acts in the name of my faith.
As I listened to the personal accounts of other anti-Zionist Jews, I recognized another familiar journey: the gradual discovery that my own country was founded on genocide. The American school system heavily sugar coats how the original colonists slaughtered Indigenous and First Nations people; only when I was older did I learn the truth that they didn’t pack up and leave to make room for European settlers (They didn’t all share turkey at the first Thanksgiving? What??). That discovery was devastating truth, and American Jews will have to do that twice — once for the United States and First Nations people, and again for Israel and the Palestinians.
Reevaluating what you thought you knew is never fun. It’s an uncomfortable process — but that’s how wisdom works. As we receive new information about a subject, it’s important to deconstruct our assumptions, ideas, and emotions about that subject. That’s how every movement in history gained allies amongst former oppressors or bystanders: those who were willing to say, “I thought it was this way, but I see the truth now.” Those who undergo that uncomfortable process make a far greater difference in the world than those who don’t.
But what next? That’s were I absorbed the importance of speaking out. I think of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote:
“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
I could not afford to be Palestine’s version of the white moderate. Silence is complicity because it tells the oppressors, “I don’t feel strongly enough about what you’re doing to say anything,” and so they hear in turn, “Well, that’s permission to keep doing it, then.”
I often wondered what I would do if I lived during the time of slavery or the Holocaust — the answer is whatever I’m doing now. If I wasn’t shouting for Palestinian safety today, I probably wouldn’t have gone down in history as one of the brave souls who hid Jewish refugees in their houses, either.
You might think the situations are different. Palestinians are an ocean away for most of us, and we cannot hide them in our homes. True, but our governments, including the United States, Canada, Germany, the UK, and France, are directly complicit in and enabling this genocide. We can do our best to hold them accountable for using our tax dollars to eradicate innocent people (I would much rather have more libraries and public parks than bombs).
What about all the other genocides in the world, you ask? Sudan, the Congo, Tigray, the Rohingya, and the Uyghurs all deserve their spotlight and freedom. You’re absolutely correct. None of those catastrophes is less important. But we cannot let the existence of multiple global struggles paralyze us from action, or use them as an excuse to not do anything at all. No other genocidaire like Israel has claimed to be a victim at the same time, which is why the battle to expose the true story is an uphill one.
Nor can we use the “it’s complicated” excuse. As writer Louis Yako said: “Many people use it repeatedly to escape depth and avoid confronting reality. They use it to take solace in the fact that they don’t know (or don’t wish to know) the ugly truth of what is happening right in front of their eyes. They reduce crimes, injustice, war, pain, hunger, rape, and everything that must be unpacked, dissected, and confronted to this: ‘It is complicated.’”
I was guilty of this for years. I didn’t want to touch the Palestine/Israel conflict. It was daunting to learn so much history, to unpack so much misinformation, to unravel so much emotional attachment. But that’s what my morality called upon me to do.
We’ve all been lied to, again — and now that Israel’s true colors are undeniable, Palestine is counting on us to transform ourselves and speak out for them. I invite you to learn more about the current genocide, the broader conflict, and concrete ways to speak out and make a difference at BystanderNoMore.com.
Jacob Yoss is a writer, artist, traveler, and burgeoning social activist passionate about ending genocide. Local to Colorado, Jacob is also involved in LGBTQ+ causes and strives to promote decolonization wherever possible.