Today, six months ago, Hamas murdered three people I knew—two peace activists and a guy I went to school with—committing horrific massacres, kidnapping Israelis, many of them civilians, with 133 still unjustifiably held by Hamas in Gaza. The women taken captive are likely facing rape, abuse, and torture based on testimonies from released hostages. These appalling crimes cannot be justified in any way. Since then, my country has destroyed the occupied Gaza Strip, brutally bombing entire families and tens of thousands of Palestinians inside their houses, knowingly using faulty AI hunting programs that also marked civilians as targets, with documented evidence of drones and soldiers murdering unarmed people and a systematic policy of shooting civilians reentering certain areas of Northern Gaza. Massacres at aid trucks, hundreds of Palestinians taken captive from their homes, many of them civilians, at least 27 killed in military camps due to torture and inhumane conditions. More children were killed by Israel in the first 4 months than all world conflicts combined for the past 4 years. These crimes—along with a military occupation and colonial land policies that existed long before October 7th—are ongoing and cannot be justified. They also happened with the diplomatic and financial support of several Western governments.
We must do everything now to urgently bring about a ceasefire, to end the mass killing and starvation in Gaza, and to release the Israeli hostages who are dying slowly with each passing day. Then, we need to move toward a political solution, which for me means rejecting the current system of Israeli-Jewish supremacy over occupied Palestinians, while also rejecting Hamas’s fundamentalist vision of Palestinian-Islamist supremacy and zero-sum subordination of Israelis.
It means, instead, promoting a post-apartheid vision of equality between Palestinians and Israelis—whether in two independent nation-states side by side, a confederation, or one secular binational state—the key being that both peoples, who in 2024 call this land home, are not going anywhere and deserve full political and individual rights in it. Security, freedom and redistribution of resources in a fair way, while holding some of those who committed crimes accountable, and maybe, one day, forgiving.
I realize this may be difficult to hear for some of you, it may seem absurd to talk about it now, but in certain ways, it’s more important now than ever to clarify where we stand. So that’s where I stand, even if it’s unpopular, and I wanted to make it clear.