Hours ago, on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, hundreds of Muslims chanted “fuck the Jews!” They also shouted “gas the Jews!” In Golder's Green, a predominantly Jewish area of London this morning, Jewish restaurants had been vandalized and the words FREE PALESTINE graffiti’d over bridges and at the train station. By nightfall, the streets of central London were so full of threatening Palestinian displays of violence and clashes with the Metropolitan police, that peaceful citizens could not make their way to the Israeli Embassy to show support during the war. They turned away in fear. This morning, students at Stanford University woke up to signs draped from dorm windows in support of Hamas. At Harvard and Columbia, statements from multiple student organizations were immediately issued in support of the terrorists, victim-blaming Israel for their own mass gang rapes and murders. In London the Head of the Jewish Free School, one of the biggest schools for Jewish children in the UK, advised that the children are no longer required to wear their blazers to school and that detentions would be cancelled so students can return home by a safe enough time, and in non-identifying clothes.
A few years ago I wrote in a Tablet article that there is no working definition of antizionism. No antizionist has ever written one. Other than to say that it is not Zionism, or that it is opposed to Zionism. So without an agreed-upon definition, we are left to understand antizionism by its actions. Antizionism is a verb and you are witnessing its expression right now. When people show you who they are, believe them. The chants outside the Sydney Opera House or in the streets of London are not about a land grab. “Free Palestine” is a chant for Jewish extermination. And yes, we tried to tell everyone. Antizionism is antisemitism.
Two years ago I talked about/coined the “social media pogrom” and everyone got real mad, remember? I was just two years ahead of myself, as per usual. Antisemitism is a slow-moving bullet. And then it hits, and the general population are left wondering how any of this could possibly be real.
The pogroms that took place in Israel this past few days didn’t take place in a vacuum. They superseded the psychological warfare that Iran was carrying out via the past few years’ social media pogrom. Jews have been turned into sub-humans online by tactics that have completely passed most people by, because a/ we are a minority, and b/ they don’t have the same instinctive response to the horrendous things we are all seeing. For years, Jews and Jews alone, have understood how much vitriol and open air abuse had become acceptable towards us in social media arenas. We have received innumerable rape and death threats for years, and the rest of the world laughed, sent more memes, and piled-on with Palestinian flag emojis.
I don’t expect everyone here to be schooled in PTSD and trigger responses, but when you’ve experienced extreme online shaming, bullying, harassment and dehumanization as a community then you have traumatic reactions to material that other people without context may see as harmless. Other people without context may even - and did - confuse a trigger response with an innate prejudice.
For example, a few years ago during the height of tensions around May 2021, a Jewish friend in London told me that she was on such high alert that upon seeing the paint on a road that said FREE PARKING, she misread it as FREE PALESTINE. When she told me, her tone was a mixture of dark humor, and yet real acknowledgement of mounting hyper-vigilance and rational paranoia among the British Jewish community. At that time, cavaldaes of Palestinians were driving through the streets of London shouting: “Fuck the Jews! Rape their daughters!” When I shared this “Free Parking” story on Twitter, it became a woke meme, and is now regularly deployed to “prove” that I’m a racist. How deflective. Instead I was commenting on how Jewish people perceive slogans we understand to be coded as threats. We’ve been doing it for a very long time.
Take the above graffiti: PALESTINE WILL BE FREE
This is a disingenuous slogan, and I’ll tell you why. The people who sprayed this are doing so in solidarity with Hamas, not the Palestinians. They are praising the efforts of Hamas. And they are parroting Hamas’s lies. Hamas have no intention for Palestine to be free. They merely use the mask of liberation to justify their real motivations: death, or more specifically – Jewish death. Compare the sign above to one that was written over the entry gates of Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei. That sign translated to: work will set you free. Again, it was a lie. Set to psychologically degrade and mock the Jewish people. The work was never going to set anyone free. The work was in exterminating Jews. “Palestine Will Be Free”: it is not as it appears. When people take to the street to scream “Free Palestine” in response to Hamas’s perceived, uh, victory, they are screaming for the death of all Jews. And they are literally screaming that too in the same breath.
“Fuck the Jews!”
“Gas the Jews!”
For years, I have received emails for gas bills in Australia from trolls, telling me I owe x amount of Australian Dollars for gas. It’s a sick act of online terrorism: Jewish people should be charged with paying for the gas that killed us in the Holocaust. Again, it’s dehumanizing psychological warfare. And for years, radical leftists on Twitter jeered and laughed and spat at Jewish people who knew exactly what this bullying was and how evil it was in its nature. Like I said, we know a threat when we receive one. For years the left have drowned out Jews online who dared to have the courage to speak the truth about what you are all now witnessing. They called us racists and transphobes and liars, and they distorted and stole our identity as Zionists to empower and enable terrorism.
I know there are many newbies still “both sides”ing the issue. It’s easy to do. People are scared to say the wrong thing. Terrified in this age of cancellations to be wrong about their history. “It’s just so complex over there”. But this is not about history. This is about TODAY. And today at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) a moment of silence was held. Not for the dead Israelis. (Come on now!) The moment of silnce was held for "the loss of innocent lives in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere”. Elsewhere.
It is unacceptable.
If you’re still scracthing your head, let me help you re: the truth of “Free Palestine”. This is it:
The Palestinian Authority have been controlling Palestinians illegitimately for years. The leadership have not been elected. They are not accountable to their population, and they violate Palestinian human rights every day. They do not believe in equality or freedom of speech or press. They torture their own people for sport. The enemy of the Palestinians is the Palestinian Authority. Not Israel. The Palestinian Authority, backed by Iran, has made Israel its culprit. It’s a classic perpetrator move. Because without Israel there is nobody to blame for the disastrous treatment of their own people. For decades, the Israel-Palestine conflict has allowed the Palestinian Authority to escape their own abuses of power. They have misled the world. And now they’re gloating. Just like this woman at a pro-Hamas rally yesterday.
It’s never too late to wake up.
Eve. This is so well written..Do I have permission to share this on twitter?
...For decades, the Israel-Palestine conflict has allowed the Palestinian Authority to escape their own abuses of power. They have misled the world. And now they’re gloating. ..
It is not just the PA and Hamas... Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan have been complicit and have held those Arabs in camps since 48... to use as a cudgel to destroy the State of Israel and the only people who were actually called Palestinians... the Jews of the British Mandate period... ( have my father in law's papers to prove it)