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"After pleading and giving money to the hungry ones of the Islamic Republic, they agreed to let us lay Ahmad on top of my dad's grave. But they weren't satisfied with tormenting us. They realized they could still extract more money from us." She wrote: "They said because Ahmad's height is over 198 [cm] and the grave size in my dad's plot is 193 [cm], we must break his legs so he can fit inside the grave."

"In the reception hall of Behesht-e Zahra cemetery for the burial arrangements, we wanted the upper tier of my father's grave to be for my brother Ahmad. They said: 'You cannot bury a rioter next to the grave of a war veteran (Janbaz). They are pure, but these people are rioters.' They were saying this about Ahmad, and we were just humiliated in the midst of our pain, while they were only looking for money."

We will not forgive, we will not forget.

The stories you hear of people dying from rationing, this is what happens to their body.

Affordable insulin isn’t just a right, it’s a necessity.

Don't worry everyone they are in great company

and it all makes sense because wikipedia thankfully explains it via a footnote:

The Palestinians of the Ottoman era were the Jews, and were certainly descended from the Indigenous population, but were very much not descended from the Arab conquerors. They were socially and legally considered inferior because they were descended from the Indigenous population and not the Arab conquerors.

And, yeah, the Arabs did consider themselves the heirs to the Indigenous population, but that's only because all of Islam considers themselves the heirs of ancient Judea.

“” I was not supposed to write this essay. I was supposed to hate Israel, the way you hate something you’ve never examined. The way you hate something you were handed.

I grew up in a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Israel was not a country in my education. It was a crime. A wound kept open on purpose. Every funeral, every slogan, every sermon pointed in the same direction: there, across the border, is the source of your suffering. Believe it. Repeat it. Pass it on.

I believed it. I repeated it. For years.

Then I moved to France. And I met Jews.

Not the abstraction. Not the enemy. People. Neighbors. Colleagues. And the collision between what I had been taught and what I was seeing in front of me was so violent — so intellectually embarrassing — that I had no honest choice but to start over. To read. To ask. To dismantle, brick by brick, everything I had been given as truth.

What I found on the other side of that dismantling was not just the absence of hatred. It was something I had not expected: admiration.

Let me be precise about what I am defending and what I am not.

I am not defending every Israeli policy. I am not defending any government unconditionally. I am not asking anyone to check their critical faculties at the door.

I am defending what Israel is. What it represents. What it has built, against every conceivable pressure, in a region that has largely failed its own people.

Israel is a democracy in a neighborhood of autocracies. It is a state governed by law in a region where law is routinely weaponized against citizens. It is a country where Arabs sit in parliament, where women lead, where dissent is not a death sentence. It is imperfect — as every democracy is — but it is genuinely, structurally different from everything surrounding it.

That difference is not incidental. It is the point.

The so-called Palestinian cause, as it is prosecuted today, is not a national liberation movement. I say this not to dismiss Palestinian suffering; suffering is real, and real people pay its price. I say it because the infrastructure of the “cause” — its funders, its ideologues, its loudest champions — has never been interested in Palestinian statehood. It has been interested in Jewish elimination.

Look at who built the movement’s international architecture. Look at the 1997 Tehran OIC summit, where the language of “apartheid” was first systematically attached to Israel, not by Palestinians, but by the Iranian regime, for export. Look at Durban. Look at who profits when the conflict continues and who loses when it resolves. The answer is never the Palestinian family in Gaza. The answer is always the regime, the militia, the ideological infrastructure that needs the wound open.

The Palestinian cause, as it functions on the world stage today, is a tool of an anti-western civilizational project. Its goal is not a state alongside Israel. Its goal is a world without Israel, and, by extension, a world where the values Israel represents are defeated. Liberal democracy. Jewish self-determination. The idea that a small people can survive, build, and insist on their own dignity against the will of those who would erase them.

When western progressives march under that banner, they are not marching for freedom. They are marching for the annihilation of the only thing in the Middle East that resembles what they claim to value.

I came to Judaism slowly, the way you come to something true, not in a rush, but in accumulation.

It was not the politics that moved me first. It was the texts. The insistence, running through thousands of years of Jewish thought, that the human being is created in the image of G-d, and that this is not a metaphor but an obligation. An obligation to see the other. To argue. To question. To hold power accountable, including your own.

I had grown up in a culture where the highest virtue was submission. To the leader, the militia, the narrative. Judaism confronted me with the opposite proposition: that G-d does not want your silence. That wrestling with truth is itself a form of worship.

And then there is the resilience. Not the resilience of stubbornness, but the resilience of a people who have survived every civilization that tried to destroy them and responded not with conquest but with contribution. With law. With literature. With medicine. With the insistence, generation after generation, that life is worth protecting and that the world can be made more just.

Israel is the political expression of that tradition. An improbable state. A people who returned to their ancestral land after two thousand years of exile and built, in decades, what their neighbors have not managed in centuries. Not because they are superior, but because they were shaped by a tradition that takes civilization seriously.

That is what is under attack. Not a government. Not a policy. A civilization.

I am Syrian-Lebanese. I was born in Damascus. I was raised on Hezbollah’s version of history. My family has paid a price for my choices. I live under threat.

I am telling you this not for sympathy., but because who is speaking matters.

I am not a westerner who discovered Israel on a Birthright trip. I am not someone who stumbled into this position from comfort. I came from inside the machine that produces hatred of Israel, and I am telling you: the machine is a lie. I have seen both sides from the inside, and there is no honest comparison.

Israel is not our enemy. It never was. Our enemy is the ideology that needed us to believe otherwise because as long as we were pointed at Israel, we were not looking at what was being done to us.

I support Israel because I believe in civilization. Because I believe in the dignity of every human being, including my own. Because I found, in Judaism and in the state it produced, something worth defending, not despite my background, but because of everything my background taught me to recognize.

The truth, when you finally reach it, does not feel like a revelation. It feels like something you should have known all along.””

It was an apocalypse, said a priest who survived the massacre.

“They were coming in thousands, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar! Let us attack them for the Arabs, let us offer a holocaust to Mohammad.’

They were slaughtering everyone, men, women and children.”

Men were lined up against the walls of their homes and gunned down.

Women were tortured and gang-raped.

Babies were shot in the back of the head.

Pregnant women had their babies cut out of the womb.

I have a story related to the Sarona terrorist attack.

Ten years ago, I was living in Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv that pretends to be a city.  One evening, I heard a knock on my door. I opened the door and didn't notice my unexpected guest until I looked down as it was young girl with a Little Mermaid nightie and a handful of stuffed animals.  

She said she was my neighbor and asked to use my phone to check if her mom was alright because she was concerned about her. I asked the child why she was afraid. She said her mother was in Tel Aviv and there could be terrorists in the city, so she just wanted to make sure everything was fine. She said she was worried each time her mother went to the city ever since she heard her mom was present during the Sarona shooting. 

This got me thinking about the little ways in which terrorism affects our lives. All the invisible injuries made each time an idiot pulls a knife, pulls the trigger, detonates a bombs, or rams a crowd waiting for the bus. 

All the injuries we cannot see.

Also, what prompted the Second Intifada (on paper), was that a Jewish politician went to visit the Temple Mount after the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf illegally excavated and dumped over 10 dump-trucks' worth of priceless artifacts within the Temple Mount.

And they slaughtered thousands of our civilians for it.

Fuck this article, but the headline spot on.

A Jewish man merely visiting the holiest place in the entire Jewish religion, that Jews aren't allowed to go near to "respect" the religion that built over it, and that alone prompted slaughtering thousands of our civilians.

And people try to, "Well... both sides" it.

"Wellllll, a Jewish politician visiting the Al-Aqsa Mosque made Muslims scared that they'd make changes to it, so you can understand why--"

a) Like when they "made changes" to our holiest site in the world by destroying and dumping tens of tonnes of our holiest artifacts??

b) A Jew visiting a Mosque shouldn't prompt slaughtering thousands of Jews.

I shouldn't have to say that.

And don't, "Well, apartheid--" me:

This was just after the Camp David Summit.

Just after the Israeli government agreed to all of Yassir Araf's demands for Palestinian statehood and then some: All of Gaza, 96% of the West Bank, East Jerusalem as the capitol, plus full monetary reparations for those displaced in 1948 War that they started.

And Arafat responded by not just rejecting statehood, but his Waqf by vandalizing and destroying ten dump-trucks worth of the holiest Jewish artifacts from the holiest Jewish place in the world.

And Jews were (and are) expected to be completely fine with it.

"They destroyed literally tonnes of our holiest artifacts, but we visited their mosque, so it's really all the same."

"They stabbed, shot, and blew up thousands of our civilians across a bloody summer, but one of our guys visited their mosque, so tit-for-tat."

Fuck that.

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If you disagree with me about any of this, that's fine.

I don't care.