I was raised to be very skeptical of the media, salespeople and politicians.

Long before I was born my father was a professional con man. Among other things he was what is called a mechanic. He would be hired to deal a private poker game and then stack the deck in order to extract as much money as he could from a ‘mark’, or target. He claimed to have done this in the employ of the mafia but he was also an exceptional liar, so who knows. But on many occasions I saw him do things with playing cards that I can’t explain to this day, so it’s not unbelievable.

I think this is why he hated television commercials with a passion. He could see right through the psychological techniques they used to manipulate audiences and it enraged him. Back then the closest thing to a remote control was one of us kids, and we learned quickly about the importance of turning down the volume before the first word of a commercial came through the speaker. I’m sure I’m better off for it.

So when I was twenty years old and saw the documentary film Manufacturing Consent, which is about Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann’s book of the same name, I was already primed to accept the main thesis of their work. In fact it really just gave me a vocabulary and evidence for suspicions I already had about the media’s role in creating and perpetuating popular support for capitalism and imperialism. Unfortunately I wasn’t equipped to do anything with that information at that time1, so instead of radicalizing me further it just helped me rationalize my depoliticization.

It would be more than thirty years before I watched the film again, but this time it came as part of a deep dive into socialist political theory so I had a lot more use for the information and I was better equipped for the resulting depression. It has also been helpful inasmuch as it has provided support for an analytical framework for understanding the massive tide of propaganda we’ve been swimming against during Israel’s genocide in Gaza (now fully extending into Lebanon). I’m halfway through a book called The Complicit Lens, by Robin Andersen that illuminates this thoroughly.2

For all these very valid criticisms of the news media, something arguably more insidious and influential is how Hollywood packages and promotes U.S. propaganda around the whole world. A friend of mine from the global south recently told me how she had grown up admiring America, even knowing all the horrific things it had done in her part of the world. I have no doubt that Hollywood gets a lot of credit for that.

I’ve spent quite a few hours over the past week watching interviews with Samantha Youssef, in which she discusses Hollywood propaganda from her insiders perspective. It has been incredibly enlightening. I’ve also done a couple careful readings of her paper, Encoding Empire: How Black Panther Manufactures Consent for Imperialism Among Oppressed Groups, in which she does a “thematic analysis”3 of the Black Panther franchise to reveal the many ways it works as pro-empire propaganda.

Most critically, Samantha, who has Palestinian-Ukrainian heritage, has come out4 very strongly against the new film The Voice of Hind Rajab. This critique was actually the first time I engaged with Samantha, in a private chat group, and it took me by surprise. I had heard nothing but good things about the film until then, and largely from other Palestinians (including Hamza and Badie Ali, the founders of the film’s distribution company Watermelon Pictures).5

I admit I wasn’t planning to watch the film to begin with because I followed the story as it unfolded in realtime and I figured the film would just depress and anger me. Not only did Samantha’s analysis reinforce my choice, it made me want very much to discourage anyone else from seeing or promoting this film. I’m not going to try to reproduce her arguments here, you can read/listen to her yourself and come to your own conclusions. But for me the undeniable conclusion is that this film ultimately does more harm than good (if any) for the cause of Palestinian liberation.

This is the important point. I am a big supporter of Watermelon Pictures. I bought a hoodie before Watermelon+ launched and subscribed the day it did. I’ve also met Hamza and Badie and I have much respect for their work. So as uncomfortable as it is to say so, especially as someone who is not Palestinian and who wants very much for Hind’s story to be told, I think supporting and promoting this film is a mistake. Now when I see movement groups hosting screenings it makes me cringe.

Unfortunately the popularity of this film in the mainstream likely means irresistible economic incentives to continue promoting and supporting it, but maybe that is the silver lining? If the popularity of this film brings new money and customers to Watermelon+, maybe that elevates the better films they have, like Palestine 36.6

So it was weird to hear Bartov, in a recent interview on Democracy Now!, deny that his position is anti-Zionist. On the contrary, in his new book Israel: What Went Wrong, he seems to be implying that the Zionist project had respectable origins but somewhere along the way it went astray.

I haven’t read the book so I’m not here to review or critique it, I just want to talk about that basic point. The same point the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who has been writing criticism of Israel in the Israeli paper Haaretz for 40 years, pushed back on during that same interview segment: the idea that Israel “went wrong” and that the problem with Israel is not intrinsic to Zionism.

As someone who identifies as strongly anti-Zionist I obviously sided with Gideon Levy, but on reflection I understand Bartov’s point. I still disagree with it, but I understand it. I believe he was saying that in the context of significant persecution of Jews in Europe and many other nations seeking to build ethno-states in that era, it was perfectly reasonable for the Jews to want their own ethno-state. A place where their existence wasn’t contingent on a majority group allowing them to live.

I personally believe ethno-states are incompatible with pluralism, democracy, and (somewhat tangentially) secularism, so I disagree with that goal on principle. However I do think it’s fair to distinguish between the aspiration to have a “Jewish state” and how Zionism actually manifested materially, as a settler-colonial project in Palestine. So Bartov is basically saying he’s not opposed to Zionism in principle, but in practice.

It does make me wonder whether his brand of criticism undermines the project for Palestinian liberation though. I am of the view that Israel is irredeemable, and that the Palestinians will not be free until the apartheid state of Israel is dismantled and replaced with actual democracy. Based on the aforementioned interview I think Bartov and Levy would agree with me. So why would anyone with that goal even suggest that the ideology on which Israel was built is redeemable? It makes no sense.

In fact I sometimes wonder if the hyper-focus on the definition and applicability of the word ‘genocide’ to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza is not just a way of distracting from the material impacts of the genocide and the fact that Israel has been conducting a “slow genocide” in Palestine since at least 1948. After all if it took a genocide scholar two years of careful consideration to come to the conclusion that the conditions of genocide had been met, the bar must be way higher than we thought.

That isn’t to say I think Bartov is being deliberately deceptive. Maybe his decision to wait until it was almost completely uncontroversial to identify the genocide as such was an unconscious attempt to dilute the message. But it was absolutely diluted, and his going on a media tour disavowing anti-Zionism isn’t helping solidify it.

I have written a lot about this but it’s pretty central to the oppression of Palestinians so it’s something worth spending more time on. I used to avoid using the word ‘Zionist’ because I believed it was basically a code word for ‘Jew’ used by neo-Nazis, so it made sense to me when people would argue that we shouldn’t use the word lest we turn people off or cause misunderstandings. I was wrong, it doesn’t make sense.

It is true that the word means different things to different people, and that like any other word that embodies a broad set of ideas it can be misunderstood. As the author rightly points out, some other words that have this issue are capitalism, colonialism, communism, progressivism and socialism, implying they are also obsolete.

Of course those words aren’t all useless. Most people have a least a sense of what you’re talking about when you use them, you just might have to be a little more careful to situate them when making an argument. For example I don’t expect people to know exactly what I mean when I say colonialism and I’m not exactly sure what people mean when they use it. So like most people if I want to be precise I will usually provide context, like a reference to specific pattern of foreign policy or military action.

Cognitive dissonance gets thrown around a lot these days but it’s often misused. The term was coined by social psychologist Leon Festinger back in the ‘50’s to describe the psychological distress people experience when new information contradicts their strongly held beliefs, and the defenses that emerge to rationalize the new info away. What could more aptly describe responding to the global awakening to the evils of Zionism with a long-form article arguing for the abolition of the term?

Instead of identifying as Zionist or anti-Zionist, the author argues, ⁠”one should say: I am for Israel’s right to exist—or against Israel’s right to exist. I am pro-settler or anti-settler. I support the current government of Israel’s policies or I do not. I support Israel as a Jewish state or I do not.”

So just to make sure you’re keeping up, ‘colonialism’ is a “muddy companion word” to Zionism, but it’s okay to refer to the colonizers as ‘settlers’ and it’s a matter of opinion on which reasonable people can disagree whether the settlers terroristic violations of international law and basic tenets of humanity is right or wrong. The phrase “Israel has a right to exist” is clear and unimpeachable, but if you add the implied “as an apartheid state” you’re not making any sense at all. Stop using big confusing words. You can criticize the current Israeli government or its policies, but if you suggest that “Jewish democratic state” is an oxymoron you’re an antisemite.

The author is right about one thing, though. I really doesn’t matter what you call it. The settler-colonial project that has occupied Palestine and committed genocide against the Palestinians for the past 75+ years should be dismantled and all of Palestine should be free from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.

I’ll close by pasting a copy of a post I made on LinkedIn last week when I was less interested in addressing this topic seriously. In retrospect it’s not a great piece of satire because the definition of ‘duck’ seems to switch between ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jew’, but I left it because the Zionist’s deliberate conflation of terms is part of the problem.

That being said, I feel it’s important for readers to understand who I am and how I came to be this way. Given that all of us are brought up surrounded by different values and belief systems and with different economic positions and cultural contexts, I think it’s useful to know the frame in which someone’s worldview has evolved.

So with that in mind, here is what I think you should know about me:

The Material Conditions

My father was an ex-convict with little formal education and my mother is a former Catholic nun. I am the youngest of 10 children. My mom took us kids away and divorced my abusive father when I was 7 years old. I was arrested at 13 for threatening my brother with a kitchen knife, and spent 2.5 years drinking and drugging (as they say)1, committing petty crimes and skipping school a lot. As a result of all this I was on probation and in and out of juvenile detention until age 16, when I quit school and my mom offered me the option of paying rent or moving out, resulting in the latter.

I got my G.E.D. and joined the US Army at 18, stationed in West Germany during the Cold War. I was invited to leave the Army at 20 (early but “honorably”) and worked various odd jobs between Michigan and California for a few years, until in 1993 I stole a Park Ranger truck (while drunk) at 24 and spent 90 days, including my 25th birthday, in the county jail, followed by 6 months in rehab. Not long after I got out of rehab I developed an obsession with an online game (Genesis MUD), which drew me in to the world of tech, where I have worked (more or less consistently) for 30 years.

The Philosophical Conditions

My parents were what I would describe as radical Catholics (see ‘Focolare’, ‘Cursillo’, and ‘Charismatic Renewal’), but with some awareness of and appreciation for Judaism as well. Some of my earliest memories are of the menorah on the fireplace mantle and watching The Sound of Music and The Fiddler on the Roof when I was very young.

When my parents divorced my mom brought us into the Word of God community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, an organization I variously describe as fundamentalist, fanatical, and a cult. Not that the community was without good people and in some ways a strong, loyal collective sensibility that I can appreciate. But when I started asking hard questions and got “just have faith” as an answer, I was unimpressed.

Living on my own in a college town, almost all my friends between the ages of 16 and 25 (except for a few who I knew from the Word of God) were students at the University of Michigan. It was probably some of those students who recommended authors like Sartre, Camus, Dostoevsky, and other existentialists to me, and it’s safe to say that reading those books instigated an existential crisis that persists over 35 years later.

How Should a Person Be?

I’ve always envied (and somewhat resented, if I’m being honest) people who are able to just live their lives without overthinking the ‘why’ of it all. I contemplate the meaning of life, the universe and everything literally every single day, and the worst part of it is that I don’t believe anyone (living or dead) has (or had) the answer.

As far as I know, reason is the only reliable skill humans have to determine facts about the universe, and reason alone cannot explain why anything exists. It’s great at explaining how things exist. The big bang. Evolution. Dark matter. Quantum Entanglement. These are all reasonable (if difficult) explanations for how things are. But once we start talking about why things are the way they are we are in the territory of faith, and in my view faith is not at all useful for evaluating competing claims.

One result of rejecting the beliefs imposed on me in my youth and not wanting to sign up for another pre-packaged set, was that I was forced to think extremely critically about my opinions and values and to try as hard as I could to determine my own. As I already mentioned this meant reading a fair number of books in my early 20’s, the most influential of which were by Hermann Hesse, Richard Bach, and Tom Robbins2. I believe all were recommended by my Jewish-American girlfriend3 at the time.

Who Have I Become?

In the early 2000’s, coincidentally the same year Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, a friend and I launched an online discussion forum called The Freethought Forum. The idea was to make a forum for discussion of life, the universe and everything without heavy-handed content moderation, and it was reasonably successful. We had engaged with hundreds of likeminded people across several other forums, so we had a substantial user base from the jump.

Over the 20+ years that forum has been online I’ve had countless discussions and debates about philosophy and politics, among all the other things people like to think and talk about, with a lot of really smart people (most of whom had far more formal education than me.) During that time I developed a worldview that works for me, but until 2020 I still struggled with how I should “show up” in the world.

I spent almost 20 years just existing, rationalizing my lack of engagement with the world4 as perfectly justifiable as long as I was paying my taxes and not hurting anyone. Nevertheless, my parents (for all their faults) had instilled in me a tremendous sense of responsibility to society that I couldn’t shake and didn’t know how to fulfill. At the same time I wasn’t just apolitical, I was downright anti-political.

Political Awakening

It goes without saying that 2020 was a monumentally significant year in the US and around the world, but the particular way that year impacted me, informing my response to the George Floyd protests and Covid-19, was the death of Michael J. Brooks.5 The first time I ever heard that name was when Cornel West tweeted an R.I.P., and suddenly I started noticing people from all walks of life lamenting the loss.

Nobody seemed to have a bad word to say about him6, and everyone was in awe of how passionate and driven he was to make a difference. He was a political analyst with a YouTube show who wasn’t just pontificating to hear the sound of his own voice or being snarky to entertain himself. He was genuinely concerned with sharing his knowledge and analysis with the world and working to make it a better one. From there I came under an avalanche of shows, books, and a crash course in political science, philosophy, electoral politics, geopolitics, etc. but no idea what to do about it.

What really struck me was that he identified as a socialist (Socialist? Not sure if he would have said big ‘s’ or small ‘s’, but definitely socialist!) I swear this was the first time in my adult life that I heard someone relatively young, very smart, well-educated, and apparently not some ranting conspiracy theorist identified as a socialist.7

Once I started taking politics seriously I also started taking history, economics, sociology and geopolitics more seriously. I started watching The Majority Report and many satellite shows8 regularly, buying every book they mentioned, and even dipped my toes into the electoral process9 and joined the DSA10. None of these experiences really made me feel like I was “doing something”, though, even though my political consciousness was expanding rapidly and my desire to act was growing alongside it.

Discovering Palestine

Looking at my journal entries, on October 7th, 2023 I was in the middle of reading Frances Fitzgerald’s seminal work on the Vietnam War, Fire In The Lake, and I was impatient to start reading If We Burn, by Vincent Bevins, an analysis of what went wrong in the largest of the mass protest movements in the 2010’s. For some reason I didn’t mention the Hamas attacks on Israel until October 10th, at which time I wrote:

I’ve been listening to American Prestige podcast daily since Hamas attacked Israel, and yesterday they had a really good guest who is a professor of, I think, Middle East studies.11 He made the really good and tragic point that Gaza was a powder keg waiting to explode, as all settler-colonial projects are, and that Hamas’ actions were wholly predictable under the circumstances. There are 17 yr olds in Gaza who have lived their entire life in one of the poorest, most desolate landscapes on earth as a result of an Israeli blockade that has lasted since they were born, and they live right next to one of the richest societies... at least in the region, maybe in the world. At some point something’s gotta give. That is just physics. The professor said historically the only time a colonized population HASN’T eventually reacted violently are circumstances like North America, where the colonizers killed enough of the native population to render it impotent. I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist of his argument. Anyway that professor and several others have also made the argument that this situation represents a paradigm shift in Israel. The Netanyahu government has been trying to pretend that the situation was under control and that in the worst case they didn’t have much to fear from the Palestinians, but now that veil has been ripped off and their vulnerability exposed. It seems likely that the Israeli people are going to change their opinion for better or worse. I’m not making a lot of sense, but this is what’s on my mind this morning so this is what I’m writing about.

Back then I had a friend I used to chat with almost every day, yet for some reason the topic of the Hamas attacks didn’t come up until October 14th, when I shared links to a couple TikTok videos with her. The first was a user named notyourlawyermd and talked about Israel’s control of Gaza’s water, the second was Sim Kern questioning why Jews believe they need a “homeland” (what Sim called a “theocratic ethno-state”).12

In those days TikTok really was my primary source of information about the history of Palestine, just as Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton warned. Of course I was also reading books, watching YouTube “explainers”, and consuming lots of overseas media like Britain’s Channel 4 and Al Jazeera to follow the genocide as it developed. That I was watching a live-streamed genocide was obvious13, but what could I do about it?

On or about January 3rd, 2024 I saw Paul Biggar interviewed on Counter Points, and that’s how I learned about his brand new initiative called Tech for Palestine. I wasn’t sure what I could add to the group but I joined immediately, hungry for the chance to do anything to put everything I had been learning to some use. The rest as they say is history, and most of that is documented in the virtual pages of this Substack.

The Struggle is the Point

As I have been learning about the history of Palestine and watching current events unfold around the world—especially the rising fascism and mask-off imperialism being demonstrated (predominantly) by the United States and Israel—it has become very clear to me that the struggle for liberation of Palestine reflects, to one degree or another, just about every other struggle for freedom and liberty. It has also become clear that the ordinary people of the world are at an extraordinary disadvantage.

I’m not going to lie, I am not optimistic about the future. All signs point to things getting quite a lot worse before (and if) they start to get better. But in a very real sense the better world I want to live in is already here—it’s the work in progress that I and everyone else who is actively engaging with the world is trying to build. I’m not in the movement because I expect a miraculous outcome (though that’s not impossible!) but because this is who I want to be and what I want to be doing. And the fact that there are many others getting up every day and doing the same is what keeps me going.

The first time I read it was a “red pill” moment for me (in the original sense of the term1, not the bastardized pro-Trump right-winger sense). Someone had finally articulated a critique of capitalism that I had intuited at a young age but could never adequately express, at the same time explaining why I could never express it. Because it had so thoroughly permeated humanity it had become simply how the world works.

I had a similar epiphany when I started learning about the history of Palestine and the origins of Zionism, the political ideology that (in practice) demands the existence of a “Jewish state” in historic Palestine. A tremendous amount of ink has been spilled over describing, defining, attacking and defending this ideology, but don’t let that confuse you. It really is as simple as that. The entire “conflict” that has been roiling the region since the mid- to late 19th century (though rapidly accelerated in 1948) is the result of one ethnic/religious group demanding exclusive ownership of historic Palestine.

During an event titled Imperial Continuity: Palestine, Iraq, and US Policy at the University of Washington, the late Edward Said was asked whether the Jewish people had a claim to historic Palestine. His response is worth quoting verbatim:

One difference between Capitalist Realism and Zionist Realism is that the former developed and spread more organically throughout the world. I mean sure, there were committed propagandists such as the OG neoliberals like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek who worked tirelessly to promote their “free market” ideology, but once their ideas started catching on they really seem to have spread naturally.

Zionism, on the other hand, has required hundreds of millions of dollars, tens of thousands of professional propagandists, and a vast network of “pro-Israel” organizations to keep it going for as long as it has. This is because once you know even the most basic facts about the history (and present) it is obviously unjust.

The question isn’t “Does Israel have a right to exist?” it is “Does Israel (or any other country) have a right to maintain an apartheid state and commit genocide against the indigenous people of the land?” The answer is obviously “no”, and that judgement has been confirmed ad nauseam by the United Nations and international legal precedent.

At this point all of this is so obvious as to be trivial to state, so why is there still anyone, in fact many people, who still support Israel? Fisher wrote:

“Capitalist realism as I understand it [...] is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.

I think this is key. The “pro-Israel” narrative has been so pervasive for so long, for many people it has become simply how the world works. Israeli Jews (a necessary distinction because approximately 25% of Israelis are not Jewish) are believed to be the natural citizens of Palestine who in their great benevolence allow non-Jews to live there (with significant limitations) but despite their great generosity the ungrateful non-Jewish barbarians periodically and randomly attack them. What else can they do but build walls, fill their prisons and slaughter Palestinians in the name of “security”?

The tide is shifting. I have only been awake for a couple years at this point, but I have heard many people who have been deeply involved in the movement for Palestinian liberation for decades say they have never seen such a seismic shift in public opinion in the “western” world. I’m quite sympathetic to those who say “who gives a shit what Americans think?” but I think it matters a lot. Support for Israel has been bipartisan in this country for decades, but the more public opinion shifts the less likely that is remain true. The government is still far behind the people, but they will come around.

All that being said, now is not the time to be complacent. Many people have turned away from the region since the “ceasefire”,2 and the joint US-Israel war on Iran have completely distracted people from Israel’s ongoing occupation and terror in Gaza and its war of aggression and occupation of Southern Lebanon. If you read articles following previous Israeli hostilities (operations “Cast Lead” and “Protective Edge”, for example) you’ll find that these events often lead to increased awareness in the US, but only temporarily. As soon as the heat dies down the media (and thus the population) look away, and the propagandists regroup and double their efforts.

It remains difficult to imagine a world without Zionism, but it’s a world we need.

It’s hard for me to understand the attachment many Palestinians have to their homeland because I can’t really relate. We left the house (and city) where I was born when I was only seven years old, then moved again and again after that. By the time I was eighteen years old I had lived in 10 different houses in three cities.

Of course I was in the United States the whole time, the state of Michigan in particular, so I have a certain affinity to this area of the world. But much of that is just because it’s easy to get around. I know the language and the culture, I don’t much care about the place. The “land” has never meant anything to me.

That being said, it’s starting to become clear to me how and why the “right of return” is so important to so many Palestinians, and what a tragedy it was that Yasser Arafat’s PLO found it necessary to effectively forfeit that right in the Oslo Accords in the 90’s.

I just finished reading the great memoir Mapping My Return, by Salman Abu Sitta, recommended by . Long story short, Salman Abu Sitta was born in Palestine in 1937 and his family was exiled from their land during the Nakba in 1948. After traveling the world working as an engineer and raising a family, he decided to dedicate the remainder of his life to building the Palestine Land Society (PLS).

In addition to reading the book, I highly recommend you watch this video in which he works with Forensic Architecture to reconstruct a 3D model of his family’s land and this one from the 25th anniversary of the founding of the PLS (in the year 2000) where he explains the extensive mapping work he’s done. It’s really awe-inspiring. This isn’t a hobby for him, it’s a meticulously engineered plan for eventual return.

The United Nations has long endorsed the right of people to leave and return to their country at will, codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (which itself was heavily influenced and promoted by Eleanor Roosevelt). Article 13(2) of the UDHR states: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country”.

One of the earliest resolutions passed by the United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 194, declared “… that the [Palestinian] refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their nieghbours [sic] should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good.” Annex II – (Text of Resolution 194 (III) at Annex II).

The UN weighed in again after the Six-Day War: “In 1967, Security Council resolutions [Res 237 & Res 242], considered binding on all member states, required Israel to undertake obligations to cooperate in the return of the second wave of Palestinian refugees to their homes.”

A study of the Palestinian Right of Return conducted by the United Nations in 1978, includes the statements “The right of a person to return to his home in his native country traditionally has been included among an individual’s fundamental rights”, and “in 1974 the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognized that the Palestinian people were entitled to self-determination in accordance with the United Nations Charter, and to reaffirm their inalienable right of return” .

I could go on and on, but suffice it to say there have been countless resolutions by many bodies of the United Nations that have reaffirmed the Palestinian’s right of return, despite Israel’s ongoing refusal of that right. That’s what makes it all the more infuriating when Israel not only refuses to grant that right but continues to steal more and more land from the Palestinians every day, in Gaza and the West Bank, and is now moving to occupy Southern Lebanon too.

In closely related news, every year on March 30th the Palestinian people commemorate Land Day to honor the six Palestinian citizens of Israel1 who were killed while protesting Israel’s appropriation of even more Palestinian land in 1976.

This year, Israel chose to celebrate Land Day by passing one of the most barbaric capital punishment laws in the history of the “civilized” world, which allows for the execution of Palestinian prisoners after simple majority of judges (in military courts) convicts. To quote Amnesty International, “while the law does not explicitly reference ethnicity or nationality, it is effectively designed to target Palestinians exclusively. It also introduces an exceptional execution regime by hanging, characterised by secrecy, and limited access to legal counsel and external oversight.”

People argue that it is unreasonable, impractical, and thus impossible that the Palestinian people will ever be allowed to return, but none of these are true. The land is very far from “full”, the land where a large majority of the villages stood that were destroyed in 1948 is still vacant, and the vast majority of Israelis live clustered in a few cities such as Haifa, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv. Yes, it does seem improbable that the current wildly racist generations of Israeli Jews would ever allow it, but populations change.

As I said in the beginning for me it’s easy to understand people who might decide to just live somewhere else and go on with their lives, accepting the unjust cards they were dealt. But at the same time I’m increasingly sympathetic to those who refuse to give up their right to return; who are willing to die trying.

She wasn’t disparaging boycotts or getting suggestions about people and topics to showcase on her platform, but the aggressive and entitled way some people do it.

I have a platform just large enough that it comes off as false modesty to deny it, but small enough that it feels completely ridiculous to use the term to describe it. Even so I feel the pressure sometimes from people who aggressively push a particular event, news item, charity, or boycott target and frame it as a moral failing if I don’t adopt their priorities as my own. I boycott. I donate. I write. I write, share, and collaborate with others on several social media platforms. I work full-time for an advocacy organization. Pretty soon I’ll be allowing embarrassing videos of myself struggling to articulate my thoughts about what I’m reading and why into the world. In other words I am doing more than my part to make the world a better place.

The irony is that this kind of social pressure only really affects people who care in the first place. People who don’t care or who think it’s not their problem just dismiss the demands as yet another reason they don’t get involved. It’s the people who care, who already feel as if they’re not doing enough, who are demoralized by these demands.

This is what some people mean when they talk about “virtue signaling”. Not people who use “social justice warrior” as an insult, fuck those people. But people trying to illuminate the difference between real advocates/activists doing the grinding, thankless work on the ground day after day, and poseurs who prioritize appearing virtuous over being virtuous. Who pretend that anyone who isn’t doing everything possible for every possible cause at all times is an enemy of progress.

I know that sometimes people who do this are agents of chaos, deliberately demoralizing and dividing people to keep them scattered and ineffective. But I think most of the time it’s just naive and overzealous people, often young people, whose ideas about activism and advocacy are more impulsive than strategic.

Last night I read (and then listened to) the speech made by the outgoing UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini at the Geneva Graduate Institute. It’s an excellent encapsulation of the current state of affairs even if I would push back on some of the framing in the statement (e.g. Israel and Palestine are not “neighbors”, the former is illegally and immorally occupying the latter).

What really strikes me, though, is that UNRWA, along with many other organizations and people, have been in this struggle for over 75 years and in some ways things have only gotten worse. In my view this doesn’t reflect a lack of virtuous intent or action, but a flawed or nonexistent long-term strategy. This is strongly reinforced by the book I am currently reading, Mapping My Return, by Salman Abu Sitta1. A memoir of a man who was a boy during the Nakba in 1948 and not only saw, but lived the catastrophe.

People, especially here in the US, think the struggle in Palestine is some ancient animosity or religious conflict wherein “both sides” are equally to blame. They do not comprehend that this is a straightforward case of settler-colonialism2, even as literal “settlers”, described as such even in mainstream (and especially Israeli) media, are in the news every day for terrorizing, displacing, and killing indigenous Palestinians.

I realized shortly after I pulled my head out of the sand and decided to educate myself on this issue and start pursuing advocacy full-time that this would be a long and difficult fight. So for me the pressure of unreasonable expectations is relatively easy to brush off. The fact is I don’t have to do anything at all, so if what I am doing is perceived as ineffective or insufficient by some, oh well. The only thing that does keep me up at night (figuratively) is when I worry that something I am doing or some org I support is actually working against the movement or the people of Palestine. So that’s something I try to stay vigilant about and constantly reevaluate.

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I just finished reading Terms of Servitude, by Omar Zahzah. I met Omar a few weeks ago and when I told him I help run Tech for Palestine we got to talking about the recent explosive growth of UpScrolled. This of course morphed into a good conversation about the suppression of pro-Palestinian content on social media more broadly, and then he mentioned that he had written a book on the topic.

I was immediately intrigued but especially so when he said the subtitle was “zionism, silicon valley, and digital settler colonialism in the palestinian liberation struggle”. I couldn’t have come up with a more accurate summary of my interests on my own, so of course I knew I had to get it. Fortunately I didn’t have to go far, he gave me a copy.

I don’t like writing book reviews because it feels like trying to describe an oil painting on canvas by producing a facsimile with watercolors on scrap paper, but I have learned to swallow my embarrassment and do it anyway. I suppose if it encourages one other person to read the book or engage with the author’s other writing it will have been worth it, even if the best I can do is poorly summarize some takeaways.

Although he started writing before October, 2023, the book wasn’t published until last year, so he was able to make important additions about events that developed during the past two years of genocide in Gaza. ‘Additions’ being the key word here because he didn’t have to make many (if any) changes. The same suppression has been going on for a very long time, and no doubt plays a significant role in why some in Gaza felt there was no hope for a so-called “peaceful” resolution to their plight.

The quote above is from the “Notes on Process” section at the beginning of the book, and it resonated strongly with me. I have been writing this Substack for a couple years now and it hasn’t gotten any easier to figure out what to write about from day to day, much less week to week. Every day the news, my social media feeds, and every personal interaction consists of one new horror story after the other. Every time I sit down and try to decide on the most important or pertinent thing to write about today, I am literally “overwhelmed by relevance”.

From state-sponsored militias kidnapping and killing people in my country to non-stop aggression in Palestine and the broader region, reflected most recently in Israel and the US carpet-bombing Tehran and the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands from Southern Lebanon while continuously bombing Beirut. It seems like an empty truism to say “it’s all connected”, but it really is. But that means it’s impossible to start anywhere and write about anything without leaving out a whole lot of context, and as Chomsky and Herman pointed out decades ago in Manufacturing Consent, you run the risk of sounding like a “raving lunatic”.

Every time I read a book that is in any way about Palestinian liberation, I learn about people, organizations, and publications that I have never heard of but have been doing good work for decades. This won’t surprise anyone who knows that I’ve only been on this path since October, 2023, but it surprises me because I have been literally immersed in this project nearly every single minute of the past two and a half years.

One name that came up several times in the book is the author of the foreword, Steven Salaita1. It turns out Salaita is a former tenured professor who lost his position because of his public criticisms of Israel and Zionism over ten years ago, yet for some reason I hadn’t heard of him until now. I’m looking forward to learning more. (Side note: In transcribing my notes this morning from another recent book I read, Selling Israel, I came across a reference to Salaita as one of a number of scholars who views the “history and struggle of the Palestinians” through the lens of “a transnational indigenous studies framework”. Now I’m even more intrigued.

During another side quest I went on in the process of transcribing my notes from Terms of Servitude, I came across the NY Times obituary for Edward Said2. It was by and large a fairly neutral piece, but I did notice something interesting. Although the author states that “Dr. Said was born in Jerusalem during the British Mandate in Palestine”, at no point in the rest of the obituary, where “Palestinian(s)” is used 13 times, does he refer to Said as Palestinian.

This might not be odd in itself—I can imagine that my obituary won’t describe me as an American—but when the piece is replete with descriptions like “most prominent advocate in the United States of the cause of Palestinian independence”, “fierce proponent of the Palestinian cause”, “an outspoken advocate of a Palestinian homeland”, and “a spokesman for the Palestinian cause”, it seems odd not to plainly state that he was Palestinian himself. Especially since the Times never hesitates to describe figures such as Yasser Arafat and Leila Khaled as Palestinian.

Anyway as per usual I have no idea how to wrap this up so I’ll just give the final word to Omar. If I haven’t made it clear enough, don’t stop here. Buy the book, read it, share it, and let’s try to liberate the digital town square for the good of all humanity.

The internet is a medium with the potential to link all Palestinians together--indeed, already has linked all Palestinians together--despite the fragmentation and ghettoization of colonialism, occupation, apartheid, and exile. It is a medium with the potential to galvanize the Palestinian elaboration and pursuit of an ideal, decolonized homeland--a virtual Palestine. Virtual Palestine represents the digital analogue of the ideal of a storied, familiar, and free homeland recounted, envisioned, and anticipated in Palestinian narrative and storytelling as elaborated by Refaat Alareer. In this sense, Virtual Palestine reflects longstanding pre- and anti-colonial ideals that undergird Palestinian utilizations and repurposing of contemporary technologies and media throughout history. Virtual Palestine is what digital settler colonialism mobilizes to inhibit. But Virtual Palestine’s rootedness in Indigenous history and resistance practices ensures digital settler colonialism’s futility, as Palestinian resistance in all of its forms will only continue to utilize alternative forms of creative opposition to imperial and colonial hegemony. (p165)

If you’re reading this you probably know that Zionism is a political ideology that sprung up in the mid-19th century, became codified (and popularized) by Theodore Hertzl in the late 19th century (via his book “Der Judenstaat”) and found its ultimate expression in the Nakba, the mass killing and expulsion of Palestinian Arabs in 1948, and the Naksa, aka the “Six Day War” in 1967, during which Israel occupied (and still occupies) the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Syrian Golan Heights.

What you may not know is that there are many very outspoken and harsh critics of the apartheid system in the occupied territories who are nevertheless still Zionists, they just think the occupation in ‘67 and subsequent acts of oppression and dispossession have crossed the line. Some even going as far as to blame the Netanyahu government for all that is wrong with Israel, while implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) continuing to support the idea of Israel as a state that should give preferential treatment to Jews.

That’s why an article titled “Evil in the West Bank”, which unflinchingly describes “a highly effective campaign of ethnic cleansing backed by the Israeli government”, refers to the Israeli police force in the West Bank as “a vicious ultranationalist militia”, and decries the actions of “brainwashed, hate-driven, sadistic settlers”, might lead some to believe it is a critique of Zionism.

“If you’d like to witness human evil at its worst, come with me any day to the West Bank.” — David Shulman

Unfortunately, things start to fall apart as the article continues. Not long after the quote above, the author writes “The army in the territories, like the police, like the civil service, indeed like most of the institutions of Israeli democracy, has been corrupted by Netanyahu’s government.” I’m sorry, what? Are we to believe that the occupation used to be a perfectly decent expression of democracy before Netanyahu?

It did occur to me that I might be reading too much into that statement and maybe I shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. A lot of the stuff in that article is true and accurate and important to share with the readership of the New York Review, for sure. Maybe I shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

But then he writes, “Is democracy, in some imperfect form, still an intrinsic part of the Israeli worldview, as it was in the Scroll of Independence, the foundational text of the State of Israel? It is, I would guess, for approximately half the body politic.” Okay now he’s just talking crazy, right? I mean he can’t really believe that as many as half of the “body politic” believes in democracy. The same body politic of which a large majority support apartheid and genocide of Palestinians in exile, and about half of whom supported expelling Arab citizens of Israel as far back as 2016?

A few sentences later he makes the claim explicit: “But as long as the occupation, with its daily horrors, continues apace, and as long as the extreme Israeli right is in power, democracy in Israel will be sick at the core.” Who’s going to tell him that democracy in Israel has been nonexistent since 1948? Sick at the core is accurate, but it’s exceedingly generous to suggest that it was ever anything else.

“Some people think that the present crisis was inevitable because of the flaws inherent in the Zionist program from the start. I don’t accept that deterministic teleology, though the settler colonial enterprise in the occupied territories and the failure to come to terms with the Palestinian national movement were and are cardinal sins.” You see what he did there? The Zionist project isn’t (and wasn’t ever) inherently a settler-colonial project, it was deformed and misappropriated.

He seems to have a glimmer of understanding in the final paragraph when he writes “In any case the ethno-nation-state is prone to racism and cruelty, as Hannah Arendt saw clearly in 1947 (and she was a Zionist.)” but it is an odd thing to concede after making so many passes at portraying Israel as a once-upon-a-time “real democracy”.

Anyway I’m sure he means well, and like I said it seems like an objectively good thing to have any strong critique of Israel in a fairly mainstream publication, but if I have learned anything in the past two-plus years it’s that the very existence of the Zionist state of Israel is, to quote Miko Peled, the biggest obstacle to Palestinian liberation. Of course the Netanyahu government is poison and the evil occupation must end, but the future I want to see is one where all Palestinians who choose to can live as free and equal citizens in all of historic Palestine. Anything less is not justice.

I was supposed to write this yesterday but when I woke up to the news of a new war (this time on Iran) led by Israel and the US, a retrospective of the week seemed silly. Of course the first news I heard was of a girl’s school having been bombed with dozens of children killed. Par for the course for Israel, unfortunately. How anyone can continue to defend much less praise that state is beyond me, but as the book title goes one day everyone will have always been against this.

I had the opportunity to meet some other people in the movement last weekend and that was both invigorating and enlightening. So many people have been doing work on the cause of Palestinian liberation for so many years in so many different arenas. I watched Edward Said’s The Shadow of the West and it’s sobering to see how little has changed in the decades since it was released in 1982.

It’s both uplifting and humbling when I think of how much of my life I didn’t do anything and what a trivial impact I’m having even now. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not downplaying what I am doing. I think it’s likely that what I’m doing is as impactful as anything else, maybe more so. It just never feels like enough compared to the need.

One of the people I met last week was Omar Zahzah, author of the book whose cover I posted above. When he told me he was an author and that he had written a book called Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle I thought he had written it just for me. When I told him how excited I was to read it he handed me a copy and refused to take money for it. Needless to say that’s what I’m reading now and it’s as good as I hoped.

Earlier in the week I finished reading The AI Con, and frankly I didn’t get much out of it. Some of the arguments were novel and interesting, but the authors just clearly find LLMs without any merit at all and are highly critical of anyone who thinks otherwise. That was my main takeaway, anyway. It was pretty heavy on rhetoric and light on argumentation. I’m not saying it wasn’t worth reading or that there weren’t any solid arguments in it, I definitely learned some things. I just found it disappointing. I’m also just not as impressed with human beings as they are. They seem to believe that any product of human creativity or ingenuity is inherently superior to something a computer generates, and I’m not as convinced of that.

I don’t have a lot more to say about this week. I didn’t watch a lot of videos or read a lot of articles because I actually spent most of the time working on T4P stuff.

I will say, even though I detest electoral politics, that I am in equal parts awestruck by what a good politician Zohran Mamdani is and how disgusting the DNC is. I like to watch IHIP News from time to time and this interview Jennifer did with a Democratic strategist about the DNC spiking the election autopsy was cathartic if nothing else. Meanwhile Mamdani is out there fulfilling all his campaign promises in record time without conceding an inch on his progressive values. If the Dems really cared about anything but holding on to power they could learn something from him.

I’ll just close by saying I’m hoping for the best for the Iranian people and every other victim of the US and Israel in the region. At least it seems possible that the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could result in a shorter war than may have happened if he lived to lead the defense. Of course it may be worse, but things can always be worse.

I finished reading “The General’s Son”, by Miko Peled, which I talked about last week. It was a great book and he is a great person. I sent an email to him to thank him for sharing his story and such, but I used a random email address I found on the ‘net so there’s a high probability he won’t see it. That’s okay. I’m sure we’ll meet on the street.

Molly Crabapple was the most recent guest on Bad Hasbara and it was a fascinating discussion. I didn’t know much about her prior to this episode except that Naomi Klein is a big fan (a very powerful endorsement in my world) but now I’m a big fan too. She just finished writing a book about the Jewish Bund and I learned a lot from that conversation. They were apparently the OG Jewish anti-Zionists.

I also came across an older video of Norman Finkelstein doing a deep analysis of the deeply disturbing United Nations Security Council resolution that resulted in the creation so-called “Board of Peace”, that entity led by Chairman Trump on which the genocidal state of Israel sits. Finkelstein tends to speak slowly, carefully, and repetitively, so he wasn’t able to finish in the allotted time. So he finishes his point during a later panel discussion at the same event.

A friend in Palestine linked me to this Guardian video which is a fairly short (~20 minutes) documentary about life under occupation in the West Bank. I’m not sure I learned anything new but it was very well done and I recommend sharing it with anyone who doesn’t understand why we talk about Israel as an apartheid state. It’s also a “part one” so I’m looking forward to more in that series.

Lastly, I’m reading “The AI Con”, by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna. It’s interesting but I’m about halfway through and so far it has struck me as overstating the negative impact of LLMs on the world, but there’s a lot more to their critique than just LLMs and a lot of it is worth analysis, consideration, and of course action (e.g. regulation). As someone who has built some very useful tools and done a lot of research using LLMs I’m obviously biased. I’m also a critical thinker though, so I would never accept the output of an LLM as the whole truth. I always check sources.

Anyway onward and upward.

When I joined Tech for Palestine (on the day of its public launch, a little over two years ago) it was 90 days into the "war" and I had just started learning about the history of Palestine. It's fascinating to go back and read what I wrote at the time, because even though there wasn't anything untrue in what I wrote I didn't have anywhere near the level of knowledge that I have two years later.

The first book I bought (and read) was "The Hundred Years War on Palestine", by Rashid Khalidi. This is my current collection of Palestine-related books.

First stack from the left are the books I've read that were published before 10-7-23, the second stack from the left are the books I've read that were published after 10-7-23, and the two stacks on the right are the books I haven't read yet. (I've mostly skimmed the large coffee-table books).

I sometimes write my thoughts about what I read here or on LinkedIn, so follow me if you're interested in that kind of thing. I'm just getting started. If you only read one of these books make it "Perfect Victims", by Mohammed El-Kurd.

Some recent publicity for Tech for Palestine has meant an increase in the number of project applications we’ve been receiving over the past few weeks, which means more of my time spent talking to people about their initiatives. That’s always interesting. At the same time we are still aggressively reorganizing T4P to be more decentralized and using a custom app I’m building to manage the new structure.

There has been some good news this past week like the High Court in the UK ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist group is unlawful. But that’s small consolation at a time when ICE Is Expanding Across the US at Breakneck Speed, including spending $40 billion on converting warehouses into “detention centers” (read: internment camps) for brown and black people.

I’m reading The General’s Son, by Miko Peled. Miko is a Jewish Israeli whose father was a general in the IDF before becoming an academic and peace activist, and his maternal grandfather was a signatory of the Israeli “Declaration of Independence”. Miko became a peace activist himself, but went further than his father by rejecting Zionism altogether. I knew a bit about him before I started reading the book and even had the opportunity to meet him1 a few months ago, but his story is still very moving.

Someone reached out to me about the possibility of doing a bi-weekly podcast during which we discuss what I’ve been learning about Palestine, so that is probably going to happen. I’ll be sure to let everyone know if/when that happens. I feel good about it.

I had dinner with one of my many nieces last night because she wanted to pick my brain about AI and the future of work, so I had to figure out how to talk about it without sounding like a doomer. I actually love LLMs and use them extensively every day, both as a research tool and to generate code for work, but I also believe AI is a bubble made up almost entirely of hype, and that the billionaire class who is building it is happy to destroy our environment and democracy in pursuit of a mythical utopia.

I sent her links to short videos by Cory Doctorow, Carol Cadwalladr, Karen Hao and Adam Becker as an antidote to the stuff saturating the mainstream press, and hopefully managed to sound positive about the future despite my inability to pretend. I trotted out the now well-worn “I’m hopeful but not optimistic”, which I probably learned from Cornel West, but I don’t think she believed it. I’m not sure I do either.

The only thing that really gives me hope is that I know there are people who are trying to make the world a better place, and there always will be. Someone said hope is an action and that really resonated with me. I used to think hope required faith in the probability of a positive outcome. Now I believe hope isn’t something I have, it’s something I do. I try to make the world a better place not because I expect it to happen, but because I want to be a person who tries to make the world a better place.

When Issam joined T4P there were 70 users of his app, mostly friends and family, so I suspect I was somewhere around user #75. By last month sign-ups had increased to 150,000, and in the week after the sale of TikTok US was finalized that number leapt from 150k to over 2.5 million.2

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with social media. I started an online discussion forum >20 years ago that is still going today so most of my social energy went into that community, but I’ve also spent enough time on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. to have a good feel for how they work (and maybe more importantly how they don’t work).

So far my experience has been different from any other social media app I’ve been on in the past 30 years for one specific reason: the blue check. From the beginning Issam gave my account a blue check icon to indicate that I am a “known individual”, because I was (unofficially) part of the team. So when the new users started flooding in, a lot of people followed me because I have that badge of respectability. As a result I have over 30k followers on UpScrolled—roughly 100x as many followers as I have on Instagram— despite having been on the latter for years.

As someone who has been chronically online for over 30 years and largely invisible to the huddled masses, it’s an interesting thing to get first-hand experience with the kinds of comments and assumptions people make about “blue checks” (a name often used in conjunction with ‘grifter’, ‘clout-chaser’, etc.) I’m described as having a “platform” now, where before I was just a person sharing my thoughts and opinions.

I’m not going to lie, UpScrolled has a long way to go to live up to the values Issam has outlined for the project. Not because he overpromised but because nobody could have predicted such a massive spike in users in such a short period of time, and some of the systems to manage these users and their content are not yet fully developed. I believe in Issam though, and in the need for the solution he’s building. So I’m all-in for now.

A lot of other stuff obviously happened this week but I want to keep this reasonably short and there’s a good chance I’ll write more before next Saturday. Meanwhile, check out my previous post on Antisemitism and download UpScrolled (IOS and Android only at the moment, sorry. Web app “coming soon”).

I should also note that I finished reading Selling Israel: Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara this morning and I took many notes, so there will likely be a post coming about that very soon. I haven’t decided what to read next but I have a big pile to choose from, so you’ll find out next week!

My opposition to antisemitism derives from my opposition to all forms of bigotry and hate, especially on the basis of immutable characteristics such as race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Thus I am also strongly opposed to anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim, anti-Black, anti-Christian, anti-Arab, and other bigotries, but for various historical reasons we don’t have special words for these.2

Of course as I have discussed before, ‘Jewish’ is used to describe an ethnicity, culture, and religion interchangeably. Thus where ‘anti-Black racism’ clearly implies racially targeted hate, ‘antisemitism’ is thought to describe hatred of Jewish people as such and as a whole, or some individual combination of Jewish ethnicity, culture, and religion, depending on context, audience and interpretation.

It is this fluid definition that enables accusations of ‘antisemitism’ against people who criticize the state of Israel. Israel is, after all, the only “Jewish state” in the world. So hating Israel, the argument goes, equates to hating Jews.

While I am strongly opposed to antisemitism, I am also strongly opposed to Zionism, which I understand to be a political ideology that entails the existence of a “Jewish state” in Palestine, and to its proponents, appropriately called Zionists. Not all Jews are Zionists, and not all Zionists are Jews. In fact most Zionists are Christians.

That said, pay attention to how and when Zionists conflate Israel and Jewishness and how and when they make distinctions. For example, if you say Israelis are terrible people you will be accused of antisemitism, as if ‘Israeli’ and ‘Jewish’ are synonyms. But if you say Israel is populated by Jewish supremacists you will be chided for not acknowledging that many Israelis are not Jewish.

My opposition to Zionism derives from my belief in democracy and egalitarianism, my belief that a “Jewish democracy” is an oxymoron, and my support for UN Resolution 194 that affirms the right of Palestinians who were expelled from their homes during the Nakba in 1948 have a right to return. I don’t support the extermination or expulsion of Jews in Palestine or anywhere, just an end to the apartheid system of governance and ongoing colonization and genocide.

One thing I will never do, however, is condemn a Palestinian, especially one who lives in Palestine, if they should fail to make the same careful distinction between ethnic, cultural, or religious Jewishness and Zionism that I make. Or for that matter if they should explicitly reject the distinction and blame “Jews” for their oppression. I can only guess what it would be like to be born and grow up in a territory occupied and regularly bombed by the “Jewish state”, by a military who wear yarmulkes and paint a giant star of David on their tanks, jets, and bombs, etc.

It’s a common refrain among Zionists to say that Palestinian children are “taught to hate Jews”, as if anyone would have to be taught to hate the people who periodically terrorize them, maim and kill their friends and family, keep them from traveling, restrict their access to food and medicine, etc. They’re being taught to hate alright, in the same way African and Native Americans were taught to hate white people.

I will continue to make the distinction myself though, as I think all people in the west should. We know there are many Jews (not enough, but many) who are not Zionists and who support the movement for Palestinian liberation, and our relative comfort and security means we are afforded the luxury of a more careful and nuanced analysis.

The highlight for me was probably meeting the epidemiologist and senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for congress in my state. But I got to meet many other people in the movement, some well-known and some not as well-known. Josh Paul, Greg Stoker, and Josephine Guilbeau were some of the “big name” activists I got to talk to. The latter two flew straight to Minneapolis after the event and were subsequently arrested for participating in anti-ICE protests.

Anyway there was a lot of good energy there. I also got to spend some more time with Issam Hijazi, the founder of the social media app UpScrolled that is taking the world by storm at the moment. I think that was the day he got 100k new users on UpScrolled (well over a million more have joined since). Regular readers may remember that Issam brought UpScrolled to the T4P incubator last summer, and he and I were on a panel discussing digital rights at ArabCon (shout out ) last fall.

I am still reading the same book I was two weeks ago1 because I’ve been slacking on my daily reading routine given the travel and stuff. I also haven’t watched or read a lot of stuff in this time, but one thing I did see was the film “Walled Off”, about a hotel founded by Banksy in the “West Bank”. It was a very moving and informative film, but it struck me as an overly sanitized, liberal Zionist type of project. What I think of as a “Rodney King” approach to resisting oppression. “Can’t we all just get along?” No, Rodney. I’m sorry, but there is no “getting along” with your oppressor that doesn’t amount to accepting (or at least tolerating) your subjugation.

Some time ago I watched a film called Co-Existence, My Ass! by an Israeli Jew who grew up (and still lives) in Neve Shalom, the only community in Israel that is built on the premise of Jews and Palestinians living together in harmony. The premise of the film is in the title. There is not (and cannot be) “co-existence” in Israel’s apartheid system, there is just a settler-colonial project and its indigenous victims.

“Liberal Zionism” (as I understand it) is the idea that there’s nothing inherently wrong with having a “Jewish democratic state” (despite the obvious fact that ‘Jewish’ implies an imbalance of rights and privileges that ‘democratic’ entails) in Palestine. Liberal Zionists thus oppose the occupation of Gaza and the “West Bank” areas of Palestine and openly criticize the apartheid, but do not acknowledge the Palestinian’s Right of Return to the homes they were driven from during the Nakba in 1948.

Of course democracy continues to erode in the United States and the genocide in Palestine continues as the “leaders of the free world” plan their seaside resorts, but we keep going because the alternative is doing nothing, and that isn’t an option.

If you haven’t joined UpScrolled, go ahead and do that now. It’s kind of the wild west due to the aforementioned sudden, massive growth, but it will settle in time. At the very least it is one of the only social media apps not owned by an evil tech billionaire. It’s available for iPhone and Android, web app “coming soon”. I’m @tom there, but you can also find important Palestinian voices like @IamBisan and @MosabAbuToha.

Not being Jewish or Palestinian, it wasn’t inevitable. I have no “skin in the game”. I had to decide to make this cause the focus of my life two years ago. I am glad I did for many reasons, foremost among them that I have had the chance to meet some great people and gain a much deeper appreciation for other cultures and societies. It also gives me a lot of context for understanding the political waters we are swimming in and something to keep my brain from exploding in a hundred different directions.

So while my focus remains centrally on Palestine, especially given Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza (having violated the so-called “ceasefire” at least 875 times since October, killing hundreds of Palestinians) I try to keep up with many other important and related causes and issues. This week is no exception.

As it has been for the past two years, the majority of my time this past week was spent on work for Tech for Palestine. I mentioned in my last post that we are going through a massive reorganization, and that has really ramped up. It can sometimes feel like all the administrative work is time that could be better spent doing more direct advocacy, but I believe we are building an infrastructure that will ultimately enable us to have much greater impact for the movement. That’s what keeps me going, anyway.

Here are the other things that got my attention this week:

1. I read Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism for the 3rd time (it’s very thin!) and it still resonates as hard as ever. The world lost a brilliant mind when he died.

2. I finished reading We Are Not Numbers (a fantastic collection of short essays and poems by young Gazans, written between 2014-2024) and started reading Selling Israel: Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara, by Harriet Malinowitz. (Side note: if you have the means, please support Mondoweiss.)

3. I bought a map of historic Palestine from Paliroots. It’s cool but admittedly much smaller than I thought it would be and pretty wrinkled because it was shipped flat in a floppy envelope. Still cool though.

   

4. I read a number of deep and frightening articles about the tech industry. Here’s a small representative sample:

   1. Carole Cadwalladr’s On Power (and the accompanying video) from her excellent Substack How to Survive the Broligarchy.

   2. Stargate LLC: An American AI Project. Kind of. A bone-chilling expose of Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s plans to take over the world in another excellent Substack, The Drey Dossier. Particularly relevant to me because I live between two planned data center developments, one of which is a Stargate project.

5. The Dean of Freedom: 45 Years in a Cell Could Not Break Nael Barghouti is an amazing profile of a man I had somehow never heard of despite two years of immersion pro-Palestine activism written by one of my favorite authors.

6. I watched the film Arna’s Children, recommended by a friend in Palestine. Arna was a Jewish Israeli activist who started a theatre for Palestinian kids in Jenin, a refugee camp in the West Bank. The story centers on those kids, some of whom grew up to be resistance fighters and even suicide bombers. Tragic but beautiful.

7. On one of my favorite podcasts, The Tea w/ Myriam Francois, Myriam’s guest was an American lawyer named Eva Golinger who has spent decades immersed in Venezuelan politics (including 10 years working in Hugo Chavez’s administration, to speak about the American kidnapping of Maduro. Later in the week Mehdi Hasan interviewed her for Zeteo, which is also worth watching.

8. I finally watched Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalisation. Curtis is a British journalist and documentarian who has made some truly exceptional films. The first one I saw was The Century of the Self and it was transformative. This one is just as good. It counterposes the rise of Trump and the turmoil in the Middle East starting back in the 70’s, and maps the military-tech complex along the way. Fascinating.

9. I posted my first-ever video on social media (on Upscrolled, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn), in which I introduce the amazing book Perfect Victims: and the Politics of Appeal, by Mohammed El Kurd. I also learned (or maybe I was reminded) that the viral video of Jacob stealing a house was Mohammed’s house, and it was his twin sister Muna speaking in the video. Just crazy.

10. On her podcast Beyond Israelism, Simone Zimmerman, the young Jewish-American who was featured in the amazing film Israelism, had Yuli Novak as her guest to talk about how Israeli society has become completely genocidal. Yuli is an Israeli Jew and head of the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem, which does incredible work. Two of the reports they released in the past two years, one about Israel’s prison network (Welcome to Hell) and one acknowledging that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza (Our Genocide), are genuinely paradigm-shifting.

11. I had a chance to see the amazing documentary film Earth’s Greatest Enemy with my sister, and we got to meet the amazing human who made the film, Abby Martin, during a Q&A after the event. (This actually happened in December but I’m not sure I’ve mentioned it and it bears mentioning.)

12. Of course the widely disseminated video of the murder of Renee Good by ICE (not to mention the 25 deaths in ICE detention centers in 2025) and the Trump administration doubling down on rationalizing it is just another terrifying example of an apparently rapid descent into totalitarianism in the US.

13. I just got off a webinar on the topic of ‘Pinkwashing’ that was really informative. Pinkwashing is when Israel sows hostility and distrust of Palestinians by portraying Israeli society as thoroughly open and accepting of queerness (it’s not) and Palestinian society as uniquely homophobic (they are not). The webinar was hosted by the founders of the T4P project “Pink Thawra”.

14. Lastly, a federal appeals court overturned the ruling that Columbia student protestor Mahmoud Khalil’s detention in immigration facility was unconstitutional, paving the way for him to be detained again and ultimately deported for daring to organize against a genocide.

So yeah, there’s a lot going on and it can be incredibly disheartening, but like I said it helps a lot to have a “north star” whatever that is for you. Almost all the horrible stuff happening is interconnected and multifaceted, so while none of us can change everything, all of us can change something. I plan to die trying.

In the two years since I started writing here I have stayed mostly on the topic of the genocide and Palestine more broadly, and that is not going to change any time soon. At the same time there’s a lot of interrelated things happening in the world that deserve my attention too, especially in my country (the USA). So I decided to start writing a weekly post that covers the range of things I’m paying attention to.

Having worked in tech for >20 years (and working full-time with Tech for Palestine), the confluence of free-market fundamentalists, Christian nationalists, and tech broligarchs that are in control of the largest military in history is genuinely terrifying. The US has always been imperialistic, but we at least had a broadly shared national delusion of being a state that champions peace, freedom, and democracy.

Most of my week was consumed by a major reorganization we are undergoing at T4P. A lot more will be said about it in the future, but the tldr; is that we’re decentralizing the functions so we can utilize a lot more people and have more impact, faster.

Here’s a few other things of note:

1. A fellow member of the Freedom Advocacy Network, which holds weekly meetings to hear speakers talk about the activism/advocacy they’re doing, spoke about her recent trip to the West Bank with an activist tour group called “Come and See, Go and Tell”. It hits different to hear someone’s first-hand experience.

2. I saw the great film Jenin, Jenin by the recently deceased filmmaker Mohammad Bakri. A stark portrayal of life in Gaza during a previous ‘war’, and a clear refutation of the idea that the genocide started in 2023.

3. I finished reading Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco. It’s a super depressing but important book about the “sacrifice zones” in the US. The many areas, from reservations to urban slums, where Americans have been left for dead by the neoliberal economic policies of the past 40 years.

4. I started reading We Are Not Numbers, by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey. It is an anthology of short essays and poems from emerging writers in Gaza, written between 2015 and 2023. Almost all are between 2-3 pages long and reflect the experience of a young person trying to find normalcy under brutal occupation.

5. Our government attacked a sovereign state, abducted their leader and exfiltrated him to the United States for a trial. It is unclear to me how a foreign national is subject to our laws, but little that this administration does makes sense to me.

6. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the organization that provides mean, stupid bigots the opportunity to cosplay as warriors, murdered another civilian this week in Minnesota. The booming anti-immigrant industry continues to expand toward the Republican dream of a Christian nationalist police state.

7. The tech industry continues to disappoint, with a handful of extraordinarily rich and powerful people going all-in on fantasies of robot slaves and terraforming Mars, willing and able to sacrifice all life on earth in the process, making armageddon seem much more like a question of when than if.

I could go on and on but I’ll keep it there. I might continue to post deep-dives or more lengthy single-topic commentary a couple times a month as I have for the past couple of years, but I will at least post a snapshot like this each week.

Just to set your expectations:

I have mostly written about Palestine for the past two years, which is to say I write about genocide, empire, settler-colonialism, apartheid, white supremacy, anti-Palestinian racism and the US military-industrial complex.

I could not have told you the first thing about the Middle East on October 6th, 2023. Certainly not that ‘near east’, ‘middle east’, and ‘far east’ were all descriptions of colonized territories relative to London during the time of the British empire. It’s amazing what you can learn from dozens of books, hundreds of hours of video, and extensive engagement with people from (and in) the region.

I am not Palestinian or Jewish, and I don’t believe in any god(s) or adhere to a religion. I avoid political labels for myself, but if I were forced to pick one today it would be ‘Liberal-Socialist’, which has been described as a variety of Democratic Socialism.

I believe in democracy and I understand that Zionism, the political ideology that entails Jewish supremacy in Palestine, is incompatible with democracy. Thus I identify as ‘anti-Zionist’. I also don’t believe in hierarchies of human value or meritocracy; I believe everyone has the same right to food, shelter, healthcare, and self-determination, so ‘pro-Palestinian’ but not ‘anti-Jewish’.

I support the BDS movement, the dismantling of the apartheid state of Israel, and the Palestinian Right of Return.

I support the idea of the United Nations but I know it is far from democratic in its current form, e.g. it is grossly unfair that the most powerful states have veto power. I believe international laws and agreements (such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) is the only way we can hope to get along without war.

I worked in tech for 20 years but for the past two years I have worked full-time doing advocacy work at Tech for Palestine. That said, I probably hate the tech industry more than you do. From Cory Doctorow’s “Enshittification” to Karen Hao’s “Empire of AI”, Gil Duran’s “Nerd Reich” to Yanis Varoufakis’ “Technofeudalism”, all of which are implicitly (or explicitly) referenced in Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s “End Times Fascism”, there is a lot to hate. I’m still a huge fan of technology, just not this stuff.

I try to post a couple times a month but sometimes it’s a little more and sometimes a little less. I don’t have any plans to try to monetize my writing any time soon. I also try to respond to all comments and I’m happy to engage with respectful disagreement or answer questions when I can, but I’m equally happy to block trolls.

Thanks for reading, I hope you find it valuable.