Member-only story
I Am Not Important
And this isn’t about me
An Israeli spectator sport
I have no relatives who are Palestinian. I have no Arab or Muslim relatives. My connection to Palestine is only incidental because I once supported Israel until I saw what Israel was doing to the people it occupied — until I could see how I’d been lied to.
In 2014, through social media, I saw how over 2,000 people in Gaza had been killed, around 500 of them children. The world stopped for a moment to rubber neck the human rights disaster and then got on with its business. Young people marched to the fence separating Gaza from Israel in 2018. Hamas certainly had no part in it and it was purposefully peaceful. In the great tradition of Ghandi and Martin Luther King Junior their protest was non-violent.
Many people don’t appreciate that non-violent protest can actually have violent intent. Martin Luther King deliberately confronted the white supremicists knowing that violence would ensue. He did this to show how beautiful the oppressed are and how ugly are the oppressors. He made no attempt to convert the thugs, his audience were the white people of conscience who put pressure on their government to change.
My world view was that the world would change its mind if it appreciated how ugly injustice was. I imagined there was always…
