I generally wake up quite early to walk to work. I’m often out before rush hour, and on my route, I pass a specific intersection lined with plain concrete road barriers. Normally, this would not be significant in any shape or form. But for the last few months, messages have emerged there; they have provided updates on the Palestinian death toll in Gaza.
Zionism is genocide, the writing will read, 15,000 dead kids.
As the toll increased, so too did the numbers on the barrier. Some mornings, I’d arrive too late, and the words were already scrubbed out, replaced instead with a sign warning of fresh paint. I witnessed the cycle as it repeated: new words, followed by fresh grey coats. Then, again new messages would emerge, followed by erasure, and back and forth for a few months.
I watched the numbers as they rose. I watched as they disappeared.
Now, the graffiti has stopped entirely. I imagine the police reprimanded the person responsible, or else the city implemented some kind of punitive strategy to discourage the constant cycle. But though the words have now long gone, the message was effectively communicated. I’ve already seen it. And I know others have, too.
The flash of this idea, thousands of dead kids, followed by a smooth, blank canvas, is an image I know will stay with me for some time. Dead kids, then nothing. Dead kids, then normalcy. Again and again, every day on my walk to work.
This switch, a message of intense, dramatic darkness followed by something so normal and innocuous and plain, is an image that unfortunately encapsulates the 2020s very well. An ugly but emotional message, followed by something that feels civilized, but unfortunately only accentuates what we are currently choosing to prioritize: there is a desire to preserve normalcy and the status quo, even if it means the concealment of one of the biggest tragedies in modern history. We are living through a deeply shameful part of human history. But through the clash of propaganda, the truth still emerges.
In the past week, the ICC declared Israel an illegal apartheid state, guilty of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinians. Netanyahu has been declared a war criminal and a warrant has been issued for his arrest. But the world goes on, as it has for years. The West, particularly America, refuses to accept the ruling, though they are unable to provide a coherent explanation as to why not. So Netanyahu is instead welcomed by the White House Administration, his lies rewarded by standing ovations. We are forced to watch Biden and Harris brag about how much they care about democracy and human rights, while doing nothing to stop this increasing death toll. Harris declares that burning American flags is wrong. But the burning of human beings is somehow another story. The burning of children is allowed to continue.
There’s a concrete barrier in my head. Dead kids. No, nothing here but grey paint. Dead kids. No, keep this thing clean. I don’t know anything about any dead kids.
Sometimes I try to think about how we got here, or at least I try to remember when I first learned of Israel and Palestine. I want to understand how this war was first presented to me. I wish I could watch recordings of my youth to remember all the details. I wish I could find my old textbooks, so that I could remember every detail of the framing.
What I do remember is learning the word Zionism. I remember sitting in my high school history class, absorbing information from a former history teacher. He was an insecure man who was for some reason over-sensitive to Nazi jokes, and ended up sleeping with a few of my classmates after they turned 18. One of the major units he taught was World War II; I remember seeing the term Zionism appear in my textbook. I wrote it in a vocab bank I drew up for myself for finals. I remember the definition that was provided: it was described as an ideology that stood for the belief that Jews deserve their own homeland.
Do you believe, this framing seemed to ask, that Jews deserve a safe place to live? After all the horrors of the Holocaust we’ve just read about, will you really say no to this? Or do you, instead, believe Jews don’t deserve a homeland? Will you deny them a home, after so much pain and cruelty?
Of course not, I thought, in my 17-year-old brain. Everyone deserves a home.
But I was not taught that the land was never theirs. I did not learn about the Nakba, nor did anyone tell me that in order for Zionism to be fulfilled, other people’s lives and land would have to be forcibly taken. No one said that thousands of Palestinian men, women, children, and infants would have to be sacrificed in the name of Jewish safety; and that, in fact, that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine had already begun long ago. No one said that we would not be allowed to ask for it to be stopped. That excuses would be made to exterminate them. No one said that for this home, the Israeli government would not stop their destruction until all the Palestinians were gone.
What I was told was that the Israel-Palestine issue was a very emotional, very complicated war. Because of how complicated everyone always insisted it was, I was persuaded to believe that it was too hard for my dumb brain to comprehend.
I know now that I should have asked more questions, and that I should have tried to learn more. But I was 17. We were all 17. When we all obtained our first instruction on this war, we were all just kids, and did not understand how to tell that the information given to us was wrong.
I don’t actually blame my high school for this. It was a great school, and aside from my pervy history teacher, I know most of my teachers worked very hard to provide me with the best education that they could. Perv or not, I don’t even actually blame that history teacher either, or at least I don’t blame him for anything other than being a perv. But he, like my other teachers, and like all of the schools that taught us, was never provided with the correct information either. The information was obscured from us. They, and I, were instructed to absorb history curriculums as it was written by the winners.
I had always been warned that this was something that could happen with history. I just didn’t know that I was living through an example.
It is a frightening to come to terms with the fact that our own educational institutions could have been misled. It means that we may have all been given a framing of Zionism that was presented in this light. We were essentially taught that this land was destined to be stolen, and that any beliefs to the contrary would always be reframed as anti-Semitic.
Dead kids. No, nothing to see here.
Dead kids. No, we are the West. This is a civilized place.
When we learned about the Holocaust in high school, many of us could not understand how such an awful thing could have happened. What about all the civilians of the world? we wondered. Hitler and the Nazis aside, why didn’t anyone say anything? Why didn’t anyone stop it?
I would have intervened, many of us liked to think and liked to claim. What a shame that I was not there. I would have spoken up. If only I were there. If only.
But now we are. And now we know. We didn’t stop this, and if we had lived back then, we would not have been able to stop it either. We would have been fed excuses, lies, denials. And if we had been able to see past that? If we had asked questions, if we had tried to challenge the propaganda fed to us?
Then we would have been deliberately gaslit, forced to struggle against those that attempted to disguise the truth. We would have been told there is no Holocaust. The Jews are not dying. And while this was drawn out, the deaths would have gone on.
It’s awful to come to terms with this. It’s a devastating thing to learn about humans. But now that we know, things must change. This is our humanity, and this must be held onto at all costs.
Thank you for reading. I write a new essay every week. If you like my writing and want to support me, please consider subscribing to my newsletter or sharing with others you think will like my work.
Articles and writers I’ve been reading on Substack:
China reconciles 14 Palestinian factions with each other by Ismaele
The World Court has cleared the fog hiding western support for Israel’s crimes by Jonathan Cook
Biden Declares We're "Not At War Anywhere." What? by Ken Klippenstein
Leaked UN report: Israeli war has killed 366 UN staff and family members as Netanyahu prepares to address Congress by Ryan Grim
I Fixed the New York Times' Pro-Israel Headlines on Gaza by Assal Rad
A Reckless Farewell: Notes on Biden's Strange Exit by Jessica Reed Kraus
Your history was way ahead of what we were taught. I never saw the word Zionism until well into adulthood. But then, I didn’t learn of concentration camps for Japanese Americans on the west coast until my late ‘30’s, and then it came from a popular novel, “Snow Falling on Cedars”. I asked my mother who lived through WWII if she’d known about it. Living in rural NE she’d been completely unaware. The control over the narrative was absolute. They lost that control thanks to independent journalism. I did used to wonder how in the past there seemed to be no disagreement on the narrative, just straightforward facts, apparently the “truth”. I was in HS during the Vietnam War and there was so much upheaval I couldn’t understand how we’d lost all that certainty of the past. My hometown newspaper even explained how Kent State was necessary because of the threat to the National Guard. The only time we had discussions about anything was my senior year in a sociology class. The vice principal started sitting in on our classes, interrupting to tell stories of his wounds in WWII. Needless to say, the teacher was only there for one year. He didn’t tell us what to think , only provided the sole space for us to discuss and form our own thoughts. That was certainly not to be tolerated.