It’s unfortunate that expressing solidarity with the Israeli public and Zionist Jews is considered a full endorsement of Benjamin Netanyahu and all that his government does. A Zionist is simply someone who believes in Israel’s right to exist as a nation that is a homeland for the Jews. Many Zionists — especially before 10/7 — actively supported a Palestinian State, including many peace activists who are among the dead and living Israeli hostages.

American Jews have the luxury of ample geography at their disposal so they are sometimes anti-Zionist, but this is not as common as it appears given their frequent tokenization at protests.

In the West, especially Great Britain, the United States, and Canada, the protests had gotten so out of hand that completely random Jews were being physically and verbally attacked and hunted in fairly terrorizing ways — well documented on video. The US Ivy League, including Harvard itself, had become such a place of distress for Jewish faculty and students that letters were sent and ignored, and people did not feel physically safe. In London, the protests became a source for posting swastikas and saying Hitler should have finished the job.

I am British, went to college in the US, and my high schools in Paris and Abu Dhabi were American — I have an allegiance to Great Britain and the United States that is foundational. Attacking random Jews in these places, who for the most part were not even protesting or expressing support for Israel, does not speed up the ceasefire and save the children of Palestine.

Unfortunately Western protest mobs were so over-excited by the protest culture itself that they completely lost the plot of the purpose of protesting — allegedly ceasefire — and went off on wild tangents, claiming things like “We don’t want no two state, we want 48,” meaning they don’t want Israel to exist as a nation at all. The swastikas and the defacement of monuments and calls for another Shoah (Holocaust) have been highly disturbing, yet ubiquitous. Apparently this is now the new normal.

A lot of voices that got hold of microphones and clout on college campuses did not convey a unified anti-war message demanding an immediate ceasefire — which is why Harvard, MIT, and Columbia ended up in Senate hearings, and why so many members of the general public grew exhausted with protests in places like London where it just meant vandalizing banks, Jewish schools, and Jewish places of business. None of this is saving a single child in Gaza.

Actually, in the West, writing to your representative in Parliament or Congress en masse could have possibly effected policy change — but people were too high on screaming in the streets. The unified call of ceasefire got very muddied by Jew hatred. I felt the need to express that you can be pro-Israeli public, anti-Israeli government, and pro-ceasefire all at the same time. The Israeli hostages’ families were being beaten up in the streets of Tel Aviv by Netanyahu’s police for calling for a ceasefire and an end to the war. When I say Am Israel Chai, I mean them and all the rest of the Israeli public.

Anybody who actually has Palestinian friends knows that Hamas terrorizes the people in Gaza — physically beating, violently attacking, and threatening them constantly. Most Palestinians are afraid to complain about Hamas, yet still there are multiple documented instances of this, even on video: old women, middle-aged men screaming and crying in fury, then quickly being silenced by those around them.

Hamas has terror tunnels longer than the London Underground running throughout schools and hospitals — this is not a conspiracy theory. Is it not strange that Hamas did not offer these 300km-plus tunnels to Palestinians for refuge? People are crying for Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, who Gazans hate for bringing this war upon them. They are billionaires. How did that happen? UNRWA has been exposed as a proven terrorist front — there are documented dossiers sent to Rome about this by Hillel Neuer of UN Watch in Geneva. Hamas is Iran-funded and directed. It is Iran who started the war.

“From the River to the Sea” means the elimination of Israel completely. If you enter Israel via tunnels and paragliders, rape women and murder children, and then celebrate it as resistance — a powerful enemy will respond. Everybody says 10/7 was acceptable as war; well then, so is the response. The resultant deaths of children in the response are not excusable, but a larger war including Yemen’s Houthis and Lebanon’s Hezbollah is the dream of Iran and Hamas. Hezbollah and Houthis are also Iranian-backed.

There are 57 Muslim nations — some hell-bent on destroying the only Jewish one. Israel has been bombed constantly by Hezbollah since October 2023. Hamas told Palestinians “Your job is to die” — on camera, broadcast by Qatar’s Al Jazeera, a Doha psyop posing as real information for the sole purpose of incitement and chaos.

Jerusalem belonged to the Jews thousands of years before Islam existed. Jews are indigenous to the land — Jewish artifacts which are thousands of years old have been found at archaeological sites in Israel. Jews lived throughout the Middle East, but thanks to over 150 Muslim pogroms against them, Jews were successfully reduced to 0.02% of the world population. It was the Islamic Empire that originally forced Jews to wear yellow badges.

People need to rethink this war and which party starts it every time. Palestinians have been kidnapping Jewish babies since the alleged “Nakba.” You cannot repeatedly start wars and then complain about the response. The entire world has been turned upside down by this inversion of victim and aggressor — and while the loss of children’s lives is always regrettable and heartbreaking, this is absolutely more reason why this conflict needs to be objectively understood and dissected in order to understand the source of the mass misery, with the goal of preventing more global madness.