it’s october 7th. you hear about the attack by seeing people you followed glorifying the terrorist attack—a massacre, a pogrom—as victory & justified resistance, glorifying a terrorist group that was founded with the explicit intent to kill your entire people
you make a post in which you make it clear you support palestinians and oppose the ways israel has wronged them, explaining that the terrorist group is still not good. you know you will probably get some flacc from the pro-Hamas side, but naively underestimate how much.
you get thousands of notifications on that one post, the majority of them hateful comments.
some of the response is positive. multiple messages thank you for the post, expressing bafflement that it’s controversial.
a few Israelis are upset at the loaded language in your post, but explain their problems with it civilly. you called Israel “apartheid”. they ask you what apartheid laws Israel has. you admit you honestly don’t know.
your inbox is flooded with anonymous hate from anti-Israel leftists.
over the course of a few weeks you have received hundreds of death threats, a dozen rape threats. people accuse you of being pro-genocide. you’re a literal Nazi. you’re racist, you thirst for the blood of Palestinians. you’re brainwashed by propaganda, a shill for The Zionist Entity. a few of the hate messages are from literal Neo-Nazis; the overwhelming majority are from leftists, many of them queer.
you are considering suicide.
you see footage of the october 7th attacks. you see footage of the bombings in gaza. you see footage of a Jewish man being murdered at an anti-Israel rally.
a popular creator you follow posts in support of an antisemitic hate group that masquerades as a Jewish organization. this organization regularly posts blood libel and other antisemitic rhetoric, works with groups that are even more explicitly antisemitic, including celebrating October 7th, holocaust inversion, blood libel, “Khazar theory” and others. more than one of the orgs they work with is pro-Putin.
your former roommate liked the post.
graffiti appears on a street you frequent that says “#freepalestine” and “end settler colonialism”
the boyfriend of the friend you spent most of the summer with makes his first post about the war. it’s a reposted comic that mocks and downplays the october 7th attack.
you doubt he’ll be receptive to criticism. he’s shared leftist memes about “monied elites” pulling all the strings and evangelicals being modern day “pharisees” in the past, and getting him to understand why that was antisemitic was like herding cats. you try anyway.
another of his Jewish friends also pushes back. he smugly dismisses her, tells her she’s falling for Zionist propaganda and uses several antisemitic tropes. you go off on him. he just deletes your comment.
you give up. you’re done. you block him.
you see anti-Israel posters and billboards around town
you mention what happened with the guy you went off on to his girlfriend—the friend you’ve grown very close to, who you’ve been listening to as she unburdens her fears for the future and complains about her bf’s BS over the last year. she doesn’t respond to you.
a friend of a friend shares posts tokenizing fringe groups that spread blood libel and have collaborated with holocaust deniers. you know they don’t know what you know, so you explain what those groups are. they seem somewhat receptive, apologize, and take it down
the next day they share several more posts that dip into antisemitic tropes. you mention this to your mutual friend, that you’re worried about them being radicalized. you’re not sure how receptive they’ll be to continued criticism
you have a confrontation with the foaf. in the meantime they’ve shared even more antisemitic posts. they say they didn’t mean to cause you distress but instead of stopping they effectively block you.
the “end settler colonialism” vandalism has been counter-vandalized with the words “commie propaganda” in place of “settler colonialism”. you don’t know if this is an improvement.
a month passes. the friend whose bf you went off on still hasn’t spoken to you. you see she shared a post defending an SJP chapter that posted Nazi cartoon caricatures of Jews repurposed in “Anti-Zionist” memes. you unfriend her on all social media platforms but you can’t bring yourself to block her number.
you see a friend of someone whose couch you surfed when you were homeless harassing Jewish celebrities with “Free Palestine” comments. you block them.
you’ve lost count of how many people you’ve unfollowed or blocked, or who’ve blocked you. friends, content creators.
when a friend takes an unusually long time to respond you worry if it’s because of your posts about antisemitism.
most of the podcasts, youtube channels, and other content creators you regularly engaged with no longer feel safe. you wonder who will be next
a couple friends wish you a happy hanukkah. you don’t celebrate much aside from lighting the hanukkiah and making some latkes.
you see posts about a destroyed chabad menorah, antisemitic comments on Jewish celebrities’ Hanukkah posts.
your neighborhood is covered in pro-Palestine & anti-Israel posters. some are seemingly innocuous, some are JVP “not in our name” posters. some call for intifada. “globalize the intifada” “Zionists fuck off!” “solidarity means attack!”
a man kills himself shouting “free palestine”. you learn about his suicide by seeing posts from several popular accounts you followed glorifying it.
you follow a bunch of jewish accounts on social media and commiserate with them about everything happening
your jewish friends post screenshots of the dead man’s antisemitic, pro-Hamas views. you look at his reddit and find even more horrific shit: anti-Ukraine posts. mocking Zelensky. “elites” are “lizard people”; the only named individual he calls a lizard person is Jewish. you start to notice a pattern: a lot of the people he dislikes just so happen to be jews.
several people you know share a post glorifying this man’s suicide. most are acquaintances, one is someone incredibly important to you.
you wonder how they would respond to your suicide.
you tell the close friend that shared this post how it scares you. you show them the receipts of the man’s antisemitism. their response is a single sentence. they didn’t know about the antisemitism.
you notice none of your irl friends, even your closest ones, interact with your posts about antisemitism. you are able to vent to a couple friends, but no one has reach out to you
you try not to read into it. you try not to take it personally.
you haven’t slept well in months. you’ve always been an insomniac but not like this. you’re not sleeping until 4am, 6am, even 9am. even when you get to bed at a decent hour and get a full night’s rest it takes you hours to get out of bed.
a few weeks go by. the friend with the single sentence response shares a post saying they’re excited and proud to join a group to help palestinians. you’re excited and proud for them.
a couple days later, they share a post about a fundraiser to help a palestinian family get out of gaza. you note to yourself this is a much more effective & less concerning form of activism than the pro-suicidal antisemite post.
your friend shares another post about the fundraiser. it’s a joint post between their group and another group.
you open the other group’s page
the page is just a wall of signs from rallies. you swipe through one after another: “from the river to the sea”, “by any means necessary”, justifying/denying the atrocities of october 7th, calling for violent revolution. anything done in the name of resistance can’t be terrorism, all Israelis are terrorists. Jews aren’t indigenous; they’re white colonizers. holocaust inversion. other vile, thinly veiled violent rhetoric
you feel sick to your stomach imagining talking to your friend about it.
you already feel like you’re burdening the few friends you can talk to about this. you already feel like you think about it too much, talk about it too much. but you can’t not think about it; it affects every aspect of your life.
you’ve filtered out relevant keywords on more than one social media site to avoid the worst of it. some still manages to leak through.
there isn’t a single friend you regularly interact with that you don’t fear the moment when they will switch from listening to your concerns to seeing you as the evil zionist or indoctrinated hasbaranik they’ve been warned about.
it’s not an irrational fear. it keeps happening. you knew it would then, and you were powerless to do anything about it before, and you continue to be as it happens again and again.
you don’t know what to do about any of it.
