I hate airing my private thoughts publicly. I prefer to leave that to “the art”, and, importantly, I assume that nobody should need to know or care what I have to say about most things. And this holds, except that I have relevant personal experience about a current issue, and it may as well be added in to what we are hearing about that. Maybe it will help someone understand something.
I wrote this and shared it with my mailing list subscribers in Jan, and feel the need to make it public following the release of private Whatsapp chats in which “Jewish Australian creatives” spent time plotting how to get various pro-Palestinian people sacked from their jobs, etc. This is grotesque, but not unique (everyone who’s tried to get me sacked via back-channels was a goy).
This introduction could go on for paragraphs, but the topic is so polarising, I have no doubt people will absolutely misconstrue what I’m saying, no matter what. They will assume (incorrectly) I hate certain people, or assume (incorrectly) I hate a completely different group of people. There’s probably no writer skilful enough to thread the needle and make themselves fully understood by everyone.
Sharing this publicly is probably a mistake. So here goes.
Above is a drawing of “my 2023”, a generally nice year studded with injuries, illnesses and deaths and infected by Israel’s war crimes.
Some nice friends have reached out since Oct 7 to ask how I’m going. Here is how I’m going:
Some of you reading know me personally, some don’t. Either way, you may not know I come from a heavily Zionist Jewish community; went to Zionist schools and Zionist youth groups as a kid. I was never comfortable with any of it, but also never deeply questioned the basic assumptions and claims it made. It was the water I swam in.
It took me a while to realise what a different upbringing I had to most people. One of my teachers told us young teens a story I cannot possibly repeat about an Arab and a donkey. Another of my teachers went on to be the focal character in Louis Theroux’s documentary The Ultra Zionists (good show, watch it).
When you are a child indoctrinated into a system of thought, you can do as I did: slough it off at age 18 like top layers of skin, and go forth into the world, meeting different kinds of people with other points of view which make more sense to you. Hopefully you form a coherent set of beliefs over time.
You can do this, but the old ideas are still there — not on that skin you shed, but deep inside, at your core. They were put there, deliberately and not, by your family, friends, teachers, spiritual leaders. They don’t remove easily!
They were born of horrifying fear. Justified fear. My grandparents kept ingots hidden in their home, assuming they would one day have to escape quickly, as they did during the Holocaust. This is common.
I was told flat-out from an early age that people like you (non-Jewish people) were not to be trusted. That in the end you’d betray us, even our non-Jewish husbands or wives. That only other Jews would protect me when shit went down — and shit, for certain, would go down. That a Jew is a Jew before he is anything else — and that meant supporting Israel, and one day moving there.
From Tristian and the Gaza Strip, 2014
Everyone I went to school with was taught these things; all the things you’re hearing now from Israeli politicians, the IDF, Israeli media:
we are under constant attack
Arabs are animals, not people
there’s no such thing as Palestine
Some of you are surprised to hear this stuff said openly, but to me it’s a top 40 of classic summer hits.
They are not speaking to you (well-meaning Western numbnuts). You are immaterial. Like any high control group (or authoritarian political force), they are speaking past you, to the people they’ve already got ‘locked in’. And to the Christian right who dig this kind of thing.
Not everybody I knew as a kid “went forth into the world” — many remain in their Jewish communities, consciously holding these beliefs.
Some are proud of them. You have something in you long enough, you’re kind of forced to be proud of it, I guess, even if it’s your own fears and hatreds. I have to actively “think differently” in order to not be guided by these instincts. They are in. there. deep.
I always thought I was a person who opposes bullies and nationalists and authoritarians and warmongers, so I oppose these ones as well.
“Fuck Bush”.
“Fuck offshore detention”.
“Fuck the Israeli government”.
Andreas Heldal-Lund recently died. I admired him very much. He helped people escape from Scientology by putting information out into the public and being kind to people in private. I first learned about that cult from his website, Operation Clambake, in the early days of the internet.
In his spirit, I suggest:
– learning about why people think the way they do
– not dehumanising anybody as part of your response to what’s happening
– speaking out where it’s possible, in ways that might reach beyond your bubble. Because no matter who you are, you are in a bubble.
“I care when I see injustices. I don’t like lies and fraud. I’m especially sensitive to lies and deceit that few oppose because there is a threat connected to doing so.”
— Andreas Heldal-Lund (1964-2023)
I wish to correct an error in the image at top: clearly the footy game I attended in August of 2023 was Hawthorn v. Brisbane, not Hawthorn v. Collingwood.