Deconstructing my internalized antisemitism alongside my pro-Palestinian rage

And why we need to make room for both

A few important notes before we begin:

• When I talk about my “internalized antisemitism,” I am not talking about my intentional desire to harm Jewish people or that I am a bad person. I am talking about all the ways that I have not been present and aware of the history and plight of the Jewish people in our shared humanity. That is something I regret and am working on.

• We are witnessing a war that is affecting the people in Israel and Palestine and also so many of our loved ones. I do not care about my feelings so much right now. When I say this, I don’t mean to deny myself the right to feel. It just means that my emotions are committed to something more important, which is to be uncomfortable so that I can hold others in their pain.

• While I show up imperfectly, I will disappoint you. Not because I am trying to be a bad person but because I am ignorant and operate under different paradigms. This doesn’t mean that you need to show me grace because you don’t owe me anything. This just means that I will make missteps that are ignorant to the experiences that you may be having.

• As a result of all of the above, my education will never end. My willingness to remain humble to other people’s truths will never end. In that process, my only job is to expand my capacity for discomfort in holding multiple conflicting truths for the sake of our shared humanity. Sometimes that involves an unconventional approach of ignoring my own truth to honor other people’s truths first and foremost. Especially under circumstances like this, that feels most congruent for me.

So.

I have been speaking up about the war about over the past week. It takes the majority of my energy because I cannot look away from the images and videos of children being killed. I feel this compulsive need to witness their reality.

Some people may try to pathologize this choice and call it an effect of survivor’s guilt, but I am not interested in psychoanalyzing myself right now. (I typically am, just not right now.) Whatever the reason is, I am tending to my frenzied need to know more and educate myself more and be present for the people around me.

I have also been speaking to close friends and acquaintances and teachers around how I can show up most effectively.

Because of my own paradigms and my own sense of justice, I identified with the Palestinians’ oppression and their need to fight for their freedom. I see all the ways my Palestinian friends and their families have felt violated in unimaginable ways.

In that spirit, I found a need to amplify Jewish voices for Palestinian lives instead of doing all the talking, so I did. I did not realize how hurtful that was going to be for the Jewish people, again because of my ignorance. I got a lot of aggressive comments and messages, most of which I ignored and blocked.

Except one person.

He had written a very long comment about how I was posting “abhorrent nonsense” and how my “moral equivalency between Israel and Palestinian terrorists is disgusting” and telling me, “shame on you.”

It was very similar to what everyone else was saying, but there was something about this one that made me feel like he had been following my work for a long time. There was something about the way he shared his thoughts that indicated to me that my voice was important to him.

There was something about this comment that, behind the seething anger and the scathing language, there was a lot of hurt that he needed me to see.

I just followed that gut instinct.

After a few exchanges, he agreed to get on a call with me. We had originally planned to speak for 30 minutes, but the call ran for 1 hour and 40 minutes.

Before the call, my brain prepared for the worst case scenario. I thought, he’s probably going to keep interrupting me and correcting me.

But my heart prepared for the best case scenario. I just had never seen a situation where we don’t return to our shared humanity when our hurts are finally being held and seen by those we don’t expect to hold or see us.

As is typically the case, my heart was right.

He told me about the history and struggle of the Jewish people and how that conflicted with the common “Free Palestine” movement and rhetoric that often advocates for the erasure of Israel and undermines Jewish lives.

We talked about the gaslighting on both sides that spreads a lot of misinformation that harms both sides.

We talked about the ways the Jewish people experience antisemitism by the global majority, ways that I just had not been aware of most of my life.

It is challenging to coexist when we do not know the hurt that the other person experiences.

I also told him that I was grappling with the fact that most of the Jewish people who are coming after me with guns blazing are those who have not stood with me when I spoke up on white supremacy.

He empathized with this and shared his side. He explained that he cares about the things I care about, but the ways we approach the same problems are so different that it is challenging to engage in conversation online.

I understood. I also held space for our disagreements.

At some points, we even shared some laughs.

This is what I mean by “coming back to our shared humanity.”

Even in our most profound differences, there will be parts of us that just cannot help but understand where the other person is coming from because we resonate with their human experiences.

Right now, the hate in the US and worldwide is catching on like wildfire. The war is encroaching very deeply into our relationships, our communities, and our future. We are gripped by the binary of “right” and “wrong” side of history without the attempt to engage in uncomfortable conversations.

I don’t think this is the way. I may even go so far as to say that this wildfire is adding, not subtracting, flames to the actual war in Palestine and Israel because we are in further division rather than in a united front on how to send support most effectively to the human lives we’re losing on the ground.

I would also argue that this is exactly how we have come to the current state of war: we were unwilling to have uncomfortable conversations to really see the human beings behind the ruptures and the politics and the rhetoric.

There is a difference between the cowardice of remaining neutral and the refusal to take a stand that denies the reality of the other side. Cowardice happens out of fear, and refusing to deny others’ reality happens out of love.

I also understand that uncomfortable conversations won’t save lives right this second. That is the unfortunate and harrowing reality.

But if we are going to build a sustainable future where coexisting doesn’t feel so threatening and violative of our personhood, we need to start building capacity to relate to and regard the human being outside our own ideologies and dogma around how the world needs to operate.

Even if it hurts. Even if it feels like we need to put down some of the beliefs that have held our livelihood for so long. Even if it means that I need to put down my own dignity so that I can hold the other person’s rage as their loved ones don’t have a choice but to lose everything. Even if it is just for a second.

I am not saying that we all need to sit down and have a “come to Jesus” moment and walk away all happy and peaceful. That doesn’t sound human or real. Especially if you are Israeli or Palestinian and just don’t have the capacity to even share the same space with the other side.

But at least for those of us who are outsiders to the actual conflict, we must ask ourselves some challenging questions:

• Am I speaking out with full and complete knowledge of the solution, or am I making assumptions about what the solution is and how we arrive at it, including the assumption that there even is a solution? Is it even possible to have full and complete knowledge about anything?

• To what extent am I actually holding space for the affected Israeli and Palestinian lives, and to what extent am I using those lives to further my own agenda, ideologies, and paradigms around how the world needs to operate?

• Where am I prioritizing my own desire to be right over the reality of those who are directly involved in the conflict?

There will always be oppression of all kinds in the world. There will also be parallels between different kinds of oppression. But to equate two different types of oppression with very different contexts and history is to reduce humanity into the binary of the oppressor and the oppressed without any regard to the human being directly and uniquely experiencing that particular power dynamic.

Perhaps I am the idiot softie trying to “understand all sides” without a backbone. Perhaps I am subjecting myself to white supremacy by listening to white people as much as I listen to non-white people.

Perhaps all of that is true.

But if that means that I can love truthfully with what I have right now, I am willing to be all those things. My focus will be on this question: Where am I dehumanizing others to feel better about how I show up in the world?

The unfortunate reality is that I will probably do this no matter what I do because everybody is hurting so deeply right now. There are no words to describe the pain. There are not enough tears and heartbreak to express the magnitude of the suffering.

The only thing I can do is love in a way that feels most truthful to me by focusing on the human being underneath it all.

This is easier to do when we trust that human beings rarely commit atrocities for absolutely no reason.

This is easier to see when we are willing to witness the human emotions and experiences, and trust that we can witness them without making ourselves responsible for it.

I was unintentionally perpetuating antisemitic narratives by subconsciously boxing the Israeli people into the powerful oppressor role who experienced way less of a plight than I was willing to understand.

I attempted to address my internal biases by sitting the fuck down and listening. This doesn’t mean that I don’t acknowledge the power that they have and their role in this war. It just means that I am dismantling the wall I’ve had in understanding perspectives I have known nothing about.

I won’t always be available to listen to everybody because I am just one person. I need to honor my own space and energy. But I will trust my instinct when it tells me that there is a story to be heard, a story that is more important than my own long-standing set of beliefs and my sense of what I know about the world.

The reason this is especially important to me is that, while the war is ongoing on the ground, the Israeli and Palestinian people living in the US from afar are also at war. They are at war with their hearts. I cannot join the ranks of battle with them as a soldier, but I want to volunteer as a medic for their hearts.

It’s kind of corny, but as my teacher James-Olivia Chu Hillman says, I live on a cob.

While I won’t understand what it is like to watch your community get killed in your homeland, I understand at the human level, at least a tiny bit, what it is like to be constantly antagonized, misunderstood, and gaslit.

As a medic, I probably won’t be able to do much or fix anything, but at least I will have the privilege to hold their hand while they hurting from battle.

To that end, here is my invitation to my readers moving forward:

• If you are Israeli or Palestinian, and you feel that there are some issues here that I am undereducated on and want to tell me about it, please know that I am available to hear you.

• If you are not Israeli or Palestinian but feel very strongly about what is going on, I ask you to consider how much your words may impact the ones receiving it. Even if you are talking to just one person, any insistence on your own beliefs may spark an erosion of trust on their part. While they have a lot to gain or lose, the rest of us have just so little to gain or lose. Especially right now when people are getting killed by the second. If you disagree or need me to hear you, I am available for you, too.

People used to tell me how naive I am for believing people so easily. But that is who I am. I believe people when they tell me things. My ability to change my mind is one of the most powerful tools in relating to people, especially those who are different from me.

Sustaining a flow of communication doesn’t mean that we are going to agree on everything. It just means that we are not going to assume the worst of the other person.

It also doesn’t mean that I am well-versed in the practice of relating, either. It just means that I see how important this work is in the world right now.

I want to always come back to this question when we are looking for direction in the void: If there was no right or wrong way to love right now, where would I go?

We won’t always have answers. But it will return us to our shared humanity because love is a universal language, no matter how messy and painful it can feel.

We won’t always feel successful, but we can make as many attempts as we can.

I, for one, hope to walk with you as we do this together.

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You can find more of me at angela-han.com.