Now that I have your attention, here’s what actual real Palestinians have to say instead of Western people put on a pedestal:

The Antisemitism Nobody Wants to Explain

Every Palestinian who attempts to accurately describe their experience — an experience of stolen homes, imprisoned and tortured family members, and besieged cities — is forced to make a very important decision: Do they name who did it?

If Palestinians acknowledge the Jewishness of the colonial project that announces itself, in its flags, its holidays, its army, and its international institutions, not simply as Jewish, but as the highest form of Jewishness, or dare mention the Magen Davids spray painted onto their homes and carved into their land and skin, or mention that it was an orthodox Rabbi who called for their murders, they are inundated with zionist accusations that they hate Jews and that they are antisemitic — the two made synonymous. Suddenly the conversation shifts away from engagement with their experiences and becomes a sham trial to determine their intent, built on the philosemitic premise that to resent their oppressors would render them an unreliable narrator who either deserved the violence against them or, at the very least, is someone who is not worth protecting. Palestinians know they will be expected to answer for, to apologize for, millennia of anti-Jewish persecution that they had no part in and will be expected to disavow and condemn not just antisemitism, but all of Palestine’s anti-colonial political history.

Knowing this, many anti-zionists, including Palestinians, have engaged in a form of idealistic self-censorship in which they rhetorically center combating antisemitism within their anti-zionism, tie the safety of Jews and Palestinians together, and preemptively assert that Palestinians do not hate Jews and therefore are not antisemitic. Meanwhile, the Jewish zionist state bulldozes more Palestinian homes, destroys more Palestinian cities, and kills more Palestinians.

This essay seeks to directly confront the reality that no one wants to engage with, one that some people either ignore or attempt to sanitize, that others trot out as if it’s proof that zionism is the answer: It is entirely reasonable that Palestinians may hold animosity toward Jews. But this is not antisemitism.

It seems quite obvious that oppressed people would hate their oppressor. In fact, it seems silly to even debate this point. For anyone who has a meaningful understanding of Palestinians’ history or present, the idea that Palestinian hostility toward Jews, including outright hatred, is antisemitism — or that antisemitism everywhere, across history, is the same — is obviously wrong. But beyond being wrong, the question of whether it is antisemitism is totally irrelevant. It is asserted specifically as a tool for the advancement of zionism.