Everybody in the chattering classes has some theory about why Mamdani ‘works’ and (if I can offer my own theory) I think most of them are poking at the wrong thing. Whether it’s the Rent Freeze talk, or the buses, or his age, or the TikTok fluency, or the socialism, or his smile, or how he looks, or the fact that he’s a Muslim who says Palestine without checking the room first. And all of them are good. But I think they all miss the point.

It’s how he talks to people.

I think it’s really as simple as that.

He talks to people like they are adults. Like they can handle the truth. Like they can parse nuance. Like they can hear him and hear that he hears them. And in a Democratic party that has spent the past forty years learning how to address its own voters the way you’d talk to a toddler or a cat you’re trying to coax out of a tree (speak softly, move slowly, be comforting), when a guy shows up and just speaks to us straight, without the bullshit nostrums and pabulum, it’s quite the fucking contrast. He speaks to his constituency like they’re his peers, not the ‘marks’ in a con.

The Netanyahu business this week, is a great example of what I mean. Cards on the table from my side, I don’t have a single scintilla of doubt that Netanyahu is a war criminal and I think he should be tried for it. But put aside (if you can) the content of Mamdani’s video, because it’s not (to my mind) the controlling factor here.

What matters is that Mamdani spoke repeatedly during the campaign about how he’d have the NYPD arrest Bibi if he attended the UNGA kickoffs in NYC. And now, in office, the lawyers sit him down with the actual law and say, “Yeah… no. You don’t get to do that.” And instead of disappearing the promise, instead of memory-holing it (the consultant-reflex: delete the tweet, pretend it never happened), or lying and trying to BS his way through by acting like a mayor can execute an ICC warrant against a foreign head of state (the demagogue/Trump-reflex), he does the rarest thing in American politics. He levels. “We do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant. The federal government, however, does, and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant.” And then, he follows it up with the coda, “Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large.”

That…. Right there is the whole fucking thing in miniature.

He tells you the precise edge of his own power (this is what a mayor can actually do, this is what he can’t) and he keeps the moral pressure ratcheted all the way up at the very same time.

He doesn’t spin up a fantasy. He doesn’t dress it up as prudence. He tells you what’s what, hands you the brief and trusts you to read it: Here’s what a mayor can do, what a mayor can’t… here’s who’s actually got a hand on the switch, now go and lean on them. That is a man who assumes that you are smart enough to sit through a civics lesson without needing a squeezable applesauce tube and a little nap in the story corner afterward. The Democratic Party’s assumption is basically the exact opposite, and my argument is that voters know exactly and precisely which assumptions are being made about them.

He made a similar move on the pay raise he was offered this past week, and that one is probably more telling, because the stakes are so tiny. A pay bump is dangled in front of him, something like forty-seven grand on top of the two-fifty-eight he already pulls, and instead of the usual focus-grouped aria of gratitude and humility, he gives the flattest, most obvious human sentence available. Nobody I met on the campaign trail told me the mayor’s salary was too low. And then, “that’s not my concern either.” That’s it. That’s the whole fucking answer delivered without a ‘woe is me’ speech or a violin section. Just a grown-ass man saying an obvious true thing out loud, which somehow, in the year 2026, is laudable, because we’ve all managed to forget it should be the base-level, bog-standard, expectation.

And before you jump in with your “Duh… this only works in ultra-liberal NYC” bullshit and try to file my argument under the idea that he’s a regional-only lefty-boy-wonder leveraging some kind of coastal-socialist-Blue-State-charisma, or whatever the fuck stupid ass reductive pundit shorthand happens to be today’s Plat du Jour, let me point at the exact same frequency in a completely different zip code, because I really do think it has fuck-all to do with ideology.

Look at James Talarico, in Texas. A former grade-school teacher who went to seminary and is now, in the year of our lord 2026, somehow the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate. And he does one thing, over and over, relentlessly. He talks to his constituency in the kinds of language and with the kinds of thinking that they think in. He talks about scripture. He quotes from the Bible and speaks from inside the house. He sounds like them and speaks in a way that honors them and who they are, and then, FROM INSIDE that language… he jiu-jitsus the whole thing and reframes the issue as top-versus-bottom instead of left-versus-right. He fisked a bill jamming the Ten Commandments into public school classrooms on the floor of the State house and he did it in a language and from a place that the audience understood and aligned with. He spoke as a believing Christian and that was precisely what gave his critique teeth. The guy argued with Joe Rogan over abortion and framed his position through an analysis of the Annunciation, “creation has to be done with consent, you cannot force someone to create,” Buy the theology or don’t, I genuinely don’t give a flying fuck. I’m not talking about what Talarico believes. I’m talking about how he communicates.

Or look a little further north, at Rob Sand in Iowa. The dude is the only Democrat elected to anything statewide in years, and he’s running for governor and is probably one of our best shots at prying a governor’s mansion loose. And his whole approach is a rebuke to the last twenty years of bullshit Democratic strategy. He visits all ninety-nine counties in the state as a matter of plain routine, political humility, and electoral hygiene. The kid is standing in VFW halls and county fairgrounds full of three-time-MAGA voters, and he neither engages them with contempt, nor slobbers all over them. He just calls it like it is, in language that is clear and resonant and points out exactly who’s picking their pockets, and he sidesteps every last fucking bit of the culture-war bullshit. The guy has decided that a farmer in a folding chair is worth his time and deserves a straight answer, and that, friends, is the exact thing the national party forgot right around the time it decided that the middle of the country was a thing you fly over on the way to a fundraiser in the Hamptons from a fundraiser in Marin County.

Trump detonated the whole Republican party’s establishment exactly by point-blank refusing to speak in that sanded-down, poll-tested, say-nothing dialect the professionals all swore was the only safe way to talk. And that instinct was (painful as it is to say) entirely correct. The difference between Trump and Sand or Talarico or Mamdani though, is that Trump doesn’t respect his constituency. He flatters and lies to them instead. He’ll tell them whatever sounds good… That Mexico is going to pay for the wall… That the tariffs will come out of some foreigner’s pocket… That they’ll never ever have to do anything hard because they’re the best people ever. With Trump, it’s straight talk as a con but in lots of ways, 2016 Trump was the right-wing’s Mamdani. Which, IMHO, is a big part of why the left hasn’t been able to fight him effectively. He built that base in 2016, and yeah, it’s bleeding out now, but it’s still alive and still remembers the flattery.

Talarico and Sand and Mamdani are the honest version of that very same instinct, the version that hands you something true even when the true thing is nowhere close to what you were hoping to hear. Same voice. Opposite intent.

They hand you something you might not actually want to hear (I can’t arrest the guy, the salary’s fine, the real fight is top-versus-bottom and not the culture war they sold you, your own governor’s donors are quietly robbing you blind) based on the CRAZY assumption that you are an adult who would rather have the truth than the flattery. Texas, Iowa, NYC. It doesn’t matter.

Now go and stand Schumer and Jeffries next to any one of them. The whole corporate-dick-sucking-donor-class-reacharound-consultancy-brained leadership class is fluent in one specific dialect of nothing (We hear you… We’re fighting for you… The stakes have never been higher… Please do chip in five dollars). It’s like reading AI stories or listening to muzak… it’s a particular brand of inoffensive bullshit engineered to sound like a position without ever actually being one. Quotable as hell, and impossible to pin down.

People feel that shit. Voters aren’t dumb. They may be uninterested in politics, but when they do hear these guys, they can smell the bullshit coming off the screen. Because every platitude is itself a condescension. And every day brings another small daily dose of it, and eventually everyone on the receiving end knows it in their gut and switches off. The con’s blown, dipshits. The voters see it. They can see it in how you engage with them. Instead of treating them like adults, you’re saying “Listen idiots, I understand the machinery at an altitude you will simply never reach, so hush now, let me chew the complexity up for you and vomit it into your mouth, and you’ll thank me for it.”

It’s contempt with a comms team.

Mainstream Dems have optimized themselves clean into irrelevance. Every sentence run through the panel until it can’t offend anyone because it no longer means anything, every position triangulated to the exact center of a room full of tired ideas that have nothing to do with the moment.

And the sad reality that it highlights is that you don’t put every word you’re about to say through thirty undecided voters in a strip-mall conference room unless, somewhere down in the lizard-brain part of your skull, you have already decided the public is a hazard to be managed and not an equal to be leveled with.

The base worked this out ages ago. Democratic leadership now polls about as well with its own voters as the Republican establishment did back in 2015, right before that same base got fed up and fed it to Trump. Schumer got told “you are out of touch” to his face after helping wave through weapons for the very government whose prime minister Mamdani wants in handcuffs.

The house is on fire and Schumer and Jeffries are workshopping strongly-worded letters.

It’s been quite funny watching the idiot-consultant-class learn all the wrong lessons from Mamdani. They’re looking at the view counts and panicking and deciding that the magic is in the production design. They’re hiring ‘youngsters’ with a Premiere license to start cranking out vertical videos with the warm film grain and the red-and-orange retro fonts and the candidate ambling through a bodega in artfully rolled shirtsleeves, gesturing gravely at the price of eggs, and underneath all that lovely seventies color grade it will be the exact same triangulated mush it always was. We hear you. We’re fighting for you. Chip in five dollars.

It’s a fucking consultant-led-cult building things that LOOK like other things… not things that WORK like other things.

You cannot TikTok and art-direct and cool-slang your way to authenticity. What matters is whether we, the voters who you need to vote for you, actually believe that you think we’re your equals and that we deserve honesty and respect. And I promise you that there is no Instagram filter that will make that happen if it isn’t true.

People are just starving to be talked to like they’re not stupid. Say true things that you actually believe and say them in your own real voice, especially when it costs you something, and trust the people who are listening to you. That’s the whole trick. It’s not even much of a trick. And Mamdani didn’t fucking invent it. He just arrived at a moment where the Democratic Party has forgotten how to do a thing they used to be able to do.

It’s about respect. Everything else is noise.

I was eleven years old the first time I understood that my answer to an ordinary question was a provocation. It was a simple question, the kind every kid gets asked at school: “Where are you from?” The other boys answered it the way you produce a coin from your pocket to buy sweets. “London.” “Brighton.” “Norwich.” “King’s Lynn.” For each of them, the coin was examined, accepted, and the line moved on.

I remember my heartbeat in my ears. The smell of floor wax and the clicking of the radiator. The dust curling through the air, backlit by the tall windows. Most of all, I remember the silence. The other boys going still in the way boys do when the next thing is unpredictable.

Nobody laughed. It would have been easier if somebody had. The Master simply moved on, not giving me a chance to offer another answer. He was matter-of-fact. He was not angry, and in that absence of heat were the coordinates of the lesson. He was not bothered, because nothing I was saying was worth the effort; I was simply mistaken about where I was from, the way a boy can be mistaken about the capital of Peru.

I have spent the rest of my life inside that moment. So has every Palestinian alive.

My real education was the understanding that I would be permitted to speak of being Palestinian on one condition: I had to prove it first. Prove the provenance. Prove the lineage. Prove the dates. Prove the year. Prove the deed, the key, the census, the grief.

Other men inherit a country. We inherit a case file. We are expected to carry it into every room and open it on request, with a fluency that makes many mistake the performance for our truth. Do it well, and you will be called what I was called: reasonable. I have come to understand the curse of that compliment. Reasonable, for a Palestinian, is a license to exist and speak. It is a license that can be revoked, and the men who issue the licenses will never grant you one you can keep.

Understand, I am nobody. I want to be exact about this, because exactness is the only vanity I have left. I am, if we are being precise, exactly fucking nobody. I am one man with a keyboard and a groaning bookshelf, commanding exactly no army, moving exactly no markets, and existing in a world that has organized itself so efficiently around my nobody-ness that my irrelevance requires citations and a notarization for the simplest claim.

And it is not my politics that are being audited. It is my existence. And when your existence is under audit, you learn the auditor’s language so young that you can forget, for thirty or forty years, or fifty years, that you have never agreed to the audit at all.

Deny the Holocaust on LinkedIn, under your own name and photograph. Your career will be over by dinner, which, to be clear, is as it should be, because that is what a civilization looks like once it has decided a people’s catastrophe is beyond dispute.

Now write that there is no such thing as a Palestinian, that the people are an invention, and the Nakba a lie. Nothing will happen to you. A few Palestinians might chime in. But from others? A yawn, maybe. You might catch a few likes from people with flags in their bios. A sitting cabinet minister said it at a podium in Paris and flew home to his portfolio with no consequence.

The first denial ends a career because the dead it insults are guarded by the entire weight of the acceptable page, and the second one costs nothing, and it has never cost anything, and I long since stopped expecting it to.

‘The West’ here is a lazy phrase, and I am not in a lazy mood, so let me be precise about who carries the auditor’s clipboard. The editor, friendly, progressive, genuinely fond of you, who wants one more pass to make the piece a little less angry. The politician who marches for every justice on the map and goes quiet at this one, because his donors are watching. The kind soul at a dinner party who needs to hear you condemn Hamas before passing the salt, the loyalty oath as amuse-bouche. The broadcaster who says clashes while one of the parties has an air force and the other builds rockets out of irrigation pipe.

Not one of them would recognize the word auditor in the mirror, and yet every one of them freely wields the auditor’s red pen.

Said has been dead for over twenty years, and the request for permission to narrate is still listed as Received and Pending. And through it all, we stand in the queue, waiting; Palestinians with their case files and their best manners, who understand that the line itself is the institution, that standing in it is the tax, and that no one collecting the tax has any intention of approving the application.

I know what it would look like to walk away from that queue in dignified silence, and I am declining that too, because silence is the queue’s preferred product. And I can hear the objection forming. I have trained for decades to hear the objections before they are spoken: “Here he is again, polished, fluent, performing for the West in its own tongue, some exit. Not much of a refusal.”

The objection is half right, and owning the half is the point. I am writing this in the auditor’s language, with the auditor’s grammar, deliberately, because the clerk’s ink is the only ink this office has ever recognized. But I am also choosing to burn the paper of the application and use it to burn down the office. A form burns just as well in official ink. This essay is the application, taken back off the desk and set alight in front of the window. What you are reading is the smell.

There is, in the moral imagination of the West, The Scripture, and The Commentary. The Gospel and The Gloss.

The Scripture, the Gospel, is Jewish pain, and before I say one syllable more, I will say what must be said and say it whole: Jewish pain is real, it is vast, it is among the deepest wounds in the human record, and the people who carry it watched the world subtract six million of them within living memory and they owe nobody an apology for vigilance. I have sat close enough to that grief to feel its heat. I would not increase its weight by a milligram, least of all by handing its bearers the weight of mine.

I mean every word of that paragraph. I will defend every word of it. But it is also true that I was not free to leave out a single one of those words because they are a required tariff. That paragraph is the tax, paid in the middle of the essay as the price of even discussing the existence of the tax.

Even in an essay against the audit, the auditor gets his payment anyway, sincere and compulsory in the same breath. I cannot even name the arrangement without bowing to it first. The bow was real. But so is the requirement.

Palestinian pain is allowed on the Western page in one form only, as the Commentary. It can only exist as The Gloss, the small type at the bottom, in the margins, in the apparatus, the places where a page keeps its housekeeping. Yes, the catastrophe, comma, but. We are only ever the but. We are only ever the asterisk on another people’s testament, named only so that the naming can be pointed to and forgotten on the way back to the Gospel.

When you grow up in the small print of the marginalia, you learn quickly the typography of your own erasure. You learn it so thoroughly that you can typeset it yourself, placing the type in the frame by hand in the dark.

And for most of my life, that has been the entirety of the only deal available to the Palestinian narrative: be legible, be brief, and stay in the margins. Stick to the bottom of the page, or be absent from it. And nobody reads the footnotes.

The library’s shelves are filled with volumes of Scripture. Full of the settled and sealed and selected version of the Gospel, done up with handsome gold-lettered spines, endpaper maps, the smell of glue and old paper, and the confident weight of the accepted truths. You can take one down, almost any one, and run your thumb through the index and find my family’s entire universe filed under See also.

I am done at the bottom of the page.

That is the whole of my message. Everything else is detail. Here is some of that detail.

Seventy-eight years is the distance between my grandmother’s door in Jerusalem and this keyboard half the world away, and people call that distance history so that they can file it. A wound becomes history only when the last person who can feel it has died, and we Palestinians have declined, so far, to complete the paperwork. The recent dead of my family lie severed from the soil their ancestors slept in for centuries. None of this is ancient, and none of it is a metaphor, and I will not be producing the documents, because the demand for proof is shaped exactly like the boot I am describing, and a man does not refute the boot by polishing it.

And what is happening now, in the strip of coast the world has agreed to discuss in the passive voice, is exactly what it looks like.

There are precise and serious and legal words for what a state does when it turns its whole machinery upon one people. Words drafted by careful men and women in the dull, quiet rooms of post-war Europe, with elements and definitions and case law, precisely so that catastrophe could be measured by somebody other than its victims. Curses get shouted. These accusations are notarized and filed. Occupation. Collective punishment. Persecution. Apartheid. Genocide.

The careful people have done their measuring, including Israelis whose love of their own country no honest person disputes, and the measurements came back, and I am not going to stand in front of the instrument panel pretending that where the needles point is a matter of opinion.

Neither will I pretend the scale is even. One party to what the newspapers call a conflict possesses an air force, a navy, an intelligence service that can find a single phone in any city on earth, an arsenal it does not trouble itself to confirm, and the signed blank check of the most powerful nation in the history of nations. The other party has no state, no army, no airport, no harbor, no currency, and no door out.

Both bleed. Denying the blood is an obscenity. I have never denied the blood, and I never will; a child is a child is a child, and grief admits no exchange rate, and the small body at the kibbutz weighs precisely what the small body in the rubble weighs, which is everything.

Even the word conflict, draped over a man strapped to a chair, stops describing anything and becomes a curtain. And printing both names in the same size type on the scoreboard is the oldest trick of the people who own the press.

Here I owe you a distinction, because I have asked you to hold distinctions all the way through this letter, and I will not exempt myself from the hardest one. Zionism is a word that holds multitudes, and I have known many of them. For millions of Jews, it has meant something I think of as tender. It is the bed that cannot be taken away, the door that locks from the inside, it is the conviction, purchased at a price no people should ever have paid, that there must be one place on earth where Jewish children sleep without packing.

I do not quarrel with that longing. I recognize it. It rhymes with my own longing, only with the names changed, and the day my people’s version of the same thing stops being treated as a security threat will be a good day for everyone alive.

But inside the same word lives another project that has outgrown the fringe. It holds portfolios in the cabinet and General Officer commissions in the military. Once a year, it marches through the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem, chanting and threatening death to me and to people who look like me. It burns villages at night and then heads to the hilltops for dinner, drafts legal opinions for hilltop extremists, and invents euphemisms and neologisms for the ministries: voluntary emigration, relocation, encouragement. A whole thesaurus employed to keep the words expulsion, ethnic cleansing, and genocide off the page. At its center sit men and women in good suits and unaccented English, explaining that between the river and the sea, one people is destined to rule and the other is to be managed, thinned, and eventually missed by no one.

It is a project of ethnic, religious, and racial supremacy. It has cousins on every continent and a long family album, and the unbearable and unjustifiable suffering in its bearers’ pasts does not change what it is, because suffering has never yet vaccinated anyone against becoming what they survived.

I say this with all the care I own.

Most of the Jews in my life—and my life is blessedly full of them, in my heart and at my table and in my work—want no part of that project, and some fight it as hard as I do, paying steep costs I have watched them pay with pride.

But it is not a handful of cranks either, and the polite fiction that it is, the insistence on reading every torched olive grove as an aberration and every village pogrom as the work of a few bad hilltops, is one more way the page protects itself. A movement is responsible for what it tolerates in its name. So is a country. And so, while we are here, am I responsible for what is done in mine, which is why my own side’s men of blood appear in this letter too.

What happened on the seventh of October was a horror. I say so because it is true, and truth is the only tribute I will pay anywhere in these lines. The people murdered in their homes and in the fields that morning were human beings entire, and their deaths sit inside me beside my own dead without canceling a single one of them, because a soul is not a ledger and I refuse to keep books in mine.

My own side holds men I am ashamed of, men who rule decades past any mandate, men whose prisons have swallowed their own critics, men who spend the lives they swore to protect like meaningless coins, without even keeping the receipts. I name them in the same voice, for the same reason, and I will name them exactly once, because the theater in which the Palestinian denounces Palestinians to reassure the audience is the one show of ours that never closes, and I have no interest in the soliloquy.

None of what that morning unleashed, and none of what produced it, is sui generis. Violence of that order is a crop. It has soil, it has weather, it has had seventy-eight years of patient irrigation, and the question about the soil excuses nothing. It happens, however, to be the only question that has ever prevented a second harvest, anywhere, in the whole bloody record of our species, and the people who forbid the question are not protecting the dead. They are fertilizing the field.

I have been speaking from a height for some pages now, and the truth does not live at a height. A borrowed hall on a weeknight. Folding chairs in uneven rows, an urn of coffee nobody finishes, name tags peeling off sweaters. Jews and Palestinians, the bereaved and the merely exhausted, the kind of gathering that draws no coverage because nothing burns. A woman from Nablus and a man from Tel Aviv are saying things to each other that their governments would call treason. The room is filled with the wrung-out tenderness that follows shared testimony. And then a phone hums. Someone jumps in with news. An attack in Israel. Israeli civilians dead.

This letter is worth nothing if I only confess on schedule. The truth is that as the news settled over the room, something in me went cold and did arithmetic. Something in me, quiet as a sentry, hissed in the dark: Maybe now they will know how it feels. What it costs.

I wish I could tell you it lasted half a second. That it was an intrusive thought quickly dismissed. That would be a convenient but untrue tale.

No. It stayed. It sat with me through the announcements and the hurried goodbyes, through the stacking of the chairs, and the worst part, the part that is hard to say out loud, is how it felt. It felt like warmth. Like an understanding hand on the shoulder. The voice of an old and treasured teacher telling me that I was finally being honest with myself, and I carried it out into the night air and into the car, and it kept me company the whole way home, steady, articulate, patient, making its case from the files it had been keeping since I was a child.

The fever broke a little past midnight, on no argument at all. Across that room, earlier, I had watched a man I admire, a man who has placed his own body and its privilege of religion and passport between settlers and Palestinian olive trees, cry as he heard the news from Israel. And somewhere past midnight, his face came back to me, unasked, the way faces do, and the arithmetic finally could not hold against it.

I am not telling you this to be absolved, and I am not performing a wound for you either. I just want you to understand that what I have written here about soil and harvests, I know from the inside. The crop grows in me too. It grows in us all. Watered by the same seventy-eight years, and the difference between the men I condemn and me is only that I am able to put the thought down before morning, while they have built a politics out of keeping it alive.

There are nights when that difference feels thinner than I want it to be. The disease is ecumenical. It does not check your paperwork at the door. The vigilance I insist on in others in these pages is the vigilance I demand of myself first, at the only checkpoint I have ever agreed to stand at, the one on the inside.

There are two fears that enter the room whenever any of this is said aloud, and I will speak to both, plainly, with the hope that plainness will deliver the truth more cleanly.

There are people murdering Jews in my lifetime, this year, in capitals and suburbs that thought themselves past it. Antisemitism is not a debating point. It is a fact, ancient, adaptive, climbing, and Palestinian agony is neither its cause nor a currency in which it may be paid.

I do some of my work shoulder to shoulder with Jews, with Israelis, with the bereaved of both houses who have somehow declined to hate each other, and each of us is called traitor in our own tongue for it. Those rooms, I will tell you, are the only rooms I have ever entered where nobody asks where I am from with an argument already loaded in the pocket.

And the mirror of that hatred is also real and runs at a discount: the boy stabbed for his name outside Chicago, the worshippers shot in their mosque, Death to Arabs sung in stadiums and down boulevards on two continents. A man who can see only the bigotry aimed at one tribe has not taken a position against bigotry. He has joined a team and issued his conscience a jersey. I am not on a team. I am against the thing.

The second fear is newer and quieter. I have watched it move through rooms full of people I love, so I will name it gently and exactly.

For the first time since the war that gave the Gospel its standing, the Jewish story is not the only center of the Western page on the region. It held that center for eighty years the way a body holds the middle of its own bed, and when the center is the only seat you have ever been offered, the arrival of company can feel, from inside, like eviction.

Nobody is being evicted. There are two different sentences in play here: your pain does not matter is one, and your pain is not the only pain that organizes the page is the other. Only the second is being said.

And the privilege I am naming here is one privilege, narrow, specific, nameable: the privilege of narrative, the default sympathy of the page, the old unexamined custom by which your dead arrive with names and faces and anniversaries while ours arrive as an estimate, a range, a figure in dispute before the bodies cool. Losing that will feel like falling for a while. It is landing. Your pain matters this morning exactly as it mattered yesterday, and it mattered immensely yesterday. What is ending is the monopoly, and the monopoly was never the thing keeping you safe. Centrality did not stop a single pogrom. It only stopped you from seeing us.

Which brings me to the cost of the arrangement that nobody itemizes, the line on the invoice that’s addressed to you.

A page built so that one grief is scripture and another is housekeeping does not merely starve the small print. It blinds the congregation. It manufactures, year upon year, edition upon edition, the most addictive product in the moral economy, which is innocence. Innocence kept past the age of knowledge stops being a condition and becomes a decision, and decisions have owners.

The weapons are bought with your money and mine, the cover is signed in our names, the plumbing of it runs straight through every house on the street, and a comfort that requires somebody’s children to remain a rounding error is a transaction, whatever else it is dressed as. I have no use for your shame. I am here to turn on the lights, which is a different act, and the difference is measurable: look what it costs me to do it, and look how little it would cost you to look.

People ask me where I stand on applying pressure, questions about boycotts, divestment, and sanctions that usually arrive as a litmus test. Here is where I stand: the machinery I described some pages ago, the jets and the checks and the vetoes, runs on money, and some of the money is mine, and a man who has noticed his own hand in the plumbing does not get to be precious about pressure. I boycott the engines of it, I divest from them, and I support sanctioning them. The settlement goods, the arms pipeline, the institutions of the occupation itself and those that gain advantage from them are all fair game. I will not perform anguish over inconvenienced industries while children are being killed.

My only critique of the pressures is that there is a version of the movement that has built a permissions desk of its own. It boycotts the bereaved mother for the company she keeps at the grave. It blacklisted the one film two peoples made together about a village being erased. It calls the people in my borrowed hall normalizers, which is a polite word for traitors. I have stood at one desk my whole life, and I am not going to bow at a second one because this clerk pronounces my name correctly. Pressure aimed at power, always. I differ only on where we should apply the standards and to whom, and I will always protect the kinds of rooms where people practice the future.

I will not be deferring any of this to a more convenient evidentiary standard. The proof exists; the careful people have it; my own version of it sits in a drawer I have been filling my whole adult life. The drawer is closed, not because the case is weak, but because I know that the courtroom itself is part of the injury.

A man’s testimony of his own life is not a thesis to be sent back for revisions. I have received the revisions for forty years. Soften it. Contextualize it. Open with the other side’s story. I decline the notes. Palestinians are not asking for permission anymore. We will narrate our own stories, and we insist on a place that is on the page, and not in the margins.

And now a confession withheld for the end, because at the beginning you would not have believed it. All of this is love. It will not have sounded like love, because you have been taught that love sounds like agreement. It does not. Ask anyone who has ever been loved by someone brave. I love this maddening, luminous double helix of peoples, the arguers, the mourners, the grandmothers on both sides of the wire who stuff the same eggplant and scold in the same cadences and bury their dead below the same sky. Rage that has been held this long, examined this closely, and has still refused to curdle into hatred, is what love sounds like after seventy-eight years in the waiting room. If I did not love you, I would not wake you.

Something in the binding of the book has given. The leather has cracked with the particular sound that a book makes the first time it is opened properly, and a new generation has opened the page and is holding the book up to the light, reading the small print in the margins out loud, in public, and declining to put it back. Nobody is burning the book. The demand was only ever for a better edition. The Gloss is moving into the text, and the Gospel loses nothing by the company; it has never needed the margin to be holy, it only thought it did, and that thought was the whole catastrophe, and that thought is ending.

If you ask me, as people always ask, which map I am for—one state, two states, confederation, some federation of cantons not yet drawn—I will tell you the truth that disqualifies me more often than not: I do not care. The map is furniture. I have watched grown men fight over the floor plan of a burning house while the fire extinguishers sit close to hand unused. What I want fits in a single sentence and requires no cartographer: every person between the river and the sea, free, safe, equal, and answerable to the same law, with the same law answerable to them, regardless of name, blood, faith, or flag.

Whatever architecture delivers that, I will support, and gladly. Whatever architecture withholds it, I will refuse, and I do not need to see the blueprints first, because the only part of a house that ever tells the truth is the door.

In the end, I am not the annotation on anyone’s story. I never was. None of us were or are or should be. Two peoples stand on one land, and neither of them is leaving, and I have never, for a single hour of my life, wanted yours gone. The page, even now, even this late, is wide enough for both scriptures, set in one size of type, and what gets printed next is, for the first time in my life, genuinely undecided.

Man, Arabs are the fucking worst. Muslims too... and the Jews... the fucking Jews... Oh... and the Christians... Black people, let’s not forget them... and gay folk... and bi folks... and Trans people... yeah... and disabled people... and ugh... the poor people... they’re the worst too... don’t forget about them... and the fucking immigrants... terrible... and don’t even get me started about indigenous people... ewww.

How the fuck do you keep it straight? Is it just a mental list? Or do you have a notepad somewhere with all the folks you dislike? A list of people whom you’ve decided to blame for everything that’s gone wrong in your life? Is there a Signal group or a “Dumb Motherfuckers” group chat where you share this shit? Or is it a weekly newsletter? Is there a shared Google spreadsheet? Do you have to update it manually, or does it auto-populate when Tucker or Fuentes or Rogan adds someone new to the list?

Because I’ve got to say that from where I stand... here on the outside looking in, it seems fucking exhausting. Like a full-time job... scratch that... more than full-time... like a first-year-investment-banker-hours kind of job. It must be so much work keeping tabs on who to be afraid of this week, especially since the list keeps growing... which, I mean, let’s not bullshit each other... the growing list is pointing to one of two things, either the world is getting more and more dangerous every day or your hateful xenophobia is genuinely five-star, ten-out-of-ten, no notes, Olympic-level paranoia, and I say that with something approaching awe because I can barely keep track of my chore list while you’re out here maintaining a real-time database of everyone who is ruining civilization and your life by simply existing.

Every day, you take your marching orders from the dumbest people in media and politics and religion, and every day you learn... Shocker! The problem isn’t you... it isn’t them... It’s those other people... You know the ones... and every day they keep adding people to the list. And no one ever comes off the list... no one ever graduates to acceptability or earns their way into your good graces. The list only ever grows... the blackness spreading... the hatred encompassing more and more of the big, scary world...

You seem to have a lot of enemies, friend. It’s a staggering number of groups and people who are all out to ruin your specific life. And I hesitate to offer this insight, but maybe let’s explore, as a thought-experiment of sorts... for the sheer arithmetical novelty of the idea, that if your list of enemies includes basically everyone who isn’t exactly like you, that the problem might not be the list?

Yesterday, two teens in camo walked up to the Islamic Center of San Diego with guns and a suicide note about racial pride and a gas can with a Nazi SS symbol on it and killed three people outside the largest mosque in the county. A week before ‘Eid. With kids in the building just going to school. A security guard, a father of eight, died protecting the building.

A couple of months ago, a man drove a truck into Temple Israel in Michigan and opened fire on people.

In December, two men killed fifteen people at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney.

In September, an ex-Marine drove into a Mormon church in Michigan and set it on fire during services.

In August, a man opened fire at an all-school Mass at a Catholic church in Minneapolis.

I could go on and on and on and on for days and never run out of examples.

And here’s the thing about the folks doing this shit... they ain’t fucking masterminds. These aren’t brilliant strategists. These are not the crème de la crème. They are not architects of anything. They are the product. They are the output. They are what you get at the end of a supply chain that starts with a man with a microphone... a woman in front of a camera... or a man behind the screen... people who have all, in one way or another, figured out, years ago, that fear is the most profitable commodity on earth and have spent the intervening decades strip mining it for all it is worth.

And the people who taught them that... they’ll never be in court. They’ll be on television... or behind an online paywall... or on a podcast... and they’ll express something that looks kind of like concern but omit the fact that their rhetoric built the tragedy. They’ll offer their cheap-ass ‘thoughts and prayers’ litanies and say shit like “lone wolf” or “deeply troubled” or “mental health crisis.” They will say absolutely anything except the thing that is true. They will say anything except “Yeah... I did this.”

That’s the fucking trick. The magic trick. And it’s as old as fucking time itself, and it’s foolproof. Quite literally so... every fool always falls for it. 100% success rate.

The people who taught them that are selling you hatred. And it’s not because they actually hate the people they’re pointing at... they don’t actually give a flying fuck about Arabs or Jews or Muslims or immigrants or trans kids or Black people or any of the other targets on the rotating scapegoat carousel. They aren’t afraid of any of them or worried about any of them. Not really. They are insulated by their money and their position. The only thing they care about is you. Not personally. They don’t give a shit about you either... not like that. You’re the product. You’re the ‘mark.’ Your fear is the revenue stream, the ‘engagement metric.’ Your vote is the payoff.

They need you not to notice that wages haven’t risen in forty years while productivity has doubled and prices have quadrupled and they have pocketed the difference.

They need you not to notice the healthcare that you can’t afford because they lobbied to kill the public option and they lobbied to protect the pharmaceutical monopolies and they lobbied to make sure you pay four hundred dollars for insulin that costs eight dollars to manufacture so that their quarterly fucking earnings call sounds impressive to their investors who will never have to choose between medicine and the rent.

They need you not to notice the schools they are defunding and the teachers they are driving out and the classrooms that don’t have textbooks while the Pentagon budget sails through without a single fucking amendment every year with both sides voting for it.

They need you not to notice the unions that they spent fifty years busting so that the only people at the negotiating table are the people who own the table and the chairs and the building the table is in and the parking lot outside and the politicians who run the town and the state and the country.

They need you not to notice the pensions they looted and the retirement funds they gambled with and the bailouts they collected when the gamble failed and the jail time that they will never serve because the people who write the laws they break are the people who need their money.

They need you not to notice that they shipped your job overseas to save eleven cents on per unit production costs and yeah that’s not a lot but multiply brother and now it’s real money and it’s not our fault the factory closed...

They need you not to notice that they poisoned your water and your air and your soil and then spent 200 million dollars a year lobbying to make sure nobody will ever hold them accountable and sold you the bullshit that Climate Change is a hoax invented by the Chinese because the alternative, which is that the people who are killing the planet are the same people who are funding your politicians, is a thought too large and too SCARY and too fucking obvious to be allowed to stand.

They need you not to notice that the democracy you think you live in has been hollowed out from inside and that your vote has been gerrymandered into irrelevance and your representation has been auctioned off to the highest bidder and your Supreme Court has been bought and paid for and your agencies have been staffed with people they are supposed to regulate and your public lands have been sold and your public services have been privatized and your trust has been shattered...

They need you not to notice that none of this... not one fucking bit of it was done by the Muslim family down the street or the Jewish guy at your office or the gay couple next door or the immigrant who mows your lawn.

They need you not to notice that all of this... every fucking bit of it was done by men and women who socialize together and use ‘summer’ and ‘winter’ as verbs and sit on each other’s boards and attend each other’s wedding and send their children to the same schools and who would not recognize you as human if you were standing in front of them in a t-shirt that said “HUMAN” because you are not a person to them, you are a line item... you are the P in their P&L... you are a unit of labor... you are a vote to be captured... a consumer to be monetized... and the only value you have to their economy is the amount of fear they can extract from you to convert into political power and advertising revenue.

So they point. Look! Over there! The Muslim! The Jew! The immigrant! The gay kid! The Black family! The Latin family! Them! THEM! THEM! They are the reason your life is hard. They are why your town is dying. They are why you can’t afford college and your insulin costs so much and your factory closed and your church is empty and your country doesn’t feel like your country anymore. IT’S THEIR FAULT!

And you look. Of course you do. So much easier. So much less complicated. Them... the other. It’s all their fault. And while you look at where they are pointing with their left hand... their right hand is in your pocket. Where it has been the entire time.

You are the underclass. You are the one being robbed. Not by the people you have been told to be afraid of. Not by the people you have been told to hate. Nope. You are being robbed by the people who told you to be afraid and hate. The people who need you to be afraid and hate... because that’s more useful to them than people who organize and demand and look around to understand exactly who has their knee on their motherfucking necks.

The teens in San Diego are not the disease. They are the symptom. The disease is profitable. It has shareholders and ad revenue and a primetime slot and a congressional caucus and a few Justices and a book deal and movie coming out. It has a business model.

And three people at a mosque in San Diego are dead because the model works.

A father of eight who put his body between the gunmen and the children is dead because the model works.

Fifteen people at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach are dead because the model works.

Four people at a Mormon church in Michigan are dead because the model works.

And every single one of those people was someone’s parent or child or friend or cousin. They were praying or teaching or studying or walking to class or celebrating a holiday or guarding a door. They were doing the most ordinary things that human beings do.

And they are all dead because the people behind microphones needed your attention and your rage and your money and your engagement and your vote and the cheapest way to get all that is to point at a stranger and say ‘enemy’ and wait for a teen in camo to take the message literally.

The model works because you let it work. Because the trick is simple and the trick is old and the trick is tried and the trick is true and the trick is the same trick that every demagogue has run since the first frightened man in the first village pointed at a stranger and said “HIM... he is why the crop failed” and the village believed him because believing is easier than looking at the sky and realizing that the drought was no man’s fault and that the work of surviving it could only be done together.

Every single person on your list has one thing in common. All of them. Every Arab and every Latin person and every Jew and every Black person and every immigrant and every trans kid and every veteran and every poor family trying to stretch a paycheck. They all have one thing in common. They are all trying to get through the day. Just like you. That’s it. Trying to get the kids to school and keep the lights on and maybe not think about the fucking news for five minutes today.

They are not thinking about you. They are not plotting your downfall. They are not making your miserable life any worse than it already is. They have no idea who you are. They do not care about you. They are trying, like you, to survive.

So maybe... just fucking maybe... try to remember that it is always way easier to hate than it is to think... it is always easier to blame than to build... but it is never more useful... it is never more effective.

And maybe... just fucking maybe... the next time someone points at the other... to tell you where to look... maybe don’t look at the pointing hand... Look at who is doing the pointing and then look down and see whose hand is in your pocket.

I remember September 12th, 2001, with the kind of clarity that only trauma produces.

Not the trauma of the attack itself, although that was real and shared by everyone who was alive and conscious that week. The other trauma. The one that started about six hours after the towers fell, when it became clear, very quickly, that the people who looked like me were now going to spend the next decade, maybe two, maybe forever, paying a tax we did not owe for a crime we did not commit.

I am a Palestinian American. I am culturally Muslim. I have a name that telegraphs both. And on September 12th, 2001, that combination became, overnight, a kind of provisional citizenship in my own country, the kind where you have to keep your papers handy and your tone modulated and your face arranged into a permanent expression of “I promise I am not what you think I am.” Anti-Arab racism existed before 9/11. Islamophobia existed before 9/11. The West has been suspicious of, condescending to, and periodically violent toward Arabs and Muslims for centuries. None of that was new. What was new was the social permission to say it out loud. The license. The sense that suspicion was now patriotic, that hostility was now justified, that the burden of proof had shifted permanently onto every Arab and every Muslim to demonstrate, continuously, in every interaction, that they were not the enemy.

It was exhausting in a way that is hard to describe to people who have never had to do it. The constant low-grade performance of harmlessness. The volunteering of your moderate opinions before anyone asked. The watching of other Arabs on TV being asked to denounce things they had nothing to do with, and the knowing that you would be asked to do the same the next time someone shoved a microphone in your face. The way your name became a thing people repeated back to you slowly, testing it, weighing it. The TSA. God, the TSA. The “random” selections that were never random. The looks on planes. The way strangers’ eyes would land on you and then slide away with a calculation behind them that you could feel even when you couldn’t see it.

But back to 9/11 and the conflation. Oh, the conflation… the endless, lazy, vicious conflation of one and a half billion people with nineteen hijackers.

The way “Muslim” and “terrorist” became, in the mouths of cable news hosts and congressmen and cab drivers and coworkers, near-synonyms. The way every Arab, every Muslim, every brown person with a beard or a hijab or a name that ended in the wrong sound, was now a representative of a death cult they had spent their entire lives trying to distance themselves from, a death cult that had murdered far more Muslims than non-Muslims, a death cult that the vast majority of the world’s Muslims found as repugnant as anyone else did. None of that mattered.

The conflation was the point. The conflation was useful. The conflation justified things that needed justifying.

Here is the part I want to talk about, though, because it is the part that has stayed with me for twenty-five years and that has become unexpectedly relevant in the last two.

Not all of them. Not most of them, even. But a significant, principled, brave minority of American Jews and Israelis I knew personally got it immediately and viscerally, because they had a long, painful institutional memory of what happens when an entire people is held responsible for the actions of a few, and they were not going to stand by and watch it happen to someone else. They wrote op-eds. They spoke at mosques. They organized. They showed up at airports when people were being detained. They invited Arab families to Shabbat dinner. They were, to use a word I do not use lightly, righteous.

Both of these things were true at the same time. The same community, the same religion, the same history, produced both the most principled non-Arab, non-Muslim defenders of Arab and Muslim Americans and some of the most virulent enemies.

It was a contradiction that I sat with for a long time, and I eventually came to understand it the way I understand all such contradictions, which is that communities are not monoliths, that traumatized populations produce both empathy and cruelty in unpredictable ratios, that the lessons of history are available to anyone who wants to learn them and ignored by anyone who finds them inconvenient.

I am writing this in April of 2026.

I am writing this because the inversion has come, and it has come faster and more completely than I would have predicted, and I want to say something to my Jewish and Israeli friends who are living through it now, because I have been through the other side of this thing and I know what it feels like and I know what is coming.

I do not say this lightly. I say it because the comparison is the most accurate one I have, and because I have watched the machinery of it for long enough now to recognize the shape.

They are a death cult that has hijacked a religion and a nation and a people and turned them into instruments of violence. They are using ancient texts and ancient grievances and real, legitimate trauma to justify atrocities that have nothing to do with the survival of the Jewish people and everything to do with the political and territorial ambitions of a small group of fanatics who have managed to capture the apparatus of a state.

And the conflation is already happening. I see it. I see it in places I did not expect to see it. I see it in the way “Zionist” has become, in some corners, a synonym for “Jew,” even though many Jews are not Zionists and many Zionists are not Jews. I see it in the way criticism of Israeli policy slides, sometimes by accident and sometimes very much on purpose, into something older and uglier. I see it in the way ordinary Jewish people are being asked to answer for things they did not do and do not support, the way Israelis who have been protesting Netanyahu in the streets for two years are being held personally responsible for his decisions, the way diaspora Jews who have nothing to do with any of this are getting bricks through their windows in cities where they have lived for generations.

I want to stop here for a second and say something about the word “Zionist,” because it has become one of the most semantically loaded words in the English language, and I find I cannot use it cleanly anymore in either direction, and I think the reason for that is worth pulling apart.

The word is anchored in two completely different histories that no longer touch each other. To most Palestinians I know, the word is the name of the thing that erased us. It describes a political project that arrived in our home, declared itself, and proceeded to dispossess my family and millions of others, and the word carries the full weight of that dispossession in every syllable. To most Jews I know, the word is the name of the thing that saved them, or that was supposed to save them, or that their parents and grandparents reached for after watching the rest of the world decide they were not worth saving. It describes self-determination, refuge, the basic human need to have somewhere to go when the world turns on you, and the word carries the full weight of that history, too.

Both of those meanings are real. Both of them are anchored in lived experience and in actual history and in the bones of actual people who are walking around right now carrying the consequences. And they do not touch. They cannot touch.

When a Palestinian says “Zionism is racism,” what a Jewish person hears is “you do not have the right to exist.”

When a Jewish person says “I am a proud Zionist,” what a Palestinian hears is “I am a proud participant in your erasure.”

The same word. Two different planets. A dialogue of the deaf that has been going on for so long that nobody on either side trusts the other to be hearing the actual words coming out of their mouth.

And it gets worse, because the word has not just split along the Palestinian/Jewish fault line. It has stretched, on the Jewish side alone, to cover such a comically incompatible range of human positions that it has effectively stopped meaning anything at all to me.

There is the one-state, fully-equal-rights, pro-Palestinian-liberation Jewish leftist in Brooklyn whose Zionism, as she will patiently explain to you over coffee if you give her the chance, is nothing more elaborate than the conviction that Jewish people, after several thousand years of being chased from one country to the next and periodically slaughtered along the way, have a reasonable interest in somewhere on earth where they get to feel safe in their own skin.

And there is Bezalel Smotrich, who refers to himself, on the record, in front of cameras, as a proud fascist, and who has spent his entire political career advocating for the formal annexation of the West Bank, the permanent disenfranchisement of its inhabitants, and the eventual “voluntary” transfer of Palestinians out of land he believes was deeded to him personally by a deity in a book.

And there is the Kahanist wing, which I am not even going to dignify with a paraphrase, because the source material speaks for itself and the source material is genocidal.

And all three of these people, the Brooklyn leftist and the fascist finance minister and the Kahanist street-thug-turned-cabinet-member, are described, by themselves and by others, using the same seven-letter word.

That is not a word doing work. That is a word that has been asked to carry too much and has buckled under the load. If you have to spend the first three sentences of any conversation explaining which kind of Zionist you are, and the next three sentences explaining which kind you are not, and the three after that explaining why the kind you are has nothing in common with the kind that is currently bombing apartment blocks, then the word is no longer a description of your position. It is an obstacle you have to clear before you are allowed to say what you actually think. That is a tax on your own speech, and you are paying it for the privilege of using a word that no longer reliably communicates anything to anyone.

The same is true of a phrase like “Free Palestine.” To me, it is a call for the basic human dignity of my people to live in their own country with their own government on their own land. To some of my Jewish friends, it is a call for their cousins in Tel Aviv to be driven into the sea. We are using the same words. We are not having the same conversation.

I mostly do not use the word “Zionist” anymore, and I want to be honest about why, which is not because I have softened on the political project the word historically described but because the word itself has stopped functioning as a description and started functioning as a flag. The moment I deploy it, the ‘how’ of ‘how I deploy it’ signals which tribe I belong to, and the conversation is over before it has started, and nothing I say after that will be heard, because the listener has already filed me into a category and stopped processing actual sentences.

That is not language doing its job. That is language failing, and the failure is being weaponized by people on both sides who would rather have the satisfaction of the flag than the difficulty of the conversation.

Here is the thing
that I cannot stop
thinking about…

The bitter little symmetry that history has cooked up and served to all of us in the last eighteen months: the exact same nonsense that was weaponized against people like me after 9/11 and after 10/7 is now being weaponized against Jewish people, and a lot of the same people who deployed it the first time are now on the receiving end of it, and a lot of the people who are deploying it now were on the receiving end of it the first time, and almost nobody seems to notice the inversion or learn anything from it.

After 9/11, the question we got, constantly, was “Do you condemn Al-Qaeda? Do you condemn Bin Laden? Do you condemn jihadism? Do you condemn whatever it is I just saw on Fox News this morning that has me looking at you sideways at this dinner party?” The list was infinite, and the test was rigged. Condemn one thing, and the next was queued up. Hesitate for a second, even to ask a clarifying question, even to point out you had already condemned that thing nineteen times this week, and the hesitation was the answer. The condemnation tax. The loyalty oath. The shibboleth you had to recite, on demand, in the right order, with the right inflection, or you were suspect.

That was the old version, and it ground us down for twenty years, and most of the people reading this will remember it the way you remember a smell from a house you used to live in. Faintly. From a distance. As something that happened to other people, in another decade, when the world was different.

But you do not have to reach back twenty years for the version that matters, because the same machine got switched on again on October 8th, 2023.

The morning after October 7th, before the bodies in Israel had been counted and long before the bodies in Gaza had started piling up, every Arab and every Muslim and every Palestinian I know was on the clock again. “Do you condemn Hamas? Do you condemn what happened at the Nova festival? Do you condemn the kidnappings? Do you condemn October 7th specifically, in those words, in that order, before you are allowed to say anything else about anything else, including the thing that is about to happen to your family in Gaza which has not started yet but which we both know is coming?”

It was the post-9/11 shibboleth, recompiled and redeployed, with the names changed and the urgency cranked up. Same structure. Same trap. Same rigged test. The condemnation of Hamas was never going to be enough, because the condemnation was never the point. The point was the demand. The point was the position you had to assume in order to make the demand stop, which was the position of someone whose humanity was conditional on continuous public performance.

A lot of the people administering that test, in my personal experience, were Jewish. Not all of them. Not most of them, as I have been at pains to say. Plenty of Jewish institutions and individuals were doing the exact opposite in those same weeks, writing the open letters, organizing the ceasefire rallies, getting arrested in the Capitol rotunda with prayer shawls over their shoulders, and I am not going to pretend they were not there or that their work did not matter, because it was there and it did.

But a meaningful and vocal segment of American Jewish institutional life was, in those weeks, extremely, enthusiastically, publicly invested in making sure that every Arab and every Muslim and every Palestinian in the country was kept in a permanent posture of having to denounce things they had no connection to, before being permitted to grieve things that were being done to people they loved.

The ADL did it. AIPAC and its flunkies did it. Hundreds of pundits and politicians and op-ed writers did it.

And it worked, in the sense that it made our lives harder and our grief smaller and our voices quieter at exactly the moment we needed our voices most, which was the point.

And now…

And now…

The same shibboleth, the same condemnation tax, the same impossible loyalty oath, is being administered to Jewish people from the other direction. “Do you condemn Israel? Do you condemn Zionism? Do you condemn Netanyahu? Do you condemn the IDF? Do you condemn the bombing of Gaza? Do you condemn whatever it is I just saw on Twitter that has me looking at you sideways at this dinner party?”

Same structure. Same trap. Same rigged test. The moment you condemn one thing, the next thing is queued up. The moment you hesitate, your hesitation is the answer. Jewish students at universities are being asked to perform the loyalty oath before they are allowed to participate in clubs they have belonged to for years. Jewish writers are being asked to recite the condemnation before they are allowed to publish on unrelated topics. Jewish people who have spent their entire lives opposing the occupation are being lumped in with its architects because they did not denounce Israel in the right tone of voice on the right day of the week.

Yes. The scale is not the same. Yes. The state power is not the same. Yes. The body count is not the same.

I am not making that argument.

I am making a smaller and more specific argument about the logic of the shibboleth, which travels even when the histories don’t.

The people who benefit from conflation are always the same people. The Bin Ladens and the Netanyahus and the Trumps and the Khameneis, the men who need their populations to see the other side as a monolithic threat so that the war can continue, so that the power can be held, so that the dissent can be crushed under the weight of perceived existential necessity. Every time we flatten, we feed them. Every time we refuse to flatten, we starve them a little. That is the math. That is the only math that has ever worked.

Zadie Smith wrote an essay about this for the New Yorker in 2024, called “Shibboleth,” and the title is the right title. The biblical shibboleth, the original one, comes from Judges 12: a password used to identify members of one tribe and execute the members of another, based on how they pronounced a single word. People who said it wrong got their throats cut at the river. That is the literal etymology. A linguistic test designed not to find truth but to find enemies, with death as the consequence of failure.

Smith’s argument was that we are now drowning in shibboleths. Words and phrases and required denunciations whose function is not to clarify thought but to sort people into camps so they can be punished or rewarded accordingly. “Do you condemn Hamas.” “Do you condemn Zionism.” “From the river to the sea.” “Settler colonialism.” “Self-defense.” The phrases themselves are not the problem. The problem is the demand that you produce them on cue, in the right order, to the right audience, as proof of membership. The problem is that the production of the phrase has replaced the actual work of thinking about the thing the phrase refers to. The problem is that failure to recite the shibboleth correctly is now treated, in too many quarters, as evidence that you should be excommunicated, fired, deplatformed, or in some cases throat-cut at the river.

Smith got pilloried for the essay, and watching it happen in real time was one of the more frustrating things I witnessed in 2024, because the people doing the pillorying were, almost to a person, demonstrating exactly the dynamic she was writing about.

She made a careful, complicated argument about the dangers of using language as a loyalty test, and the response was a loyalty test. She declined to recite the required phrases in the required order, and she was excommunicated for it. The irony was so perfect it should have been embarrassing for the people administering the punishment, but irony does not work on people who have already decided that nuance is a form of betrayal.

I read her essay when it came out and I understood what she was trying to do.

She was trying to say: be careful with these words, because words matter, because the moment we start using them as tribal markers instead of as descriptions of reality, we have stopped thinking and started sorting, and the sorting always ends somewhere ugly.

That is a hard thing to say in a moment when people are dying and the temptation to sort is overwhelming, and she said it anyway, and she paid for it, and the way she paid for it proved her right. That is the cruelest thing you can do to a writer, which is to demonstrate the validity of her thesis by punishing her for stating it.

So no, I am not going to distance myself from Smith’s essay. I think she was largely right, I think the parts of it people objected to were mostly misread or read in bad faith, and I think the fact that she was monstered by people who claimed to share her broad politics is itself one of the strongest pieces of evidence that her diagnosis was correct.

The shibboleth machine eats its own.
It always has. It always will.

And the only defense against it is to refuse to participate, which is what she tried to do, and what I am trying to do now.

It is not okay. It was not okay then. It is not okay now.

The condemnation tax is a tool of small minds and bad-faith arguments, and every time we accept it as a legitimate way of doing politics, we entrench the principle that some people have to perform their decency in advance of being permitted to participate in public life, and that principle has only ever been used to make life worse for whoever is currently out of fashion.

Today it is Jews. Yesterday it was us. Tomorrow it will be someone else. The tool does not care who is holding it. It just keeps cutting.

Jewish people, like Arab people, like Muslim people, like every other community on earth, contain the full standard human distribution of angels and assholes, saints and shitheads, brave people and cowards, the principled and the opportunistic, the cruel and the kind, and the proportions are roughly the same as in any other group, because there is nothing magical or cursed about being Jewish, just as there is nothing magical or cursed about being Arab.

Communities are made of people. People are complicated. Anyone who tells you a community is uniformly anything is selling you something, and what they are usually selling you is permission to hate or permission to absolve.

What I am saying is NOT “there are good Jews and bad Jews.”

What I am saying is: there is no such thing as a community that can be held collectively responsible for the actions of its worst members, and the moment you start doing that to anyone, you have abandoned the basic moral premise that makes coexistence possible. I have been living that lesson since 9/11. I have been living it again since October 7th.

I am not going to forget it now, and I am not going to participate in inflicting it on anyone else, no matter how much the current moment tempts me to.

The temptation is real. I want to be honest about that.

It is wrong when it is done to Arabs, and it is wrong when it is done to Jews, and it is wrong when it is done to anyone, and the wrongness does not become rightness because the wound is recent or the grief is fresh or the cause is just.

Here is the thing I need to say clearly, because I do not want any of the above to be misread as some kind of softening, some kind of retreat from positions I hold with my whole self. I have not moved an inch on Palestine. Not one inch.

The Palestinian people have a right to live free, safe, sovereign, and fully at home on the land they have lived on for generations. Not under the Swiss-cheese Bantustan fiction currently being administered in the West Bank, with its checkpoints and its settler-only roads and its permit regimes and its house demolitions and its land theft dressed up in legal language. Not in Gaza, an open-air prison that has now become an open-air graveyard. Real freedom. Real safety. Real sovereignty over their own lives. The right to control the water they drink, the air they breathe, the borders they cross, and the future they build. The right to defend themselves. The right to exist on the same terms as every other people on earth, including the people currently occupying them.

That is not to me a negotiable outcome, nor has it ever been one.

And nothing I have written here, none of my refusal to flatten Jewish people, none of my acknowledgment of the trap that is being laid for them, should be read as a step back from that position.

It is precisely because I refuse to flatten that I am able to hold all of it at once.

I can say Netanyahu is the architect of catastrophic crimes, and also say that not every Jew is Netanyahu.

I can say the Israeli state is conducting itself in ways that violate every principle of international humanitarian law, and also say that the Israeli people are not a monolith and that many of them have been in the streets for two years trying to stop the men running their country from doing what those men are now doing.

I can say Hamas committed atrocities on October 7th that I will not soften and will not contextualize away and will not file under "resistance" as if the word "resistance" launders a music festival massacre, and also say that not every Palestinian is Hamas, that most Palestinians I know loathe Hamas and have loathed them for years, that the people of Gaza did not vote for the men currently using them as human shields, and that the children buried under the rubble of Khan Younis did not get a ballot.

I can say that there are men in keffiyehs who have done monstrous things in the name of my people and that the monstrousness is not redeemed by the keffiyeh, and also say that the existence of those men does not retroactively justify the flattening of fourteen million Palestinians into a single threat to be managed.

I can say that there are men in IDF uniforms who have done monstrous things in the name of the Jewish people and that the monstrousness is not redeemed by the trauma of the grandparents, and also say that the existence of those men does not retroactively justify the flattening of fifteen million Jews worldwide into a single threat to be managed.

I can demand the end of the occupation, the end of the siege, the end of the settlements, the recognition of Palestinians as a free people on the land, all of it, the whole package, no concessions, no half-measures, and also demand an end to violence and terrorism against Israelis and Jews, and the prosecution of the men who planned and carried out October 7th by any court that will hear the case, and also say that holding every Jewish person on earth responsible for the policies of a government most of them did not vote for and many of them actively oppose is exactly the same logic that was used to make my life hell after 9/11 and exactly the same logic that has been used to make Palestinian life hell for seventy-seven years, and I am not going to participate in it from any direction.

These are not contradictions. They are the basic prerequisites of any moral position worth holding.

The hard work, the actual work, the only work that gets us anywhere, is holding the line on both at the same time. Refusing to dehumanize anyone. Refusing to collectively punish anyone. Insisting on the full humanity, the full rights, the full sovereignty of both peoples, simultaneously, without trade-offs, without one being contingent on the other, without anyone having to earn their humanity by performing acceptable politics.

I have lived my life paying the cost of conflation with the worst people who share identity markers with me. I am watching the same conflation happen now to a different community, and I am writing this essay to say: I see it, I refuse it, and I am asking everyone else who lived through the last round to refuse it too.

Not because Jews need my protection, but because the principle matters.

I am Palestinian. I want my people to be free. I want them to be safe. I want them to have a home. I want the occupation to end and the siege to end and the bombing to end and the settlements to be dismantled and the prisoners to be released and the dead to be mourned and the survivors to be allowed to live, finally, after seventy-seven years, like human beings, on the land. And I want all of that for Jewish people too, on the same land, in the same breath, with the same insistence. And for all of that, I do not apologize.

I do not apologize for wanting it all, and I am not going to pretend to want less to make anyone comfortable.

And I want it without becoming the thing that was done to me. I want it without flattening anyone. I want it without participating in the conflation that I know, from personal and bitter experience, is the first step toward atrocity.

I am begging you to read this because I do not know how else to say it anymore, and the alternative is to let the shibboleths win, and I have watched the shibboleths win over and over in my life already, and I am not going to stand quietly while they win again.

Both things.
At the same time.
Always.

That is the assignment.
It has always been the assignment.

And the only way through this
is for enough of us, on all sides,
to refuse to fail it.

Right. Before I start, let me inoculate against the wilful misreading that is already forming in someone’s bad-faith little brain: I am not defending the Iranian government. Clear? Good.

Moving on.

The Iranian government is a theocratic horror show. Full stop. It hangs gay teenagers from cranes in public squares, which is a sentence I should not have to write in 2026 and yet here we bloody well are.

It shoots its own daughters in the street for the crime of letting their hair exist in sunlight, and then, in a flourish of bureaucratic sadism that would make Kafka weep, sends the parents a bill for the ammunition.

It funds every proxy militia, ideological murder franchise, and freelance chaos engine between Beirut and Sana’a.

It took a revolutionary promise of liberation and curdled it, within about fifteen minutes, into exactly the repressive theocratic apparatus it replaced, because that is what happens when you let men who think God is their constituency run a country.

Every time.

Without exception.

Show me the theocracy that didn’t eat its own children and I will show you a theocracy that just hasn’t been around long enough yet.

The morality police.

Evin Prison.

The mass executions that don’t even make the news anymore because they are as regular as weather.

Mahsa Amini, murdered by the state for wearing her hijab wrong, and then five hundred more people murdered for having the temerity to be upset about the first murder.

I have no illusions about this government.

Zero fucking illusions.

I would like to see it gone.

Iranians would like to see it gone.

The Iranian diaspora has been screaming for that since before I was old enough to know what a diaspora was.

And yet, through a feat of diplomatic and military incompetence so towering, so perfectly, almost artistically catastrophic, that it deserves its own wing in whatever museum future civilizations build to catalogue the stupidity of this era, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have managed, in the space of five weeks, to make this gang of theocratic murderers into the sympathetic party.

The underdog. The outfit that half the planet is, against every sane instinct, against the full weight of the historical record, quietly and then not so quietly rooting for.

Sit with that: The Iranian government spent forty-seven years (forty-seven years!) doing everything in its power to make itself despised by every sentient being on the planet, and these two men, these two vain, reckless, messianic fucking wrecking balls, undid all of it in five weeks.

They made the mullahs sympathetic.

They made Pezeshkian, a man who presides over a government that hangs people from construction equipment, sound like the adult in the room. They made Iranian state media, Iranian state media!, more credible to the global public than the White House press office.

That is not an easy thing to accomplish.

That takes a special, rarefied, once-in-a-generation genius for fucking things up.

The Iranian embassies are trolling Trump on social media. And winning.

The embassy in Zimbabwe posted “We’ve lost the keys” about the Strait of Hormuz.

South Africa replied, “Shh, the key’s under the flowerpot, just open for friends.”

Bulgaria dropped an Epstein joke.

These are embassies. In Zimbabwe and Bulgaria.

Running a funnier, sharper, more strategically coherent communications operation than the United States of America, the country that invented the concept of soft power, the country that gave the world Hollywood and Madison Avenue and the fucking Marshall Plan, and they are doing it with memes, from countries most Americans could not locate with a GPS and a police escort, and it is working, because the comparison does all the lifting.

When your opponent is promising to end your civilization with three exclamation marks while signing off “Praise be to Allah” on Easter morning, you do not need to be good.

You do not need to be competent or kind or decent.

You just need to be less insane than the other guy.

The hanging-teenagers-from-cranes government is clearing that bar with room to spare, which should tell you everything you need to know about where the bar currently sits: underground, in a hole, and still sinking.

This is what bombardment does.

This is what it has always done.

You bomb a country’s schools and universities and hospitals, you kill its children, you threaten to destroy its power grid in the syntax of a going-out-of-business sale, and you hand the regime the one thing forty-seven years of domestic repression could never, ever generate organically: legitimacy.

The hard, diamond-bright legitimacy of victimhood. Of being the ones getting bombed. Of being the ones whose children are under the rubble while the man doing it can’t spell “reign” and thinks Persia is a type of carpet.

Fourteen million Iranians have volunteered to fight. You think they love their government?

Motherfuckers, these folks were in the streets three years ago trying to pull the thing down with their bare hands.

But you bomb a country, and the population rallies around the flag, because that is what human beings do under fire, that is the one iron law of aerial bombardment that every military thinker since Bomber Harris has understood and articulated and written down in books that are available in libraries, and that Trump and Netanyahu have apparently never encountered, because reading would require an attention span longer than a TikTok and a humility neither man has ever been accused of possessing.

The regime was dying.

It was eating itself from the inside out.

Economy in freefall.

Youth population furious, secular, educated, online, and completely done with the whole project.

The women’s movement, the movement that Mahsa Amini’s murder ignited, was the most potent internal threat the Islamic Republic had faced since 1979.

Time, demographics, economics, culture, all of it was working against the mullahs.

All the West had to do was keep the sanctions in place, support civil society quietly, and let the internal contradictions do what internal contradictions always eventually do.

Instead, Trump and Netanyahu handed the mullahs the greatest gift they have received since Saddam Hussein invaded in 1980: an external enemy so loud, so stupid, so cartoonishly villainous that the entire country had no choice but to rally behind the one institution still standing, however rotten, however despised.

The regime was on life support, flatlining, the monitors beeping their final beeps, and these two men walked into the hospital room, ripped out the DNR order, and administered a blood transfusion.

With someone else’s blood, naturally.

With the blood of Iranian children and American service members and Lebanese civilians and Israeli civilians and Emirati bystanders.

Because it is always someone else’s blood.

It is never, ever, ever the blood of the men who make the decisions.

In Tehran, someone should be writing a card tonight:

The Iranian people deserve so much better than their government.

We also deserve better than ours.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

That is a sentence written by the President of the United States of America, almost certainly in soiled incontinence wear, on what one can only assume must be a plastic-sheeted bed in a building that used to mean something, on a Tuesday morning in April of 2026, on a vanity social media platform that he owns because no other platform will have him, about a civilization that has existed for five thousand years (give or take), before the fucking Greeks had an alphabet, millennia before Romulus and Remus shared a pungent wolf-tit, way before Britons were painting themselves blue and headbutting each other by torchlight on Salisbury’s hills.

Persia.

This dumb, embarrassing, short-fingered vulgarian is talking about Persia, where Cyrus the Great was issuing the first known declaration of human rights at about the same time this American embarrassment’s ancestors were trying to decide which color of Prussian mud is better tasting.

He is threatening to end Persia. To switch it off like a light. And he is doing it with the breezy confidence of a man canceling a magazine subscription:

“I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

Ninety million people, five millennia of continuous civilization, poetry and mathematics and architecture and medicine, the entire inheritance of a culture that was old when Alexander wept at its gates, all of it dangling from the subordinate clauses of sentences tapped out by an addled man whose brain is leaving his body in reverse-mortgage installments, somewhere between his morning pharmaceutical event and whatever flunky drew the short straw of reading him his first briefing at a pace his collapsing attention span can absorb.

Two days before this (lest we forget, lest we forget), on Easter Sunday, the holiest day on the Christian calendar, the day of Resurrection, of life prevailing over death, of the stone rolled away, a day this man is contractually obligated to pretend matters to him, he skipped church entirely, picked up his phone, and posted:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell. JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

And then he signed it. “President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Because of course he fucking signed it.

The man signs his war crimes the way a proud toddler signs a refrigerator drawing. And then he went to Easter dinner, having skipped the service that gives Easter its meaning, with a wife who has perfected the thousand-yard stare of a woman who has been tracking her personal bourse index fund of self-abasement, access to power, and money for so long she has forgotten there was a before, and presumably he ate whatever mush his handlers spoon into him, and then he went to bed in that building that used to mean something, and the world held its breath, and he slept, because men like him always sleep, that is the one talent they have in abundance, the ability to sleep after saying the unspeakable and doing the unthinkable.

I need you to sit with the substance of his post. Not the profanity.

I swear like I’m paid by the fuck, (I’m not, but if you find a gig like this please let me know) and I couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about the profanity.

No. Skip the profanity and sit with what he is actually promising:

The President of the United States is announcing, with the giddy register of a CRAZY EDDY sale, that he will destroy every bridge and every power plant in a country of ninety million people.

“There will be nothing like it!!!”

Three exclamation marks. “Everything must go!!!” energy.

And everything WILL go: hospitals that run on those power plants, the dialysis machines, the neonatal units, the ventilators, the water treatment facilities, the refrigeration for food and medicine and insulin, the thing that keeps the incubators warm around premature babies, the thing that powers operating rooms, the thing that pumps clean water into homes.

He is describing, with the delight of a particularly stupid child pulling wings off a particularly beautiful butterfly, the systematic and deliberate reduction of an ancient nation to a pre-industrial state, and he is doing it in the syntax and cadence of a going-out-of-business sale at a carpet warehouse in northern New Jersey.

COME ON DOWN TO POWER PLANT DAY, FOLKS! NO REASONABLE OFFER REFUSED! EVERYTHING MUST GO, INCLUDING THE HOSPITALS AND THE SCHOOLS AND THE LITTLE MACHINES THAT KEEP THE BABIES BREATHING!

And when a reporter, performing the increasingly quaint ritual of asking the president a question that presupposes he is bound by law, asked him if he was concerned about committing a war crime, he said, “I hope I don’t have to do it.” He then pivoted, unprompted, unasked, because the man cannot resist the sound of his own voice even when it is actively incriminating him, to explain that the real war crime was “allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” a sentence that reveals a relationship with the concept of war crimes roughly equivalent to his relationship with fidelity: he has heard the word, he knows other people take it seriously, and that is the entire extent of it.

Hope. He hopes. The way an arsonist holding a jerry can hopes the house doesn’t catch.

Let me be precise about one thing. What I am about to say is not about the full sweep of American history. This country committed genocide against its indigenous peoples, methodically, over centuries, and then named football teams after them. This country enslaved millions of Africans and their descendants, built the entirety of its wealth on their broken bodies, and then spent another century and a half pretending that it had stopped. Those are the nadirs. Those are the abysses. I am not ranking atrocities and I am not saying that what is happening right now is worse than the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears. It is not.

But on the international stage, in the full view of the entire planet, with cameras rolling and satellites watching and every phone on earth refreshing the same feed, I cannot identify a moment in the record where an American president has so openly, so gleefully, so incoherently, with such evident pleasure, threatened to annihilate a civilization as a negotiating tactic. As a haggling position. As the geopolitical equivalent of “I’d like to speak to the manager.”

Truman dropped the bomb, and whatever you think of that decision (and I think quite a lot of it, none of it good), it was at least the product of a strategic calculus conducted by serious people in a serious war against an enemy that had attacked American territory. This is not that.

This is a 79-year-old man whose brain is visibly caulking over in real time, who conflates “rain” and “reign” and (one presumes) “rein” (“all Hell will reign down on them,” he wrote, like a ninth-grader who skipped every vocabulary quiz since 1958 and never went back), threatening to murder millions of people because he wants to control a shipping lane he couldn’t find on a map if you spotted him the ocean, and he is doing it on the same platform where he posts about his TV ratings and his golf handicap and whatever fresh grievance has burrowed into the collapsing architecture of his liquifying frontal lobe that morning.

The man has the oratorical range of a backed-up garbage disposal and the strategic patience of a coked-up and incontinent, one-eyed Pomeranian with a mange problem and an eight second memory loop.

He has been given, by a compliant court and a supine congress, the unilateral authority to wage war, and he is using it the way he has used every grant of authority in his entire life: recklessly, noisily, without comprehension, and with the attention span of a man who has been channel-surfing for six decades and has finally found the one channel that shows explosions and lets him push the button.

Iranians are forming human chains around their power plants tonight. Picture it. Let it form in your mind. Ordinary people, teachers, students, parents, grandparents, children, wrapping their actual physical bodies around electrical infrastructure because they believe, on the basis of the specific and repeated promises of the President of the United States (promises he signed, like a fucking refrigerator drawing), that they will be bombed.

A woman in Tehran told a reporter that she and her family are not fleeing the city because there is nowhere to go.

There. Is. Nowhere. To. Go.

That is what American power looks like to the world right now. Not a city on a hill. Not the arsenal of democracy. Not the last best hope of earth.

A sundowning Adderall addict with a phone and a nuclear arsenal and the impulse control of a Jack Russell terrier in a room full of squirrels, surrounded by self-abasing toady sycophants, none of whom are willing to take the keys.

That is what frightens me the most.

Not Trump. Trump is what he has always been: a man of titanic ignorance, planetary vanity, and a lizard-brain cunning that has curdled, as the body liquefies and the mind follows it down the drain, into something that is less a personality than a collection of reflexes wearing a suit and a combover held together by whatever aerospace adhesive his handlers source for him.

He is not new. He is not a surprise. He is the same grifter, the same fraud, the same hollow obscenity in a red tie that he was in 2015, just louder, less coherent, more prone to sundowning into apocalyptic tantrums on the toilet at 6 AM, and now in possession of the largest military on earth and the absolute immunity to deploy it however the electrical storm behind his eyes dictates on any given morning.

(Thank you for that, Supreme Court. Hand-delivered. Gift-wrapped. No returns.)

The man who bankrupted a casino, a casino!, a building specifically and mathematically designed so that the house always wins, and he still managed to lose!, the man who bankrupted steaks and vodka and a football league and a university and a magazine and an airline, this man is now conducting the foreign policy of the most powerful nation on earth, and the results are, predictably, indistinguishable from his business record: catastrophic, expensive, and entirely someone else’s problem to clean up.

The terrifying part is that the system designed to contain precisely this scenario, the checks, the balances, the whole magnificent Madisonian architecture of distributed power and mutual restraint, has been hollowed out, co-opted, or simply cowed into silence by men who have done the arithmetic and concluded that the madness is useful to them personally.

Little Mike Johnson. Speaker of the House. Second in the presidential line of succession. The man who holds, constitutionally, the power of the purse and the authority to declare war.

A man whose most notable public achievement before his baffling ascent to the speakership was installing a mutual accountability app on his phone and his teenage son’s phone to monitor each other’s pornography consumption (each other’s! mutual! the mind recoils!) and then volunteering this information to a reporter, unprompted, apparently under the grave misapprehension that it demonstrated moral seriousness rather than a profoundly, luridly unsettling fixation that no sane person would confess to a journalist, let alone brag about.

This man, this sentinel of the republic, this Dollar Store Goebbels with a covenant marriage and a browser history problem and the charisma of a damp washcloth, looked at an unauthorized war launched without congressional approval, a war that has now killed over 1,600 Iranian civilians (244 of them children), a war that has killed 13 American service members, that has destabilized the entire Persian Gulf, that has sent oil past $111 a barrel, that features the President of the United States openly promising war crimes on a social media platform while signing off with “Praise be to Allah” on Easter Sunday, and said, with a straight face, with that thin-lipped undertaker’s smile, with the confidence of a man who has confused cowardice for piety his entire adult life: “The operation has been necessary, lawful and effective.”

He whipped the votes to kill the War Powers Resolution. He called any attempt to reassert Congress’s constitutional authority over war-making “a frightening prospect.”

He then told reporters, displaying the same relationship with observable reality as a man who monitors his son’s porn and calls it parenting: “We are not at war.”

We are not at war.

Bridges are falling into rivers in Iran.

We are not at war.

Two hundred and forty-four children are dead.

We are not at war.

Thirteen American service members are in body bags.

We are not at war.

An elementary school was hit, and one hundred and seventy children died in it.

We are not at war.

Oil is at $111 a barrel.

We are not at war.

Saudi Arabia is taking missile fire.

We are not at war, says Mike Johnson, because calling it a war would mean acknowledging that the Constitution requires his involvement, and his involvement would require him to stop what he is actually doing, which is using the war as a smokescreen to ram through a domestic agenda so toxic, so deeply and comprehensively shit, so staggeringly unpopular, that it cannot survive ten minutes of contact with public attention.

Every minute YOU spend watching Kharg Island burn on your phone is a minute you are not watching what Mike Johnson is doing to the tax code, to reproductive rights, to public education, to the separation of church and state, to every load-bearing wall of the social contract that keeps this country from collapsing into a theocratic plutocracy run by men who think monitoring their children’s masturbation habits is a qualification for governance.

The war is not a failure of his oversight. The war is his cover. The unchecked executive is the delivery vehicle for a wish list that polls somewhere between “compulsory tithing” and “bring back scurvy.” Johnson knows this. He has always known this. And every time he stands at a podium in that cheap suit and tells the American people that the operation is “lawful and effective,” he is buying another news cycle of legislative darkness in which to work, and he is doing it over the bodies of dead children, Iranian and American, and he does not care, because Mike Johnson’s God has apparently given him permission to not care, which is a nifty trick if you can manage it, and a damning indictment of the God in question if you can’t.

And John Roberts. The Chief Justice. The institutionalist. The umpire who just calls balls and strikes, provided the balls and strikes do not involve actual human life and death, in which case he’d rather give a measured address at a university and then retreat to chambers to polish his legacy like a man buffing a vintage car he never intends to drive.

Roberts, who as a bright young lawyer in Reagan’s White House wrote a 1984 memo arguing that Congress should have no defined role in terminating military operations in Lebanon, which tells you everything you need to know about the man’s lifelong project, which has been, from the start, from before most of us were born, the systematic expansion of executive war-making power and the corresponding castration of the legislature’s constitutional authority to say “no, actually, you can’t do that.”

Roberts, who in his 2005 confirmation hearing, when asked point-blank by then-Senator Joe Biden whether Congress has the authority to stop a war, ducked behind the procedural skirts of “hypotheticals” and said he couldn’t answer in the abstract.

Well, mate. It’s not abstract anymore. It’s not a hypothetical.

With all due apologies to Mike Johnson… there is a war.

An unauthorized one.

Being waged by a man who just promised to extinguish a five-thousand-year-old civilization on a website originally built so his fans could share memes about him. And Roberts sits in his marble temple, twenty-one years into the center chair, composure immaculate, enigma buffed to a high shine, saying nothing, doing nothing, because doing something would make the court look “political,” and that is the one outcome John Roberts cannot abide, which is ironic in the way that a man drowning while holding a life preserver because he doesn’t want to get it wet is ironic.

He struck down the tariffs in February. Fair play to him.

He pushed back on birthright citizenship last week. Quite right.

He told Trump’s Solicitor General that his arguments were “very quirky,” which, in the rarefied dialect of Supreme Court understatement, is the equivalent of calling someone a weapons-grade plum to their face while wearing a robe.

He is perfectly content to check presidential power when the stakes are trade policy or constitutional jurisprudence in the clean, academic sense, when the confrontation can be managed through written opinions and the satisfying rituals of appellate procedure, when no one has to look at a photograph of a dead child afterward.

But on the question of whether the President can unilaterally launch and sustain an unauthorized war and then escalate it, publicly, gleefully, on a phone, into the promised destruction of civilian infrastructure across a nation of ninety million people, a question that is not hypothetical, that is not abstract, that is happening right now, tonight, while Roberts sleeps in whatever tasteful arrangement he calls a bed?

On that question, John Roberts has nothing to say. He is sitting in the cuck-chair, watching American constitutionalism and international humanitarian law get railed by a man who cannot spell “reign” and who holds a Bible the way a chimpanzee holds a smartphone (with the evident conviction that it does something important but absolutely no theory of what), and his overriding concern is that the court not be perceived as “political.”

The court IS political, John. It has been political since Marbury v. Madison. The only question, ever, has been whether it would be political in the service of power or in the service of law, and you have made your choice, which is to make no choice, which is the choice of a man who would rather preside with immaculate composure over a dignified irrelevance than risk his precious legacy on an undignified necessity. People are dying while you calibrate.

May the phrase ‘Roberts Court’ ever live in our memories as a gold-standard for venal and corrupt contortions.

And then there are the men who are supposed to be the adults in the room that has no adults.

Pete Hegseth. The Secretary of War. He had the department renamed because subtlety has never once troubled the inside of Pete Hegseth’s beautifully empty skull.

Pete Hegseth’s entire management career before being handed the Pentagon, the largest employer on the planet, two million service members, an $800 billion budget, was running two veterans’ charities so catastrophically that one ended up half a million dollars in debt and the other produced a whistleblower report describing him being carried out of events because he was too shit-faced to walk, trying to climb onstage at a strip club while his staff physically restrained him, and, on one memorable occasion, closing down a bar in Ohio chanting “Kill all Muslims!” at the top of his lungs on an official organizational tour.

This man. This spray-tanned dollar-store frat pledge with a jawline and a blood-alcohol problem is now managing the largest military operation since Iraq, and he is doing it the way he does everything, which is as a segment on a show. Iran is “toast.” He promises “death and destruction” with the cadence of a UFC promo.

When an American pilot was rescued from behind enemy lines on Easter Sunday, Hegseth’s first instinct, his immediate and irrepressible reflex, was to turn it into a Passion narrative for the cameras: “Shot down on a Friday, Good Friday, hidden in a cave, rescued on Sunday. A pilot reborn. God is good.”

A man nearly died in the mountains of Iran and Hegseth converted it into Easter content before the rotors stopped spinning. There is no second layer to Pete Hegseth. There is no moment where the bro-vet cosplay drops and a serious person appears. The cosplay IS the person. Fox News taught him that reality is a broadcast and he learned the lesson so completely that he now runs actual wars as though they’ve been picked up for sweeps week.

Oh, and while he was planning strikes that would kill American soldiers and Iranian children, his broker was on the phone to BlackRock trying to invest millions of Hegseth’s money in a defense industry ETF. War profiteering. The Secretary of fucking War, profiteering from his own fucking war. You could not write this villain. A studio would send the script back saying tone it down.

And Marco Rubio. Little Marco. The Secretary of State. Still the same damp, startled, overcaffeinated face (only now equipped with ill-fitting Florsheims), still carrying the same essential quality he has carried through his entire public life, which is that Marco Rubio will say whatever the last powerful person in the room told him to say, with conviction, and when the next powerful person says the opposite, he will say that with equal conviction, and at no point will the contradiction register, because Marco Rubio does not experience contradiction. Marco Rubio experiences instructions.

His legal justification for the war, the thing he presented to Congress with the sweaty earnestness of a sophomore presenting a book report on a book he skimmed the Wikipedia summary of, was this: Israel was going to attack Iran, which would provoke Iran to attack American forces, so America had to attack Iran first. America went to war because a third country was going to do something.

That is the imminent threat. That is the legal basis for thousands of dead people. It is a bank shot so preposterous it makes the Iraq WMD rationale look like a peer-reviewed triple-tested double-blind research paper.

And for all that, the next day, Trump contradicted him completely, said Iran was about to attack America on its own, nothing to do with Israel. Rubio folded like a lawn chair in a hurricane. “The president determined we were not going to get hit first. It’s that simple, guys.”

The entire justification he’d delivered twenty-four hours earlier, gone, vapor, never happened, and he didn’t blink, because blinking would require a spine and Marco Rubio’s spine is a vestigial organ, technically present, serving no known function, like the appendix but less likely to cause a crisis.

He told Iran to spend its money on its people instead of weapons. While his administration was requesting $200 billion in supplemental Pentagon funding and cutting Medicaid. He said the war would last “weeks, not months.” That was five weeks ago. He said Iranians “deserve better leadership.” He works for Donald Trump.

Marco Rubio would not recognize irony if it introduced itself, pointed to a t-shirt it was wearing that said “HELLO! I AM IRONY” and the face fucked him while waving a hat around and showering him in business cards saying “Hello, I Am Irony,” because recognizing irony requires self-awareness, and self-awareness requires a self, and what Rubio has instead of a self is a suit and a set of talking points and the God-given gift of being able to say absolutely anything without the faintest flicker of recognition that he said the opposite thing yesterday.

These are the professionals. This is the team. A Fox News bro who got hammered and screamed “Kill all Muslims” running the Department of War, and a man whose own rationale for the war was publicly contradicted by his boss within twenty-four hours and who responded by simply pretending he’d never said it. These are the guardrails between the man on the plastic-sheeted bed and the button.

And tonight at 8 PM, when the order comes down the chain, some colonel, some weapons officer sitting in front of a screen with a target overlay of a power plant that keeps a children’s hospital running, is going to have to decide whether to carry it out.

Whether the oath she swore was to the Constitution or to the man on the plastic-sheeted bed.

Whether the laws of war apply to her even when they’ve been deemed inapplicable to the men giving the orders.

Hegseth won’t ask that question. Rubio won’t ask it. Trump can’t even formulate it.

But someone down the line will have to. Someone always does. That is the Nuremberg question and it has never once in the history of the species been answered correctly by pretending it wasn’t being asked.

So who is left?

We have arrived, and I need you to understand the full, shrieking grotesquerie of this, at a place where the people calling for the 25th Amendment, the people saying out loud what anyone with functioning optic nerves and a residual capacity for pattern recognition can see, are Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones.

Read that list again. Out loud. Let it sit in your mouth like a gulp of curdled and chunky milk from a carton has been left out all day on a sidewalk in Houston in June.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who spent four years as Trump’s most embarrassingly servile knob-gobbler of a congressional hype-woman, a woman who could not have located Iran on a map in 2020 if you’d offered her a map of Asia and drawn an arrow to Iran, is now posting “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”

The odious and oleaginous Swanson’s TV-dinner scion, Tucker Carlson, who called the war “absolutely disgusting and evil,” who looked at Trump’s Easter tantrum and said “Who do you think you are?”, who went on his podcast and said “We’ve intentionally bombed civilian infrastructure and that is totally unacceptable, not under the phony laws of some international body but under moral law, God’s law,” and whom Trump then excommunicated from the MAGA movement with the wounded petulance of a cult leader discovering that even his most reliable lapdog has a gag reflex (“Tucker has lost his way. He’s not MAGA. And Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that,” said the man who cannot spell “reign” and who thinks Persia is a type of rug).

And Alex Jones. Alex. Fucking. Jones. A man who told the parents of murdered children at Sandy Hook that their dead babies were crisis actors. A man who was found liable for defaming the grieving parents of slaughtered six-year-olds to the tune of over a billion dollars. This man, in April of 2026, is calling for the 25th Amendment. Alex Jones is a voice of comparative reason on the question of whether the United States should exterminate a civilization. Read that fucking sentence again without gagging. If it doesn’t make you want to lie face-down on the floor and stay there for a geological epoch, I genuinely do not know what to tell you.

The motherfucking arsonists are calling the fire department. They built the apparatus. They sold the matches. They soaked the curtains in kerosene. They lit the fire. They fanned the flames. They warmed their hands on it. They posted Instagram stories of themselves silhouetted against the glow.

And now they are standing in the ashes, singed and blinking, saying “this has gone too far,” and they are, God help us all, God help every last one of us, correct. They are correct.

I am so fucking tired of this. I am tired of writing it, I am tired of knowing it, I am tired of the fact that it needs to be said, and I am tired in a way that I do not think will go away when I sleep tonight, if I sleep tonight, which I probably won’t, because unlike the man in the plastic-sheeted bed in the building that used to mean something, I cannot do the one thing he does effortlessly, which is sleep after the unspeakable has been spoken.

The worst people you know are making the best point available, and the people who are constitutionally empowered and duty-bound to actually do something about it (Johnson, Roberts, Vance, the Cabinet, the entire invertebrate chorus of Republican senators who know exactly what they are watching and have concluded that their reelection prospects are worth more than the Geneva Conventions and the lives of Iranian children and the lives of American soldiers and the rule of law and the constitutional order and whatever remains of America’s claim to moral standing in the world, which, admittedly, was already on life support, but still) are sitting on their hands and letting it ride, because the insanity is load-bearing.

Pull it out and their project collapses.

The madness is not a bug. The madness is the operating system.

And sixty-two percent of Americans oppose this war. Sixty-two percent. Eight million people marched in the streets last month. Even among Republicans who voted for this man, his approval is collapsing. The public is ahead of its leaders. The public has been ahead of its leaders for weeks. The people who are supposed to represent that public, who swore an oath to that public, are ignoring them, because the public’s opposition is inconvenient and the war is useful.

Iranians are forming human chains around their bridges tonight. A woman in Tehran says there is nowhere to go. Thirteen American service members are dead. Over 1,600 Iranian civilians are dead. 244 of them were children. An elementary school was bombed and 170 children died in it. A university has been bombed. Doctors in Tehran are demonstrating because their hospitals have been hit. More than 1,500 people are dead in Lebanon. Fifty are dead across the Gulf states. Twenty Israelis are dead. Oil is at $111 a barrel. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Saudi Arabia is getting hit. The UAE is getting hit. Israel is bombing railways. Iran is firing at everyone in range. Pakistan is trying to mediate. Britain is hosting a virtual meeting of military planners from forty countries to figure out what comes after, assuming there is an after. The Iranian president says fourteen million citizens have volunteered to fight and that he is ready to die alongside them.

And the President of the United States, the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military force in human history, a man who has bankrupted a casino, and steaks, and vodka, and a football league, and a university, and a magazine, and an airline, and the moral authority of the republic, woke up this morning and typed, with his thumbs, on his phone, on the toilet, that a whole civilization would die tonight, and then added “WHO KNOWS?” in all caps, because he genuinely does not know, because there is no plan, because there has never been a plan, because this man has never had a plan for anything in his life that extended past the next news cycle or the next cheeseburger or the next woman or the next con, and the only people on earth willing to say so out loud are the lunatics he built and then discarded when they became inconvenient.

It’s time to take the keys off Grandpa.

Except the people who could take the keys are in the passenger seat, eyes shut, knuckles white, telling themselves the swerving is strategy, while the rest of us are belted into the back, watching the cliff edge approach and screaming into a void that has been gerrymandered, filibustered, and immunity-doctrined into silence.

Panels. Podcasts. Webinars. Interfaith dialogues. I do a lot of these conversations. Voluntarily. Eagerly, even.

They’re the kind of thing that gets organized by people with genuinely good intentions who genuinely believe that putting people with genuinely different perspectives in a room together will genuinely make the world a slightly better place. And they’re right. I believe that too. It’s why I keep showing up.

This though… it ain’t about showing up. It’s about staying… in the room, I mean.

It costs me something and I want to talk about what it costs, because I truly don’t think that people see it, and, more importantly, I think it matters.

And to be hella clear, it’s not about me… it’s not just my experience.

It’s the experience of anyone who has ever been the only [insert identity here] in a room full of people who themselves share a broadly similar framework and who have, with all the best intentions in the world, invited you to be a part of the conversation and provide ‘the other’ perspective.

It’s the Black woman at the dinner party who gets asked to do the work of explaining racism over dessert. It’s the gay colleague who becomes the spokesperson for an entire community because he happened to mention his husband. It’s the Jewish kid in the dorm room who gets asked to answer for the decisions of a country he’s never lived in because someone saw a headline. It’s the woman in the meeting who gets invited to “give us the female perspective” as if fifty-one percent of the human race has a single perspective to give.

Some of you know what this is like. Some of you don’t. Some of you, like me have been on both sides of it, in the majority group in one discussion, but in the minority in another.

And some of you have no fucking idea what I’m talking about.

Well… let me explain what it’s like from the inside.

You show up. Loaded up with good faith and a genuine desire to engage. You believe that your presence matters. You believe that your perspective adds something. You believe that the conversation is better with you in it than without you. And all of that is absolutely and indisputably true.

And then the conversation starts, and you realize something that you already knew but had allowed yourself to forget, which is that you are not a participant.

You are a respondent.

The others show up with frameworks and arguments and institutional authorities and charts and presentations and perspectives that they want to share.

You have showed up with yourself.

And the structure of the conversation — not by anyone’s malice, not by design, just by the gravity of numbers — is that they present and you respond. They assert and you react. They build a case and you are, whether anyone means it this way or not (and I am confident that they don’t), the defendant.

And so you spend the entire time not saying what you came to say.

Because what you came to say is: Can we talk about the future? Can we talk about what’s happening right now? Can we talk about the thing that actually matters, which is how real people are actually suffering while we sit here arguing about events that happened before any of us were born?

But that’s not what they came to say. They aren’t there for a conversation, or a discussion that is focused on understanding each other better. They are there to literally present a case.

And every time you try to talk about what you think matters, you’re back in the dock, because if you don’t respond, your silence becomes agreement, and if you do respond, you’ve just given the conversation another thirty minutes of exactly the kind of debate you were trying to move past.

This is the trap. And it is not a trap that anyone sets on purpose. It is a trap that is built into the architecture of being the only one.

Here’s another thing that happens.

Someone says something that lands in your gut like a fist. Not a slur. Nothing so crude. Something intellectual. Something framed as analysis. A comparison that equates your side with the worst things that have ever happened to theirs. You’re presented with a framing that says your community’s longing for home is not grief but pathology. Or made the focus of a historical argument that tells you that your people’s pain is their own fault and the solution is for them to stop being who they are.

And you have about four seconds to decide how to respond.

And you know — you know — that the person who just said the thing that landed in your gut is not your enemy.

They are a just another human person with their own wounds, their own history, their own grief that is no less real than yours.

You know that.

You hold that.

And you still have to respond.

And you can’t lose your temper. If you lose your temper, you become the angry [insert identity here], and everything you say afterward gets filtered through that anger, and the people in the room will remember the anger and not the argument.

You know this.

You have known this your entire life. I’m not saying that’s right. I’m saying that’s what it is.

You can’t be dismissive.

If you’re dismissive, you’re not engaging seriously, and the whole point of being in the room is that you engage seriously, and also, some of what was said contains real truth, and you know that, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest and you refuse to be dishonest.

You can’t be silent.

Silence is agreement. Silence is defeat. Silence is what they want, “Look, he cannot respond to my brilliant insight,” and you will not give them what they expect, not because you’re stubborn but because silence is a luxury that people with backup can afford and you don’t have backup. You are the only one in the fucking room.

And so you find your way, somehow, to the words. In real time. With your heart pounding in your fucking throat and your stomach loop-de-fucking-loops. You find the precise way… the measured way… the generous and intellectually serious way to respond… the way that honors the truth in what was said while naming what was missing.

And you do this not because you are a saint, because come on… who are we fucking fooling… but because you have been doing it your entire life and you are, at this point, very fucking good at it.

And afterwards, they are kind and pleasant and generous and they thank you for being a part of this conversation when what they mean is thank you for not making this uncomfortable and what they don’t understand is that it was uncomfortable the entire time.

For you.

Not for them.

Uncomfortable for fucking you.

What I’ve found, and I wish I didn’t have so much data to source the insight, is that the real work, for me, is rarely the actual conversation. The real work is what it takes to stay in the conversation.

There’s a particular flavor of this that I want to name, because I think it’s the part that’s hardest to explain to people who haven’t lived it.

It’s the moment when you realize that you are expected to be a scholar of the other side’s perspectives and justifications. Not just familiar with it. Not just respectful of it. A scholar. You are expected to know the history, to acknowledge their traumas, and to genuflect before the historical imperatives that forced them to do this or do that, and to contextualize every predation visited upon you as an understandable, if regrettable, consequence of their context.

And you do it.

You do it because you believe in it.

Not as performance. Not as a strategy. You do it because you believe the core of the you that makes you you, that understanding the other side’s contexts and acknowledging them is not a concession but a prerequisite. Because you know that solutions, if they ever come, will be built on these foundations of mutual recognition, and you are willing to do your part of that work honestly and without shortcuts.

But then you look across and you ask yourself: is anyone doing that work in the other direction? Is anyone in this room expected to be a scholar of my contexts? Is anyone required to genuflect before my historical imperatives? To acknowledge that the things that were done to my side of the issue were not just unfortunate but devastating, not just regrettable but defining?

And the answer, most of the time, is an utterly irrefutable no.

Because the architecture of the conversation — the architecture of the world, frankly — has arranged things so that some people’s context is the text and another people’s context is the footnote. One people’s trauma is the thing that must be understood and honored and centered. The other people’s trauma is the background. The unfortunate but necessary cost.

Your pain is the Gospel. Mine must be ever the Gloss.

And you sit there thinking: my brother, your truth is no more true than mine. History and data can be marshalled to support just about any point of view. The truthfulness of your truth is a function of where you stand and how you see the world. It is not objective truth.

But when you are the only one in the room, you don’t get to say that. Because everything you say is heard as a position statement on behalf of your entire people.

You are not, then, just a person with a perspective. You are the representative of a side.

And if you say something nuanced — if you say, for instance, that your own community’s leadership has failed catastrophically, or that there are faults in your own side, and you mean it, genuinely, not as a rhetorical concession, but because it’s true and you refuse to pretend otherwise — that nuance gets picked up and used, not as evidence of your honesty, but as a confession.

See, even he admits it.

Your ethical honesty and moral compass become nothing much more than ammunition. Your complexities become their talking points.

The reverse never happens: members of majority frameworks are rarely (at least, in my experience) expected to perform the same self-criticism.

Nobody asks them to begin their remarks by acknowledging the worst things their side has done. That’s not how the architecture works. The architecture works like this: they present their narrative as history. You present yours as perspective. Their truth is truth. Your truth is “a different take,” or, (FML), “interesting.”

To be clear, I don’t think this is a conspiracy. I don’t think the genuinely good folks who organize these things are sitting in a back room designing the structure to create these imbalances. But intent and impact are different things.

There is often an asymmetry that is baked-in-structural and not, at all (at least I don’t think) intentional.

But when the narrative you are in dialogue with has had decades of institutional and ideological support and your narrative has had decades of being told to wait its turn, it’s not that the room is rigged, it’s just built on a foundation that was poured before you arrived, and that foundation has a tilt to it, and everybody in the room is standing on it, and the people who aren’t sliding downhill never ever ever notice the fucking angle.

I want to pause here and say something that I mean with my whole chest: I am grateful for every single one of these invitations. Every one. The people who organize these conversations are doing something that matters. They are doing the work of creating spaces where difficult things can be said out loud, and that work takes courage, and it is necessary, and it is often thankless, and I have nothing but respect for the people who do it. Truly. And the fact that I sometimes leave these rooms carrying a heaviness that takes the rest of the day to metabolize does not diminish what those rooms are trying to be. It doesn’t. I want that to be absolutely clear.

The problem is often just math. When you are three and I am one, the room has a center of gravity, and it’s not in my chair. That’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just fucking physics. But physics or not, it’s worth noticing. It’s worth designing around.

If I could ask one thing of the people who build these rooms — and I’m speaking now to the awesome fucking folks who do the tough and thankless work… the organizers, the moderators, the hosts who are trying so hard to get it right, and who are, in fact, getting so much of it right — it would be this: notice who in your room is the only one.

Notice what you’re asking of them that you’re not asking of everyone else.

And ask yourself if there’s something you can do — not to make it easy, because it will never be easy — but to make the weight a little more evenly distributed.

Just sit with it.

That’s all I’m asking.

Sit with the discomfort of it for a minute.

Because sitting with discomfort is what we have to do every time we’re the only [insert identity here] in one of those rooms.

And I do it and will continue to do it, every time, and willingly, and with an open heart. I’ll keep going to these things. I’ll keep showing up. I’ll keep sitting in rooms where I am the only one, and I’ll keep finding the words, and I’ll keep being “measured” and whatever the fuck else people need to call it to feel comfortable with what they just watched me do.

Because the alternative is not being in the room.

And not being in the room means the conversation happens without you. And a conversation that happens without you will decide things about you. And that, for anyone who has ever been the only one, is the thing that is more exhausting than any panel, any podcast, any argument about history that happened before anyone in the room was born.

Not being in the room is a shitty option, but some days, staying in the room costs more than others.

Boy fucking howdy.

Two peoples have come to dwell upon the same land.

One holds the keys.

One asks for permission to pass.

One builds where it wishes.

One watches its homes reduced to rubble.

One controls the water.

One rations what remains.

Each says, “I was wronged here.”

And both of them speak the truth.

But the wrongs are not equal in their present form.

The teaching says:

That which you give shall return to you in kind.

But the return is not immediate.

And the return is not proportional to present power.

The powerful give:

Checkpoints. Permits. Demolitions. Siege.

“For security,” they say.

And this, too, is fact and not fiction.

They remember bombs on buses.

Cafes turned into graves.

Children murdered in their beds.

They remember a history where weakness meant annihilation.

They remember being hunted, everywhere, always.

Their fear is not imagined.

Their fear is inherited.

But fear, once armed, becomes policy.

The powerless give:

Stones. Rockets. Rage. Bodies.

“For survival,” they say.

And this, too, is fact and not fiction.

They remember land taken, futures closed, movement denied.

They remember soldiers deciding who may pass and who may not.

They remember law arriving as force, not protection.

They remember that patience has never been rewarded.

Their rage is not spontaneous.

It is taught daily.

The Law replies:

Your justifications do not change the gift.

If you control a people’s movement, food, water, and future — what do you think you are teaching their children?

If you are denied movement, food, water, and future — what do you think your children are learning?

The one with power says:
“We must have security first, then peace.”

The one without power says:
“We must have freedom first, then peace.”

Both are saying:
“The other must change first.”

And so nothing changes.

The one with greater power bears greater responsibility.

Not because their grievance is lesser.

Not because their fear is invalid.

Not because history is simple.

But because power creates the conditions.

The strong choose whether to show restraint.

The weak act within the constraints the strong have set.

When the strong say, “We are also afraid” — this is true.

When the strong say, “We also suffer” — this is true.

But fear with an army is different from fear without one.

Suffering with sovereignty is different from suffering under domination.

Can the jailer and the prisoner both be trapped?

Yes.

Are they trapped in the same way?

No.

The teaching does not deny the fear of the strong.

It asks what that fear has been made to justify.

The teaching does not sanctify the rage of the weak.

It asks what that rage has been made to destroy.

The teaching does not promise justice.

It promises only consequence.

If you build a system that requires another people’s subordination, you will get resistance.

If you crush that resistance with greater force, you will get greater resistance.

If you teach a generation that they have no future, they will act as if they have no future.

Security built on another’s unfreedom is not security.

It is a wager that force can be sustained forever.

It is the assumption of a debt that will be repaid.

History does not favor that wager.

The Law applies always, but it operates on the scale of generations.

The question is not “who is right?”

The question is “what is sustainable?”

The answer has been shown again and again:

Domination is not sustainable.

Humiliation is not sustainable.

Permanent control is not sustainable.

You can win every battle and still lose.

You can have the greater army and still be destroying yourselves.

You can be justified in your fear and still be creating the future you fear most.

Restraint from a position of power is not weakness.

It is the only path to actual security.

Rage born of injustice does not make every action righteous.

Resistance born of oppression does not make every choice acceptable .

The innocent you kill do not care about your justification.

Their deaths become weapons in the hands of those who oppress you.

When the oppressor uses your violence to justify the system, and you choose it anyway — what are you building?

The oppressed do not have the luxury of perfect choices.

But choices remain choices.

And consequences remain consequences.

Both peoples must decide what they are willing to live with.

Not what is just.

Not what is deserved.

Not what history demands.

But what is actually possible

between two peoples who cannot leave,

cannot separate,

cannot wish each other away.

The alternative is visible to all:

More of what has already failed.

The Law does not offer comfort.

It offers only consequence.

Choose the gift.
Receive the return.

And know that the children are watching both.
And learning.

I was asked by my friend, Achinoam Nini (Noa), to speak at an event raising funds for a concert for peace happening next summer in Florence, Italy. Many of the attendees have asked me for a copy of the speech so I am posting it here (with minor edits).

I want to start, even before introducing myself, by thanking my dear, huge-hearted and compassionate friend, Yaffa Maritz for that generous introduction. I promise you, if you believe a word she says about me, you will be sorely disappointed by the reality of me.

And to you all, good evening.

My name is Mo Husseini. I am a writer and a filmmaker, which means I am professionally obligated to be an introvert. I usually prefer to hide behind the words. But tonight, the words aren’t enough.

I should probably warn you in advance: I am a Palestinian who was educated in English boarding schools. This is a very specific recipe for a deep love of literature, a distinct and profound level of emotional repression, and access to reams and reams of creative profanity.

So, if there are children here, this is me technically apologizing… in theory, just not in practice. There will be swears.

I don’t know what kind of day you’ve had. Maybe it was full of noble deeds. Maybe it was just a long slog of unanswered emails and mild existential dread.

Either way, you showed up.

And that alone makes you action something of a modern miracle.

Because to show up right now, to gather for anything that dares to whisper the word “peace,” takes a degree of emotional fortitude and optimism that deserves a small medal and possibly a glass or three of wine.

We are living in a time where everything — from the news to the discourse to the algorithms that feed on outrage — is wired to divide us, depress us, or sell us something we don’t need while we argue with people we’ve never met about bullshit that doesn’t matter.

And in a time like that…

The simple act of choosing to stand for hope is borderline rebellious.

So here we are. Rebelliously gathered.

I want to thank the amazing Sunny Finch Miller for opening up her space tonight — for her generosity and her big heart. I’d also like to thank her for inviting me to speak here, despite having a very accurate, long-standing understanding of my… let’s say, limited social skills. I’m honored. A little confused — that’s normal for me — but honored.

And yes, I am reading this. I’m a writer. It’s what we do.

Or as Harrison Ford once said to my old boss, George Lucas, on the set of Star Wars: “Just because you can type this shit, George, doesn’t mean I can say it.”

So, with that caveat, I thought I’d start with something simple:

I’m fucking exhausted.

I think most people involved in issues around Palestine and Israel are.

We’re exhausted.

Exhausted by the killing. By the hatred. By the refusal to see each other. By the endless conflict.

By the way everything tries to shrink you into a position.

By the way the noise drowns out the humanity.

We’re exhausted.

Because the story we’ve been sold is a bad one.

It’s a lazy script.

You know the one. It’s the binary story.

The one that says there are only two kinds of people: Victims and Monsters.

Us and Them.

The Righteous and the Damned.

It’s a very seductive story because it’s simple. It requires zero processing power.

You don’t have to think; you just have to pick a team.

But the problem with that story is that it’s a lie. It deletes the nuance.

It edits out the inconvenient humanity of the “other side.”

It demands that I, as a Palestinian, look at an Israeli and see only an occupier, not a human.

It demands that they look at me and see only a terrorist, not a man.

And maintaining that lie takes an immense amount of energy.

It takes work to keep your heart closed.

It takes physical effort to constantly suppress your own empathy just to stay loyal to your “tribe.”

That is what’s exhausting us.

We are burning ourselves out trying to maintain a fiction that keeps us safe but leaves us lonely.

So, the real rebellion tonight isn’t just about “peace.”

It’s about plot twisting.

It’s about refusing to play the character you were assigned in a tragedy written by men who profit from your rage.

And what we need now is a way out of it all.

Not a UN resolution.

Not a treaty.

Not a utopia drawn in crayon by some armchair wonk.

A way out.

A way back.

A way through.

And that begins not with a side, or a flag, or a position. It begins with questions:

What if we simply decided to stop being afraid of each other?

What if we rejected the idea that grief must come with a passport, or that empathy needs a permission slip?

What if we stopped parroting the same tired mythologies that have left us here, cynical and spiritually threadbare — and instead, with whatever battered courage we have left, imagined something different?

Not something perfect. Just something better. Something possible.

Hope isn’t a mood or a slogan, and it sure as hell isn’t something you print on a tote bag.

Hope is not a noun; hope is a verb.

An action. A stubborn refusal.

Hope is what you do in the dark when you can’t see the exit, but you’re walking toward it anyway.

It’s inconvenient. It’s slow. It’s fragile.

But when it’s real, it’s contagious.

And I know. I know how easy it is to roll your eyes at all of this.

Because hope can sound like a trick, like a bumper sticker, like the thing you try just before you give up.

But here’s the truth: hope is dangerous. It’s dangerous because it forces you to act before you’re certain.

It dares you to believe in people who’ve disappointed you. It dares you to open your mouth when silence would be easier.

It dares you to be soft in a world that rewards hard edges.

And that’s not weakness. That’s resistance.

Because despair is seductive.

Despair gives you an excuse to do nothing.

Hope says: do it anyway.

Even if it won’t fix everything.

Even if you’re tired.

Even if your heart is half-broken and duct-taped together with coffee and gallows humor.

Because the other option — the one where we all just fold our arms and say “nothing will ever change” — that option leads exactly nowhere.

And we’ve been there.

We’ve seen what happens when we build shrines to cynicism.

Spoiler alert: no one gets saved.

But hope… real, grounded, stubborn hope… asks you to do something.

To show up. To listen. To risk being changed.

And yeah, to write the damn check. Let’s be honest.

But more than that — to stay in the room.

Even when it’s uncomfortable.

Even when you want to scream.

Even when it would feel better to walk out.

That’s what this night is about. Not the machinery of war, but the mechanics of hope.

The slow, stubborn, inconvenient business of choosing to see the human being in front of you — even if they come wrapped in a story you were raised to mistrust.

That’s what this festival — Reimagine Peace — is for. Not to soothe you with sentimental nonsense, but to challenge you with beauty.

To provoke you with generosity. To remind you that before we are slogans, or nations, or tribes — we are bodies and voices and breath.

And tonight, we get to listen.

To people who are not supposed to be on the same stage.

To songs that are not supposed to be sung in harmony.

To ideas that, frankly, make all the warmongering assholes very nervous.

Good. Let them be nervous.

Because tonight, we get to choose music over dogma.

Creation over cruelty.

Art over algorithm.

Tonight, it is my honor to introduce someone I’m proud to call a friend.

Someone who has been choosing that for a very long time.

If you know her, you already know: there is no one like her.

An internationally renowned singer, songwriter, activist, and poet, she has spent the last three decades putting her art where her mouth is. She’s sung on some of the biggest stages in the world, represented her people at Eurovision, and stood beside my people in solidarity, and somehow — through all of it — never stopped being a fiercely independent voice for dialogue, empathy, and yes, peace.

She doesn’t just believe in peace.

She fucking builds it.

With melody.

With courage.

With hope.

And with love.

So please — with gratitude, with admiration, with that very specific kind of awe reserved for someone who still gives a damn when most people have gone numb — join me in welcoming the extraordinary, the uncompromising, the most excellent…

Noa.

I’ve been avoiding posting on social media for days now and mostly just lurking. Reading. Getting frustrated. Tweaked.

Trying to hold onto something real in a flood of reactions, hashtags, memes, demands, judgments. I want to say the right thing.

But more often, I just want to feel something bigger than despair.

I’m glad the fighting has paused. I’m glad the hostages are home. I’m glad, for once, the skies are quieter, the nights don’t tremble so often, the ambulances slow, the walls of fear crack ever so slightly.

Yes — I’m happy about that. Deeply.

But it is not a victory lap. Not by a long shot. That kind of happiness — the happiness of a war “done,” of justice “achieved” — would be hollow here.

All I have is “better than yesterday,” and that is both something and nothing. It’s not enough. It’s not the metric of peace.

Because peace is not the absence of violence. Peace is the presence of equitable justice. Not just a truce or lull, but the flourishing of human dignity for everyone.

When the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) died, Abu Bakr (the first caliph) stood before the people and said:

“Whoever among you worshipped Muhammad, then know that Muhammad is dead; but whoever worships God, know that God is Ever Living and does not die.”

The moment was not just about loss. It was a reminder: don’t idolize the messenger; worship the timeless. Don’t let your devotion be to comfort, or to figures, or to temporary outcomes. Devote yourself to what must outlive violence — to justice, to truth, to the living.

If what you worship is only “no rockets, no bombs, no tension,” then this moment may feel like peace.

But if what you seek is justice — for all people — then this moment is just a breath, not a breakthrough. A necessary pause, yes. But not a resolution.

Just because you started thinking about this situation on October 7, 2023, doesn’t mean that that’s when it started. And just because you stop thinking about this situation in October 2025 doesn’t mean that’s when it ended.

October 7 was a catastrophe. It tore open wounds, stole lives, and left forever scars in Israeli families. The trauma is real, indelible, and must be acknowledged without equivocation.

But it is a special kind of stupid that insists that the story started there. It didn’t. It didn’t start with rockets or with tunnels. It began long before — in the dispossession of homes, in the checkpoints and concrete walls, in the normalization of suffering and humiliation, in a world that has tolerated statelessness and displacement for generations.

And yes — even within that pain — Hamas has made things worse. Much worse. It has ruled with violence, silenced dissent, used its own people as leverage in a game where everyone loses. It has hijacked the cause of liberation and turned it into a death cult masquerading as resistance.

And on the other side, Israel’s right-wing government — fueled by religious zealotry and nationalism — continues to provoke, punish, and expand. It arms settlers, protects land theft, and dismisses international law with impunity. It treats vengeance as diplomacy, and dominance as destiny.

So here we are — again — standing in the middle of a ceasefire while the people who suffer most, Palestinians and Israelis, have gained almost nothing but more suffering and loss.

I dare to imagine something more.

I dare to imagine a day when Palestinian children wake up not to surveillance drones or rubble, but to breakfast and school and futures not yet stolen. A day when water flows clean and free, when roads are open, when birthright isn’t a sentence.

I dare to imagine a day when Israeli children are no longer drilled on siren responses before they learn how to write their names. A day without bomb shelters as architecture. A day where Jewish safety is no longer framed as dependent on Palestinian erasure.

I dare to imagine borders that are not prison gates, but crossings between lives — marked not by checkpoints and guns, but by cooperation, by coexistence, by trust built painstakingly over time.

I dare to imagine a justice that does not flinch: truth commissions, legal accountability, and global recognition of suffering on all sides — not to keep score, but to heal what denial has allowed to fester.

I dare to imagine classrooms that teach not just one history, but both. That honor the losses and sufferings and pains and traumas of all people. That make space for both truths, so that children grow up knowing their pain does not cancel someone else’s. That your grief doesn’t erase mine.

I dare to imagine a shared culture and a shared ‘language’ with a common grammar that is rooted in empathy, where difference is not threat, and where solidarity doesn’t mean sameness — just shared humanity.

This isn’t a utopia. This is a roadmap — fragile, slow, imperfect — but a real alternative to endless blood and blame.

So yes: I feel relief. I feel gratitude that lives are spared today. I feel love for people — Israelis, Palestinians, anyone still willing to hope in this wreckage. Anyone still showing up, still reaching across, still refusing to harden.

Because relief is not justice.

Because silence is not peace.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”

Justice means Palestinians live in freedom, safety, and rights — not someday, not conditionally, but fully.

Justice means Israelis live without fear — not behind walls, but in a future where safety doesn’t come at the cost of someone else’s freedom.

Justice means no more children raised among rubble and caution. No more hostages or orphaned families. No more bombed hospitals, no more schools leveled, no more fear as daily routine. No more justifying one atrocity with another.

Justice means we finally admit that both peoples deserve full, free, meaningful lives — and that one people’s liberation should never demand the erasure of the other’s.

This is the work.

It’s slower than war. It’s harder than airstrikes. It’s messier than flags.

But it is the only way forward.

Because peace is not the moment when violence ends.

Peace is what you build when no one is watching.

It is what you whisper between heartbreaks.

Peace is what you fight for — with compassion, with clarity, with relentless moral focus — even when the world tells you to pick a side or stay quiet.

We’re not there yet.

But I still believe we can be.

And that belief — stubborn, exhausted, aching — is where I’ll keep standing.

I pray that others do too.

οἶδ’ ἐγὼ φεύγοντας ἄνδρας ἐλπίδας σιτουμένους
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope

Aeschylus

I made mujadarah the other night. It’s a spiced (not spicy) lentil pilaf that, when made to my mother’s specifications, transports me to my happy place.

It was a failure.

The lentils broke down, the rice got soggy, and something about the mix of aromatics was ever-so-slightly yet fatally wrong. Everything was just… off. And I knew it from the aroma, even before the first bite. An uncanny valley of flavor: familiar but wrong.

I cook a lot. Some of it is habit, some of it is hunger, and very often it is homesickness. Taste and smell have always been for me the fastest way to a sense of time and place. Even now, in my fifties, I still find myself chasing certain dishes — not for their taste exactly, but for moments and places they remind me of. Or promise to. I want the smell of something real. Something rooted. Something that whispers, “You’re from here.” But food only gets you so far. The deeper hungers — the ones shaped by absence, by narrative, by the world’s indifference — are harder to feed.

My mother taught me to cook in a way that all mothers teach: not through measurement or mechanics, but by sentiment. My mother’s recipes were feelings. Measures of gut instincts and vibes. Rituals of the hand and wrist. “Nitfet bharat,” she’d say — “a pinch of seven spice.” “Shwayet irfeh” — “a bit of cinnamon.” “Enough salt in the water that an egg will float.” My mother cooked like a jazz musician: improvising around a melody only she could hear.

When I cook now, I try to find that key and follow the tune. But even when I replicate the steps perfectly — hit every note, measure for measure — it quite often still feels wrong. Like playing a Coltrane solo note-for-note, you can build the body but still miss the sacred breath. No heart. No feel. I can follow the rhythm. But not the soul.

That’s an outcome that I know all too well as an exile. Where you can build all the pieces of a ‘home’, follow all the steps, include all the ingredients you know by heart, and fill it with people who matter to you and to whom you matter, and yet still, as close as it gets, it’s a simulation that still doesn’t quite taste like home.

Exile isn’t just about geography. It’s about dissonance. It’s about making something with love and muscle memory and grief and still finding it doesn’t quite land. It’s about the irretrievable — the flavor you almost remember, the place you almost had, the version of yourself that almost made sense.

Exile is an insatiable hunger. Not metaphor or gauzy abstraction, but a gnawing, physical insistence that eats at that part of you that’s just a few inches to the left of the place you carry your broken dreams.

It is an open-mawed mewling hunger that you can’t feed with falafel or hummus or rosewater-scented pastries. An ache that you can’t quiet with bedtime tales of longing and loss.

It’s a gluttonous hunger that dreams of feasting on the never-happening, the almost-was, and the might-have-been.

The cruel trick of my exile is that I was taught to yearn for what was lost and have ended up starving for a taste of what can never be.

Exile doesn’t just strip you of home — it strips you of narrative. You end up, like Tantalus, reaching for fruit that dissolves at a touch, trying to write your story while the world erases each word before the ink dries. Everyone has a pen. Everyone has a different outline. And somehow, you must make sense of it all.

There’s a silent film from 1924 with an ending that’s been stuck in my mind for the three decades since I saw it: Greed, by Erich von Stroheim. In its final moments, two men are handcuffed together in the middle of Death Valley. One kills the other, realizing too late that he’s condemned himself to die with the corpse he’s created. It’s overwrought, sure. But it’s also, in its way, prophecy.

That’s the shape and the structure of my exile.

If you’re born Palestinian but born outside of and after the flickering moment of Palestine to parents who are themselves exiles, themselves caromed with you across lines on a map by the shifting and baroque architecture of history (which is to say, violence), then what you inherit is not just a hunger for a place but also a hunger for a story.

It’s a dizzying narrative vertigo where your bones whisper one thing and your passport and mailing address shout another.

Adding painful insult to historical injury, the people around you, wherever around you happens to be at that particular phase of your eternal migration, don’t quite see you. Or worse, they do but mistake you for something else entirely.

I was born in Heliopolis. Cairo’s City of the Sun. A name so grand, so mythic, that it feels like a satirical dig. And in a way, it may be. The name Heliopolis implies clarity, illumination, and centrality, and my birth was anything but.

I was born de-centered, granted the Ottoman deeds and rusty keys to the outline of a something that was long gone. I am the heir to an absence. The unpapered citizen of a Palestine that had already begun to exist only as an addictive mix of rightful grievance, bone-deep grief, and a resigned resentment at the world’s apathy by the time I drew my first breath.

My father, born in a Palestinian Jerusalem, still referred to it as home. My mother, born in a Palestinian Nablus, did too. But they weren’t allowed to return — not really — and so their home was always an abstraction, a concept.

We Palestinians are the living proof of Thomas Wolfe’s hypothesis; we literally can’t go home again.

And so, my exile begins as a genetic injury forged in the fusion fire of colliding recessive alleles for loss and homesickness.

I have lived in many places: Kuwait, the United Kingdom, Jordan, and the United States. Each one tacked into the fabric of my identity with a rough, uneven thread that pulls too tight in some places and hangs loose in others. Each stitch pulls differently through new cloth, old cloth, borrowed cloth, and layers my life into a patchwork of experiences that define the Josephic Dreamcoat that I wear as I walk the earth like Kung Fu’s Caine, “till God puts me where he wants me to be.”

But none of the patches on that coat have ever given me the thing that people mean when they talk about home. That casual intimacy people mean when they talk about home — the kind of home that doesn’t ask you, But, where are you really from?

Kuwait was only ever transient and transactional, a weirdly plastic Disneyland of petrodollars, refugees, and expats.

The UK was cold, both socially and meteorologically. In this, the era before the push for multiculturalism, the message was clarion clear: You will never be English, but you had very much better bloody try to be.

Jordan was so close culturally and geographically, but, delicious irony, the place where you are most forced, as a Palestinian person, to sublimate those parts of yourself. To tuck it away, or dilute it, or make it less inconvenient. The Western tendency to collapse Jordanians and Palestinians into one tidy category might work well for facile op-eds or mealy-mouthed diplomats, but anyone who’s actually lived inside those identities knows better. Yes, we’re similar. But similarity only heightens the stakes of difference. Freud’s Narcissism of Small Differences explains so much with surgical precision. Hic sunt dracones, amice.

Adulthood in the United States was the first time things even hinted at being better. My first year here, in Boston, brought something that was not comfort or belonging exactly. In retrospect, I think it was a joy in a sense of anonymity. A feeling of not mattering. A sense of spaciousness. A liberating feeling rooted in the idea that here, no one knows you, no one cares, and everyone’s kind of doing their own thing. A moment that said, Unclench your fists, think what you want, choose which parts of yourself to show and which to keep folded quietly in your coat pocket. I wanted to be seen. I also wanted to disappear.

Boston taught me how to become scrutable — readable, familiar, and just foreign enough to be interesting, but never enough to be troubling. A Palestinian who smiled just enough to put people at ease, who offered critique in doses small enough not to disturb digestion. Who wore his displacement lightly, tastefully, intellectually, and never wound it too tight around the neck. Because while America didn’t demand erasure, it did ask for a little sanitization. A little performance. A little translation. And I obliged.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/275aaddfa1b7a31ba978347c1d86f1aa/href">https://medium.com/media/275aaddfa1b7a31ba978347c1d86f1aa/href</a>

Transferring to Berkeley came closest to something like belonging. There was air there. Big air. Big, wide-open space to ask big questions. To say the things I couldn’t say anywhere else. But even then, I was performing to the edges of the version of myself that the environment could accommodate. Hospitality, understanding, and acceptance aside, the inner master who cosplays as a slave stands just behind the exile, whispering his quiet warning to the stateless: “Memento peregrinum esse. You will be ever the guest. Yes, the door is open. But this is not your house.”

I often don’t want to be Palestinian. That’s not something rooted in a sense of shame; I am, and have always been, deeply proud of my heritage and culture. It’s a desire parented by the consummated union of Exhaustion and Hopelessness.

It’s a shitty and thankless gig, being a Palestinian. It’s not a job people are rushing to apply for. How much easier it would be to walk the world as a Laotian, or a Nepali, or a Costa Rican, or a Swiss? To never have to explain, to defend, or represent? To never have to help translate the idiom of pain and loss into a digestible expression for those who do not even understand the equation? To never have to wear the responsibility of staying unflinchingly friendly, inoffensive, and generous in the face of aggressive interrogations and dismissals that question your right to exist in your identity? To never carry the grief, or worse, the expectation of grief?

It clings to you, your Palestinian-ness. Like wet clothes. Like a birthmark — unseen until someone winces and asks, What happened to your face?

Above all, there’s a maddening absurdity to being a rational, secular Palestinian in a world that insists on turning you into a symbol — flattened, simplified, branded.

And the call’s not just coming from outside the house.

The first home I remember is an apartment on Baghdad Street in Kuwait City. We lived on the top floor, two floors up from the apartment of the PLO/Fatah representative to the Gulf states. I have no recollection of the man (save his name, Salim Za’anoon). He is not really part of my story except that his role in the PLO meant that our apartment building had a rickety nicotine-stained RV at the entrance to our building as a shelter for a rotating cast of young Fatah security men who sat, wreathed in a dense and ever-present miasma of cigarette smoke, drinking syrupy-sweet sage tea, and nodding to mesmerizing ballads of Palestine that sang of love, of dispossession, of homesickness, and of a painful and enduring sense of loss.

Their music was all lament and minor-key yearning — odes to lost keys, uprooted trees, ghost houses on hillsides no one had seen in decades. They smoked, drank tea, and regaled the children of the building with stories delivered with the weighted cadence of Scripture. Young men who had been taught that the best use of their lives was to end them in the service of a story. A cause. A flag.

They terrified me.

Not just because I feared death, which I absolutely did, but because I did not understand their narrative.

I could follow the beats of their stories and their logic, but always there was the ‘magical thinking’ step in the flow. The idea that sacrifice, or martyrdom, or the killing of others could somehow turn a life devoid of meaning into something honorable, useful, and more valuable than gold. A koan that confused me; Die to make your life make sense. You are the sacrifice. The point. The clean ending. The last paragraph. Become Capa’s Falling Soldier and transubstantiate from zero to hero, from lamb to lion.

Narrative coherence is, more often than not, a trap. Chaos, attenuated by the ablation of Nuance, that mortal enemy of every good piece of propaganda.

Those early years cursed me with what I can only describe as an allergic reaction to narrative clarity. I am someone who mistrusts tidy explanations. I flinch at the painting of suffering as noble, or victory as righteousness.

I understand in my bones how stories become cages.

I know all too well how Meaning can be the cosplay get-up of blood-thirsty lunatics. Because once you buy into the story — any story — you buy into its casualties. You kill the other and find yourself still shackled to the consequences. This is the handcuff logic of history. You swing the axe, but the chain doesn’t shatter — it coils tighter — Death Valley, measureless to man, beckons.

I grew up steeped in stories that didn’t always make sense, that often asked for belief instead of offering clarity, that turned pain into performance and grief into currency. I have come to stop trusting stories altogether. Or rather, I distrust those tales that tidy up too neatly.

I’ve come to think of exile not just as a loss of place, but as a war over meaning. I have always been (now unfashionably) drawn to David Foster Wallace. Not just for his tangled syntax or linguistic pyrotechnics, but for his obsession with how narratives disguise themselves as truths.

For an exile, this isn’t philosophy; it’s survival. When every story carries an asterisk, when every narrative aims to gaslight you, vigilance becomes breath itself as you try to resist the ego’s endless urge to center itself in every story.

Story is a double-edged sword; as likely to injure the swordsman as it is their foe.

I learned that lesson listening to those impossibly serious men talk about delivering liberation with Kalashnikovs and cassette tapes.

I remember the dissonance. The sense that something in their stories felt off. Imaginary. False. That the Palestine they described was less of a place than it was a mood. A vibe. A perfume. Something made fonder in its absence.

Most of all, I remember thinking, quietly and with profound guilt and shame, that killing to stop killing made little sense to me. The illogic terrified me. I remember wondering what would happen if they actually won. Suppose they got it all back. Would the story end? Would the hunger stop? Would we all finally be happy and at home?

You know the answer. And so do I.

Because in the end, exile isn’t just about connection to the land. It’s about narrative. About identity. You’re not just kept from a place. You’re kept from a version of yourself that only exists in that place. And which, if you ever got there, might not exist at all.

I wish I could tell you there was some clarifying encounter, some speech or moment that made it all legible. Some Pauline moment on the road to Damascus. But that would be the memoirist’s lie — manufacturing post-facto arcs across the messy sprawl of an ordinary life, finding patterns and assigning meaning to what is mostly beautiful, ordinary noise.

My life is far quieter, far more mundane, and far, far messier. I have accumulated contradictions like books I never shelved — stacked in teetering piles, mislabeled, misremembered. Some I understood. Some I ignored. Most, I polished into insight and passed off as wisdom, when really, they were just armor. Pretended enlightenment.

And in my darker moments, that’s all I think I’ve got.

Exile is not just distance from land.

It’s the internal dissonance of carrying a dream you can never fully inhabit. But also, an inherited dream that you can’t let go of. Not without betraying the people who willed it to you. Or the people who died trying to make it real.

Even the stories we almost live — like the meals we almost get right — can leave an aftertaste that lingers for decades.

There’s a moment I return to often, not because of what happened, but because of what almost did.

I am walking past Harrods during winter break from school — blazer off, hands in my pockets, nursing the soft alienation of being a brown boy in England. Two hours later, a car bomb explodes in that exact spot. Six dead.

The randomness has stalked me ever since. If I’d lingered, taken a different turn, slept in — I’d have become part of a different story. One I didn’t write.

That’s the thing about exile: you’re always at risk of being cast in someone else’s narrative. Not the one you author, but the one imposed on you. Victim. Martyr. Symbol. Footnote. You’re never the protagonist. You’re just the plot device.

It’s not the bomb that haunts me — it’s that I almost became part of someone else’s story.

But fortuna favet fatuis. So, I walk on. An exile living in the parentheses of someone else’s script, haunted by stories that almost happened, and held hostage by the ones that did.

Just one, in a pile of memories that live, torn and folded and yellowed, in layers.

I flip, horrified, through a magazine tick-tock of the Sabra and Shatila massacres the image of fly on a curled dead hand forever seared into my brain.

I climb an impossibly long ladder to a plateau in Nablus, where my cousins and I fly homemade kites as IDF soldiers laugh and point their guns at us.

Driving through the desert in Kuwait, my father, snapping off the radio for the 100th time because the news is “too much” the tone of the announcer annoying him by slipping into a register that paints tragedy as routine.

It is this routinization of conflict, suffering, and death that is the real obscenity to me. More than anything else, it is this that has shaped an uncontrollable revulsion for the easy valorization of violence. Even righteous violence. Even dressed in the robes of defense or resistance.

Because when the atrocious becomes routine, you’re not fighting for dignity, you’re feeding on suffering. You’re harvesting the rich crop of pain and spinning the fibers of trauma into currency. This is where the machinery of despair becomes most terrifying: when repetition turns atrocity into ambience. And that ambience isn’t accidental — it’s engineered.

Exile isn’t just sustained by grief; it’s maintained by power. It is reinforced — actively, cynically — by those who benefit from its permanence. For them, exile is a system. It is managed, marketed, and efficiently administered.

Hamas exploits it. The PA monetizes it. The Israeli state bureaucratizes it. None of them is working to end exile. All of them are investing in its continuation because it grants them legitimacy, leverage, or both.

And so, exile stops being just a wound — it becomes an industry.

They are alchemists of despair, measuring out the precise volumes of tragedy and outrage needed to turn the news cycle.

Viewed through this lens, the attacks of October 7th, 2023, weren’t a strategic failure. They were a massive and calculated success for the Hamas™ brand. Massacre as marketing.

And like all marketing, the aim isn’t accuracy — it’s impact. The point isn’t truth; it’s traction. Control the story, and you control the outrage.

But the head-bangingly frustrating reality of this is that the Hamas story collapses the second it’s held up to a humanist light.

That’s the part that still undoes me. That’s what keeps me up when the bombs fall, even oceans away. That’s what drives me to write these sentences — unread, maybe, and certainly inadequate — but the only offering I have.

There are children under that rubble. Their names are not hashtags. Their deaths are not symbols. And the people who kill them will tell you, without blinking, that it was necessary. That it was regrettable but justified. That they had no choice.

But. There. Is. Always. A. Choice.

That doesn’t mean it’s an easy choice.

That doesn’t mean it’s a fair or symmetrical choice.

But if we are honest, we know that “We had no choice” is rarely the truth and often instead just a story we tell to live with the monstrousness of what we’ve already chosen to do.

It is complicated, yes, but complexity is not exoneration. It’s an indictment.

I have never met a Palestinian who didn’t carry grief like a spine. For some, it’s a second spine, but for many, it’s the only scaffold they’ve been able to build their lives on.

But I’ve also never met a Palestinian who didn’t dream, maybe quietly and oh-so-painfully, of something better than just survival.

The PA, toothless and complicit, has perfected the art of managed decline. The illusion of statehood as a substitute for the real thing. Their violence is quieter and more administrative. But no less corrosive. And beneath it all lies the same hunger: not for justice, but for power. For staying in the room.

A liberation movement that no longer seeks liberation. It’s not a paradox — it’s a farce.

And the Israeli political landscape has followed its own descent. What was once a country precariously navigating between its democratic aspirations and its colonial realities has now committed decisively to the latter. The rightward lurch has not been accidental; it has been engineered. Brick by brick. Bill by bill. The occupation, once whispered as a temporary compromise, now stands as a permanent fixture; normalized, bureaucratized, invisible to those privileged enough to look away.

Settlements don’t expand by accident. Dissent isn’t crushed incidentally. Courts don’t just tilt; they are tilted. Words like “defense,” “security,” and “necessity” are repeated like litanies, while the daily indignities inflicted on Palestinians are rendered into white noise. This is no longer a state trying to wrestle with its contradictions. It is a project of supremacy cloaked in the language of victimhood.

And just like Hamas. Just like the PA. The system isn’t interested in peace. It’s interested in permanence. In control. In narratives that sustain itself.

The calculus isn’t about justice — it’s about managing visibility. Pain is fine, so long as it doesn’t go viral. Violence is tolerated, as long as it’s quiet and procedural.

And yet, even now, even as Gazans burn again, I find myself asking questions I can’t easily answer. Like: what would I do if I had grown up in Sderot, not Kuwait City? If I had spent my childhood counting the seconds between sirens and impact? Would I still be capable of moral symmetry? Of empathy? Would I care about the dead in Gaza?

I want to say yes. Every bit of morality in me is pulling me to say, “Yes, of course.” But the truth is that I’m not sure. I’m not sure that I’m that good. That humane. That empathetic. And in a weird way, that’s comforting to me, because it reminds me that being properly human means you don’t get to be certain. You just get to try.

When I got to Berkeley, my world shifted. Not dramatically. Not all at once. It was a subtle tweak, like a Dutch-angle camera setup or a table leg shifting half an inch beneath your coffee mug — enough to notice but not enough to annoy or disorient. It was strange in the best possible ways. People traded ideas like currency and elevated curiosity as the greatest of all the virtues. At eighteen, intellectually over-caffeinated and emotionally jetlagged, I was dropped into a weird and wonderful subset of people who wanted to talk about politics and philosophies and rhetoric and semiotics.

It was amazing.

I met an Israeli kid who was arrogant, funny, bombastic, self-assured, and obsessed with skate culture. We argued constantly. Frustrating at times, for sure, but it was also the kind of arguing that felt like building something. He talked about fear the way I talked about grief. And the more we talked, particularly about things unrelated to the conflict between our peoples, the more it became impossible to ignore the humanity and justifications behind the thinking of the other side.

I want peace, not because I believe in some kumbaya fairyland, but because I’m exhausted by the alternatives. That exhaustion isn’t weakness. It’s wisdom. Earned.

The mirror we hold up to our oppressors also reflects us.

Once you look into that mirror and clearly see the ugliness of both faces, you can’t go back to certainty. You can’t look at a map or a bombing or a checkpoint and not also see those faces.

This isn’t the same thing as forgiveness.

This isn’t the same as agreeing, giving license, or accepting atrocities.

It’s more complicated, nuanced, and, yes, more frustrating.

It is disappointment layered over disbelief layered over some almost-gone echo of compassion.

It was also at Berkeley that I met Thich Nhat Hanh — not in person, but through the hours of raw documentary footage I logged as an assistant editor. He was quiet in a way that demanded full attention. “We co-create conflict,” he said. Over and over, like a mantra. Like a dare.

At first, I rolled my eyes. It felt like spiritual flattening. Like erasing history with incense. But I shifted. I am proof that watching 200 hours of Buddhist lectures and taking second-by-second notes on them will change you.

I started to understand that co-creation wasn’t another term for moral equivalence — that lazy, dishonest calculus that pretends a Predator drone and a homemade rocket occupy the same ethical space. Moral equivalence is a way to stop thinking. Co-creation, I realized, is more dangerous because it demands you think harder.

It suggests that even in a relationship of profound asymmetry — that of the occupier and the occupied, the powerful and the subjugated — both sides become locked in a toxic feedback loop.

One side holds the vast majority of the power; they build the walls, man the checkpoints, and deploy the jets. Their culpability is structural, active, and immense. But the other side, in reacting to that power — with righteous anger, with narratives of martyrdom, with their own acts of horrific violence — also contributes to the machinery of the conflict.

It doesn’t balance the scales of justice, not in the slightest.

But it does mean both are chained to the consequences of the dynamic they perpetuate.

It asks something impossible of you: to see your own side’s contribution to the toxicity, to carry weight you didn’t choose but can’t deny. It’s not fair. But it is true.

When Rabin was assassinated, I wept. Not because he was a hero — we hated the guy. But he was an old warrior who sat with another old warrior and cracked open a window. A right-wing lunatic slammed it shut. To me, Rabin’s death was a message: Hope is provisional. Dream too loudly, and someone will end you.

And so, I got quieter. I stopped writing. Stopped debating. Silence felt safer. Cynicism became the armor I didn’t know I was putting on. The world moved on. Oslo faded.

Intifadas flared and subsided. And my Palestinian-ness became a private ache, a song I hummed under my breath but didn’t perform.

Then came October 7th and everything after.

And here I am again. Writing. Not because I think it will help. But because I can’t not. Because the silence has become unbearable. Because exile’s hunger still demands feeding. And because some dreams are worth chewing even if they hurt going down.

The thing about writing this — now, after all these words — is that I don’t know how to end it. Not emotionally. Not structurally. I keep circling back to that image from Greed: two men in the desert, handcuffed together, one dead, one alive, both doomed. Melodramatic but maddeningly exact.

I’ve seen both sides clawing at the sand, dragging each other’s corpses, and calling it progress. To be clear, one side has advanced jets and billion-dollar defense systems; the other has jerry-rigged rockets and tunnels. But asymmetry aside, the chain that binds is real. Every politician speaks as if the chain doesn’t exist. As if victory were just one more strike, one more wall, one more rocket, one more child buried.

We’re all standing in the same dust. Chained to each other. Not metaphorically. Mechanically.

The other side — Israelis — carry their own exile. Different shape, different timeline, same structure. Fear as inheritance. Trauma is baked into language. Kids are taught to expect rockets, sirens, and bunkers. Grandparents who survived genocide and told stories that became state policy. It doesn’t justify what they’ve done. But it does explain it. And yes, explaining isn’t excusing, but it’s just the only way I know to keep the chain from strangling both of us.

Because that’s the choice.

Not justice or injustice.

Not peace or war.

But chain or knife.

Stay bound together and learn to both live or kill the other and die with them, too.

The truth is, I don’t want to be handcuffed to Hamas, or the PA, or the Israeli government. I don’t want their blood-drenched fantasies anywhere near my child.

But I don’t get to write this story alone.

And neither do they.

No one does.

This is why the only path forward, the only one that doesn’t end in more bodies and press conferences pretending to be mourning, is recognition. Not some soft-focus reconciliation fantasy.

Just the brutal, unvarnished fact that neither side is leaving.

Not love. Not even forgiveness. Just a cold, sober, mutual admission: we are here.

We are not going away.

There are handcuffs.

We cannot break them.

This is the least romantic kind of peace imaginable. There’s no hugging at the end. No flags waved. No Nobel Prizes.

Just tired, blood-soaked, and bone-weary adults in a room admitting to each other that the alternative is untenable. That the blood we spill now is borrowed from our children.

Maybe, if we’re lucky or just tired enough, that kind of honesty can birth a different kind of future. One that doesn’t have to be fair. Or symmetrical. Or even redemptive.

Just one that doesn’t require Israeli and Palestinian parents to bury their children in freshly dug earth, day after day.

I will make mujadarah again.

The lentils might break down. The rice might go soggy. But I’ll stand at the stove anyway, adjusting the heat, adding “shwayet irfeh,” and trusting my hands to remember what my mind cannot.

Not because I believe this act will rebuild a home; I have spent decades learning that exile is a wound that never fully closes. But because the act of creation itself is a form of hope. Because it insists on a future. Because it builds a momentary tabernacle against despair.

Because sometimes the dream of what could be is more nourishing than the memory of what was.

This is the discipline I have learned: that hope is not a feeling to be found, but a choice to be made, a dream to be fed. This is how exiles must live, tending to a fragile possibility in the dark.

And so when the steam rises, fragrant with cinnamon and cumin, and that image of the two men in the desert returns unbidden, I will have my answer.

The handcuffs are real.

But so is the dream.

And I am the living man, stirring not because I am pretending the chains aren’t there, but because this is how we prove we are more than the chains, that there is power in dreams of hope.

Some months ago, while I was wrestling with my own draft, I asked my incredibly talented and generous friend Libby Lenkinski to read it. She, in return, asked me to read an essay she was working on.

I was floored. Her piece, “Rose Jam,” is tender, unflinching, and grounded in a clear, moral call: reparations for Gazan families and the hard truth that healing needs more than ceasefires — it needs repair.

I’m grateful to have read it early, and humbled to point you to it now. start with libby’s essay; Let it sit with you. It’s the kind of clarity we all need more of.

read: https://medium.com/@libby_59066/rose-jam-135b108b0d84

I was asked to give a speech on my perspective on the role of mediators in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I thought it might be of interest to some of you. So, here it is (for whatever it’s worth)

Václav Havel once said, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

I come back to that quote often, especially when confronting this, seemingly most intractable of conflicts.

Because optimism feels like a luxury, almost an affront, when faced with the sheer, visceral reality of the grief, the rage, and the endless cycles of intergenerational trauma that define so much of what we see.

Optimism asks you to believe, often against evidence, that it’s all going to be okay.

But Havel’s hope asks here for something harder, something more profound. He asks that we keep showing up, keep bearing witness, keep striving, even when it’s not okay. Even when it keeps NOT being okay, year after year.

That’s the frame I want to use today. Because the question of mediation, whether external actors can authentically contribute, isn’t about quick fixes, or fleeting photo ops, or superficial Band-Aids on gaping wounds, it’s about helping to carve out space through principled pressure, unflinching truth, radical empathy, and yes, the discomfort of genuine growth.

Carving out space for the people mired in this conflict to imagine a future that makes sense for them, on their own terms. Even if arduous. Even if it requires confronting their deepest pains. Even if it takes longer than we, in our impatience, want.

So I begin: Not with facile optimism or self-serving fantasy. But with disciplined hope. And the belief that humane striving still, and always, matters.

When most people imagine peace talks or mediation, maybe they picture a long table. Mahogany, with tea and coffee, and hushed tones. Pens, nameplates, and meticulously prepared folders. It looks civilized. Rational. Symmetrical.

But honesty requires us to recognize that the table has never been balanced or neutral, has never been a meeting of equals. And for too long, folks have refused to acknowledge this core structural imbalance.

One side shows up stateless, occupied, its people and territory fragmented by decades of siege, blockade, pervasive surveillance, military control; horizons often limited by the next checkpoint, permit, demolition order.

The other side: one of the world’s most advanced militaries, backed by significant international alliances, nuclear capabilities, billions in aid, and a sophisticated global diplomatic and communications apparatus.

This is not a negotiation between equals. It’s more often a performance, to manage perceptions, to maintain a status quo, not resolve core issues. For years, many mediators, consciously or not, have played their part in that theater.

Calling for “restraint” as airstrikes flatten apartment blocks and refugee camps. Nodding solemnly while illegal settlements expand and checkpoints multiply. They talk of “both sides” compromising as if both possess the same tools, freedom, margin for error, or capacity to concede essentials in return for a dignified survival.

Let me be unequivocally clear:

I am not against Israel’s right to exist in security.

I am not denying a real and meaningful Jewish connection to the land.

I am not opposing the right of Israelis to liberty and self-determination, free from fear.

What I am against is the pernicious idea that ANY nation’s existence, security, or self-determination should come at another people’s existential expense for the same right.

What’s mediated — stripping spin and euphemisms — isn’t merely a border dispute or security dilemma.

It’s whether Palestinians are recognized and treated as fully human. To have the same fundamental rights, inherent dignities, that Israelis, like all peoples, insist on for themselves.

The stark truth is a binary one. You can’t mediate fundamental humanity. No percentages are allocated or negotiated. You honor it — wholly, unequivocally — or betray it.

About 15 years ago, my wife had one of those monumentally challenging days, the kind that makes you question every life decision, perhaps (or even especially) the decision to have children.

Our son, now 17, who’d cringe if he knew I was sharing this, was then a formidable two-year-old. She was exhausted. He was incandescently cranky. As she tried to make him dinner, he announced with the unshakeable confidence of a 2-year-old that he wanted ice cream.

Not AFTER dinner.

FOR dinner.

And, like any parent trying to maintain a semblance of order and nutritional sense, she said, “No.”

And he lost it. Absolute, seismic, Category Five Meltdown. Screaming. Sobbing. Full body, full volume existential collapse.

And she, a tired human at her wits’ end, gave in.

She figured: I’ve had a day. It’s one bowl of ice cream. I’m not dying on this particular hill. So she gave him the ice cream.

Problem solved. Peace restored. Right?

Wrong.

He kept crying. Harder. Louder, if possible.

She knelt, genuinely bewildered, and asked: “Honey, I gave you the ice cream. Why are you still crying?”

And his answer, delivered between body-shaking, snotty sobs, was, “I… don’t… know.”I

n many ways, that’s where the political machinery, the emotional heart of this ecosystem, of this conflict, has landed.

The original fight — safety, justice, dignity, land, the haunting legacies of trauma — is still there, buried deep under layers of accumulated pain, political performance, and identities forged in bitter opposition and mutual demonization.

The fight has become the habit.

The trauma, the script.

They’re not crying over ice cream anymore. They’re crying because crying has become a ritual, a language, a shield from the terrifying vulnerability of imagining something different.

Mediators, if they are brave and insightful and committed to resolution and the humane ending of this conflict, have a real job.

And that job isn’t to referee the tantrum, say, “Go to your room,” or tell one side that, “You apologize first.”

The job is to kneel, with genuine curiosity and profound respect, look the conflict in the eye, and ask: “What’s truly hurting you, beneath the accumulated anger, beneath the decades-old scars of trauma and fear? What do you fundamentally need? What do you yearn for, as a people, as humans?”

Real mediators don’t police tone or impose superficial solutions. They help re-center purpose, meticulously excavate legitimate human needs from beneath the rubble of corrosive rhetoric and historical injury.

They help both sides remember the thing behind the thing. Not slogans. Not rituals of outrage, however justified. But the actual, universal goals: Safety. Freedom. Dignity. Respect. Justice. Peace. That’s the job. Helping people to stop screaming their pain long enough to remember the ice cream.

This conflict isn’t just policy, geopolitics, or even a contested, blood-soaked land. It’s about deeply ingrained identity narratives. Ego, individual, and collective. And profound, often unacknowledged, existential fear.

Neither side, it must be said, is particularly eager for prolonged, honest self-reflection.

Extremists are useful scapegoats, easy to point at, allowing moderates to feel virtuous.

Pro-Israel folks say, “Oh, I don’t support Netanyahu, violent settlers, or far-right ideologues.”

Pro-Palestinian folks say, “Oh, I don’t support Hamas, indiscriminate rocket fire, or annihilation rhetoric.”

That differentiation is good, essential.

But too often, the self-examination stops there.

People think criticizing their side’s worst, most blatant excesses gives them a pass on the many more insidious and mainstream failings on their part. It doesn’t.

The problem isn’t just the overt fringe. It’s normalizing aspects of it.

It’s about how fear, anger, and exclusionary ideologies get quietly, almost imperceptibly, baked into the center. Into curricula that erase or demonize, state budgets that prioritize armament over human development, into bedtime stories and cultural narratives that shape a sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them.’

Unless we hold a mirror to that — the internal rot, learned hatreds (however subtle), the seductive convenience of perpetual victimhood, all of them foreclosing agency — then nothing will ever change.

Real mediation, then, isn’t just facilitating dialogue between adversaries. It’s fostering courage and safe spaces for each side, each individual, to tell difficult truths to themselves.

The U.S., Europe, Australia, China, Iran — the “international community” — we must stop pretending that we’re merely neutral observers or dispassionate arbiters.

Everyone is an actor in this tragedy, profoundly implicated.

Funding death.

Arming parties.

Legitimizing a status quo that perpetuates suffering and injustice, while expressing performative dismay when predictable violence spirals.

Ethical, effective mediators must include courageous, uncomfortable confrontation first, within their own governments and societies, and then with powers sustaining the conflict.

You can’t credibly guide anyone toward sustainable peace while your hands, actively or by omission, fan the flames of war.

So, what is the authentic role of external mediators in all of this?

It’s not to pick a side in a zero-sum game. It’s not to amplify one nationalist position against another. It’s not to reinforce any exclusionary agenda.

Mediation shouldn’t be sophisticated advocacy for one narrow nationalist vision.

Mediation should be a fierce, unwavering advocacy for people.

All the people at the heart of this conflict. Israeli. Palestinian. Arab. Jew. Muslim. Christian. Druze. Secular. Human.

The people who bear the crushing weight of every missile launched, every home demolished, every checkpoint ritualized, every hostage taken, every prisoner held, every future dimmed, every funeral ignored.

Those are the people who pay the horrific price for the checks we write and for the policies we enact or fail to enact.

They’re the ones who bear the unconscionable cost of our carefully calibrated statements, our strategic silences, and our diplomacy-by-press conference.

And those are the lives, in all their sanctity and complexity, around which we should be building our peace work.

The role of external mediators is to protect THOSE lives. To center THOSE futures.

To push back, with moral clarity, against governments, movements, and systems that treat human beings as pawns, or demographic threats, or regrettable, yet all-too-acceptable, collateral damage.

And yes — that means applying principled pressure, even when it’s diplomatically inconvenient or economically costly.

It means naming injustice with clarity and courage, regardless of who perpetrates it or how powerful they are.

It also means undertaking the patient, often thankless, and always emotionally taxing labor of building fragile trust in rooms saturated with generations of animosity and profound distrust.

But that’s what this moment, and indeed every moment, of this conflict, has demanded, continues to demand, and will demand in the future.

Because this conflict will not be resolved by killing more people. Or by one side outlasting or exhausting the other. Or by waiting until one particular version of God, or history, or trauma, finally, decisively, wins.

There are only three ways off this devastating ride.

The Israelis manage to kill all the Palestinians.

The Palestinians manage to kill all the Israelis.

Or somehow, against daunting odds, but with profound moral imperative, they figure out how to share the land and build a future together, recognizing their intertwined destinies and indivisible humanity.

And if you believe in the inherent dignity of any human being, if you think that peace is more than the mere absence of gunfire, if you are not a fucking psychopath, then there’s really only one option.

I’m not asking mediators to take a side in the conflict. I’m asking them to advocate for humanity.

To take responsibility.

To show up for the people, not the flags, however revered, not the slogans, however catchy, not the abstract ideologies, however compelling, not the entrenched tribes, however historically defined — but the actual, breathing, suffering, hoping human beings.

And to do the thing that real hope, Havel’s hope, demands: Keep showing up.

Keep pushing for something that makes profound human sense, even if it doesn’t turn out well right away or even in our lifetimes.

Because the only future worth striving for, the only peace that can ever be sustainable, is one where both peoples, indeed, all peoples in that land, get to truly live.

Not just exist in the suffocating shadow of fear and recurrent trauma.

But live.

In full dignity.

In lasting safety.

In a just and enduring peace.

It’s become almost trite for me to start by saying that my words will almost certainly provoke discomfort for many. Among Jews. Among Muslims. Among Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans alike. Perhaps even you.

But I offset that discomfort by reminding myself that I’m not trying to offend anyone (although I don’t mind offending some folks); rather, I’m writing because, to me, in most ways, silence is very much complicity, and I very much refuse to be complicit.

In recent weeks, after an all-too-brief respite, we’ve managed to start up yet again the endlessly shitty carousel of suffering between Palestinians and Israelis.

And as usual, we’re not just killing people (as if that weren’t bad enough), we’re also working incredibly hard to unravel the moral fabric and ethical foundations of two long-suffering peoples, diminish their humanity, harden their hearts, and distort the contours of their souls even more than we already have.

Violence. Cruel, sustained, and endlessly cyclical, it has transubstantiated the unspeakable and unimaginable into the mundane and routine.

We have mainstreamed cruelty and snapped the scales of Justice across our knee, as we internalize a false and toxic truth that hatred is an inevitable destiny with an inescapable gravity.

We have convinced ourselves that compassion is weakness and that death and suffering have meaning or purpose.

We have turned the roll call of the dead into fodder for a Trauma Olympics that weaponizes and gamifies grief and suffering.

It is easy to say, “They hate each other… they always have, so let them kill each other; what difference does it make?”

But it’s not just a stupid and backward regional struggle: it’s a conflict that has exposed the moral failings of a world that is more comfortable with platitudes and tut-tutting than pushing the sides towards a solution.

It’s a purulent and festering global wound that weeps and bleeds through borders, corrupting discourse and poisoning hope everywhere, whether in Jerusalem, Ramallah, New York, London, or any other city.

Can we ever learn to focus on a bigger picture that centers our shared humanity and resists needless suffering and loss?

There is an all-too-familiar rhythm to the devastation.

A cadence that almost feels rehearsed.

Violence. Retaliatory violence. Eulogies. Denials. Statements. Silence. Repeat ad nauseam.

This is a tragic repertory at a theater of suffering, where the actors change, but the script is a painfully predictable call-and-response written in the blood of innocents.

We see Israel’s rightwing government violently suppressing peaceful Israeli protesters demanding an end to aggressive settlement expansion and violence in Palestinian territories, with police using excessive force, detentions, and intimidation tactics to silence dissent.

Simultaneously (but far more egregiously), we see Hamas violently cracking down on Palestinian protesters in Gaza who bravely opposed Hamas’s oppressive governance, executing demonstrators under false accusations of treason to silence and intimidate their critics.

It is an institutionalized and embedded brutality and callousness that highlights a shared crisis of accountability and morality.

To those pro-Israeli readers who would respond with “…but Israel is at war…” and to those pro-Palestinian readers who would respond with “…but Hamas is a legitimate resistance…”

No. This is not war. This is war crimes. This is hatred. Unleashed. Unmasked. Unrestrained.

And while Israel’s resources and martial capabilities have allowed it to inflict a staggeringly disproportionate toll upon the Palestinians, it’s important, to be honest and acknowledge that Hamas would readily bring the same levels of senseless and vengeful violence to Israel if they had the same resources and capabilities.

Hamas is not more just or more noble; they are only less equipped and less capable, and what they lack in firepower and ability, they make up for in a fervor that has fanned the violence and consumed the lives of innocents.

This is not a contest of saints and sinners. It is a confrontation between failed visions of the world, each clinging to trauma like a birthright and wielding memory and religious fanaticism as a weapon.

Across Israel, the promise of democracy falters. Extremism festers. The judiciary bends. Dissent is criminalized. Nationalism eclipses decency.

Across Gaza, in the midst of death and destruction, the chant is for life. Against Hamas. For bread. For breath. For life.

“We want to live,” they say — and the simplicity of that cry should humble every policymaker, every pundit, every person.

Hamas answers that call with bullets and oppression, dragging protesters from the streets, silencing dissent with the barrel of a gun, and executing their own people not for treason but for daring to hope for something better.

Just as Israel’s leaders treat calls for equity as existential threats, Hamas treats pleas for freedom as insubordination.

The mirror has no agenda. It’s a cold and uninflected window that reflects the monstrosities on both sides; people are being ground beneath the same machinery of cruelty and monomaniacal fanaticism.

We see the future mortgaged to pay the debts of the egos of the past and present while the list of inhumane transgressions grows unbearably long.

Rockets fly indiscriminately toward cities. Settlers descend upon villages while soldiers stand as silent witnesses. Activists disappear into the night. Teens rot in prison for refusing to participate in injustice. Death is glorified. Grief is repurposed for propaganda. Starvation becomes a strategy. Suffering is weaponized and propagandized to serve the organs of the state.

And every day, we tacitly normalize this reality with our inaction

I’m not a person of moral purity.

I am not without pride, nor am I immune to the faults I see in others.

But I am honest with myself and open to my failings.

And after years of carrying the weight, that weight has clearly become unbearable, I feel exhausted and broken.

My identity and pride as a Palestinian-American is not something I apologize for, but neither will I apologize for a moral compass that points me towards a truer north that sees failures on every side.

In the end, one of the things that gives me comfort is the realization that it is not Palestinians or Israelis.

It is Palestinians and Israelis.

It is not Muslim versus Christian versus Jew.

It is human beings, each endowed with dignity, each deserving peace, each deserving safety, each deserving a future, and all of whom must be seen, not as tools of politics or pawns of tyrants but as bearers of the divine privileges that are attached to the very fact of being human.

All of them are fighting against a mean and ungenerous vision of the world that places winning above thriving, tribal supremacy over tolerance, and hatred over love.

I am also comforted by the fact that many are stepping up. Many are pushing against the weight of historical grievance and choosing to cast a generous and open-hearted light into corners long overwhelmed by darkness.

People like my friends Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah, each having buried loved ones lost to war, now plant seeds of peace and cautious optimism in the bitter soil of their grief and sadness.

People like my friend Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Gazan native whose family was decimated by the war, now leading the Realign for Palestine effort who dares to speak truths even when doing those truths offend the orthodoxy of pain and suffering as currency.

People like my friend Nadav Weiman of Breaking the Silence, who, because of his first-hand experience as an elite unit sniper in the IDF, leads an organization that is trying to shine a light on the moral and ethical corrosion that the occupation has spread through the IDF.

People like my friends, Alon-Lee Green and Rula Daood, founders of Standing Together, who are working for a greater and more equitable existence for both Palestinians under occupation and the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

My friends are not speaking from a place of unrealistic delusion.

They are not speaking from a place of naïve kumbaya progressivism.

My friends are not waiting for leaders.

They are becoming them.

They are the architects of a future we can still choose.

So, yes, the grief is heavy.

And yes, the injustice is loud.

But I still cling to a fervent belief in Dr. King’s vision of a moral universe that bends toward justice.

And a belief that the future is not just something designed by cynics.

It can be shaped as well by the stubborn-hearted, by those who refuse to surrender to what is and instead work for what must be.

Whatever you believe — whether in scripture or skepticism — our traditions all point toward mercy.

Toward equity.

Toward tolerance.

Toward peace.

Toward life.

The Torah tells us that those who save one life are as those who save the world.

The Quran tells us that those who kill one human unjustly are killing all of humanity.

The Bible tells us that our shared God of Abraham blesses the peacemakers as he would his children.

And even if you hold to none of these faiths, there is still the enduring truth that our lives are entangled, that our freedoms are mutual, and that our future is only a shared one.

We must build a new ethic — an ethic that elevates empathy above vengeance, refuses to call cruelty strength, and rejects supremacy, whether it drapes itself in a flag or a scripture.

Decency is not weakness.

It is the last line of defense against barbarism.

We must say that civilians are never acceptable targets. Trauma is not a crown. Pain does not grant license. All human life holds equal weight. And freedom for one cannot come through the subjugation of another.

If you cannot mourn both Palestinian and Israeli dead, your vision is partial.

If you cannot condemn both occupation and terrorism, your justice is performative and incomplete.

If you believe your people alone carry the imprimatur of righteousness and the flag of truth, you are not fighting for peace. You are fighting for dominance.

Extremists have had their turn. Decades of it. And they’ve given us rubble and ruin: grief and graves.

We can choose something else. Something higher. A future where safety is not purchased with subjugation. Where history is remembered but not weaponized. Where dignity is shared, not hoarded.

I long for a final chapter, if we can ever find the courage to write it, that is written by those who yearn not to conquer but to coexist and thrive and grow together, not by those who wish to retaliate, but by those who want to reconcile and create.

Yes, it is a hard path.

Yes, it is a steep path.

But if we do not climb it, then we doom our children to inherit our stagnation and fill their mouths with the ash of death and loss.

Because if we do not rise to defend a world where everyone can live in dignity — truly live — then what legacy have we earned? What faith have we betrayed?

Hope is not weakness. Hope is not naivety. Hope is defiance.

And hope is a verb.

Let us hope together and banish the darkness together.

Reflections on private struggles, public silences, and the complexity of Palestinian discourse.

One of the most common — and frustrating — comments I hear from well-meaning Jewish friends is some version of the statement, “I wish more Palestinians thought like you.”

I know that it’s meant as a compliment, but it’s not how it lands… at least, not fully.

Just like any other group, it’s good to remember that Palestinians aren’t a monolith.

Some think like me.

Some are more radical.

Some are more conservative.

Often, the only thing that binds us is the shared weight of a struggle that has defined our history and shaped our futures.

And right now, amidst the ongoing devastation in Gaza, most Palestinians, regardless of their positions, are simply struggling to find the words.

The silence of many Palestinians isn’t apathy — it’s grief, it’s anger, it’s exhaustion, but it’s also a human urge to ‘get behind the team.’

If this doesn’t make sense to you, think about how like most liberal folks, on September 10th, 2001, you might have been critical of the Bush administration, but by September 12th, most of us realized that this was not the time for public dissent.

And if you recall, it took over a year before that self-imposed silence began to lift.

A similar dynamic is operational now within the Palestinian community. Even those who believe in dialogue and coexistence are finding it difficult to speak up while bombs fall, and bodies pile up.

But that doesn’t mean that in private, the conversations aren’t rich, raw, and complex.

I was recently part of one such conversation with other Palestinians in a WhatsApp group.

Stemming from a discussion about Hamze Awawde’s new initiative, the Center for Palestinian Renewal, the conversation quickly expanded into a broader exploration of how we, as Palestinians, navigate the impossible terrain of advocacy, grief, and dialogue.

It was a heartfelt and deeply honest discussion that grappled with the central tensions that nearly all Palestinians face today: how can we balance the acknowledgment of injustice with the necessity of pragmatism, and how can we advocate for peace without being accused of betrayal?

For me, the conversation highlighted the ways that we, as Palestinians, wrestle with language, perspective, and perception.

Words like “normalization” have been utterly weaponized.

Used repeatedly this freights us with very real and almost primal fears of being misunderstood or accused of complicity.

To some, even engaging in dialogue can be seen as a betrayal of Palestinian suffering.

But to others, there is also a recognition that dialogue is not only necessary but inevitable.

Hamze’s words echoed throughout the discussion: “We have to always keep channels open and talks open… if we’re not ready for changing the structures and the paradigms that led to this war, we’re just going to have another.”

This duality — between fear of misinterpretation and the belief in dialogue — defines much of the Palestinian experience.

On one hand, there’s a profound awareness of the injustices we face. On the other, there’s an urgent need to engage, to talk, and to imagine a future beyond the cycle of violence.

And to be abundantly and ridiculously clear, I’m not advocating for glossing over atrocities or accepting the status quo.

I’m advocating for the hard work of building something new and hopeful, however hard it is to build, even in the face of (if not precisely because of) unimaginable loss.

A recurring theme in our group chat was the challenge of navigating purity politics. There’s a pervasive expectation, both within and outside the Palestinian community, that any deviation from a perceived ideological orthodoxy renders one suspect.

This kind of purity test is suffocating, especially when the stakes are so high. It’s as though any attempt to engage in dialogue — or even to speak in less-than-absolutist terms — is grounds for dismissal.

But while we argue about purity, the suffering continues.

Children in Gaza live under siege.

Families in the West Bank endure daily humiliation.

Words matter, but so do actions. And as someone in the conversation pointed out, the question we must ask ourselves is simple:

Are we working toward justice, or are we indulging in righteousness?

Because those are not the same thing.

Mutual respect, often dismissed as naïve, is essential. Respect doesn’t mean agreeing with the actions of someone you see as your oppressor; it means refusing to deny their humanity in the process of advocating for your own.

As Palestinians, we must demand justice without veering into fantasies that ignore the realities of Israel’s existence.

And Israelis who claim to want peace must create space for a Palestinian state that is not an open-air prison or a connected series of bantustans but a sovereign, viable nation.

The hardest truth is this: peace demands loss for both sides.

For Israelis, this means relinquishing the false security that comes from domination.

For Palestinians, it means grappling with the pain of compromise in the face of profound historic injustice.

Both sides lose something. But what both sides can gain — true freedom, dignity, and peace — will be infinitely greater than what they might give up.

Conversations like this and many others reflect a yearning for what comes next.

Sure, they can be brutally honest, raw, messy, and imperfect, but they are also deeply necessary.

They show that Palestinians are not waiting for permission to dream of a better future. We are wrestling with the questions, the contradictions, and the complexities in real time.

To those who say, “I wish more Palestinians thought like you,” I offer this: Many do. Many don’t. And that’s okay.

What matters is that these conversations are happening everywhere — in WhatsApp groups, living rooms, and private moments where trust and honesty can flourish. They are vibrant, diverse, and full of the kind of humanity that rarely gets acknowledged in the public discourse.

When I share these conversations, it’s not to meet anyone’s expectations or to align with anyone’s narrative.

It’s to remind the world that we Palestinians, like any people, are humans — messy, complicated, and full of contradictions.

And right now, what unites us is not a single perspective but a shared yearning for a future where our children can grow up in dignity and peace.

We don’t need a purity test for justice. What we need are practical, courageous steps toward equality and coexistence.

This isn’t about agreeing on everything — it’s about committing to the hard work of listening, understanding, and building bridges.

These conversations are not performative.

They are the groundwork for the only future worth fighting for: one where Palestinians and Israelis alike can live — not just exist — in dignity and security.

It’s a vision of the future born not of naïve optimism but of a deep belief in humanity’s ability to learn, to change, and to rebuild.

And that’s why I wanted to share this.

Because these conversations are happening.

They always have been.

Like more than a few folks that I know, I’ve spent more than a healthy slice of the past week trying to wrap my head around the results of last Tuesday’s election and, more importantly, what that means for me over the next four years; so here, and worth exactly nothing, is where I’ve landed.

With the caveat that I realize that I’m probably going to piss a lot of you off, I figured that I’d start by discussing all the folks whom I blame for the loss.

It’s not Vice-President Kamala Harris or her campaign.

She did a remarkable job running a fairly error-free campaign. She was dropped into the last few miles of a marathon and burdened by the weight of a pretty successful presidency that was nonetheless perceived badly by the majority of Americans who do not think about politics all that much.

It’s not President Joe Biden or his administration, at least not really.

I am still annoyed by the hubris of his decision to run again, but I am, nonetheless, able to rationalize it:

I don’t think that Biden did Harris or the Democratic Party any favors by deciding to run, and I certainly don’t think that his team (who absolutely understood the realities of his visual and verbal diminishment (utterly normal for a man of his age)) helped either.

But, having spent a lot of my life around powerful people and the people around them, I understand the time-space bending power of ‘reality distortion fields’ around principals affect the folks in their orbit, but in the end, I don’t think that his decision particularly cost us the election; it wasn’t helpful, but I don’t think it was decisive.

It wasn’t all the folks who put their backs into canvassing and writing postcards, talking to their neighbors, putting out yard signs, and raising money.

They left it all on the field. They worked their asses off. No blame or shame attaches to them in my view of the world. I am and will always be deeply proud and grateful for all the work we did to support each other and try to get our candidate over the line.

It wasn’t Putin, or a Starlink conspiracy, or voter fraud, or rat-fuckery, or miscellaneous shenanigans.

Most of us on the left heaped well-deserved criticism on those on the right who refused to accept the results of the last election because they didn’t match their expectations. We should do our best to innoculate ourselves from this particularly odious strain of nonsense, which is deeply corrosive to democratic norms.

It wasn’t the media, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg.

Once again, I don’t think they helped, but I don’t think that this was the decisive factor. There’s a lot of crap that I am deeply disappointed in from those in corporate media. Still, media is (at least in a capitalist ‘free-speech’ democracy) a reflection of who we are and what we are interested in. In this omniverse of omnichannels, there’s something for everyone, and the reasons that the NYT or CNN or whomever say or frame things a certain way, is a complicated equation that includes us (the public writ large). That we didn’t like this view for being too dismissive of our concerns about the then-candidate-now-President-elect (on the left) is indicative less, to my mind, of our media and more of our misunderstanding (fatal to our hopes, as it turned out) of the mood and perspectives in the country.

And finally, it wasn’t Hispanics, or Arabs, or women, or Black men, or Jews, or LGBTQIA+ people, or immigrants, or working-class folks, or Gen-Xers, or Boomers, or White people.

There’s been a lot of this online, and it bugs the ever-living shit out of me.

It is deeply ironic that people whose roots run deep through a fertile liberal and anti-racist soil (etc., etc., etc.) quickly manage to uproot themselves and plant tendrils into a wasteland of generalization and tropes about others to explain behaviors or decisions that we do not agree with.

People vote their interests.

All people do.

Not just ‘educated’ people, or liberals, or ‘Awesome People I Agree With’™… all people.

The problem is that THEIR interests, as THEY see them, may not actually be THEIR interests as WE see them.

Everyone who voted voted for their interests. Regardless of how misguided you, me, or your super-blue neighbors think they are, that is what they did.

We may not… actually fuck that… we definitely don’t agree that THEIR votes were in THEIR interest… but they believed that they were, and in the end, that’s what matters when you are getting ready to make your selections.

Sometimes, interests are driven by fear, pride, grievance, happiness, sadness, disgust, agreement, denial, or any combination of these and a million other reasons. However, whether we want to validate those reasons or not, every voter votes for their interests.

So who the fuck do I blame then?

No one.

I know. It sucks.

This would be easier if I could blame someone.

Scapegoats are useful, psychologically speaking, as a heatsink for disappointment, anger, and sadness; I know that if I could blame and focus my feelings on an external someone or something that betrayed us and ‘cost’ us (dearly) the election, I would feel ‘better.’ But it’s not a net-positive better. It’s a crutch.

We lost this election because a plurality of our fellow citizens did not see THEIR interests as bound up with OUR intentions and visions.

This includes the set of folks who voted against us on the left by voting affirmatively for President-elect Trump, but, more decisively, it also includes the voters who selected the candidate that best represented THEIR interests. By far, the largest segment of US voters picked ‘None of the Above.’

That’s the problem.

And, for the avoidance of confusion, that’s not a THEM problem; they literally didn’t care enough to show up… AND THAT IS NOT ON THEM!

I deeply understand that goes against a lot of what we are feeling as we marinate in our bitter and caustic but comfortingly piquant disappointment.

It’s hard for me to acknowledge this to myself, but my ability, and yours, to come to terms with this is neither here nor there when it comes to whether it’s true or not.

It just fucking is.

The vast majority of my professional life has been spent in marketing and advertising, which doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot in the grand scheme of things. Still, it does mean that I know a little bit about the utterly critical sine-qua-non connection between ‘the message’ and the people that the message is intended to reach.

There is a brutally harsh reality about the world I operate in, and it’s this: when people don’t buy what you’re selling, it’s not because they’re ignorant or unwilling; it’s because you didn’t manage to make the choice matter to them.

And you can, if you want, blame them for not “getting” what you’re selling… but in the end, it’s not their problem.

To my mind, this election wasn’t lost on policy, values, or facts. It was lost on connection and resonance.

If we want people to feel a stake in what we’re fighting for, we have to show them, not tell them, why it’s in their interest — why it’s real, personal, and life-altering.

You can blame apathy if you want, but apathy is a symptom. It’s not the disease.

You can blame people for being uninformed or cynical, but more honestly, it’s all about reach, relevance, and resonance.

We’re a nation of over-stimulated, hyper-individualized consumers bombarded with information — and if our message didn’t cut through that, it’s on us.

So what’s the lesson? I don’t think this is the moment to decide that we need to be shouting louder or cranking up the volume on fear.

For me, this is a moment to fundamentally rethink how we on the left speak to people, how we acknowledge their experiences, and how we connect our values to theirs without assuming that they’d be “stupid” not to agree with us and be ‘naturally’ aligned with our vision of the world.

While I realize that this is a little ‘on-the-nose’ for my brand, I think that what’s needed is acknowledgment, empathy, and compassion.

We need to resist the deeply attractive urge to talk down to those who don’t agree with us and dismiss their lack of connection with our message as their failure, as opposed to ours.

To be clear, I am not delivering a message of blame or shame for our efforts in this campaign.

It is what it is: we missed the mark.

I am a big believer in the power of iterative improvement on the journey to ‘beautiful.’

I think it’s a time to think about how we can be better at bridging the gap between how we say what we want to say about our vision for America and how we make that vision resonate with people who do not (unlike most of the folks I engage with online) particularly give a shit about politics and view it as a somewhat insular and self-dealing game that doesn’t particularly hurt or improve their lives.

This is a moment for deep self-reflection and honesty about our own efforts.

If we want to lead, we can’t assume people are misled or ‘wrong’ for not seeing the world our way.

And we do do exactly that.

Not just us on the left but those on the right as well.

Politics is a passionate tribal sport fuelled by fervently-held conviction for those who care about it, but it’s noise to those who don’t see it as relevant to them.

To win, we need to listen as much as we talk, we need to build trust, and we need to make the people we are talking to believe that we care about the things that matter to them (without pissing and moaning that they don’t care about the things that matter to us) and — if we’re serious about progress — realize that connecting with people on their terms isn’t selling out, it’s just selling.

Because that’s what you are doing in an election campaign: you are selling your brand, your vision, your candidate, your story… whatever it is… you’re selling it.

When people don’t buy the product, you need to think about why they don’t believe that your product is solving their problems and what you need to change on your side to get them to believe that.

They say you have to meet people where they are, not where you think they should be. That’s true in marketing, and it is just as true in politics, too.

So that’s what I think.

And before I get to what that all means for me, I think it’s important to make clear that I’m not being Pollyanna-ish: The next four years (or the next two years till the mid-terms if I’m being optimistic) are going to suck.

For lots of folks — minorities, women, our trans siblings, those who voted for Vice President Harris, President-elect Trump, and, yes, those who decided they didn’t care enough to vote.

I will still care.

I will still fight for them, support them, comfort them, and try to help them through.

I will still listen and try however I can to make it better.

Because my feelings for them, my support for them, and my vision of America aren’t transactional. They aren’t based on supporting me or my ideals. They’re based on the secure knowledge that we are all in this stupid and all-too-often-off-course boat together and my deep and ever-constant belief in this country’s ability to heal itself and course correct itself towards better.

Politically, my goal, as always, is to help us all move toward a vision of America that is more just, inclusive, and united.

And I think that means stepping outside my bubbles and finding ways to communicate those values so that they resonate with those who don’t see the world as I do.

I am forcing myself to center the reality that the largest (non-)voting group of people are trying to live their lives, and to them, politics feels like background noise.

If I want them to care, I have to figure out how to make it matter.

And that’s about listening, reaching out, and showing up not just for issues I care about but also for others.

It’s about empathy, allowing myself to be uncomfortable, and finding ways to connect and create a bridge between my vision and the reality of others.

Most importantly, it’s about staying in the fight without validation.

In the coming months, there will be moments that feel like gut punches, and people I love and care about will bear the brunt. But I refuse to let those near-certain realities push me into isolation, apathy, resignation, or bitterness. I refuse to be tolerant of intolerance. I refuse to look back and wish that I had spoken up.

I’m choosing to dig in, keep believing a different America is possible, and stay open, compassionate, and hopeful.

I’m choosing to dig in and reaffirm that my support, advocacy, and empathy don’t depend on people agreeing with me or voting the way I want. Rather, they rely only on my sense of morality, humanism, ethics, and an ardent desire always to help move the world to a fairer, kinder, more compassionate, and more understanding version of itself.

And so, onwards to the quiet, sustained work of reaching out, building trust, and fostering shared purpose. To getting deeper, being uncomfortable, and engaging with folks who may not have felt seen or understood. To meeting people where they are and doing whatever I can to help design and articulate a vision that aligns where they want to be with where I want to be in ways that resonate and excite us both.

That’s where I’ll be.

And I’ll keep showing up there — for those who voted like me, for those who didn’t, and for those who didn’t vote at all.

It’s going to take all of us — the voters, activists, and those who feel that politics is distant, esoteric noise.

I still believe it’s possible. Because if there’s one thing I know about America, it’s that even at its messiest, it has a knack for finding its way.

Hope is a verb.