Israel-Palestine: I'm Not Picking Sides Anymore

For a long time, I had a very clean story about Israel-Palestine based on my antisemitic beliefs: the Jews came in, stole the land, and every act since has just been the same crime playing out again. A Jewish banker named Rothschild wanted Palestine, lied about his intentions, and the whole thing was theft dressed up in legal paperwork. When the Holocaust happened, Jews used their “Never Again!” motto as an excuse to do to the Palestinians what Nazis had done to them.

I believed that narrative without ever caring to even listen to the Israeli side. In fact, I didn’t know much about the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict prior to October 7th, learning more about it afterward, mostly from the pro-Palestinian camp.

But since walking away from the JQ movement, humbling myself and reexamining everything that I believed for the last fourteen years, I have updated my worldview, learning that so much of what I believed was simply untrue or lacked nuance. This conflict is much more complicated than I had recently believed, but I was unable to see that, stuck in an epistemic echo chamber for so long.

The thing about “Rothschild wanted the land and lied”—it’s not even a story that’s false so much as a story built by taking two real facts and adding a secret intent that is unverifiable. It’s true that Edmond de Rothschild really did fund early Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine, starting in the 1880s, and the Balfour Declaration really was addressed to a Rothschild. What’s impossible to confirm is the part that makes it a conspiracy—a scheming financier orchestrating events from behind the curtain, lying about his aims.

What actually happened is duller and more legal than that: land was purchased from private owners, often absentee landlords living in Beirut or Damascus, under whatever property law was in force at the time—Ottoman or, later, British Mandate. Zionism itself started decades before any of this as a 1897 political response to European antisemitism, most immediately the Dreyfus Affair in France. It’s the same kind of nationalist movement that produced modern Italy, modern Germany, and eventually Palestinian nationalism too.

Once I saw that, the whole “who started it” question stopped having the answer I was given before: there was no single starting point, no single villain. There was a persecuted Jewish diaspora building a national movement, a colonial power making wartime promises it couldn’t keep, and an Arab population with its own emerging national identity—all converging on the same strip of land within the same fifty years. For Jews to have planned this would have required an omniscience no humans have, which, ironically, many antisemites give to the Jews, as I once did. The reality is that everybody involved thought they had a legitimate claim, because in the terms available to them, they did.

But for the last three years, all I kept hearing was that the Jews came in and ethnically cleansed everyone during the Nakba. Indeed, roughly 700,000 Palestinians were displaced in 1947-49; villages were emptied and many destroyed. There were real, documented expulsions and real massacres. But none of that needs a grand Jewish conspiracy to explain it.

When you strip away the thought of a conspiracy, you stop treating displacement as evidence of a premeditated theft-plan and start treating it as what serious historians on both sides of that debate actually argue about: a war started after a UN partition plan was accepted by Jewish leadership and rejected by Arab leadership. Displacement happened through a mix of panic, flight, and deliberate expulsion, whose exact balance is still contested by scholars using the same archives and reaching different conclusions. That’s different than “Israel was built on theft.” It’s messier, and it implicates fewer secret intentions and a lot more war.

I used to think the Holocaust got Jews in a fervor and drove them to conquer in response. That’s wrong—Zionist settlement had been building since the 1880s. The Holocaust added urgency and international sympathy to a movement that was already decades old, not the origin of one.

I don’t think the honest version of this history makes Israel innocent, and I don’t think it makes the Palestinian cause illegitimate either. There’s real land purchased legally that still displaced people who’d farmed it for generations. There’s a rejected partition plan that led to a war nobody had to fight. There’s a refugee crisis in 1948 whose causes are still argued over by historians and experts on this subject. There’s an occupation today with no end in sight. Now there’s a war or genocide going on, depending on who you ask.

But this situation is not as simple as any side makes it out to be, and I’m honest enough to admit my ignorance and biases kept me blind to the nuance this issue deserves. It certainly doesn’t help when you see children blown to pieces on your X feed on the daily, either. But the truth is that I simply don’t know what could or should be done at this point. I reject “river to the sea” from either side. If I have to plant a flag anywhere, it’s a two-state solution—which, at this point, both sides largely reject. But that’s not my problem to solve; it’s theirs.

I can’t change how I feel to appease either camp. I feel for the Palestinians, genuinely—the suffering there is real, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But I’ve exhausted myself on this issue to the point where I’ve come close to resenting the people who demand I keep talking, keep posting, keep picking a side, and keep proving myself, even after I put myself and my family at real personal risk for years. I don’t owe anyone that. I spoke out because I felt it was the right thing to do, but I didn’t know I only had parts of the truth. Now I see how complicated this issue really is, and I want nothing more to do with this land dispute. I can only wish both peoples the best and hope it’s resolved one day in a way that actually benefits everyone.

What frustrates me as I watch this from the outside is how much of the moral weight has been outsourced to the West. Arab governments that could exert real pressure—economic, diplomatic, the kind that actually moves outcomes—have largely chosen not to. Some have normalized relations with Israel and moved on. Others have kept Palestinian refugees stateless and unwelcome for three generations rather than absorbing them the way Jordan did. Meanwhile, the loudest demands to keep marching, keep posting, and keep bleeding for Palestine land on Western commentators, social media influencers, and students, most of whom have no leverage over anything that actually happens on the ground.

Pro-Israel groups like AIPAC clearly have real influence on US politics. But pretending only one side plays this game isn’t honest. It’s not just Israel-aligned money in the room: Qatar and Saudi Arabia have poured hundreds of millions of disclosed dollars into American universities, and Qatar owns Al Jazeera outright—an outlet with an obvious agenda. On the other side of the ledger, researchers at NewsGuard and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue documented Iran-, Russia-, and China-linked networks flooding the conversation with conspiracy narratives after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, including the “exploding lapel mic” theory traced to an anonymous source claiming Iranian hacker credentials, a claim fact-checkers found no evidence for. The theory was manufactured and pushed by exactly the kind of foreign influence apparatus everyone insists doesn’t exist until it’s inconvenient for their own side.

Do I blame any of these countries for playing this game? No. My government has done terrible things in the last century. But I’m not going to pretend it isn’t happening just because acknowledging it complicates a narrative that might offend many of my followers. I have my own kids to think about and a country I still have to live in, regardless of who wins an argument about a war in the Middle East.

We never heard the end of Israeli war crimes and barbarism, but people refuse to accept that Hamas’ strategy doesn’t seem to be avoiding civilian casualties at all costs; in fact, it seems to be telegraphing them at every chance, operating from civilian infrastructure, and slow-walking evacuations. I find that dishonorable. That’s not an excuse for Israel, which has killed civilians on a scale that demands its own reckoning, but let’s stop pretending Hamas is doing everything it can to prevent Palestinian deaths.

Even worse is what Hamas does with its own children—not the ordinary families who stay in half-collapsed homes out of fear, poverty, or nowhere left to go, but the institutions themselves. Hamas’ own media, textbooks, and summer camps have spent years cultivating martyrdom as an aspiration in children specifically, teaching kids that dying for the cause is a form of victory rather than a tragedy to be avoided. But what do we only hear about? The real, documented “Amalek” comments from a few Israeli politicians, controversial verses from the Talmud, and quotes from Jewish supremacists. Hamas are painted as saints when they aren’t, either.

I reject religion entirely, so I have zero tolerance for any framework, from any faith, that tells a child death is a reward. That’s not resistance; it’s insanity. This kind of martyrdom cult uses footage of the dead as political leverage. A strategy that requires dead children to work isn’t a strategy I’ll ever respect, regardless of which side runs it.

I’ve said versions of this privately to Muslim friends, letting them know exactly how I feel about this “strategy” in conversations I never let go public because I didn’t want to hurt the pro-Palestinian effort or face the backlash from my own audience. That’s over now. I won’t hold my tongue again on any of this, in either direction.

I’m not “pro-Israel” now in the way I was reflexively “pro-Palestine” before; swapping one team for another was never the point. I’m pro-America, and I’m done being pulled in every direction by anyone else on this planet. I’m also done promoting the falsehood that only one side is responsible for starting conflict when it’s not.

Like I’ve always said, it takes two to tango.

But I’m done dancing.

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