Why I Sided With Humanity (at 17 years old)
My 1-on-1 with Sulaiman Ahmed exposes my story of high schooler to prominent advocate towards justice for Palestinians in a free Palestine.
I hear from people all the time that your early teens are “formative” years. It’s when you begin to voice your opinions or even realize that you have a voice in matters like global politics to begin with. For me, my years as a teenager will primarily be defined by the headlines of Gaza’s genocide. I was 17 when it started and I’m 19 now. In these two years I’ve witnessed the destruction of the true unrecognized Palestinian state, its infrastructure and its people. I’ve watched kids much like myself in age and personality suffer an unending nightmare livestreamed on my phone for nearly 800 days – students waiting to enroll in college classes suddenly orphaned and homeless overnight, young parents turned into living ghosts, their children turned into amputees. It has consumed much of my brain space as a content creator and forever shaped my worldview and what it means to take leadership in times of crisis.
I know now, also, what failure looks like, what it sounds like and how it manifests not just in the genocide of Gazans, but in the destruction of our institutions in the heart of the empire. I’m still 19, and my perspective is biased and limited, but I have no doubt that in 10 years from now when I’m asked about my political education, I will only need to point to “Palestine”.
Truthfully, I did not know much about the Palestinian struggle prior to October 7th. I’d always known peripherally that they were not free, that they were an oppressed people living under occupation, but aside from my default solidarity I had not meditated on what it would mean to free Palestine. As a young student about to enter college and being bombarded with post after post on every platform of young scholars at Harvard having basically their entire professional lives thrown out the window, I was truthfully really worried about what taking a public stance on the matter would mean for me. I made the jump anyway on my platform which had a significant reach at the time (it’s been since significantly diminished across the big 4: TikTok, Meta, Youtube and X), and within days of posting was met with my very first bribe from an Israeli news outlet. 5000 dollars to take my videos on Palestine down and replace them with reporting favorable to the “other” side, and solidarity with Israel and its hostages.
I was shocked. 5000 dollars was a lot of money then, it’s certainly a lot of money now, and the only thing I could think was “if someone has to pay me to justify the illegality of their warfare, they cannot possibly be doing anything good.”
From the Crimson: Adam Giulliette, CEO of conservative think tank “Accuracy in Media” stands in front of the “anti-Semite truck”, a hired van with digital posters of students at Harvard that signed a letter in support of a ceasefire in Gaza [x]
I’ve since learned Israel fights its multi-front war online, on tv, in print and through the infiltration of “progressive” ideologies like socialism and secular values, so it’s less surprising to me now, in hindsight, that the offers like this were going out to many of my friends, also social media influencers, from outwardly “liberal” outlets like Haaretz. It also taught me the importance of reading what the zionists write about themselves in their own media, and how to “test” their headlines by stacking opposing sources against each other to find a common element of truth.
Not unexpectedly, the most revealing truth I’ve learned about Israel & the one it guards most closely is its lack of foundation for existing at all. As a settler colony Israel’s rough equivalent to a “constitution” or charter or raison d’etre is the constant expansion of its illegal statehood. Israel, in a way, doesn’t really exist until it expunges all existing Indigenous Palestinians from their lands. And this expanding occupation is the basis for all of Israel’s institutions, its national and ethnocentric foundation, and explicitly its war/genocide economy which relies on the constant production of weapons systems to maim, kill and displace Palestinians. Ending the genocide in Gaza is the biggest existential threat Israel has faced because the resulting global rejection, anti-Zionist education and economic isolation has been the harshest to date. We know this because both the liberal and most propagandistic right media outlets are shouting the same thing, 24/7, in Hebrew to Israeli readers.
We also know that the demands of their victims, enshrined in the charter of Palestinian resistance, has never seemed less radical, less unreasonable, and more possible than they do today. Undoubtedly this is why Israel and its primary financiers in America have made it a practice to expel the voice of the resistance as persona-non-grata that can neither be interviewed on tv, printed in magazines, or streamed on social media.
There is no such thing as a pure advantage, however. While the nightmare in Gaza has not taken human lives in the heart in the of the empire, it has totally killed its institutions of any credibility. As an independent journalist, and one that Israel unsuccessfully tried to silence for as long as its genocide has been live, I feel it’s my duty to shine a light on the frailty of the Israeli state, the mechanisms they have for prolonging their reign and the multi-modal civil, journalistic and legal resistance we have at our disposal to dismantle their genocide.
As a mostly short-form content creator, I typically focus on making sure my community is maximally informed as possible in as short a time as possible. But a few days ago I had a chance to do something I usually can’t: sit down for 90 minutes and talk through all of my thoughts on the Israel question, the existential threat it poses to the rest of the world in the Samson Option, the ceasefire hoax, “progressives” betraying their constituents on Gaza, the failure of our media, AIPAC, and the plausibility of “ZOG” vs. a united left-right front.
This long-form interview covers the story of how I became an advocate for Palestinian liberation, my thoughts on how to solve Israel-Palestine, the real story behind the TikTok Ban, mass media censorship, AIPAC, and how the left & right can find unity against Zionism. You can watch the entire interview at the beginning of this publication or on YouTube. [link to video]
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A big thank you to Sulaiman Ahmed for having me on and for his continued journalism on Palestine. You can find his interviews and other news segment on Parti: https://parti.com/ShaykhSulaiman & follow him on X @ShaykhSulaiman_