To Those I’ve Lost (In The UK)

Dear well intentioned ones,

We need to talk.

Yes, you there. Typing furiously away in response to my lived experience online; someone who you used to know, who you thought existed in the same black and white world which you inhabit. A world where you don’t have to fact check every news report you read that involves your home.

A world where you don’t question where those Red Cross donations are going to. A world where you can ignore corruption in favour of feeling secure.

We’ve shared drinks, shared jokes, but we’ve never shared the same reality. You continued to believe in the Labour Party through every anti semitic incident, while I learned from an early age to trust no politician (especially those that claim to align with your values). You see pathos laden appeals for aid, while I see an organisation who has sat idly by, unless called upon to perform in a Hamas media circus, grifting for money.

I really do want to believe that you have a good heart, but your actions say otherwise. Over six hundred days ago my heart was torn from me in a violent onslaught and I have carried it with me ever since; open, wounded, exposed. And when you climb on your soapbox to whitewash violent anti semitic rhetoric at Glastonbury, you slice right through it. 

When you continually cherry pick sound bites from one of the world’s sloppiest historians, who is wholly disconnected from the Israeli working class reality, in order to prop up your personal bias against my home, you trample all over it.

When you didn’t even bother to ask who I lost, you hardened it a little more.

That’s part of the problem. You didn’t bother. Didn’t bother to learn, didn’t bother to ask, didn’t bother to remember that you’re talking about people and not an abstract.

You’ve never listened to that old man in the shuk who was imprisoned as a child for attempting the escape from Iraq over the Iranian border, or even know that his story is not unique. You don’t know the pain and frustration of watching your Druze neighbours in Syria be slaughtered while world leaders are not only silent but hosting the perpetrator. You’ve never had to “hope for the best” when you’re outside without shelter and the rockets are flying overhead. You’ve never woken up to a nightmare and still had to log in to work.

You aren’t aware of those we are still missing.

You don’t see the faces of the dead.

But you have good intentions.

Maybe. 

Good actions?

My heart says no.