What October 7 Taught Me about ‘Good Palestinians’

Three years after the Oct. 7 massacre, I understand that the world as I knew it before has ceased to exist.

Many years ago, I went to Sweden to do my degree. I had won a scholarship, and life seemed to look good. It was there that I met many people, learned about new cultures and lifestyles, fell in love, and encountered Palestinians for the first time in my life. In Kyiv, and in other cities where I briefly lived, like Vancouver and Geneva, there were none.

At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to the political aspect or the Palestinian cause. I simply communicated and hung out with different people, Palestinians included.

And they were nice people. They often treated me to something and told their stories. I listened. I asked questions and once brought up the topic of Israel with the person I was close to, asking him, well, so what do you make of it?

I can’t remember the answer verbatim, but it wasn’t overtly hostile. He didn’t say he despised Israel. Rather, he evaded the question and went on to talk about Sunnis and Shiites.

He would also hang out with an Egyptian student who would bring up Gaza, but he seemed to have no problem with the fact that Egypt took control of it in 1948 and wasn’t planning on creating Palestine there before losing the Strip to Israel in 1967.

Then the studies finished. We all went home, had our hearts broken, and our paths diverged.

So imagine what it was like several years later to discover that all those people I had smiled with, laughed with, and texted with had turned out to be full-blown Hamas supporters. One by one, they took to Facebook and Instagram, wearing keffiyehs and praying that Hamas, which had by then launched its incursion and started slaughtering and kidnapping people, would reach Hebron.

Some of them blocked me when I aggressively stood up for Israel. But one of them, the man I had once been emotionally close to and who allegedly didn’t hate Israel, suddenly reached out to me after completely ignoring Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

He, a Doha-born Palestinian with no Qatari passport, started attacking me for defending Israel.

I said: How can you say such a thing? You don’t believe Israel should exist?

To which he finally cracked and said: “Not on my land.”

I asked: “Well, do you support Hamas then?”

“Not all their methods, but they’re the only ones who defend Palestine around the clock.”

What followed was an extensive set of accusations directed at me, during which I was told, among other insults, that “I regret sharing food with you.” And it would have been rather funny if it weren’t for the fact that I had bought and cooked that food.

I must admit that I have never placed much trust in Arab men and women because of what I see as a bizarre propensity to call black white. But this was not some random stranger on the internet who never studied abroad, including in the US.

It was a person I once loved — sadly, the feeling was mutual — and that person told me to my face that Israel should be eradicated and that I was “an animal.”

So how can I place any trust in what the so-called “good Palestinians” say when they insist that they allegedly don’t support Hamas and want a two-state solution?

My own bitter experience tells me that people can lie straight to your face without batting an eye until they lose their cool, and then all the masks come off.

So while I still don’t want to claim that there are no reasonable individuals out there who genuinely do not want to pursue the goal of eradicating Israel, my question is: how many of them are there?

The non-wishful-thinking answer, I’m afraid, is not particularly flattering.