Help! I Am an Anti-Palestinian Bigot

My organization,the Vulnerable People Project (VPP), is advocating for the victims of the war in Gaza. Recently, while shooting interviews for a documentary about Palestinian Christians, I discovered something shameful about myself: I am an anti-Palestinian bigot.

In interview after interview, I caught myself having these surprised thoughts: Wow, she has a PhD? As if Palestinians are incapable of intellectual pursuits. Wow, he’s such a nuanced conversationalist. As if Palestinians are genetically bound to be inarticulate simpletons. She’s so beautiful! Like Palestinians are ugly as a rule. He is so thoughtful and empathetic. As if Palastinians are all childlike narcissists.

When you hear your inner voice talking about Palestinians the way Joe Biden talked about Barack Obama (“He’s so “clean!” Biden said of the black senator in 2008, and “articulate!”), you know you’ve got a deeply ingrained prejudice.

The Foreigners Attacked One of Us

America is extremely racially mixed, and most ordinary Americans have no temptation at all toward antisemitism. We see Jews in America primarily as fellow Americans, and even Israeli Jews are easily recognizable as belonging to the same broad, free, glorious Western civilization.

But after my unpleasant self-realization during the interviews, I went back through my memories and realized just how deep-seated my anti-Palestinian sentiment is.

When my friends and I heard one day during my teens about an acquaintance having a run-in with a group of Palestinian boys who were new to the community, our attitude was unmistakable. We were rough kids, and scattered acts of violence and vengeance were normal in our neighborhood. But this was different: The foreigners had attacked one of us. That day, I remember a big group of us piled into the back of my friend’s car armed with baseball bats.

I’ve been weathering attacks on my reputation and losing donors because of my decision to speak up about the civilian casualties in Gaza. Fifteen thousand dead children. Twenty thousand missing children. And I will not stop speaking up.

But in the face of each Israeli or fellow American who’s questioned my advocacy for Palestinians, I’ve seen my own. I look at these critics like I’m looking in a mirror. And there, to my own embarrassment, I see bigotry.

They Forgive. Would We?

The Palestinians I interviewed for my documentary were magnanimous, principled, and compassionate.

Take one woman who fled for her life and lost family members in Gaza. Her church was bombed. Israeli soldiers deliberately humiliated her, rifling through her private things and filming themselves playing with her underwear.

“I don’t blame the Israeli soldiers at all,” she told me. Many of them are very young, she explained, and they had been civilians just months earlier. “They’re barely trained, and they’re angry over October 7.”

She blamed the politicians of Israel – fallible and in some cases cynical actors whom the Israeli public itself distrusts.

My friend Khalil is from Gaza, but now lives in the West. During our interviews, I have to admit I was testing him. I was and remain truly worried about the rise of Jew-hatred in the West. When you tell people what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza, as Khalil does, there is a risk of fomenting more of that hatred.

So I pressed Khalil for hours about how to stop American Jew-hatred. Mind you, Khalil is a young, red-blooded man whose father died during the war – and whose 18-year-old sister was killed just a few months ago by the Israeli Defense Force in Gaza.

Despite those traumas – any one of which could serve as justification for rage – Khalil passed my “test” with flying colors. Not once did he so much as downplay Jew-hatred, and he sincerely advocated for his own people without any hint of animosity toward the Israeli people.

Could our feelings about Palestinians pass the same test?

Maybe Calls for Genocide Are Un-American

This year, I’ve seen mainstream American commentators publicly call for genocide in Gaza. That’s not an exaggeration. Israeli officials have said even worse, calling for ethnic cleansing, deliberate mass starvation, Dresden-style firebombings, and more.

And on October 7, my own thoughts weren’t any nobler. “Flatten Gaza,” I said under my breath as I watched the horrific footage of violence against innocent Israelis.

Benjamin Netanyahu, of course, is taking full advantage of that kind of thinking. He is an ideologue swept away by history, and he seems bent on undermining Israel’s true interests the way George W. Bush undermined America’s when he invaded Iraq – a tragic decision that led to genocides, the displacement of millions from their homelands throughout the Middle East, and the rise of ISIS.

I don’t look down on my Israeli friends for their rhetoric. I’m also not shocked by the rhetoric of some Palestinians now boiling over with vengefulness toward Israel.

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But what we need is a harnessing of these sentiments, and a salvaging of the deepest and most legitimate sentiment of all: a healthy pride in one’s own people and an eagerness to defend it against injustice.

And for that urgent need, I am looking to former President Donald Trump – a man who, for whatever his faults might be – has a natural revulsion for war.

Only Trump Can Fix

In order to extricate the world from the brink of catastrophe, we need a Trump administration willing to channel toughness into thoughtfulness and grace and dignity. An administration that recognizes that other peoples and states have their own interests, and that most of the time we have shared interests.

America has a longstanding alliance with Israel and shares its interests. But Palestinians and Israelis have more obviously shared interests than any other two people groups in the world. And Israel – surrounded by a tinderbox Arab world filled with competing vendettas and historical grievances – cannot afford to be as stupid as the U.S. has been.

Under the leadership of a strong but sensible, humane but tough United States, the international community still stands a chance of guiding Israel away from the path toward disaster. It’s a delicate operation that will require a change of direction that doesn’t compromise the rights of the Israeli people to a sense of pride and dignity.

But if anyone can pull Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders back from allowing the pain of history to drive them to recklessness, it’s Trump, who deftly dismantled the reckless foreign policy approach of Bushism while leaving America still standing tall.

Jason Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, activist, and human rights worker. He is also the author of three books, the latest of which is The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset.