*This article is a response to some comments I received on Instagram about my content regarding Israel and Palestine.

I’ve been sharing some different perspectives about Israel and Palestine on my Instagram. For instance, when I pointed out that people are leaving harsh comments on posts that condemn anti-Semitic hate crimes. Or when I said we should be extra careful when posting things on this topic because Israel and Hamas are fighting an informational war.

Whenever I share those things, I’ve been getting messages from friends, acquaintances and even strangers who are very critical of what I post. So I want to clarify a few things and tell you the story of why I started posting about this in the first place.

When this latest crisis in Palestine started last October, I made a deliberate effort not to read any news, because I knew that if I did that I would get too involved, go down on a rabbit hole of news, lose my sleep, etc. Despite that, people I know were already sharing it on social media, so I couldn’t avoid seeing it.

On my Instagram feed things are very progressive. I consider myself a center-left person, most of my friends are very liberal and very much on the left-wing side of things. This means that almost all the content I see about this topic on social media is from a pro-Palestinian perspective. And yet I was able to keep the information somewhat at bay, and I didn’t even know the facts. I knew about the history of the conflict, but this time I only knew that that there was a new crisis and people were criticizing Israel.

And then one day I was out for a walk and I saw a bunch of missing people posts on the street. I got worried it might be someone in the neighborhood and I went to look it up. When I got closer, I saw it was about Israeli families.

And then I did this thing.

I had this automatic reaction to it, something along the lines of a long eye-roll with the whisper “They’re so dramatic!”

At that moment my reaction was so nasty and so instantaneous that I ended up shocking myself. I remember stopping in the middle of the street and thinking — what did I just do there?

That’s because in my adult life (and especially since I started working in the mindfulness industry) I’ve been very vigilant of my feelings and how they can affect others. We’re living in these intense polarizing times, and I’ve seen a lot of people fighting with their friends, families, and even strangers on the internet. I took a lot of pride in not letting that hate get into me, and I’ve been very vocal about more tolerant and peaceful ways of spreading awareness.

And then all it took was one poster.

I had a nasty visceral reaction to something that I knew nothing about. At that time I didn’t know about the hostages, or the attacks, or the retaliation. My reaction was 100% preconceived ideas about Israelis. About Israelis. Because if I’m honest, that’s what pissed me off. The fact that they were Israelis.

That was a big wake-up call for me. I started to be extra mindful of what I say about this topic, and extra mindful about the kind of content that I consume about this topic. That’s when I realized that I was only educating myself in the Palestinian perspective of the conflict, which is a very important part of the story, but not the only part of the picture.

So I thought: ok, how do I get more pieces of this puzzle, so I can have a complete picture of it? That’s when I started going out of my social media feed and started consuming all kinds of content about Palestine and Israel. And I really mean all kinds. As a result, I’ve seen a lot of very twisted accusations against Palestinians. But I also started to see important pieces of the puzzle that were not being shared on my feed. Like the story of what really happened on October 7th and how people were killed that day.

That made me realize that most people in my feed, who are probably following the same accounts as me, also had an incomplete set of this puzzle. So what I’ve been doing is trying to bring different pieces of this reality so people have a wider view of what’s happening.

And it has been so hard to share information that doesn’t fully align with the pro-Palestinian perspective being shared on my Instagram. I feel like I’m constantly measuring my words and walking on eggshells. I don’t want to sound like “I’m on the other side”, and mostly, I don’t want to sound disrespectful or insensitive to the suffering that’s happening in Gaza.

Despite that, I keep sharing it because I think we need to change the way we discuss things on the internet. More than showing the crimes of one side or the other, I’m worried about how we’re approaching this topic. This is something that I shared before when I was talking about the war in Ukraine.

It seems like we’re stuck in this narrative that on one side you have the absolute hero, or the absolute victim, and on the other side the absolute villain. So when I criticize Hamas or the Palestinians, people try to fit that info into the narrative. If I’m saying Hamas did something bad, it must be because I’m putting them into the “villain” box. And then Israel can only go into the “hero” box, right?

But reality is more complicated than that because we don’t live in a Disney movie. We’re talking about international conflicts, there’s nothing more complicated and full of nuances than this. Both sides can suffer huge losses and inflict huge pain.

This is a double tragedy. And seeing the tragedy on the other side doesn’t diminish the tragedy on my side, on the opposite. If we refuse to see and talk about the trauma caused to Israeli families on October 7th this becomes an excuse for more violence.

Because right now the only online spaces where people can openly grieve the loss of Israeli lives are pro-Israeli spaces, in which very little context about Palestinians is shared in return. This has the potential to push people who were hurt but willing to see both sides to the extremes and feed even more into the cycle of violence.

We need to foster safe places where people can talk about this without getting verbally attacked. Well, this is what’s going through my mind when I post about anti-Semitic hate crimes. Now you know. Thanks.