Palestine 2025 - A Personal Retrospective

Now that we are well into the ceasefire, I unpack the mountain of things that I (we?) didn't know, all the things I have learned, and all the reflections that I didn't have the time to share before.

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I believe I speak for more than myself when I say that I didn’t know much about the Israel-Palestine “conflict” - or its history - prior to October 7th, 2023.

All I knew was that Palestine - like so many other Arab nations - is unfortunately caught up in conflicts and its people are suffering as a result.

So it is an understatement of the century to say that what I learned was eye opening and soul crushing.

Today, about two weeks since the ceasefire was declared, I dare to hope that the worst of it is over, and I look back at the sequence of events and unpack what I learned and how I learned it, along with thousands and millions of other people around the globe.

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I used to think - because they are made to be so by the western and sometimes, unfortunately, even Muslim societies - that the jews are very disciplined and educated etc. So many of their people are scientists and otherwise accomplished individuals, after all.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that these qualities were about jewish people, that too the ones that are true to their faith, and not Israelis.

The first time I got an inkling about what is happening over in Palestine was in 2021, on LinkedIn of all the places. This was the time when I opened a profile on LinkedIn as a content creator and had followed many Muslims over there as my brand - Soulful Productivity - was just starting (back then as a podcast), and as always, I wanted to go with a fresh platform and was bored of Facebook and overwhelmed with Instagram.

Israel back then was attacking worshippers at Masjid Al Aqsa and not allowing them to worship. I posted a few times about that, and the only reason I was even aware of it was because I was surrounded by a circle of Muslims. The only reason I had the courage of posting about it was because I was already doing something courageous (for me) by sharing about Islam, and again, because I had so many Muslim followers to support me.

In 2022, when this happened again, I would learn that they harass Muslim worshippers by disrupting their prayers every Ramadan.

I knew as a teen that it is almost impossible for Muslims to visit Al Aqsa because it is controlled by Israel. In fact, the Imam of the mosque himself visited our city during an event and urged people to do something for Palestinians and for Al Aqsa.

His efforts, like those of countless other Palestinians, were years away from reaping their results. Back then, people barely knew what was happening over there, especially in a country like India. Back then, I was a distracted teen who couldn’t and didn’t know much about the World Order even when I thought I knew it all.

It actually makes me sad if I think that he may not have lived to see people finally paying attention. So I hope that he is alive, and I hope that the past 15 months have not broken his spirit. I have no way of knowing - unless the internet can provide some clues about that event, or a list of Imams at Al Aqsa - as I don’t even remember his name.

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So I was in for a shock after the events of 7th October. Again, it was pure chance that I even learned about them to the extent that I did, for I was active on Instagram at that time (I am periodically inactive over there from time to time including now).

It was not even October 7th when I learned of all this, but a few days later. And of course, none of us knew the coming extent and excruciating duration of the horror until weeks or months later, when this turned into a nightmare that wouldn’t end and that the world continued to allow.

And Instagram so happened to be the eye of the storm, so to speak. This was the platform that Palestinians started posting their plight on. It started with a few posts coming in to my feed, and then turned into many. Soon, I was actively following all the journalists’ accounts that were being suggested and Gaza was all my feed was about.

I believe that Instagram became a mini (Micro? Nano?) ecosystem where I could start the process of actively doing something for the Palestinians, as I did things I usually never bother with, like liking all the posts to increase their reach, watching all the stories (usually I have them all muted), and adding multiple posts to my own stories (I almost never post my own stories either).

I let the Palestinian voices lead me both on Instagram and on other places in that it is not my reach that matters (which was negligible), but the way my share would boost the posts for the algorithm. It is for this reason that I briefly logged into places I was inactive on like Facebook and now, LinkedIn too, to post at least once about Palestine.

I unfollowed so many Instagram accounts that either said nothing about this even as they had posted about Ukraine or posted something taking sides with Israel. I lost admiration for so many authors and other well known figures for similar reasons. I was glad that I never got around to buying some of their books.

I started educating myself - and eventually others - about the history and the reality and the extent of the Palestinian suffering.

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Here are just a few things that I never knew of before. You can consider it a recap of what zionists and Israel do:

1. I never knew that Israel was never a real country and was “formed” in 1948. That the Jews did not have a country to call their own thanks to the Europeans and that Palestinians were being made to pay the price of what Germany did

2. I never knew that Israel was established with the help of UK and then the US, on top of an existing population of Palestininans

3. I didn’t knew that the reason the nation of Palestine is not recognised by the western countries is because they have established Israel along the same boundry lines

4. I didn’t knew that the country of Palestine now lies divided into one random piece of Gaza on one end and many tiny islands scattered between Israeli occupied regions in the West Bank

5. Obviously I knew nothing about the Nakba

6. And about the generations of Palestinians resisting the Israeli occupation

7. And the jewish authors like Ilan Pappe who have been writing about this for years

8. I learned that the reason Israel is not recognised by the Arab nations is because of the way it was formed, rather than due to any religious reasons

So this was the time when I learned that the attacks on Al Aqsa worshippers that I had learned of several years earlier and that the Imam at Al Aqsa was probably talking about more than a decade previously were able to happen because of these illegal settlers in the West Bank.

I realised that the Israeli army system, which I had heard praises of because their entire civilians can be converted into an army, was actually nothing, because the only enemy this army had fought was unarmed civilians and children with stones.

Learning of and seeing photos of the huge walls around Gaza took me to scenes from the movie World War Z, in which Brad Pitt is told that Israel knew a zombie apocalypse was coming and shut itself off from the world long ago. I thought this was actually Israel’s way of defending itself and couldn’t have ever guessed that all that these walls did was keeping Palestinians as prisoners.

And, of course, I realised all that the Mighty Iron Dome did was keep handmade, amateur missiles away.

I learned that education in Israel, which was again something I had heard praises of, was rife with the propaganda of this whole thing.

I found myself scratching my head as to how these people could possibly believe that the Palestinians or Arabs were responsible for the holocaust, which is so well known to be done by Hitler who had no ties to Islam whatsoever.

I also finally got an explanantion as to why virtually every company seemed to be on a boycott list, which is that they were heavily incentivized by US and Israel to establish their bases there.

Back in 2021, I had boycotted certain brands like HP when I learned that they help Israel through technologies that harm Palestinians and/or are based on stolen land. But I had also dismissed certain boycott lists if basically every famous brand was present on there. The skeptic in me thought that this might just be random people having fun putting every well known brand on the list.

Long story short, I had no idea what zionism is and how it differs from Judaism, and how it is so heavily supported by US and other western countries so that they can have a base from which to control the Arab nations.

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Needless to say, my worldview had changed quite significantly.

As the western world continued to allow this to happen over the coming weeks and months and so many people and institutions continued to act like nothing was happening while they demonstrated support for Ukraine or showed an outcry of injustice if even one (usually white) westerner was harmed, I was baffled by the double standards.

I won’t say that my faith in any of these nations or laws or the news was broken because I already knew that ultimately, the governments and media are usually unfair, but I sure was shocked, time and again, about the extent of this denial and how it continued to happen even after so long and after so many veils had been lifted.

And I was shocked by the openness by which it was all done, both by Israel and the media and governments of other nations.

Openly destroying hospitals. Refugee camps. Openly killing children. Violating ceasefire agreements. Using banned weapons and chemicals. So, so much more. Yet nothing seemed to deter these propagandists from spreading their false ideas, even as everyone seemed to know they were false.

When challenged, they simply parroted the lies that had long been debunked. Or they ignored the question altogether. Or they answered the question with their own question (the infamous “Do you condemn the attacks on October 7th” or “burned babies” or “Hamas”), trying to deflect the blame.

One thing that did surprise me - and continues to do so - is how the western governments continued to support Israel - a different country - even as so much of their own population was turned against it. They were no longer trying to even put a facade of caring for their own populations’ views.

It felt like they either didn’t knew the extent of how downhill their propaganda was going or they had committed so much that they thought they couldn’t turn back or there was some really deep, unknown favours that they were getting from Israel.

Because to me explanations like “Colonists always stand up for eachother” don’t make sense of the extent of this alliance.

I have since found a better explanation for this here:

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Eventually, I moved past passive sharing and got motivated to start writing about all this on my long dormant Substack publication, and desgining Instagram posts dedicated to Palestine in Canva.

So I posted some poetry, talked about the correct way to address Israel and the Palestinian struggle, and tried some amateur journalism.

Unfortunately, I could not sustain my efforts for the whole of 15 months as I got caught up in my usual expectations of perfectionism, inevitably started caring about external validation and just got somewhat despairing and off track. However, this is not a time to regret past mistakes and it is never too late to start or restart, which is what I am hoping to do this time around.

How do I plan to do this and how could you go about doing the same? That is what I hope to discuss in my next post about what to do next, how to systain your efforts for the longterm and hopefully move beyind sharing posts on sical media.

Do let me know your thoughts, about how you discovered about the reality of Israel, and how you are planning to continue your efforts for Palestine.

Until next time.

Atiba.