How many ways do you gaslight me? Let me count the ways:

1. When you chant, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!’ and tell me it’s a call for peace, justice, and freedom, you gaslight me. I know it means a state of Palestine that extends from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, built on the ruins of Israel, just like the Al Aqsa Mosque is built on the ruins of the Temple Mount. And I know that should this expansionist Palestine ever come to pass, there is little basis to believe it will be a bastion of peace, justice and freedom or a home for Jews, judging by the Palestinian self-rule we’ve witnessed so far.
2. When you tell me the protests are peaceful, you gaslight me. I’ve witnessed the ‘globalise the intifada’ chants (are words still literal violence?), the demonic diatribes, the Hamas insignia, the signs, the death threats, the police interventions, the defacing of property, the assaults on people, and the keffiyehs wrapped ominously around their faces. When the masks come on, it is a mask-off moment. And as all this gets sucked into a vacuum of silence and complacency from our leaders, institutions and authorities, the protestors are emboldened.
3. When you object with ‘not all protestors’, you gaslight me. Weren’t you the one who said that if a neo-Nazi supported a cause, all the supporters of that cause are Nazis? When did you stop doing guilt by association?
4. When you can’t condemn antisemitism without an ‘all hatreds matter’, you gaslight me. Who else is hiding the physical hallmarks of their identity, being evacuated from their houses of worship, having their children bullied, hearing chants for their death, having police stationed outside their schools, being told to cede ground to the mob and avoid certain areas for their safety? Who are you worried about offending by singling out antisemitism?
5. When you tell me reflexively, robotically, ‘it’s not antisemitic to criticise Israel’, you gaslight me. We know what criticism of Israel is. We do it ourselves. It’s not a sign with a Star of David in the bin and the words, ‘Keep the world clean!’ It’s not dehumanising, intimidating, and attacking Israelis and Israel’s supporters. And it’s not defacing Israeli restaurants.
6. When you talk a lot about kindness and empathy, about how you care about marginalised communities and their feelings of vulnerability, but dismiss and pillory my anguish and fears, you gaslight me. When did you stop sanctifying lived experience?
7. When you claim freedom of speech is terribly important to you and that condemnations of antisemitism are suppressing ‘peaceful protest’, but you continue to call for strengthened hate speech laws, you gaslight me.
8. When you tell me some of your best friends are Jews, and they agree with your views, which the vast majority of Jews do not subscribe to, you gaslight me. When did tokenism stop being racism?
9. When you devoutly declaim ‘never again’ and cosplay as an antifascist who would have been on the right side of history back then, you gaslight me. You wouldn’t recognise fascism if it bashed down your door and put a gun to your head in front of your kids. We don’t need to wonder any more who would have hidden us.
10. When you talk about the Nakba as ‘context’, you gaslight me. History did not begin in 1948, and it did not skip from then until now. Whoopsie, you forgot the 1947 Partition Plan, the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, the 2000 and 2008 peace offers, and the 2005 disengagement!
11. When you rant about decolonisation, you’re erasing millennia of Jewish connection to and presence in the land, you gaslight me, but it’s much worse than that. You cannot even conceive of Jewish babies who were burned alive, as victims. Resistance ‘by all means necessary’, right?
12. When you stay silent over indescribably barbaric terrorist attacks, but I remember you telling me ‘silence is violence’ after George Floyd’s murder, you gaslight me. There are limits to intersectionality, right?
13. When you never put out statements on any other foreign conflict but suddenly feel moved to put out a grandiloquent statement condemning Israel, you gaslight me. Your failure to mention October 7, Hamas, or the hostages revolts me. Do you think Israel has been waiting anxiously to hear your edict issued from down the bottom of the world, equipped with your #everythingyouyouneedtoknowaboutIsraelPalestinein20seconds Instagram history?
14. When you tell me you care about Muslims, you gaslight me. Where are your protests against Pakistan sending almost two million Afghan refugees back to live under the Taliban and China incarcerating one million Uyghurs? How did you show your concern for the hundreds of thousands dead (including thousands of Palestinians) in the Syrian civil war? And what of Yemen? No Jews, no news, right?
15. When you’re ‘just asking questions’ about whether the atrocities of October 7 really happened in the way they have been reported and depicted by Hamas’ real-time footage, but you take Gaza’s ‘Health Ministry’ at its word, you gaslight me. Here’s the news: you’ve fallen for jihadist journalism and become a Hamas henchman.
16. While you take Gaza’s ‘Health Ministry’ at its word, yet you refuse to believe or ignore what Hamas tells you repeatedly about its genocidal intent and its bloodlust, and how happy it is to sacrifice its own people, you gaslight me. And when you accuse Israel of the same, despite its Palestinian citizens who are fighting and uniting for it, despite its warnings and opportunities to evacuate, you invert reality. And you ignore an actual genocide unfolding as the Islamist Janjaweed massacre ethnic Africans in Darfur.
17. When you complain about this war bringing genocide and occupation and siege and humanitarian disaster you gaslight me, because you’ve been complaining about that for years.
18. When you demand Ceasefire Now! because you want a free Palestine and peace, ‘Peace for our time!’, you gaslight me. Because for there to be any chance of peace Palestine must be freed from Hamas, which means Hamas must cease.

Remember those tiki torches that you were so outraged by six years ago? In fueling the firestorm of Jew hatred, your gaslighting has eclipsed them by far.