Oh Gal, you were shocked? Honestly, how utterly disconnected are you from the reality of being a settler? How can you continue to claim ignorance about the Nakba? How can you continue to pretend you have no idea how this all started?

Here’s the deal, Gal. I know I am a settler. I am not indigenous to North America. I know that this one fact does not make me an evil person. It doesn’t mean that I do not belong here either. But I know that being a settler requires my attention and action to work toward justice. A justice that was violently robbed of the Indigenous people here. It caused generational trauma. And I have a responsibility to acknowledge that. To listen and to act in a way that heals and restores what was lost. It won’t erase the crimes committed against Indigenous people here, but it is literally the least I can do.

Gal, you served in the IDF even as it carried out heinous acts of oppression and cruelty against millions of people. You ignored the ongoing apartheid implemented by your government. You defended them even as they commit genocide. You even took a role in a movie that showed you saving children from a missile attack. Yet you defended Israel even after it slaughtered four boys with a missile on a beach in Gaza who were merely playing football.

Gal, do you know how many Palestinian children have been targeted and killed by the IDF? Before AND after the tragic events of October 7th over a year ago? There were terrible things committed on that day, but do you know that there were no “beheaded babies” on October the 7th? That that was a lie? Or that there have been many beheaded babies in Gaza from airstrikes over the last year+?

Have you heard of little Hind? How she sat in a car with her dead family for hours through the cold night? How she desperately called emergency services to save her? How she was terrified and badly injured? And how an Israeli tank killed her and the paramedics who came to help her?

And yet, after almost a year and a half of endless airstrikes, imposed starvation, complete destruction of hospitals, clinics, bakeries, water treatment facilities, shelters, apartment buildings, universities, you are shocked by a backlash to you claiming you are Indigenous to a land that is being mercilessly emptied of its actual Indigenous population?

Gal, the backlash you received was not hatred. It was disgust. It was rage. It was the reaction from people who have just seen videos of children limp or burned beyond recognition. Mothers wailing. Torn bodies upon the scorched earth. And yet you stand in this moment of historic weight and claim you are the real victim here?

You are wrong, Gal. We know. We have an idea of what is happening here. And we also realize you probably never will. 

Kenn Orphan, March 2025