Matt Hrkac/Flickr

Protestors rally in support of a free Palestine on Oct. 15 in Melbourne, Australia, as fighting continues in Gaza and Israel.

On the morning of Oct. 7, Hamas — a self-proclaimed Islamic armed resistance group — fired missiles into the state of Israel, according to Israeli authorities. I watched in horror as the death toll rose and the photos and videos of death and destruction spanned across my social media timelines.

I read the news as it came in, the amount of casualties that continued to rise and the videos of bloodied families attempting to escape demolished neighborhoods. It was, and still is, horrifying. And yet, every time I have opened Instagram since that Oct. 7 morning, my stomach has dropped for a completely different reason.

The Instagram stories of people I know were suddenly flooded with blue and white. People who I had never once seen talk about antisemitism — or any Jewish issues for that matter — were now posting their prayers for Israel. Every new story I clicked onto had messages about the innocent people lost, the attack on Israel and how the state was now retaliating back.

It, quite frankly, disgusted me.

I am ethnically Jewish. While I have never been religious, my Jewishness is something I have always held close.

Because of this, I grew up enriched in Zionist propaganda. Zionism is the belief that Jews need a protected ethnostate, which is why so many people believe so strongly in the state of Israel. I blindly believed what I had been told for much of my adolescence: that Israel was our homeland, that Jews had rights over the land and, simply put, that it was ours.

Though this ideology is by no means accurate, it’s true that Jews are indigenous to the region — but because they’re Palestinian Jews.

It took me years of conscious unlearning, of reading and research, to realize how passionately I believed in Palestinian liberation and how horrified I was that Israel uses Judaism as a scapegoat for Palestinian suffering. Which is why, as I viewed Instagram story after Instagram story of people I knew had never heard of this war until a week and a half ago, I felt horrified.

In order to fully understand why people believe in a free Palestine, it’s important to know the unadulterated history of the land. Long before the state of Israel ever existed, there was Palestine, which became an official United Kingdom territory in 1922 by the League of Nations. As Jewish persecution began to spread across Eastern Europe, the U.K. adopted the British Mandate to deal with it, which “created” a Jewish ethnostate within Palestinian land.

The history is long and spans decades, but the influx of Jewish refugees that were entering the region from the end of the Holocaust created more displacement and rising tensions.

After the 1948 Declaration of Israel, lines were drawn that dedicated areas of the region to the country, which led to the Nakba. The Nakba was the first major displacement of the Palestinian people, where over half of the population was forced to flee or were expelled to make room for the new settlers. Around 15,000 Palestinians died and 531 towns and villages were destroyed, and the state of the region for them has only continued to decline.

Since the violence that occurred on Oct. 7, the Israeli government has most certainly retaliated — on the Palestinian people. As of Oct. 16, the death toll of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has reached 2,750 dead, with 9,700 injured, according to Reuters. The Israeli government also cut all electricity, water, fuel and internet access to Gaza, as reported by PBS Newshour and CNN.

Between Oct. 7 and Oct. 12, the Israeli Defense Forces stated 6,000 bombs were dropped on the Gaza strip. For context, that is only around 1,000 less than the U.S. dropped on Afghanistan over the span of the entirety of 2019.

And yet, outside of one or two friends who also believe in the liberation of Palestine, I have not seen a single person take to their social media in outcry. All the posts about the value of a human life, about condemning violence — did it only matter to you when your “side” was experiencing loss?

The horrors the Palestinian people have been facing — and the complete ignorance by the vast majority of Western society to their suffering — have brought truly nauseating consequences to the U.S.

On the morning of Oct. 15, AP News reported that a Chicago man was charged with a hate crime after stabbing a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy to death, and seriously wounding his mother. He shouted “You Muslims must die!” as he stabbed the young child 26 times. Local authorities confirmed that the killing was a response to the war in occupied Palestine.

Palestinian people are dying. Their land, their freedom and their lives are being brutally ripped away from them. The West, and many of the people in it, are not just standing by and watching, but vocally encouraging this destruction. We cannot sit in silence as an entire population is wiped out of existence before our very eyes.

I beg people to do their research before they post. To learn about the horrors occurring, to look outside the misinformation being spread around through Instagram infographics and to have basic human empathy for people because they should, and not because social media is telling them to.

A commonly-used phrase in the call for Palestinian freedom is “from the river to the sea.” Many believe that this is antisemitic, saying that it calls for the extinction of Jewish people from the region, along with it being “claimed” by militant groups.

However, as historian Maha Nassar explains, the phrase in its original origins calls for a “secular democratic state established in all of historic Palestine” — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Palestinians have long said that a free Palestine would include Jews who are able to live there “in peace and without discrimination,” according to Nassar.

May Palestine soon be free, from the river to the sea.