We will get deeper and deeper into it, but by staunch I mean that I can shake with anger whenever I think CNN is distorting reality with headlines like ‘five Palestinians reported killed in blasts’. Blasts? Murdered by Israel you mean!!! And I swear for the hundred times to never give CNN any more of my clicks that fuel their ad revenue. Am sure they would soon be poor as church mice if I could just keep my promise.

The first time I remember writing about the Palestinians was when I was 19. The internet hadn’t transformed our lives yet and I wrote with pen and paper. What I wrote may still be somewhere in a box in the attic back in Belgium. All I remember is that I wrote something like ‘x number of Palestinians got killed today. Business as usual.’

So at 19 I clearly had the feeling that when it came to Palestinians it was always open season and they could be shot to pieces by Israel with impunity.

One of the images that really awoke me to this conflict was that of a Palestinian father trying to protect his 12 year old son from getting shot, but the boy dies. I remember seeing that on television and I found it utterly revolting.

I remember doing a sketch during my last year of highschool where I play either Arafat’s wife or Arafat himself. Arafat needs his scarf back because his wife is using it to do the dishes. She refuses and she goes to the market and Arafat orders a bomb explosion at the market to punish her for disrespecting her.

I got a 85 percent mark for that sketch, which I think is like a B+ or an A- in the US. I wouldn’t conclude from the content of the sketch that I was in any way anti-Palestinian, I would rather conclude that the Palestinians were on my mind enough to make a sketch about Arafat. Am very sure I lacked enough info to do a sketch about any Israelis at the time.

Apparently you can also get away with rather controversial stuff in a Belgian highschool. This was before cancel culture was a thing.