‘I don’t like Hamas, because of how they were cheerful around those coffins. Israelis would never do that.’

A good person is talking. A generous woman. Supportive. Often very funny. Loves dogs. Careful not to gossip about colleagues. If she does talk about other colleagues she does so more with concern than with judgement. A rarity. In our sessions she is always thinking out loud on how to be a better partner to her boyfriend. She has an extraordinary insight into how her own actions influence her relationship. Take it from me, this is a good person. I could give you a brief description of some other clients.

I know she doesn’t want to spend more than 2 minutes talking about this subject. I already feel her impatience with this depressing topic. I didn’t plan for this subject to come up at all. I don’t want to plunge my clients into the darkness of one of the saddest issues of our time.

I could state the obvious and remind my client that Israel bombed kids until the mush that was left of them could be scooped into shopping bags, but she needs to hear something about the behaviour of some Israelis. Kids being bombed is just too surreal to resonate.

‘Ali on the grill’ comes to mind. I have to be quick, because am not being paid to make clients uncomfortable. I do need to put food on the table just like anyone else. ‘An Israeli put a Palestinian house on fire. One child survived. A bunch of Israelis gathered in front of the courthouse during the trial and chanted ”Ali on the grill” cause they wanted the child dead too.’ I don’t even mention that Ali was horrifically burned, even though he survived. She says: ‘That’s just awful’ and I can see that she is done with this topic. We don’t say anything more about it. I do not lecture my clients. I save my arrogant lecturing impulses for quality time with myself and my keyboard.

I don’t know where she saw the images of Hamas handing over the coffins. I know this client really well and she tends not to follow this issue. Maybe it came up on Instagram. I can’t force feed info on this issue to my client. It’s just not my job. The client could easily find everything I write on this topic, but it’s not her cup of tea.

That one image was enough for her to form an opinion on the topic. It’s making me even more reluctant to say things before am really certain of what am saying. Today I was asked a question about the war in Algeria and sure, I have some very basic facts in mind, but it would have been wrong to cobble together an answer.

Our schools don’t teach us how to process images and information. What the source of them is. The long road we traveled before this image was served up and how our experiences may influence our interpretation. They don’t teach us how to be sceptical about our knee jerk reactions and emotional reflexes. We are definitely not taught that it’s wise to say we don’t know when we don’t know.

With this Palestine-Israel thing… I accept that I have done my ‘due dilligence’ to talk about the nature of what is happening with enough certainty. I keep reading books about it, also pro-Israeli ones, which are often very cleverly composed and with lawyerly smarts lie by omission. I’ve written a whole manuscript where I question my own motivation to support the Palestinians. A journey through my soul and Palestine with my enemy as my guru, which is a manuscript am fairly fond of cause it reaches the level of authenticity and vulnerability and factualness am always hunting. I didn’t write it in the hopes of drawing in a huge audience. I haven’t even tried to get it published.

We live with this fragmented info stream. We are often forced to compartimentalize. We all wear masks at work. I wear practically no mask with this particular client, I just know that boring her with a thorough presentation on this subject would do nobody any good. When you pay for a service you don’t need any kind of history lesson as a bonus. So I have compartments. I adapt. There is one client who does ask for a bit of analysis of this subject. Sparingly. He always asks to leave the gruesome details out of it. He has kids and is a devoted father.

There is a war raging for our eye balls, our clicks and our likes. As in any war the truth is also a casualty of that war.

One finds a niche and runs with it. Or doesn’t. My personal posts never do well, but I post them anyway. Which probably sets the algoritm against me. It works according to the Matthew principle. If you get likes they put your stuff on more time lines, so you get more likes. If you regularly post stuff that gets you no likes, they put you on fewer time lines and you get even fewer likes. You know, the Matthew principle. You can see this principle organizing so many aspects of our human existence. So I get why some people strictly post on one issue, cause it works for them and it grows their audience. This ‘sucksess’ obsessed society worships growth.

Would I still write this if I knew 100 percent for sure nobody would ever read it? Yes, I would, because I have to write to defragment the harddrive in my head.

I wrote this specifically for the dozen people who regularly interact with me on this plaftorm. The dedicated dozen, who are some of my light in these murky times.

So this is an exceptionally long post for Twitter.

If you’re still with me, this is the essence of what I wanted to say:

I find it terrifying how we are so quick to have strong opinions on topics that require life long study to fully comprehend, see all the nuances of, and be able to see what is propaganda, mere optics and what is the heart of the matter.

More and more I am convinced that to do good or at least nothing evil in the moments when we interact with people, but also in our thoughts, is the way to positively influence humanity.

And to train ourselves not to judge others who have had a radically different journey in this life from our own.

I fear that if I had grown up in Gaza, I would, unlike the vast majority of the members of Hamas, have become the very embodiment of every lie zionists spread about Hamas.

If I want to see less violence in this world the number 1 thing I have to do is cleanse my own suppressed violent urges.

I have the hunch that even our unexpressed thoughts influence the world. The thoughts I have about the IDF aren’t pretty.

Perhaps it’s better if my thoughts focus on more positive things, like how to be more attuned to what exactly makes my son reach a flow state when we play together.

Or how Palestinians can shine even more than they already do.

If I wanna see fewer millitant zionists in this world, I have to become less millitant myself.

You know, I wish I could ask all of you how your day was and take in your honest answer, but this platform only attracts users cause it mostly fuels indignation, not congregation.

Still…

How was your day?