In the aftermath of October 7, as waves of anti-Jewish hatred surged globally, I had a strange thought: what if I set up a stall at one of the “peaceful” protests in the city and sold watermelon icy poles?
It was summer in Australia, and this made sense in my traumatised mind. Anti-Zionists had quickly adopted the watermelon emoji as their political identity. But I couldn’t unsee the fruit’s deep cultural association with Israel. I wanted to sell artik—the classic Israeli watermelon icy pole—just metres from where Keffiyehs (mass-produced in Bangladesh) were being hawked as revolutionary accessories. Perfect for those wanting to parade their performative activism or capture it in a #RiverToTheSea selfie.
I figured most protestors wouldn’t recognise the Hebrew packaging. They’d assume they were supporting the cause while enjoying a Middle Eastern snack. The irony made me laugh—briefly. Maybe I’d donate the profits to victims of October 7. But in reality, my chutzpah gave out long before my freezer would have. The crowds were too large. The protests too aggressive. Too threatening.
They could keep the emoji. We had artik and the perfect Zionist summer salad: watermelon, feta, and mint. Breakfast of champions. Breakfast of Jews with a homeland.
At one point, I thought about writing a satirical poem:
“First they came for the watermelon emoji.”
But the appropriation of Jewish trauma and history by anti-Zionist activism quickly became too grotesque to parody.
First, they came for our connection to the land. Then, they came for our language.
Suddenly, Gaza was a “Holocaust”, a “genocide”. Gaza was a “concentration camp”. Israelis were “Nazis”—”Zio-Nazis”. Jews were white “colonisers”, and Jesus? Palestinian. (I figured Christians could fight that one out. I was just relieved they hadn’t claimed Queen Esther—our malkaleh—yet.)
When a Swedish teenager in a regrettable hat released a pre-recorded video calling her airport detention “kidnapping” and herself a “hostage,” I thought I’d seen the worst of it. This was not adult behaviour. She was given snacks. She boarded a flight home. Home.
“Bring Them Home”—a slogan calling for the release of Israeli hostages still held by Hamas—has now been co-opted by pro-Palestinian groups to refer to Palestinian detainees.
I recently saw an Instagram post from a “Free Palestine” printing company that featured a ribbon—an obvious riff on the yellow hostage ribbons used in solidarity with the victims of October 7—reworked into a Palestinian flag.
Was this a lack of imagination? Or a deliberate attempt to weaponise our grief against us? I knew it was the latter.
Seeing those images and slogans felt like looking into a funhouse mirror: a distorted, mocking reflection of real trauma.
I wondered how people would respond if the IDF were referred to as “freedom fighters”
I wondered how people would respond if blue and white keffiyehs were fashioned into challah covers?
I wondered how people would respond if they read “Globalise the Nakba” or “Long Live the Nakba” on protest signs, on signposts, on t-shirts and #trending on social media. I thought about entire suburbs plastered in “Globalise the Intifada” and “Long Live the Intifada”. Somehow that was acceptable.
To be clear, I would never culturally appropriate a keffiyeh or call for violence and terrorism against an entire group of people.
The diet coke version, “The Sit-Intifada” is just as bad, yet praised and promoted by a shocking number of Politicians here in Australia. Is it ignorance? ‘Intifada’ is a call for a violent uprising, mainly in the form of terrorism. ‘Intifada’ is championing the death of Jews. Even if you’re sitting down.
I thought about Kanye West—Ye—wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt in October 2022. There was immediate and justified outrage. The shirt was denounced as a racist response to Black Lives Matter. No one questioned that.
And like Zionism, “Black” can encompass many races, cultures, and religions.
But Jews are always cast as white. Never the victim. Always the oppressor.
Maybe that’s why so few people reacted when Kanye dropped a song titled “Heil Hitler.”
What shocked me even more was the coverage. Reporters quoted the lyrics but censored only one word: nigga.
“All my n**s Nazis, n*a, heil Hitler.”
Nigga couldn’t appear in print.
But Nazi? Heil Hitler? That was apparently fine.
Where was the outrage?
Why is antisemitism—especially when repackaged as anti-Zionism—so palatable, so permissible?
Why is it acceptable to reverse-engineer Jewish suffering, to borrow our pain and use it to vilify us?
If this doesn’t show how normalised racism against Jews has become, I’ll eat Greta Thunberg’s hat.
