A Friendship Ended Over Gaza. Here's What I Actually Think.

A few weeks ago I sent a message to someone I used to be close to. Nothing dramatic — just that I still thought about her, and that I hoped she was okay.

The reply came in five parts. She told me she had been disappointed in my views, and in the things I had posted online since 7 October. She told me I had contributed to hatred of Jews. She said some of what I posted wasn't even true, and that when things were disproven I never corrected them. She wrote that she is afraid now, that she doesn't dare be herself, that she never wanted her child to inherit the fears she grew up with as a third-generation. She said she had stepped away from people who make her feel unsafe. And then, at the end, she thanked me for my kind words, and said she still misses me.

I have read it more times than I'd like to admit.

I'm not going to publish her name or her words in full. She wrote them to me privately and she meant them. But I do want to write about what happened, because I don't think this is only about the two of us, and because I've decided I'm not going to keep turning it over anymore.

What I actually believe

I'm a pacifist. That's not a position I picked up in 2023. It's the only thing that really works as a belief system for me: I don't think you can solve anything with violence. Not permanently, not honestly. Violence buys time and makes the next round worse. That's it. That's the whole creed.

Which means, and I want to be specific here: what Hamas did on 7 October was a crime. People were murdered in their homes and at a festival, and hundreds were taken hostage. There is no framing, no context, no historical grievance that makes that acceptable to me. I have never posted anything celebrating it and I never would.

And it means that what has followed is also not acceptable to me. More than 70,000 people have been killed in Gaza. Nearly three years of it. Famine. Aid trickling in, or not. And the animals nobody counts.

This is the part I can't get past. One day, however terrible, does not license three years. It doesn't matter how the maths is arranged — there is no number of dead children that balances a ledger. That isn't a political opinion. It's the only thing I've ever consistently believed.

What I was accused of

The accusation wasn't that I said a particular thing and got it wrong. It was that my views, as a category, made me part of something. That objecting to how a state wages a war is the same act as hating a people.

I don't think those are the same, and I think collapsing them costs everyone. It makes it harder to criticise a government, and it makes it harder to name real antisemitism when it shows up, because the word has already been spent on people who didn't earn it.

It's also worth saying that plenty of Israelis and plenty of Jews have said much harder things about this war than I ever have — human rights organisations inside Israel, historians who have spent their lives studying genocide, former Israeli officials. You can disagree with all of them. But you can't call the position hatred without calling theirs the same.

If I got a specific thing wrong, tell me what it was and I'll correct it. A general charge with no example attached isn't something I can do anything with.

The part where she's right

Antisemitism has risen, and I'm not going to soften that to make my own position more comfortable. So when she says her world has become smaller and that it feels safer that way, I believe her. I'd probably do the same.

But I can hold that and still ask the obvious question: does any of it justify what is being done to people in Gaza? Because that's where the argument always seems to end up — as though her fear and their deaths sit on the same scale, and one cancels the other. They don't. Both things are true, and one of them is being carried out by a state with an air force.

Some history

I'm not a historian and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But a few things seem worth holding at the same time.

Europe has a long history of deciding which of its minorities don't belong, and acting on it. That part is ours, and I'm not interested in pretending it isn't.

What I'm less sure about is the conclusion. That history is used to explain why a state had to be created elsewhere, as though it followed automatically. It didn't. It was a decision, taken largely by European powers who had their own reasons for wanting a say in where those borders ended up. Even the names we use for that part of the world were drawn from a map with London at the centre of it.

And the land wasn't empty. People were displaced, and their descendants have lived under occupation longer than most of them have been alive.

None of this makes 7 October defensible. But nothing about that day weighs against three years of killing, and no history disappears because of it.

Why I'm stopping here

I sent a kind message and got a verdict back. She said she tried to have the conversation and found no interest. I remember it differently, but I'll accept that we each experienced it that way, and that neither of us was really listening.

What I won't accept is the charge itself. Not because it hurt, though it did, but because accepting it would mean agreeing that being against a war means I hate a people. I don't agree, and I've thought about it long enough to know that thinking about it more won't change that.

So this is where I put it down. She's welcome back, genuinely, if she ever wants to talk about what I actually said rather than what my saying it made her feel about me. Until then I'm not going to keep auditing myself against an accusation that came without specifics.

I'm a pacifist. It's the least dangerous thing a person can be. It turns out that isn't a defence.