I used to be one of them. I used to support Palestine over Israel, without question.
Now I’ve started to look at the conflict in a much more nuanced way, as time goes on.
Wisdom comes with the ages, after all. Yesterday Hamas attacked Israel at a grand scale, and the barbarism of it shocked me.
I asked myself a question, as an outsider: “Who is more likely to kill me or my loved ones?”
The girl in the picture is a German national named Shani Louk.
She had absolutely NOTHING to do with the conflict between Israel and Palestine. All she did was attend a concert in Israel. Palestinian militants captured her, did God-knows-what with her, and killed her. They then paraded her naked body through the streets on the back of a truck. she was identified by her tattoos.
Shani could have been my sister, my girlfriend, my cousin, she could have been any girl in my family, really… the happy-go-lucky backpacker, basically.
She was attending a “festival for peace” concert in Israel, back in Germany she worked as a tattoo artist.
This isn’t some raging Zionist conservative with a hate-boner for all things Palestinian or Arab, far from it — people like Shani wish the best for both Israelis and Palestinians, and love to see peace.
Instead of peace, she saw death. So did around 400 other Israelis, and hundreds more Palestinians. Those numbers are expected to rise as the days progress. Israel will retaliate, and it will be brutal. More innocent people will die, on both sides. But now more than ever, I hope that they crush the hydra that is Hamas, once and for all. They’re terrorist scum and they have shown the world their barbarity on October 7, 2023, in a way and on a scale I will never forget.
