An Assyrian and a pro-Palestine protestor walk into a bar

Caught in the middle of the Israel-Palestine debate is the last place I wanted to be at a nightclub. Yet somehow, that’s exactly where I’ve found myself. I’ve stepped off the dance floor for some ‘fresh’ air in a crowded, outdoor smoking section. Stuck in the corner amidst a sea of people, I tune into the conversation happening right in front of me.  

A young Australian woman is asking a young Middle Eastern man where he’s from.  

“I’m Assyrian,” he tells her.  

“Oh, Syrian?” she replies, mishearing him. “I speak a bit of Arabic, Habibi!”  

“No Assyrian,” he corrects her. “I don’t like Arabs. They stole our land.” 

The woman is completely stumped. It’s evident she has no idea what an Assyrian is, let alone how it differs from a Syrian. Granted, the Assyrian people’s history is complex, but too often it’s ignored by young Westerners – especially those who pretend to care about minorities in the Middle East. 

An indigenous ethnic group, Assyrians trace their roots back to the Assyrian Empire, a major ancient civilisation in Mesopotamia, which today corresponds to parts of modern-day Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. Numbering about two to four million people, they are almost exclusively Christian, and speak various dialects of Neo-Aramaic.  

Like many indigenous ethnic minorities in the Middle East, Assyrians have been victims of centuries of Islamic conquest and violence. In WWI, upwards of 250,000 Assyrians were murdered in a genocide led by the Ottomans. In the last decade, they’ve faced persecution and genocide at the hands of ISIS in Iraq. 

Given this history, the Australian woman mistaking the Assyrian man for an Arab Muslim couldn’t be more ignorant.

Still not grasping what he’s said, she soon switches the conversation to Gen Z’s favourite topic, Palestine. The woman, who says she has Indigenous Australian heritage, reveals she in fact lived in Israel for two months. Now, she says doesn’t like Israelis because “they’re colonisers”, like the British, who “stole Palestinians’ land”.  

The Assyrian man tells her he doesn’t support Palestine because, he reiterates, he “doesn’t like Arabs,” because they stole his land. The woman’s reaction is like a video game character glitching in real life. She can’t process what he’s saying. When he tries to elaborate, she talks over him. “No, no, we support the Palestinians,” she insists.

“But fuck Israelis,” she spits. With that, she walks off into the night. 

I make eyes with the Assyrian man. We laugh in disbelief.  

“I just watched that happen,” I tell him. “I’m Jewish, so I kept quiet.”   

“She doesn’t understand anything!” he laughs. “If she were to go to an Arab Muslim country she’d be made to cover up, she couldn’t dress like that.”

I tell him my friends and family in Israel just want peace, co-existence, and to be left alone, without the fear of being targeted. He smiles knowingly, gives me a fist bump, and tells me to have a great night.

I walk back towards the dance floor, stunned by what I just witnessed.

That conversation perfectly encapsulates the attitude, and the ignorance, of young people who join the pro-Palestine movement. Contrary to the belief that it is an Indigenous rights movement, it is in reality, an Islamic conquest ideology, one that justifies or supports the Islamic Republic’s terrorist proxy groups Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.   

To understand the movement’s actual goals, one only needs to listen to the original Arabic version of “from the river to the sea,” which translates to “from water to water, Palestine will be Arab”. In February, a video was posted online of a young Australian yelling the chant at a rally in Melbourne. 

It’s also an ideology that shouts over Middle Eastern voices who disagree with it, especially those who oppose Islamist terrorism. In March, Syrian-Lebanese and German peace activist Rawan Osman visited the Netherlands for a series of lectures entitled “From Antisemite to Zionist”. At all three venues, her lectures were interrupted by aggressive pro-Palestine protestors, screaming over her, banging on windows, and forming vicious mobs, requiring her to have security guards. 

What’s also shocking about young people who join the movement, under the guise of supporting ‘human rights’, is their selective empathy. While they post constantly about the tragic suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, they are completely silent about the rights of almost every other group in the Middle East.

The very same people who posted “don’t stop talking about Palestine” were silent last October, when a 21-year-old Yazidi woman escaped from Gaza after spending years in captivity there. Kidnapped by ISIS from Iraq at age 11, Fawzia Amin Sido had been trafficked across the Middle East and forced to marry an ISIS member, before being moved to Gaza several years ago. She was finally reunited with her family in Iraq after a rescue operation led by the US and Israel.

So called ‘activists’ who posted constantly about Palestine said nothing, likely because the story challenged the allegation of Gaza being an ‘open air prison,’ and because they seemed not to know who the Yazidi people are. They seem uninterested in learning about the ISIS-led genocide of 3000 Yazidis in 2014, during which thousands of Yazidi girls and women were kidnapped.

These same activists were silent too, when 12 Druze children were massacred in a Hezbollah strike on a soccer field in Majdal Shams. For people proclaiming to care about Middle Eastern minorities, they seem to consistently ignore the Druze community or be unaware of their existence. This is likely because many Israeli-Druze citizens are fiercely loyal to Israel, serve in the IDF, and oppose Arab and Islamic radicalism, none of which fits the pro-Palestine narrative.

Their silence has been especially deafening in recent months, following the massacre of over 1300 Alawites by Islamists in Syria. Those who have claimed to be against ethnic cleansing and genocide seem eerily quiet as tens of thousands of Alawites flee their homes, while horrific videos online show their torture, kidnapping and murder. 

While Western pro-Palestine activists claim they are uplifting Middle Eastern voices, it seems that in truth, they only care about one voice, one group and one narrative. Any Middle Easterner with a positive view of Israel is shouted over. Any minority group that opposes Islamist terrorism is ignored.  

To put it bluntly, they seem to only care about Middle Eastern conflicts when Jews can be painted as the aggressors. No Jews? No news.