I’M TRIGGERED!

NOW WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

Picture it. Sicily. 2025.

I’m triggered!

In advance of what is shaping up to be, unsurprisingly, an incredibly intense time when I arrive in Israel next week (huge thanks to the many people who have agreed to meet, submit to interviews and tour me around), I am enjoying some vacation time in Sicily.

I haven’t yet been here an entire day, but I am already in love with the chaotic vibrancy of Palermo.

Of course, no matter where one goes in the world today, a Jewish person (or, like me, an ally of Jewish people) is triggered at almost every turn. I’ve seen more than my share here in southern Italy.

For those who have remained sequestered among the untriggered for the past several decades, one definition of the term is “to feel an intense and usually negative emotional reaction.”

Yeah, that oughta do it.

As you can imagine, there is hardly a more heinous crime for the emotionally mollycoddled than to be flagrantly forced to confront an unpleasant emotion.

But now I am one of the triggered.

Graffiti, stickers, murals and assorted detritus declaring “Free Palestine” and similar messages make my gut coil.

Of course, the uninitiated may ask, what is triggering about “Free Palestine”? What could be wrong with free anything?

In theory, nothing.

In reality, “Free Palestine” is code for something very, very dark.

To be clear: to actually “free Palestine” would be a great thing.

But it would require a rejection of the binary, intolerant, one-sided approach that the “pro-Palestinian” movement has almost unanimously adopted. Actually freeing Palestine, if that’s what Europeans and North Americans activists wanted to do, would require them to encourage their Palestinian allies and friends to renounce antisemitic violence (which they euphemistically call “resistance”), return to the negotiating table that Yasser Arafat overthrew in September 2000, and begin to teach their children, for the first time, to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors.

That is what it would take to free Palestine.

Anything short of that advances intolerance, violence, war and continued Palestinian statelessness.

And these steps toward peace, of course, are precisely what overseas “pro-Palestinian” activists refuse to do. Which is why I always put scoff-quotes around the term.

The first problem with the “Free Palestine” slogan is obvious: There is, for all intents, no movement to actually free Palestine. So that’s a first sign that something is seriously amiss in the “Free Palestine” movement.

There is effectively no organization, group or effort in Europe or North America to advance equality for women in Palestine or, Allah forbid, LGBTQ+ people. What few ethnic and religious minorities remain in Palestine after 75 years of Islamic theocracy and Arab tyranny exist in a status far closer to the term “apartheid” than anything you will find in Israel (it should hardly need to be said). A “Free Palestine,” given the evidence we have today, would be among the least free places on the planet.

In other words, all of this “activism” does nothing at all to advance actual freedom for actual Palestinians.

So if “Free Palestine” doesn’t mean “Free Palestine,” what does it mean?

Well, to some ears, it sounds like a much older slogan: “Kill the Jews.”

Oh, am I massively overreacting? Have I gone off the deep end again?

Have I?

Consider: the chant “Free Palestine” is almost always accompanied — in rallies, on social media, in commentary and effectively everywhere it is heard — by parallel messages that include “Globalize the intifada,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and the slightly less ambiguous “F**k the Jews.”

The latter is pretty self-explanatory and is also pretty much the Palestinian movement’s mission statement with all its false diplomacy (scant though it may be) swept aside.

“Globalize the intifada” is an absolutely undeniable appeal to kill Jews worldwide. Incredibly, activists do have the audacity to deny the meaning of this genocidal phrase, insisting it merely means “resistance.” This is a rather circular argument — since, as we’ve seen in no uncertain terms since October 7, 2023, “Palestinian resistance,” in its iteration in Palestine and among activists worldwide, literally means “Kill the Jews.” So six of one/a half dozen of the other.

There is simply no other interpretation of the words “Globalize the intifada” than “Kill the Jews.”

Only slightly less genocidal is the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Complaints that this phrase is a call for (at best) ethnic cleansing of Jews are again met with the alibi of plausible deniability. But this too is simply not plausible.

Oh, sure, some dupe can make the case that, No, when we say “From the river to the sea …” we are talking about a Jewish and Arab democracy, a charming, Canadian-style binational democratic federation.

Well, two responses to that.

What passes for activism in Palermo.

There is effectively no movement for, or history of, democracy in Palestine. So a unitary country from the river to the sea would be, at worst, the kind of Islamist terror regime we see in Hamas or, at best, a democracy in which an Arab majority that has been bred on genocidal Jew-hatred by their religious, educational and political leaders for three generations will immediately or quite soon constitute a majority.

To sum up: Since no one who uses the term “Free Palestine” has demonstrated much or any inclination to create an actually free Palestine, I don’t think I am too far off the deep end making the case that it is actually just a polite (and, again, plausibly deniable, if just barely) call for ethnic cleansing and genocide of Jews.

As a result, my stomach clenches, and some combination of fear and rage overtakes me when I see the words “Free Palestine.”

I am triggered.

While the anti-triggering crowd tends to argue that the onus is on the perceived “triggerer” to alter their behavior, the likelihood of overseas “pro-Palestinian” activists suddenly taking into consideration the alarm they are instilling in Jews is about zero. (This alarm, in fact, is what they thrive on.)

So, what then?

Being triggered is an emotional response. There is no one but myself who can control my emotions or my responses to external events. That’s on me.

So what should I do when I’m triggered? The same thing, I guess, that they tried to teach us in kindergarten. Recognize your emotions, acknowledge them for what they are, and develop some sort of means of dealing with them.

So this is what I’ve decided to do.

When I am triggered by imagery and language that I consider calls for death or ethnic cleansing of Jews, I redouble my commitment to fighting that ideology. And I remind myself that this is a moment of absolute moral clarity.

The “Free Palestine” mobs are having no positive impact on Palestinians (although they are doing a swell job of terrorizing Jews worldwide, which, in the end, I think is their actual goal).

But what they are absolutely doing is separating the wheat from the chaff, dividing people who believe in peace and coexistence—us—from those who are committed to continued violence, terrorism, antisemitism and hatred — the people who falsely declare themselves “pro-Palestinian.”

This is what I try to remind myself every time I find myself “triggered” by the “Free Palestine” crowds.

I am working toward a constructive, nonviolent future of coexistence and peace. They are not.

I am right. They are wrong.

And that clenching in my gut — that triggering — is something I can do something about. I can take that negativity and channel it into something constructive.

I can take that coiling, anxious, sickening feeling and turn it into a fire of determination in my belly. We all can.

Call them out. That’s what I’m doing.

Ask them what they are doing to actually free Palestine. To free Palestinian women or queer Palestinians, to encourage democracy and civil society in Palestine. To make Palestine actually free.

Demand that they explain how inciting hatred against Israelis (and Jews) advances any sort of peace and coexistence or how it makes life better for any parties in this terrible conflict.

Inquire why, in this sole instance, their values of coexistence, dialogue and peace are replaced with the most uncompromising intolerance, intransigence and endorsement of violence.

Ask why, when any identifiable community in our society expresses concern about racism or discrimination, these activists are the first to stand in solidarity, but when Jews implore the world for a little empathy and to tone down the genocidal rhetoric, these same activists accuse them of “smearing” them with “false allegations” of antisemitism and of inventing antisemitism as a smokescreen to “prevent criticism of Israel.”

Let their example of hypocrisy and hatred inspire us to advance an agenda that advances peace and love.

Be triggered.

And use that emotion to trigger an engine of activism that is positive and constructive.

Being triggered can make us feel hopeless and helpless. The antidote to hopelessness and helplessness is action.

Take action.

(Here is one place to start.)

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