Everyone Wants to be Free

“Free Palestine,” like “Free Tibet” or “Free Mandela,” can be a legitimate call for freedom and self-determination. It can also be a slogan, a protest, or a publicity stunt. That is not my argument. My argument is about what happens around it. Free Tibet did not make Chinese Canadians answer for Beijing. The anti-apartheid movement did not make every South African abroad answer for Pretoria. Ukrainian flags fly across Canada, yet we understand that the Russian man down the street is not Putin. But when it comes to Israel, that distinction too often disappears. Jews thousands of kilometres away become proxies.

And this is where the conversation becomes more complicated. Saying “Free Palestine” is not, by itself, antisemitic. But that truth should not prevent us from looking carefully at what has gathered around the movement. Palestinian human-rights advocates, ordinary people horrified by civilian suffering, extremists who glorify Hamas or Hezbollah, and foreign actors seeking to exploit Western division are not the same thing. They should never be treated as though they are. But neither should the legitimacy of one protect the others from scrutiny. A movement can be created and exploited by people with very different aims.

I felt that complexity firsthand when I went out with friends for a night of celebration. At a free public event meant to bring people together, a keffiyeh came onto the stage and “Free Palestine” followed to cheers. My response was visceral. I was angry. I left. Yet I can find no history suggesting the performer hates Jews. Quite the opposite: his own grandfather was part of the Dutch resistance against the Nazis, a story he has honoured publicly. His intention may well have been solidarity with Palestinians. That is precisely why the moment matters to me. Good intentions do not make any of us immune from participating in something whose wider meaning—or impact on the people standing beside us—we may not fully see.

Since then, I have been told—even within my own community—that there are bigger things to worry about. Of course there are. There always are. But that is how small things become invisible. Homelessness becomes scenery. Poverty becomes statistics. Mental illness becomes somebody else's problem. Hatred can become ordinary too. Today's university students will soon be our doctors and lawyers, teachers and public servants, journalists and politicians. What we normalize today walks into the institutions of tomorrow. The Holocaust did not begin with cattle cars and gas chambers. Before the state-organized genocide came years of propaganda, exclusion and the normalization of treating Jews differently. That does not make today's actors Nazis. It means history has already warned us about waiting for catastrophe before paying attention.

At fifteen, I stood at Treblinka and promised my family I would never be invisible. I understand that promise differently now. I will not wait for something to become enormous before calling it wrong. I will not mistake silence for tolerance, indifference for peace, or repetition for normality. Pay attention to the small things. They become habits. Habits become norms. Norms shape institutions. History rarely announces that a line has been crossed; more often, we discover afterward that there were a thousand smaller lines and decent people found a reason not to make a fuss about each one. I cannot control where those lines are drawn. But I can refuse to sleep while they are being moved. And when necessary, I intend to make the fuss.