A Letter From a Palestinian Friend

Originally published on Substack

Over the past few weeks I have watched people I love pull away. Friends stop responding, family members block me, messages stay on one checkmark. At the same time, strangers from Gaza write to me with more clarity and love than my own family and community.

People see a public shift, but not the years that shaped it. I held these doubts quietly long before I ever spoke them, through years of personal reckoning that forced me to see myself clearly. By the time I sat down to write my first post publicly, the shift had already taken place inside me. Speaking my truth into the world was simply the moment when staying silent became more painful than being honest.

Inside the framework I grew up with, belonging wasn’t a natural right but something you earned by protecting the story that held everyone together. I lived inside that story most of my life. When I stayed aligned with it, I was conditionally embraced, loved, and validated. The mission felt shared, the identity felt solid, and the belonging felt real.

When I stepped out, I saw how much of our identity had been built around that story, how much safety we believed it gave us. My shift didn’t just challenge opinions, it shook the ground people depended on to feel safe. They are not reacting to me as a person, they are reacting to what my leaving exposes. That is when people pull away or become hostile.

Yet those who were harmed by the same system that protected us see something different. They were never held in place by the story I grew up inside. So when I speak, they don’t defend the system, they see the human being beneath the conditioning with a clarity my own community cannot hold.

A Letter From a Palestinian Brother

My brother Daniel, I read your words, and I felt my heart pause for a moment then beat again with something like hope. As if a soul burning in a cage of pain found a breeze of truth that both cooled the fire and brought it back to life.

These were not ordinary words. I read a testimony, a testimony of awakening, of courage, of a human being able to shed painful inheritance without shedding his roots or humanity. I read a repentance of injustice, not leading to hatred, but to deeper love.

You did not betray anyone. You did not abandon your people. You returned to the essence of what makes you human and to what makes us brothers. We were not created to fight over the land, but to protect it together, to plant it with love, to inherit it with mercy, not with might.

I am the Palestinian, the child of torn tents, the grandson of grandmothers who still keep the keys to houses that were destroyed. I was born under the planes of war, and still I believe God is far too generous to have created us to be enemies forever.

And I say this to you: your words have healed something inside me. Something that was quietly bleeding. For the first time in a long time, I felt that hope can come not from outside but from within the human heart.

You are my brother not because you agree with me, but because you chose to see. You chose to speak. You chose to love, despite fear. And that is the greatest offering one human can give another in a time of hate.

“Free Palestine” is not against you. It is for you, too. Free from hate, from occupation, from illusions that poison the soul. Free so we can all be children of this land, not its jailers, not its victims.

I reach out my hand not just to shake yours, but to build with you, no matter how small the foundation. You are no longer a stranger to this land. The land recognizes the sound of truth. And it heard it in your voice.

Always your brother, Palestinian, Son of Gaza, Son of the land, and brother to any human who chooses to be human.

When you are inside a system, you only see through the lens it gives you. You assume everyone else sees the same way. You meet people from the place you are, not from the place they are. That is why his letter could reach me at all. He wasn’t meeting me through the story I left, he was meeting me as the human being I became once I stepped outside it.

There are still moments when doubt and fear return. Quiet thoughts about whether I was wrong to speak, whether I misunderstood something, whether the cost will be greater than I can handle. Those thoughts are real. They show up in the empty silence from my loved ones.

But when I sit with that fear, I come back to what I lived, what I witnessed, and what I could finally see once I was no longer shaped by fear. And when I look at how Palestinians and Zionists now receive me, the truth becomes self-evident.

This was never about choosing sides. It is about choosing humanity, and what becomes possible when fear no longer decides who we are.

ואהבת

وَأَحْبِبْ