

My father was an Arab muslim, and was involved in the fight for Palestinian rights for as a long as I can remember, until he died of cancer a few months before the October 7th attacks. I never really thought much about his activism and was never curious enough to ask him questions about what he was actually doing.
When he was on his death bed at the hospital and I was staying with him, we got visited by members of his town’s Jewish community. They told me he was a great guy, and that throughout his years as an activist for Palestinian rights he has always strived to build bridges between Muslim and Jewish communities and always made it clear that the palestine-israel conflict shouldn’t be an excuse to antisemitism or islamophobia. They also told me he took part in a humanitarian trip in Palestine with them, as a translator, and was instrumental in bridging the gap between them and their Palestinian contacts. I never knew he did all that and it really made me proud.
What sometimes still keeps me up at night is to think that, should he have lived to see the current events, he would probably have been called a raging antisemite by the assholes we see all over the media.




I’m sure there are plenty of activities that you could enjoy but never thought of. Try joining a sports club that isn’t a gym, or a board games club, or a book club, anything really. It doesn’t have to be something that you currently do or that you already enjoy, you can also try expanding your hobbies by thinking of cool stuff you’d like to do but never got around to try