If you have Jewish friends, they’re probably feeling something right now that they’re not telling you.

Not because they don’t trust you. Because every time they’ve tried to say it, the conversation ends. They get labeled. Dismissed. Told to “wake up.” Told they enable evil. Told that if they can’t condemn Israel, they should at least be quiet.

So they’re quiet.

I’m not going to be quiet. Because somebody has to say this, and I’d rather it be me, a Sephardic Moroccan Jewish woman, a mother, a daughter of refugees, a psychotherapist who has spent her career studying why human beings can’t hear each other.

Here’s what your Jewish friends can’t say

→ We Know

We know the creation of Israel displaced Palestinians. We know that suffering is real. We know families lost their homes, their land, their futures. We see it. Many of us grieve it. Privately, at kitchen tables, in conversations you’ll never hear, we wrestle with it.

We are not the heartless people you think we are.

And our parents were afraid for their lives in countries that were supposed to be home. And Israel took them in when nobody else would.

Both of those things are true. At the same time.

The world keeps asking us to choose one. We won’t. Because choosing one means erasing the other. And we refuse to erase our parents’ survival to prove we care about someone else’s suffering. We already care. We said it. We meant it. But nobody seems to hear it.

→ The Word That Does the Hiding

When people say “reject Zionism,” they think they’re talking about an ideology. A political movement. Something abstract you can oppose without hurting anyone.

But here’s what that word means in my house.

My mother couldn’t walk down the street in Morocco without fearing for her life. When violence came, Jews in her neighborhood closed their doors and windows and waited. People disappeared. There was no future. My parents left in the seventies with nothing. They started over because a place existed that would take them in.

That place is what you’re asking me to reject.

The only Zionism I know is my parents having a home when the world didn’t want them. If that’s evil, then say it to my face. Tell me my parents should have stayed in Morocco and taken their chances. Say it clearly.

Nobody ever says it. Because saying it out loud would make them the thing they think they’re fighting against. But not saying it means the position has a hole in it the size of my mother’s life.

→ 800,000

Here’s a number most people have never heard. 800,000.

That’s how many Jews were expelled from Arab countries in the twentieth century. Iraq. Yemen. Egypt. Morocco. Libya. Tunisia. Entire communities, centuries old, erased in a generation. My parents were part of that number.

When I tell people this, the most common response is a link. A video. A counter-narrative explaining that it didn’t happen the way we think. That it was manufactured. That Zionist agents staged attacks on Jewish communities to scare Jews into leaving.

Let me say that again slowly. People who have never set foot in my mother’s house explain to me, the daughter of Moroccan Jews, what happened to Moroccan Jews. Using a YouTube video.

If someone sent a Palestinian woman a link and said “actually, your family’s displacement didn’t happen the way you think, here’s what really happened,” every decent person would call that erasure.

That’s what happens to us. Constantly. And nobody calls it what it is.

→ The Question Nobody Answers

If you believe Israel shouldn’t exist, I have a real question. Not rhetorical. Real.

Nine million people live there right now. What happens to them? Not historically. Not ideologically. Right now. Tomorrow morning. Where do they go? Who protects them?

My best friend has three kids in Jerusalem. They didn’t create Zionism. They were born. When you challenge Israel’s right to exist, you’re challenging their right to safety. So what’s the plan for them?

Nobody answers this question. Because the framework that says “delegitimize Israel” has no forward-facing proposal. It has blame. It has history. It has moral certainty. What it doesn’t have is a plan for nine million human beings.

What does that tell you?

→ Why It Doesn’t Register

I’ve spent years studying why human beings can’t hear each other. And I think the reason Jewish suffering doesn’t land the way other suffering does comes down to something structural. Not malice. Something harder to fight than malice.

*The story looks finished. The Holocaust ended. Israel was created. Jews rebuilt. From the outside, the narrative has a resolution. Nobody empathizes with a story that seems like it’s over. It doesn’t matter that my mother still carries the fear in her body. The world sees a country with an army and assumes the suffering is done.

*Resilience gets used as evidence against the pain.** Jews rebuilt from nothing, repeatedly, in every country, after every expulsion. That resilience gets converted into proof that the pain was exaggerated. Nobody applies this logic to anyone else. Nobody says Japan’s recovery after Hiroshima means the bombing wasn’t that bad. But Jewish resilience becomes an argument against Jewish suffering.

*The numbers create a gravity.** There are roughly two billion Muslims in the world. Fifteen million Jews. The weight of amplification is enormous. The Palestinian narrative has a quarter of the world behind it. The story of 800,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries has almost nobody. Most people have never even heard of it.

*There’s an ancient framework underneath.** The idea that Jews are powerful, controlling, and engineer their own fate is centuries old. It shows up today as “the Zionists orchestrated the exodus” and “false flag operations.” My mother’s fear becomes a conspiracy. My family’s survival becomes a scheme. Jewish pain has never, in thousands of years of history, been taken at face value. It has always required proof. And even proof gets debated.

*Jewish pain isn’t useful. Palestinian suffering serves geopolitical purposes. It gives governments a deflection. It gives movements a villain. It gives public figures a cause. Jewish pain serves no strategic purpose. Nobody benefits from amplifying it. So nobody does.

None of these require hatred. All of them produce the same result. A woman tells someone her mother was afraid to walk outside, and the response is a YouTube link.

→ What “Choose Your Tribe” Really Means

I’ve been told more than once that I should separate myself from Israel. That I don’t have to identify with Zionists. That I can choose a different tribe.

Here’s what that actually sounds like to a Jewish person.

It sounds like: there is a secret group of powerful people hidden among your community who are the real source of evil. Your job is to identify them and condemn them to prove you’re one of the good ones.

Read that again slowly. Because that framework, a hidden powerful group among the Jews, pulling strings, causing suffering, is the oldest antisemitic structure in existence. It has been recycled before every pogrom, every expulsion, every persecution. Prove you’re not one of THOSE Jews. Condemn your own, or be condemned with them.

The people saying it don’t hear it. They genuinely believe they’re distinguishing between a political ideology and a people. But when “Zionist” expands to include every Jew who believes Israel has a right to exist, which is the vast majority of Jews on earth, the distinction disappears. It becomes a filter that sorts Jews into acceptable and unacceptable. A word that lets you target almost every living Jewish person while insisting you only oppose an idea.

I am not going to condemn my family’s survival to earn anyone’s respect.

→ What We Actually Want

We’re not asking you to support Israel’s government. We’re not asking you to reject the Palestinian cause. We’re not asking you to pick a side.

We’re asking you to hold two things at once.

We’re asking you to understand that a people who were expelled from every country they ever lived in, for centuries, across continents, culminating in the murder of six million, might hold on to the one place that says “you can come here and be safe.” Not because they don’t care about anyone else. Because they remember what happens when there’s nowhere to go.

That’s not politics. That’s a survival response. And if you’ve never had to worry about whether your country would exist tomorrow, you might not feel it. But it’s there, underneath every Jewish person you know, whether they talk about it or not.

We can hold the complexity. We know it’s not simple. We know people were hurt. We know it wasn’t clean. And Israel is still the reason our parents are alive.

Both things are true. We need you to hold both. Not one. Both.

If you can’t hold both of those things at once, that’s not our failure.

That’s yours.

Karine Spiess, LMHC

*I’m a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, a Sephardic Moroccan Jewish woman, a mother of two, and the daughter of refugees. I study the invisible frameworks that drive human behavior at the Invisible Spectrum Adults Initiative. If this piece reached you, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)