By Paul Salvatori  

I was trolled for a greater portion of the week by someone I know. They specifically were messaging me privately on Facebook, upset that I’ve been showing solidarity with Palestine, and trying to figure out why I haven’t been showing more solidarity with Israel.

It confused me at first. I thought to myself: Why does this person care with whom I show solidarity so much? Why, instead of perhaps using arguments or providing me with evidence of how my position is wrong, are they insistent that I should basically repent for being on the side of Palestine?

It’s as if the person won’t be happy with themselves, let alone me, til I do something like apologize for my solidarity and start parroting pro-Israeli statements, as they themselves were doing in the private chat.

For a while — and maybe it was a mistake — I tried to engage this person in conversation. I challenged them to think about the racism, for example, underlying their inherent equating of Palestine with senseless violence and how that serves as a “justification” for what Israel is currently doing to Gaza.

Didn’t work.

Instead, this person attempted to guilt me into feeling that I was sympathizing with “terrorists.” They did not have any intellectual humility, whatsoever, to consider what I was putting forth as an alternative point of view and that just maybe Israel is wrong for how it’s harming and killing countless Palestinians.

Eventually, I asked this person to stop and added that I felt they were close to harassing me. That shocked them. The troll told me to “take it easy.”

This admittedly confused me too because I at no point, despite the troll’s ignorance, got upset with them. Even when I cautioned them to stop bothering me I was diplomatic.

In retrospect I see that the troll was gaslighting me. They wanted me to think that I was overreacting by asking them to desist from behaviour that’s inappropriate.

I did not reply to the troll for days til, as the bombing intensified on Gaza, they again reached out to me.

“Siding with Hamas, are we?” they asked.

This upset me. Not because I felt attacked but because of what I took to be the heartlessness underlying their (insincere) question.

Immediately preceding it, I had been making multiple posts, drawing attention to the ruthlessness of Israel in massacring so many innocent civilians and which no doubt the troll was following. The question was meant to convey that this was to be on the side of “terror”, reflecting the mainstream media’s framing of Hamas.

I again asked, this time more firmly, for the troll to stop. They did though not before offering a virtual “hug” — another attempt to gaslight.

The interaction with the troll has driven home to me how powerful mainstream media is. Normally the troll says nothing about Israel or Palestine. That is, when neither takes up a great deal of airtime in the said media.

Apart from that, I doubt the troll ever thinks of Palestine or Israel.

But from the moment that mainstream media started covering the attack on Israel by Hamas and eventually the ongoing retaliatory assault on Gaza by Israel, the troll started having thoughts about Palestine and Israel, albeit misguided ones to be sure.

And in large part that’s because he never reflected on, assessed the veracity of those thoughts. They were rather put there by mainstream media, pushing as it typically does the narrative that Israel is “good” and Palestine “bad”.

The same media made the troll so confident about this that they felt the need to chide me. I was in their view a sinner who had to be corrected.

It recalls the the colonial missionary who, having no real knowledge of Indigenous peoples, still felt entitled to “fix” them by introducing them to religious doctrine that they claimed would “civilize” them but in reality was but another tool to further subjugate them, as well as strip them of their own culture — include ways of knowing that world that do not conform to and enable them to resist their subjugation.

I regret that the troll, like many others, is overly impressionable to mainstream media. It makes me think of Noam Chomsky and others who’ve talked about critical thinking as a form of intellectual “self-defense.”

Without such defense, people unquestioningly absorb what mainstream media tells them and that, over time, conditions them to take what’s said as gospel. As in the case of the troll, this may very well embolden them to “teach” others the “truth” of something they ultimately know nothing about.

We can fight against this, including how it is manifested in people expressing false and anti-Palestinian points of view, by creating more educational opportunities in the public sphere. Independent media can do that.

In presenting an accurate and nuanced view of Palestine, including the nature of its oppression at both the individual (e.g. persons in Palestine, presently and historically) and collective level (e.g. communities in the West Bank and the Palestinian diaspora), such media — not bound to major corporate interests, prioritizing profit over truth — illuminates reality.

Needless to say that without being able to access reality one cannot even begin to understand Palestine. In that position, an unfortunate one to be sure, it is better for one be patient and learn about Palestine than speaking falsely about it.

Doing so is directly at odds with liberation for Palestine, which like all forms of justice, is based on truth. Not trolling.

– Paul Salvatori is a Toronto-based journalist, community worker and artist. Much of his work on Palestine involves public education, such as through his recently created interview series, “Palestine in Perspective” (The Dark Room Podcast), where he speaks with writers, scholars and activists. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.