Friday, February 16th, 2024

An artist I know is starting to sell her merchandise on Etsy. What she’s selling is positive Israel-Palestine-Peace messaging. It made me curious about this commercial niche, so I went onto the Etsy.com website and typed in the search bar “Israel Palestine.” My mind is spinning from what I uncovered.

Obviously, I expected to see plenty of “Free Palestine” and “Am Yisrael Chai” on posters and T-shirts. (I did see generous offerings of the former. Only one appearance of the latter.) I was pleased to note that nowhere was there anything with “From the River to the Sea”, so I suppose enough Jewish people have written letters of protest to Etsy in addition to writing to Amazon.  What I was not expecting to see was the following, all on T-shirts, baseball caps, and stickers:

• 1. Bright red baseball caps that read (a la Trump election caps) “Make Israel Palestine Again”. Clever. Dangerous.
• 2A. Two words, all capital letters:  “F*** ISRAEL” (asterisk mine) with a Magen David in place of the “A” in “ISRAEL”. 
  2B. Similarly, “LOVE ISRAEL” (again, Magen David for the “A”), followed by “Support the Palestinian Genocide.” I had to look at that for a while before I understood that the first words were sarcastic.
• 3. Stickers that read “This company’s funds support the Palestinian Genocide”. These stickers were so cheap — 500 stickers for $5.64 — that I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t buy rolls and rolls to stick on store front surfaces everywhere.
• 4. Disturbing, menacing black and-white graphic illustrations, above which read “Resistance Until Reclamation” and below which read “Generation after Generation until Total Liberation”. This T-shirt was being modeled by a Caucasian girl in her early 20s. Scared the daylights out of me. They really do want it going from Generation to Generation.
• 5. The simple statement: “Criticizing Israel is NOT Anti-Semitism”. Yup. They’re just saying it outright. Because they believe it.
• 6. T-shirt with a large image of a young Leila Khaled, wearing a keffiyeh and holding an AK-47 rifle. For those of you who don’t know who this heroine is, she was the first woman to hijack an airplane – TWA Flight 840 in 1969, Rome to Tel Aviv (she thought Yitzhak Rabin, then Israeli Ambassador to the US, was on board). Her photo was circulated after that hijacking, so she underwent six plastic surgeries on her nose and chin to conceal her identity and allow her to take part in an El Al hijacking the next year. Arrested, she was later released in a prisoner exchange for kidnapped civilian hostages.
• 7. An image of a Google search in which “israel” has been entered.  Underneath, Google is asking “did you mean: Palestine“
• 8. Umpteen images of watermelon, which is a symbol of Palestinian solidarity due to its red, black, green and white colours, similar to those on the Palestinian flag. Don’t be fooled.  Watermelon isn’t watermelon anymore.
• 9. An image of the World Trade Centre tipping over, with the slogan “Israel did 9-11”. Wait – what?

The Etsy online store also had a modest selection of pro-Israel merchandise, and an even more modest selection of peacenik merchandise (the market that my artist friend is entering). But seeing this enormous choice of goodies for pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas, Israel-hating anti-Semites, was an unsettling, eye-opening experience. This is not only where Gen Z-ers and Millennials shop, this is how many of them actually form their opinions. If it’s on this many T-shirts, it must be true . . . .

Folks, our enemies are getting followers in the strangest ways. We have to be louder. We have to be heard. We have to speak up, not just among ourselves but with the outside world. Israel needs us for our financial support and volunteer efforts, yes, but no less importantly, Israel needs us to be Truth Ambassadors. Let’s do that. Let’s be educated, share information with the ignorant and misled, and correct the narrative. And let’s get the hostages home.

Am Yisrael Chai!