I Envy The Palestinians

I envy the Palestinians. Not for what they’re going through, obviously, but for what they have. Their supremely authentic culture, with its deep roots and ancient connection to the land.

One of the very, very few good things that the Gaza holocaust has brought into this world is a deluge of footage of Palestinians living their lives, interacting with each other and relating to their loved ones as they find ways to get by in this nightmare. Westerners like me have been quietly watching these video clips on our little screens in our homes, and watching the various films, documentaries and shows that have been made about Palestinian life over the years, and taking it all in.

And it’s just so very moving. Palestinians are such amazingly beautiful people. How tender they are with each other. How real and organic their spirituality is. How deeply they love their culture in all its unique expressions. How profoundly intimate their connections with each other are, both between individuals and with their community as a whole.

The footage arising from this genocide has made me love Palestinians so much. What beautiful people. I have such culture envy. https://t.co/ZeRlW2FbdT

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 24, 2025

I’m a white Australian. We just don’t experience such things. The indigenous inhabitants of this land were massacred, robbed and displaced just as the Palestinians are today, and my ancestors were brought to this continent from Ireland and Scotland by circumstances beyond their control. Now for the most part it’s just this shallow, vapid civilization whose primary cultural identity consists of not getting too worked up about things. We live with this perpetual vague state of alienation and dysphoria buzzing in the background of our consciousness, because we have no roots here.

My husband Tim is an American of Irish descent and has had much the same experience. That’s just what it’s like for white people in the colonized world. We have no connectedness. No historical depth. No real culture. No real grounding. That’s why we’re always reaching around for something other than what we have, whether it’s more money and more possessions or a return to the religion of our grandparents or New Age spirituality or substance abuse. Our experience here just doesn’t feel quite right. We don’t feel like we belong.

Then we look at the Palestinians and how starkly their society contrasts with our own, and we can’t help but feel a sense of deep longing. They live so naturally and so warmly. It just looks right.

And I am quite certain Israelis feel the same way when they look at Palestinians. Here they are with this ridiculously fake culture of AI and electronic dance music, speaking a strange new version of a dead language that Zionists reanimated a few generations ago so they could LARP as middle easterners and pretend the “Israel” of today has anything whatsoever in common with the historic Israel of Biblical times. And then they look over at the people who were living there before them with their deep roots and vibrant authenticity, and they feel envy. And their envy turns to spite. And their spite turns to hate. And their hate turns to genocide.

Everything About Israel Is Fake

There are other reasons for the hatred Israelis feel toward Palestinians, to be sure — the entire apartheid state depends on their being aggressively indoctrinated into viewing the lower-tiered inhabitants of the land as less than human. But jealousy surely plays a part.

And I hope they don’t succeed in wiping out the Palestinians. I hope they don’t succeed in driving them off their land. It would be such a loss to the whole world for a thing of such beauty to be snapped from its roots and cast into the dustbin of history. Apart from all the other reasons to feel heartbroken about the abuses we are witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank, there’s the fact that our world is losing one of the most breathtakingly beautiful things it has ever birthed into existence.

If these freaks succeed in stomping out Palestine, I think it will genuinely feel like losing a loved one. I think many people around the world will feel the same way.

I desperately hope this doesn’t happen. If I were a different sort of person with a different sort of spirituality, I would say I pray this doesn’t happen. In a world that’s increasingly fake and fraudulent, we can’t afford to lose Palestine.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/i-envy-the-palestinians