Highlights include: having been well fed while Hamas fighters skipped meals and could not eat, seeing/hearing the struggle of the Palestinian people and their families and feeling deep sympathy, and being baked a birthday cake on their birthday which is now being reported as a “cynical gesture.” As we all know, it is very easy to acquire the ingredients to bake a cake in Gaza right now and there is plenty of time to spend baking it just so you can dunk on somebody. Israel’s barbarity knows no end. It will simply not allow Palestinians to be portrayed as human beings who have emotions, human connection, and empathy for even a moment.
The article has since be republished here with an entirely new narrative and pieces of testimony removed
Jesus christ, I think if I was presented with a birthday cake by the starving people who my state was genociding, I would fluctuate on a cellular level between “There are no words to express how destroyed I am at this moment, this burning solar fire of humanity has scoured away every comforting lie I have ever even half-believed to help myself sleep at night and I no longer have any idea how to live with myself” and “don’t be an asshole, now is not the time for self-pity, yours is the least pressing plight of anyone for miles, these people baked you a cake now say thank you and share it.”
I might just implode from the cumulative emotional pressure of that situation. That cake is like a psychic lance that focuses everything tragic and human about the situation and punches your heart out with it’s tender absurdity. I would implode like the titanic sub. Especially after being released, to have an experience I now know countermands pretty much everything I’ve ever been told my entire life, to be invited even amidst relentless bombings and attacks into a cooling pool of shared humanity and then returned to the boiling acid bath of the “Isreali” vibrasphere in full genocide mode must be doubly shocking. And you cant talk about it with anyone around you, because nobody wants to hear it, because they all think the new friends you’re now terrified for are all cockroach people. I wonder if any of them have some kind of mental break from the sudden isolating clarity of it all.
And while they’ve been released from the path of the indiscriminate zionist violence that’s killed so many other of their own prisoners, I kind of don’t think they’re in much less danger now. I think if they keep telling truths like this that are inconvenient to the entity’s government, they’re probably at much more risk for very specific zionist violence.
I’ve gotten horribly, depressingly used to seeing shredded human bodies, but the cake is what finally broke me to tears. I read something recently on here about how if you keep scolling in search of one single piece of information that will galvanize you, youll be scrolling forever. I usually agree, but this time i found it. They baked him a cake. The knowledge is like a harpoon in my brain, dragging my thoughts back to the bleeding center of gravity and tugging on every connected nerve. They baked him a cake. Death to the zionist entity, death to America.
Would straight up render me catatonic I think. The cake is a bonkers level of kindness and generosity.
How could you come back from something like this unchanged?
The vast amount of starving children a cake could feed. The starving children that myself, my captors, and the families of those starving children which baked me the cake are well aware of. And yet, the cake is baked for me and given to me because I am a person and therefore worth celebrating. They gave me a cake because we both know the unfortunate situation I’m in is larger than me or them.
They gave me a cake because it is my birthday.
I know it’s fucked up to spend extra time empathizing with the Israelis. But if I was one of those four hostages, and I found out that Israel had killed fifty people and wounded another hundred specifically in my name. Christ. How could you live?
