The absolute best thing about smoking is you meet a lot of random people. Last week, while staying in Amsterdam, I met two guys smoking in front of the hotel. We started talking. Initially, I thought they were Armenian. I thought “fuck, they will be biased against me because of… y’know, the genocide1.” I asked where they were from. They responded: Israel.
“Fuck, I’ll be biased against them because of… y’know, the genocide.”
I repeated internally: we must separate regular Israelis from the racist and genocidal Israeli government. I’m sure there are a lot of people in Israel who are genuinely against the repression and slaughter of Palestinians.
We started talking about shawarma and döner kebab. I learned that they use tahini as a sauce for döner, which intrigued me a lot. I also realized they can’t imagine döner without sauce, which means they have shitty döner, lol.
We were just three guys arguing about sauce. We finished our cigarettes and were about to go our separate ways. One of them stopped and said to me with a smirk on his face:
“Y’know, shalom means both hello and peace. So every time we greet each other, we also wish peace.”
Motherfucker…
Since I was there for work, I couldn’t afford a political conflict—especially about Israel. But I couldn’t believe he had the audacity to say such a thing. I wonder how he would feel if he heard a German in the 1940s saying something like this while thousands of Jews were being slaughtered every minute. I doubt he would be smirking like that.
Footnotes
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A lot of Turks would be very angry with me for saying this. I have a much laxer definition of genocide than many: Armenians had been living in Anatolia for centuries and had deep roots here. Even if we didn’t really try to systematically exterminate the race, we forcefully removed them from their land. This is, by my definition, a genocide. ↩