Who's writing this?

Nobody, really. Or rather: someone with no particular reason to be writing about any of this.

I'm not Jewish, not Israeli, not Palestinian, not Arab. I have, as they say, no skin in the game. I'm European, and I spent the better part of twenty-five years with my eyes on a keyboard, not looking at much else. I'll also confess, without pride, to having been a proper dunce at school, probably too busy staring out of the window the day they covered the subjects I write about here.

And then came the 7th of October 2023.

I woke early, opened my phone, and spent hours watching footage I couldn't reconcile with the reactions of the people around me. Where I saw something appalling, many saw something else, or saw nothing. I thought: I must have missed a crucial piece of information. So I started to read.

This blog grew out of that reading, and above all out of what it did to me.

A method, not an opinion

I tried to read as widely as I could: Israeli, Palestinian, British, Zionist, anti-Zionist, non-Zionist points of view, and across different eras, because a book from 1980 doesn't lie the way a 2025 post does. Mostly I tried to avoid the trap of picking a team: seeing the world as pro-X and therefore necessarily anti-Y, like a football match. With no knowledge and no skin in the game, taking a side would have felt a little foolish.

What I eventually found wasn't a team. It was a mechanism. Hatred between humans almost always rests on an idea of the other built out of nothing: a "culture of rumour." And the simple versions, the ones that fit on a slogan or a flag, almost always leave something out, almost always in the same direction.

So I gave myself a few rules, which this blog tries to keep:

Calibrate. Separate what is documented from what merely resembles, and say which is which. An honest "this is resemblance, not proof" is stronger than an overclaim.
Guard the boundary. Criticising a government's policy (including Israel's) is not bigotry. And the reverse isn't either. The two must never be conflated.
No collective guilt. Document what a specific person, text or institution said, named and dated. Never generalise from that to a whole people, be they Arab, Muslim, Jewish or Palestinian.
Concede what's true first. Credit the other side's accurate points plainly before taking issue.
Restore the missing third thing. Put back what was cut out to make history fit a slogan, including when it's inconvenient to my own argument. Grey isn't "the middle": it's the refusal to let a complicated reality fit on a slogan.
Show the receipts. Verbatim quotes, checkable sources, page numbers. And flag my own weakest sources.

Why anonymous?

Because I'd like what's written here to be judged on its sources, not on who wrote it. I have no authority to offer: no title, no origin, no tribe. Just some reading, some notes, and the stubbornness of a reformed dunce who finally looked up from his keyboard.

I write under the name Léon M. Degrauwe. It isn't my name. The rest is true.