You Can’t Be Half Against a Genocide
I have always been proud of having friends from around the world. People who, more or less, share the same values as me — or at least land somewhere in the middle. Not radical, not racist, not dangerous. Over the years I have opened my home, my country, my personal space, and whoever counted as family at the time, to people of different nationalities and backgrounds. And those who stayed within my path, I made the effort to see, to communicate with, to keep the thread alive.
This time was no different. I was genuinely happy to see friends in France — people who came into my orbit because of me and who I still meet every now and then when our paths cross. One of them brought along a mutual friend. The kind of woman who has always had the life — the one I couldn't have and wouldn't want, but always found interesting to observe from a distance. A wanderer, like me, but differently. One of those women who belongs everywhere but never anywhere, to everyone but never to anyone. Not entirely by choice — by design. Beautiful, magnetic, and built by circumstance into something the world finds useful but never truly values. Let's just say she is the kind of woman men find fuckable but not liveable, and she has been paying the price of that distinction for years without fully naming it.
We sat together and for a while, everything aligned. Same strong beliefs about the broken system we are all living inside. Completely against the genocide and the annihilation happening in Gaza. Against America and what it represents — the wars it wages in the name of freedom while unconditionally funding and arming another country's expansion. Against what the United States of Israel has become as a political project. We were, as always, on the same page. We all have Jewish friends. We all understand clearly that Jewish people and Zionism are not the same thing. The conversation was sharp, clear, and honest.
Everything is ok till one day a choice will have to be made.
She mentioned she was thinking of moving from Milan to Dubai. Understandable — given her line of work and her lifestyle, Dubai makes a certain kind of sense. She said she was waiting to see how things developed in the region before making her move. And then, almost casually, she said she was specifically waiting for Trump's success mission.
I stopped. What success mission?
The fall of the Iranian regime, she said.
I looked at her. The Iranian regime — the same one that, for all its faults, stands as one of the few remaining forces actively resisting the exact power structure we had just spent an hour condemning. The same regime that is, whatever you think of its internal politics, on the opposing side of the genocide we just agreed was unacceptable.
Yes, she said. But she preferred it fall rather than risk a world where women are forced to veil, where nudity is policed, where sexual freedom disappears.
The world stopped for me. Completely.
I tried. I told her — yes, we are against radical regimes, all of them. But we are also against the regime that is murdering innocents and redrawing the world order. We are against the same people engineering wars against the earth, the climate, the food supply, humanity itself. These are not separate conversations. They are the same one. But she had already made her calculation, and in that calculation, nakedness outweighed dead babies and the right kind of freedom that any human should have. Sexual freedom took precedence over the annihilation of an entire people. Her personal liberties — the very specific liberties of being unclothed and choosing her partners without restriction — mattered more, in the end, than everything else she claimed to believe.
I was out of words. And I am rarely out of words.
This is the actual problem. Not the obvious villains — the ones who never pretended to care. The real problem is these people. The ones who sound exactly right until something grazes their personal comfort. The ones who are progressive and anti-war and anti-system right up until the moment the conversation reaches their body, their bedroom, their lifestyle. Then suddenly the framework shifts, the principles evaporate, and what remains is the same shallow self-interest they claimed to be above.
She genuinely believes that women's rights begin and end with sexual freedom. Not inheritance rights, not educational access, not basic human dignity — just the freedom to be naked and desired. And I want to be clear: I am not against freedom. I am not a moralist. I am not here to police anyone's body or choices. But I do believe in something called normal — and I think we have collectively lost our grip on what that word means.
Normal is reproduction. Normal is heat and cold, day and night, masculine and feminine, the rhythms that governed life before we decided to engineer everything into submission. Normal is equality and equity existing together. Normal is a government that works for all its people, not just the ones with the right passport or the right amount of money. What is not normal — and should never be normalised — is genocide, settlers displacing civilians, systematic violence, and the slow annihilation of cultures and peoples. These things should disturb us more than a veil ever could.
The generation raised inside the wars and manufactured chaos of the last thirty years — millennials like us, like her — grew up without a clear model of how to fight back. The system made sure of that. And what it produced, in some cases, is people who perform resistance beautifully, fluently, convincingly — right up until the resistance requires actual sacrifice. Then they choose the sugar daddy. Then they choose nakedness over solidarity and call it freedom.
This woman is forty years old. Beautiful, genuinely — like sunlight on water. Intelligent enough to see the system clearly. And yet she has no family of her own, no life she has built from the ground up, no partner who sees her as a person rather than an accessory. She moves from one arrangement to the next, from one man who can afford her lifestyle to another, treated consistently as a product — and still, somehow, she looks at the world and concludes that the primary threat to her freedom is the possibility of being asked to cover her hair.
She wants to fall in love, she said. She is against genocide, against the killing of children, she said. But when the moment arrives and she has to choose between two extremes, she chooses corruption — every single time. She believes in goodness but keeps selecting evil. In her story, when it comes down to god and the devil, the devil wins. Always. No middle ground.
The audacity is not even the right word anymore. It's something sadder than audacity. It's the specific tragedy of a person who has all the information and still chooses comfort. Who knows exactly what is happening and decides, quietly and finally, that it is happening far enough away.
Another conversation filed. Another layer understood.
Another friend lost.