A man sits in his car in the Emirates, in a white headdress and a pale blue robe, the wire from his earphones hanging down over his chest.
His name is Majed Alameri, and usually he talks to his nearly four hundred thousand followers about family life, about why so many marriages fall apart, and about the loneliness that spreads even in an age when everyone is connected.
He is a man who believes in what holds things together.
In the corner of the frame this time he has put a photo from Lyon, where "Free Palestine" is sprayed in purple paint across the front of a Zara store.
At the weekend all hell broke loose in France. On Saturday 17 October it burned in Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Lille, Grenoble and a dozen more cities.
The town hall in Limoges, a listed building since 1975, burned down, roof, rafters and bell tower. The town hall in Marseille was stormed, the tourist office in Lyon was burned out, and between two and three thousand shops were smashed or emptied.
Nearly a thousand police officers and firefighters were injured, and over 2,300 people were arrested. The first estimates of the bill are already up near a billion euros, and nobody has even added it all up yet.
Whatever it was all supposed to be about - the high schools, the prices, the diesel, everything the president mentioned in his speech - Gaza was not on any list of demands.
The flag came anyway.
It hung over the shoulders of the masked youths going from shop to shop, and "Free Palestine" was painted on the facades, including that Zara store in Lyon that Majed Alameri has put in the corner of his video.
Majed doesn't raise his voice. He mostly sounds like someone who is tired of having to say the same thing again. People say "Free Palestine" and think it is a free pass to commit their crimes, he says.
And then he asks the central question - HOW on earth this helps his brothers and sisters in Gaza, and he asks it twice, as if the answer ought to be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for even a moment.
He thinks of the people who worked in the shops, and who support their families on the wages they are now not getting.
They have misused the words - "Free Palestine" - he says, and he ends by asking Allah to guide mankind.
I like him. The look in his eyes. The weight in his voice. Rising up from within his own tradition.
You could object that he comes from a country that in 2020 chose to make peace with Israel, and that has sent a student out of the country for shouting exactly those two words. That is true. But it doesn't make the question any smaller. It makes it clearer that it comes from a part of the world that chose to BUILD instead of KILLING AND BURNING DOWN, and has seen what came out of each of those two choices.
He is right, and I think he is more right than he himself gets round to saying.
Because the question he asks about a wrecked shop in Lyon can - and of course should - be asked about 7 October in exactly the same words.
How did anything that happened that day make a single human being freer?
It did not make the young people dancing at Re'im, or the families in the kibbutzim, or the hostages dragged through the streets of Gaza freer…
And it did not make a single child in Gaza, who has since lived in what followed, under the same movement that claimed to be breaking them out, freer…
Nor did it make the tens of thousands of Palestinians who had work in Israel and lost their work permits within a few days, and who were some of the few who had a way out towards an ordinary everyday life with wages and responsibility and a future to plan, freer.
Quite the opposite.
Some will say that people actually were set free.
And taken on its own that is true. Terrorists were set free. The prisoner exchanges have since freed thousands of Palestinian prisoners, and that was one of the things Hamas itself said the attack was meant to achieve. But then you also have to look at what a release is in this story.
In 2011, 1,027 prisoners were set free in exchange for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. One of them was called Yahya Sinwar. He walked out of prison, rose to the top of Hamas in Gaza and planned 7 October. The release set no one free. It became the first step towards the next cage, and that cage was built around two million people.
Can any of you imagine a more idiotic form of "freedom"?
That is the difference between being released and being free, and I think that is the difference Majed Alameri is circling without quite saying it.
The pattern is the same, whether it is a facade in Lyon or a fence by Gaza.
First comes the word. - Free Palestine - and it works as a permission. Then comes the destruction, and it always hits those standing closest.
It is the shop assistant who loses the job, the family in the kibbutz and the Palestinian father whose work permit was torn up. In the end it hits the whole people who have to pay the bill for what was done in their name.
The one who said he was fighting for them - never pays himself.
Spineless.
And then there is what happened in France, which perhaps says the most. No one had written Palestine on the list of demands, and still it was that flag that went at the front through fourteen cities.
It does that because it no longer points to a people, but to a belonging.
It is the flag the radical left and Islamism can gather under, even though they want two completely different things from the society they are tearing down.
The left sees it as a revolt against the state, capitalism and the West itself. Islamism sees it as a step towards another order that is to take over once the old one has collapsed. They need each other, until they don't any more, and we have seen how that ends before. I wrote about it recently, about the Horse with "Free Palestine" painted on its side, being pulled in through the gate while everyone looks at the flag and nobody asks who is sitting inside.
On Saturday 17 October you could see who was sitting inside. The flag belongs to them and not to the family in Khan Younis, who will never be asked whether they want their name painted on an emptied shop in France.
Majed Alameri says the cause is right and it is only the way that is wrong.
Here I will go a step further than him.
If a word can carry any destruction and still be called Freedom, then it is no longer about those the word names. Then it is about those who use it.
And that is why none of those with the flag over their shoulders asks the question that a man in a car in the Emirates asked twice.
Who in Gaza was helped by this?
Freedom is something you build and carry and answer for. It cannot be taken by tearing down another Human being's house, because whoever does that has already bound himself to the next house that has to be torn down, and the next one after that.
What was built on 7 October was not a way out.
It was a cage - and the key was thrown away that day.
❤️🔥🪽
