Taryn Thomas Was Deeply Anti-Israel, and Then She Began to Think

This is a true story about Taryn Thomas, an impressionable young woman who started out as an Israel-hater as an undergraduate at Stanford, since it seemed the thing to do, and then by slow degrees underwent a change of heart and mind, especially after she visited the Jewish state. She then became the object of calumny and death threats from her former friends who didn’t want to hear about her mental metamorphosis. More on Taryn Thomas’ journey from the swamp of lies to the sunny uplands of the truth can be found here.

Thomas “helped lead large protests against Israel and, within two weeks of October 7 2023, had joined an encampment of activists on campus protesting against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Like many others, she donned a keffiyeh, the headscarf worn to demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians.” She recalls: “I really loved it, because of the sense of belonging and the sense of purpose. It was like an instant community.”

That “sense of belonging,” of submerging one’s identity with others in a crowd, of simply throwing in one’s lot with the most fashionable stormtroopers of the day — all of this was explained by Eric Hoffer in his study The True Believer. How difficult it is to think for oneself, how much easier it is to be just one among many, all of them thinking, or not thinking, as one.

However, “in October 2024, Thomas was one of many students who received an open invitation to the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition, which has recently opened in Shoreditch, east London, aims to recreate the festival site where 413 people were murdered by Hamas, and many more were injured or taken hostage.” Thomas’ initial reaction was skeptical to the point of hostility: “Initially, I laughed, thinking, ‘What’s this propaganda?’” Nevertheless, she ultimately decided to go: “I’d heard about the festival and was curious, but I’d only really heard the reasoning, ‘Well, why would you have a festival next to a contested border? Essentially, they were asking for it.’ I was hoping it was going to reaffirm my position, that I would find Zionist lies and whatever. I went with a very closed mind.”

Yet that visit transformed her outlook: “I experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance – what I was seeing versus what I’d been told. It was like I arrived a year too late to a funeral. I had so many questions, but I really had no one I could talk to about this. All of my friends were from the encampment. I’d never met an Israeli or talked to them about their experiences – I was fluent in the state’s sins, but I was illiterate in its people. They were kids my age, just dancing, and then fleeing for their lives the next moment. I could see myself in them. I could have been sending a last ‘I love you’ message to my mum. I felt so much empathy and sadness.”

Thomas recounts that one incident changed everything: the Hamas jihadi’s jubilant call to his parents announcing that he had murdered ten Jews. “My heart sank, because these [were meant to be] our martyrs. [This was] the resistance we were claiming we wanted. When we called for any means necessary, I didn’t realise that’s what it meant.”

Now, she says, “A lot of us on the pro-Palestine side were recruited through empathy, so I think we can be reached through it, too. Because of this unique perspective I have of what changed my heart, I think I can hopefully change other people’s. I’m not Jewish; I’m an African American woman. But a lot of our struggles are parallel. We’re seeing an increase in antisemitism, we’re seeing an increase in extremism and political violence. There’s just no way that I can now sit back, kick my feet up and call it a day.”

Think of that. Someone who once shouted “from the river to the sea / Palestine shall be free” along with her “instant community” of Israel-haters, began to think and observe and listen and read for herself. She visited the recreation of the Nova Music Festival. She heard the audio of the Hamas killer proudly telling his father that “I killed ten Jews.” She visited Israel, where nothing she saw looked like the apartheid she had been assured was practiced in the Jewish state. She posted a picture of herself in Israel, which caused her to be immediately shunned with a thud by her former campus encampment friends, the ones still bedecked, as she once was, in keffiyehs that are the death-to-Israel symbols of our age. Now Ms. Thomas has worked her own way out from lies to the truth. Let us hope others make her same journey.