A Few Words in Defense of Rami Ismail
And other Palestinian creators who speak out for their people in times of war
I saw a social media post today by Rami Ismail, a colleague and fellow traveler in Indie Developer circles.
In it, he was apologizing for “failure to condemn” the deaths of Israeli civilians, particularly the women and children, who were killed in the opening salvo of the latest IDF-Hamas War on October 7, 2023.
Rather than go straight to quoting the full text of the posts that followed, I want to show you the exact post that he was being asked to apologize for.
Note that as a Jewish person, I was extremely upset on October 7, 2023. There are sixteen million Jews in the world and I don’t think a single one of us was feeling great on that day.
And I did see Rami Ismail’s original post. Since I was already upset, I was more than ready to start punching people who took the occasion of a painful, tragic day to start posting anti-semitic nonsense to social media. But I didn’t lash out at Rami Ismail. I didn’t even mute or silence him.
He was saying what I knew was true—that one of the most likely outcomes of a Hamas attack on civilians in Israel would be horrific reprisals against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, to be committed either by IDF soldiers led by a right-wing extremist government, or by self-appointed “settler militias” acting on the same political agenda.
Rami Ismail was only predicting what would come to pass, within hours of his post—attacks on Palestinian civilians, 99.9% of whom have as little to do with planning or supporting the activities of Hamas as Jews like me have to do with planning operations for the IDF.
I’m going to quote the full text of Rami Ismail’s posts on this topic below, not least because the modern world trends toward bullying people into retracting or deleting public statements that should not have be quashed because they touch on uncomfortable truths.
I've gotten some deserved criticism for my failure to condemn the death of children and civilians in the recent events in Israel and Palestine. I do see this as a failure & for those that care I wanted to share my thinking & apologies, but it'll take a moment to get there.
Palestinian children and civilians are routinely murdered and face routine acts of physical, psychological, economical, and sexual violence. As this normalizes through routine, I have failed to consistently condemn those acts by Israel's government, military, and extremists.
That places me in an impossible position: to condemn violence now would feel hypocritical towards the Palestinian people, who see my (frequent) silence when they're targeted, murdered, violated, and abused. But if I would always condemn those acts, I would tweet of nothing else.
Tweeting only about that would be more just, of course, and I acknowledge that I have tremendous privilege to tune those daily atrocities out and tweet about games and aviation and other things I enjoy without fear or worry. So while I could tweet about such crimes every day...
...I haven't. Like so many, when the fake lull of "peace" returns, I eventually stop counting the bodies old and young, and stop reading the reports of atrocities as intently. Because it is so much, and so unfair.
And when the pressure of injustice builds up too high again, I return to the photos of dead kids in rubble & "catch up" on nothing changed besides the names of the dead. I read up on illegal settlements built on razed towns, on burnings of fertile fields, on raids & executions.
Given that, it makes me feel really gross to suddenly go "targeting civilians & children is bad" when it is primarily the people dying that sets this instance apart. Of course I condemn all harming of civilians & kids, but being selective about -saying it- feels disgusting.
The reason I am seizing upon these words, and taking the time to defend them, is that I personally identify with this position.
To be clear—I truly value Rami Ismail’s posts on many topics. I have enjoyed his social media presence for years. I even have a subscription to his newsletter.
I met him briefly at Full Indie Summit, in Vancouver years ago, and have been following him on social media ever since. We are not friends, and I doubt he would remember me or my talk on “the secret stories” of games at that conference—I was one of the first industry pros to start talking about narrative design at the meta level, and the way story can be woven into other elements of game design and marketing.
My point is not that he’s a popular creator in my field or a social media influencer. Rami Ismail is has been generously sharing his work, his thoughts, his expertise and his time for many years. He freely distributes a lot of valuable resources and information that help aspiring game developers handle some of the hardest parts of the job of setting up a studio or building a career.
Most recently, he developed a pitch template for devs who need to explain their projects to publishers and grant committees. One of his earliest contributions to his community was a press kit to help developers set up press pages to promote their works in development. He routinely gives out free advice on issues of design, marketing, and business development.
He is in many ways a mensch—a good person. From my perspective, he is a truly human and humane being. The kind of person that we should all aspire to be.
So the question I have, for everyone who demanded an apology from him on the eve of war:
“Why do we applaud Rami Ismail for telling us the truth every day of the year, except on the one day that he needs us to hear him most?”
Why does everyone think that they can greedily scoop up a man’s wisdom on every other topic—but when he has something to say about an existential threat to his people, suddenly they demand apologies?
As a Jewish woman and a fellow developer, I do not want Rami Ismail to apologize. If he owes the world one apology for things left unsaid, I owe the world a thousand apologies. Because I too have made personal decisions about my social media postings on the topic of war in the Levant:
I selfishly decided that it was not my job to scream every day about the deaths of innocent people.
My reasoning was that I am no one. I’m an obscure game developer and writer. Hardly anyone has heard of me. If I died tomorrow, no one would know or care but a handful of friends and family.
My reasoning was that I live and work in Canada. I have no close family living in Israel, no physical or emotional skin in the game. The first thing I did, when I heard war had broken out again, was to text my girlfriend to make sure that her Mom was okay—she was my only connection to Jews living in the Holy Land. I haven’t even visited Israel as a tourist, or spent time in a kibbutz.
My connection to this conflict was complicated, I reasoned. Because I do understand the appeal of Israel as a concept. I know why Jewish people around the world desperately need a safe haven, a place we can go when our neighbors and our governments suddenly blame us for all their problems and decide to destroy us.
I understand that Zionism as we know it today is a movement sparked by over a century of hideous persecution of Jewish people in Russia and Europe.
I know that these persecutions cost hundreds of thousands of lives, rendered thousands homeless and destitute, and created wave after wave of Jewish refugees with nowhere to turn—all long before the culminating horror of six million Jews and twelve million innocents of other “undesirable” identities being reduced to ashes in the Holocaust.
And I also understand that the suffering of my people does not justify or legitimize the suffering of other people. I know what is happening now in Gaza. I have known what is happening in Palestine for quite some time.
And yet…I posted very little about it. But who demanded my apology?
If I haven't been on social media screaming every time Palestinian children, men, women, elders were kidnapped, incarcerated or killed...
If I haven’t been screaming for all 3,500 Palestinians who have lost their lives since Netanyahu took control of the Israeli government in 2009...
Or the thousands more who have been injured or disabled for life...
Or the thousands more who lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers and bombs...
If I haven't been screaming since a Jewish right-wing extremist murdered Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 at a peace rally, finally succeeding after THREE similar attempts in that same year failed...because the Israeli right wanted to destroy any bridge or road that could lead to peace and justice...
If I haven't said, OUT LOUD, that Israel's right-wing extremists spit on the Karchei Shalom as routinely and as brazenly as America's right-wing extremists spit on the Constitution...and that I know that they are equally indifferent to the deaths of Jews and Palestinians of any age or gender, because innocent lives are the eggs that must be broken to create their fascistic Zionist omelet…
If I’ve decided that it was not my duty to publicly share my inner cry of anguish and fury for all those who have already died, already suffered, already been snatched from their homes, tortured, beaten, humiliated or killed…
Then who am I to condemn terrible things that were done to another 700 innocent people in the Levant on October 7, 2023?
If the only thing that makes certain deaths special or meaningful, certain victims worth speaking out for, is that they happened to be Jewish again this time…then how dare I mention them at all?
So before the Demanders of Apologies come to my door, let it be said aloud.
This time and for every time:
I condemn the cruel and needless deaths of children.
I condemn the cruel and needless deaths of teenagers..
I condemn the cruel and needless deaths of grandparents and the elderly.
I condemn the massacre of civilians, the destruction of homes and communities, and the expulsion of innocent people from their land.
Jewish lives matter very much to me. Palestinian lives also matter. And if I despise Hamas for their acts of criminal violence against civilians on October 7th 2023, I can and do despise the violent acts that right-wing Israeli troops and militias have committed for years as well.
I despise them all the more, perhaps, because those crimes were committed by people who have justified their crimes as being somehow a defense of Jewish lives, identity and ancestry—as if repeating the crimes that others committed against us ad finitum could ever make us safe or whole.
Irrational as it may seem at this moment, I truly believe that the people of the Levant can walk the Path to Peace together, and find a way forward to a better future. People in other countries have found the will and the ways to put the past behind them. It can be done.
But I do not believe the path to peace is paved with the bones of the innocent.
Nor will we find it by forcing people to apologize or recant every time they tell us a truth that some are apparently still not ready to hear.