We are all witnesses. And to witness is to inherit responsibility, whether or not we ever asked for it.

People often assume I support Palestine because I am Muslim. Sometimes that’s true, sometimes it’s lazy. I ask myself the embarrassing version of the question: Would I care this fiercely if Gaza prayed differently? If the babies were baptised instead of called to prayer, would I still cry the same way? I want to say yes. Of course yes, because pain is pain. But I don’t trust easy answers. I have a body, and bodies come with loyalties.

My faith taught me to love my neighbour, to care for strangers, to protect children, and that teaching is not neutral. It binds me to people I’ve never met. Faith makes me care. But faith is also comfort, and comfort can be bias. Then again, perhaps the word bias works too hard to disguise something simpler: it is wrong to starve and bomb people.

I once met an Israeli woman who despised what her government had made of her. We sat at a plastic table that stuck to our wrists. She was in her late thirties, perhaps forty, her hair buzzed short.

“You served in the army,” I said.
She nodded. “Five years.”
“You were in prison?”
She smiled faintly. “I was a traitor.”

I wanted to sound clever, but what came out was simple curiosity.
“Then why stay? You could have left. You could have started again somewhere else.”

“I did. You leave in your mind first,” she said. “The body just takes longer to follow.”

She told me about her husband, a man from the side her country had trained her to hate. Gaza. They met at a checkpoint and, years later, re-met at a protest. They later married in Cyprus. Loving him, she said, had been the best decision of her life. It made her feel human again. But a year after their marriage, he was killed. Officially, it was “crossfire,” but she said there had been no crossfire that day. Just a single bullet. 

“He was a teacher,” she said quietly. “He taught equations. What could a man like that possibly do to a state with tanks, jets, and even nukes? How disgustingly ignorant must you be to fear someone whose only weapon was a piece of chalk?” When she spoke about him, her face didn’t move much. Her voice didn’t tremble. It was as if grief had calcified somewhere behind her ribs, permanent and unrepairable.

Then she told me about her friend, a Spanish journalist she had met while volunteering at a clinic. She was twenty-eight. A young, cheerful, endlessly talkative girl. “I never understood why she gave up her easy life to care about Palestinians,” the woman said. “She didn’t have to. She could have gone back home anytime. But she stayed.”

The journalist was later arrested and imprisoned with her. They shared a cell for three months, sleeping on concrete, whispering stories to keep themselves from falling apart. One morning, guards entered the cell and executed the journalist and another inmate in front of her. Headshots. She said she screamed until her throat tore, but no one came. No one cared.

She didn’t cry when she told me this. She didn’t even flinch. She just stared at the coffee on the table, as if it might swallow the memory whole.

Then she looked at me and said quietly, “You must hate us.”

“I hate what you guys did,” I said. “But I want to understand. You’ve lived both sides. You’ve also been caged in prison. They killed your husband, your friend. Isn’t that reason enough to hate?”

She sipped her coffee and replied, “Reason enough is that I am more Jew than I am Israeli. And Jew, to me, means remembering who I am supposed to love. If being Israeli means forgetting and killing those I’m meant to protect and claim – the Jews, the Palestinians, humans. Then I abstain from the word.”

I wrote that down with a shaking hand because it rearranged the furniture in my head. “Being Jew means I don’t lie about suffering or cooperate with it. If my state asks me to, then it is the state that has strayed, not me,” she added.

She wasn’t condemning her people. She was indicting what they had allowed themselves to become. Faith before nation. It sounded familiar, like a principle I believed in but hadn’t yet risked anything for.

That night, her words followed me. I kept turning them over like a stone in my hand. Am I Muslim more than I am human, or human more than I am Muslim?

My instinct says the two are not adversaries. My faith should widen my humanity, not narrow it. But instincts are not proof, and the world is ruthless in asking us to choose.

I tried to fit my own words around hers. I am Muslim more than I am human. Saying it felt unsettling, like shrinking the vastness of faith into a flag. I am human more than I am Muslim; that one felt like discarding the very thing that taught me to love widely. Neither answer felt right. Maybe the question isn’t which comes first, but which one I betray less often. 

I have watched a hundred videos of protests in cities I’ve never lived in, and my chest loosens when I see a forest of faces chanting in unfamiliar accents. Sometimes I wonder if humans share a universal moral code. Every religion claims to own it, and every government claims to represent it. Yet perhaps there is no universal code at all. We call something humanitarian only when it suits us.

We invent rules we can break anytime, anywhere, anyhow. We condemn violence until it needs defending. We are, truly, the masters of conditional empathy.

And yet, there are cracks in that cynicism. Protesters and activists, bless them. They are the anomaly that keeps the rest of us from collapsing into nihilism. Students who should be drinking and flirting, enjoying their youth, instead stand and shout for strangers they will never meet. Teachers, nurses, farmers – people who could stay home but choose instead to be inconvenient. I am especially soft for the older ones. They remind me that courage can be contagious. Surely you can’t run a hospital on courage, but you cannot run a movement without it either.

What I finally arrived at was smaller, quieter, and more useful conclusion: I am accountable. To God and to people.

But accountability is not the property of belief. It does not belong to Muslims alone, nor to Christians, Buddhists, Jews, or any other name we give to faith. It is the burden and privilege of being alive. Whether one prays, doubts, disbelieves, or even resents the idea of belief altogether, we are all caught in the same moral weather. The ache of seeing a child die unjustly does not ask what scripture you keep by your bedside. 

To be human is to be implicated. Believer or atheist, pilgrim or cynic, worshipper or anti-believer. The duty to care precedes every theology. It’s the one commandment we invent repeatedly, even when we think we’ve outgrown it. And maybe that is what faith, stripped of its symbols, was always trying to say: that love without qualification is the closest thing we have to proof that humanity still works.

Ask me again if I hate Israel. Ask if I am biased, if I would care this fiercely were the children to pray differently, if the rubble sounded less familiar to my faith. The answer will not change.

Do not starve people.
Do not bomb hospitals.
Do not shoot journalists.
Do not execute prisoners.
Do not bomb schools and shelters.
Do not force families from their homes.
Do not turn medicine into a bargaining chip.
Do not make language do the killing for you.
Do not teach the world to measure grief by geography.

These are not political demands. They are the minimum requirements for calling ourselves human. The bare minimum.

So yes, ask me the question if you must. Ask it with all the comfort of distance. I will answer the same way each time: as much as I hate Israel for the atrocities it commits, what I hate more is the ease with which we forget. Because forgetting is how violence survives.

But conviction is easier to write than to live. Outrage feels righteous until you notice how safe it sounds in your own room. Every time I write an article like this, a pettier voice whispers inside me, one I dislike but recognise.
Will people know where I stand? Will I look brave? Will they love me for saying what they wanted to hear?

We speak of righteousness, but we practise self-gratification. I am not exempt. I re-read what I’ve written and see my guilt between the lines. I sit in a safe room, type in safety, post in safety. My outrage is sanitised by distance and Wi-Fi. I tell myself it helps. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. Sometimes I wonder if I write to be good or to look good. Maybe I like the applause for being “brave.” Maybe I am addicted to my own virtue.

That’s the risk of writing; it can so easily become a performance of morality. So, I test myself with substitutions.

Would I still care if I never wrote this? If I weren’t Muslim? If no one agreed with me, no one clapped, no one watched? Would I still care when I’m tired, busy, alone – when caring costs me something?

That, I think, is the only honest test left. The test is crude but clarifying: the wrongness is portable. That’s how I know my loyalty isn’t only to my own.

But self-interrogation only goes so far, the world eventually asks louder. Back home, people often ask, “Why do we care so much? We’re a small country with our own problems. Why care this loudly about a place we cannot fix?”

True. Malaysia is not an empire. We have our own emergencies, our own awkwardnesses, our own people who simply want bread to be cheaper and buses to be on time. But moral attention is not a finite resource. We can fight our own demons and still weep for others. We can fix potholes and still refuse genocide. A small nation can have a large conscience, often larger than most.

Injustice, when left unchecked anywhere, rehearses itself everywhere. The moment we say that’s not our problem, we audition for the day when no one says that’s theirs for us.

The truth should hurt. If it doesn’t, it isn’t doing its job. Being from a small country teaches you early that your voice is not an earthquake. You speak anyway, trusting in the mathematics of many. Because what’s happening to Palestinians is not a complicated policy argument, it’s a primer on what happens when we allow a government to decide that a hospital is an acceptable battlefield and starvation an acceptable winning tactic.

If you cannot oppose that when it’s far, what will you do when it comes close?

Kerana memanusiakan manusia bukanlah tugas penyair, agamawan atau politikus, tetapi fitrah yang kita semua dustai setiap kali kita memilih diam. Kerana memanusiakan manusia ialah menolak selimut selesa, menolak alasan bahawa tragedi di negara asing bukan urusan kita. Kerana memanusiakan manusia ialah berani memihak kepada yang tertindas, walau suara kita kecil, walau lidah kita digigit takut, walau dunia memanggil kita naif. Kerana memanusiakan manusia ialah mengangkat kembali nilai yang telah kita buang, malu, empati, sedih, marah. Kerana memanusiakan manusia ialah menegur bangsa sendiri ketika mereka memuja zalim, dan menegur diri sendiri ketika hati mula letih peduli. Kerana memanusiakan manusia ialah tidak menunggu musim simpati untuk menjadi manusia, ia tanggungjawab yang tidak kenal erti berhenti. Kerana memanusiakan manusia ialah memahami bahawa setiap jasad yang tumbang di tanah asing adalah kehilangan sebahagian daripada semua. Kerana memanusiakan manusia ialah menolak untuk berpura-pura tidak tahu, tidak nampak, tidak terlibat. Kerana memanusiakan manusia bukan sekadar tugas moral, tetapi satu-satunya cara untuk membuktikan bahawa kita masih punya jiwa. Maka memanusiakan manusia, pada akhirnya, ialah menatap wajah sendiri di dalam cermin dan berkata: aku masih manusia, dan aku memilih untuk terus menjadi manusia.

-YQ (Excerpt)