I read with great dismay, and a rather challenging plate of burrata at the Garrick Club, the recent comments made by Sara Husseini. The director of the British Palestinian Committee has claimed, ahead of this weekend’s Nakba march, that British Palestinians feel “gaslit” and unable to speak openly about Israel’s war on Gaza. She noted a growing climate of hostility, pointing out that some feel afraid to wear Palestinian symbols or Arabic jewelry at work, feeling they are treated as suspects rather than victims of mass suffering.
To which I must ask: have they considered how exhausting it is for the rest of us to constantly police their jewelry?
It is a fundamental cornerstone of British society that we do not let global atrocities interfere with the vibes of a Tuesday morning stand-up meeting. When I take a British Palestinian colleague aside and gently explain that the mass suffering they are watching on their phone is actually a complicated semantic dispute that they are misinterpreting, and that their visible anguish is making the marketing department feel unsafe, I am not "gaslighting" them. I am simply providing constructive, robust corporate leadership.
We must push back on this rampant misuse of therapy speak. Gaslighting is a serious psychological term meant to describe when you manipulate someone into questioning their own sanity. But when I tell my colleague Tariq that his family's neighborhood wasn't actually bombed, and that his insistence on bringing it up is an act of workplace aggression, I am not manipulating his sanity. I am simply establishing a collaborative corporate culture where his reality is politely outsourced to the legal department.
The keffiyeh issue is particularly vexing. Husseini says people are afraid to wear them at work. But the modern workplace is built on conformity and shared values. We do not wear flip-flops to the office. We do not microwave fish in the communal kitchen. And we certainly do not wear scarves that actively remind the C-suite of their own complicity in a geopolitical catastrophe. It is simply basic professional etiquette. If I can leave my golf clubs in the boot of my Audi, surely they can leave their reminders of displaced populations at home.
I was discussing this very phenomenon just last week with a former home secretary and a few senior partners at a top-tier consulting firm. We were enjoying a delightful sea bass when the topic turned to the immense burden of managing diversity in the modern era. We all agreed that the true victims of the current geopolitical climate are middle managers who are forced to awkwardly ask their staff to hide their cultural heritage. The emotional toll of having to constantly pretend you don't see someone's humanity is staggering, yet no one is holding marches for the HR directors.
Let us address the accusation that British Palestinians are being treated as "suspects." Is being a suspect not, in its own way, a profound form of inclusion? In a post-9/11 world, we treat everyone as a suspect, except of course the people who actually crash the economy or pollute the rivers. Treating British Palestinians as underlying security threats is just our way of welcoming them into the robust British tradition of state surveillance. They should be flattered by the attention.
I recently had to intervene in a workplace incident that perfectly encapsulates this divide. A young woman in our accounts department—let us call her Laila—came to work wearing a small gold necklace featuring Arabic script. Naturally, my fight-or-flight response kicked in. I did not know what it said. It could have said 'Peace,' it could have been a recipe for hummus, or it could have been a call for the complete dismantling of the Western democratic order. The point is, it wasn't in English, which in today's climate is basically a direct threat to corporate synergy.
I bravely reported her to Human Resources. When she was called in, she wept and explained it was simply her grandmother's name. But the damage to my morning was already done. She had aggressively forced me to remember that the Middle East exists, and that my government's policies have real-world consequences. Who is the real victim of workplace hostility in that scenario? The woman who had to tuck a necklace under her collar, or the man who had his morning oat milk flat white ruined by the sudden, intrusive thought of human mortality?
I have repeatedly told our Palestinian staff that we see them, we hear them, and we will absolutely discipline them if they continue to visually remind us of their existence. It is essential that we maintain a neutral environment where only the dominant, state-sanctioned narrative is quietly assumed.
We pride ourselves on civility in this country. And civility, as any student of British history knows, means suffering in absolute silence so as not to ruin the atmosphere at the Pret A Manger. When British Palestinians express their anguish, when they speak out about the erasure of their families, they are violating the social contract. They are being incredibly selfish by insisting that their actual, documented grief should take precedence over my hypothetical, entirely imagined discomfort.
At the Aspen Ideas Festival last year, I spoke on a panel about "Bridging Divides." I posited that the bridge of understanding can only be built if one side agrees to lie down and let the other side walk entirely over them. It was very well received by the CEO of a major defense contractor who happened to be in the front row. The point is, unity requires sacrifice. And right now, we are simply asking British Palestinians to sacrifice their identities, their voices, and their right to mourn in public. Is that really so much to ask in the name of office harmony?
I am a classic liberal. I believe deeply in free speech. I believe anyone should be able to say whatever they want, provided that speech is delivered at a volume I find acceptable, on a topic I have pre-approved, by someone who went to Oxford, and which ultimately affirms my pre-existing worldview. But this current trend of marginalized people insisting on their own reality is simply a bridge too far.
So please, I ask of Sara Husseini and the British Palestinian Committee: stop using words like "gaslit." It implies that we care enough to actively manipulate you. In truth, we are just hoping that if we ignore your existence aggressively enough, you will simply fade into the background noise of our quarterly earnings reports, right where you belong.
