The Blogs: Why my antizionism didn’t survive a Houthi missile | Taryn Thomas

A first-person blog account by Taryn Thomas, a 20-year-old American student, tracing her path from Stanford anti-Zionist activism to publicly reversing her position in November 2025. She cites a Los Angeles exhibit on the Nova massacre, a recording of a Hamas attacker's call home, a Druze family lunch in the Golan and a Houthi missile intercepted over Ramle.

In a first-person blog post, Taryn Thomas, a 20-year-old American student, describes how she moved from campus anti-Zionist activism to publicly reversing her position in November 2025, and what prompted the change. She dates her entry to a Stanford tent encampment, the "Sit-in to Stop Genocide," which she says went up thirteen days after October 7, when she was one of the students she describes as having become "genocide scholars overnight." She traces an earlier seed to a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest at 16, where an organizer told her Palestinians "feel our pain." At the encampment, she writes, the one time she raised two states, a friend corrected her that believing Israel should exist made her a Zionist, and she accepted the label. A turning point was an exhibit in Los Angeles about the Nova Music Festival massacre, which she attended intending to fact-check. She describes burned cars, rows of shoes and bullet-riddled portable toilets, and a video of a twenty-year-old hiding. She also cites a recording of a young man calling home on a dead woman's phone to say he had killed ten Jews, and his parents' blessings in reply. She recounts a lunch with a Druze family in the Golan Heights and the deaths of twelve children, the youngest ten, from a rocket from Lebanon on a soccer field in Majdal Shams. In Ramle, she sheltered face down as a missile from Yemen was intercepted overhead, and watched the market reopen immediately afterward. She says she went public in November 2025, that her best friend blocked her without a word, and that another friend asked her to remove her photos.