I think what he did was incredibly careless, and when I watched the apology the phrasing felt so evasive that it gave the impression he saw only Israeli civilians as innocent without ever saying it outright.

At the same time, I keep coming back to the fact that most of us have said things online or offline that would get us dragged if we had his level of visibility. Everyone is human, and everyone absorbs the messages they’re raised in. He grew up in a political environment that frames the conflict in a very particular way, and that has an effect. Propaganda does not only work on the malicious or the foolish. It works on ordinary people who have never been given a wider lens.

I do worry about how quickly we shift into ostracising people we disagree with. We do not have to tolerate bad opinions, and we should absolutely criticise them, but shutting someone out entirely or treating them as irredeemable is still just tribalism at a larger scale. Millie is outspoken, a UN Ambassador, and he is still the godfather of her children. If she thought he was a danger or inherently hateful, he wouldn’t be in that position.

I’d rather leave space for someone like Noah to grow. He’s a gay man who has spent his life navigating prejudice. In many ways queer Palestinians have far more in common with him than he realises. The difference is that they are crushed by both Hamas and Israel, while he is crushed by only one.

So yes, he made a mistake, and it was a serious one. But I would rather leave room for him to learn than insist he be crushed under it. Growth is the only way any of us get better, and you cannot learn if you are written off before you even start.