In Search of a Porn Star with a Nuanced View of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Last year, during the October 7th massacre, the Lebanese porn star Mia Khalifa sent out a tweet asking for the Hamas terrorists to flip their phones horizontally to get a better view of the carnage. This was really hard for me to hear. Not as a Jew, but as a big fan of all her previous work. In a way I felt like I knew Mia so her tweet couldn’t help leave me feeling betrayed. And I know they say one has to try and separate the artist from the collection of hard core porn they engage in on a regular basis, but this is easier said than done.

I was facing a real moral dilemma:

How could I continue masturbating to this woman as she’s being gang-banged by an entire college basketball team and still feel like I was doing the right thing?

The answer is reluctantly.

But the penis has more tribal allegiance than you might expect and I soon found myself returning to the Jewish heritage I had turned my back on for so long, by which I mean I started masturbating exclusively to the Israeli porn star Chemda Shoshana Bracha Chachachachchchchchch.

Although I hate being idealogical when it comes to pornography, I found myself enjoying Chemda’s work quite a bit. She was a big fan of B.D.S.M. (Bondage, Domination, Sadism, Masochism) though not so much a fan of B.D.S (Boycott, Divest, Sanction).

Her work really spoke to me, and helped fill the void left by Mia.

But then a couple months later I was performing at a comedy fundraiser in Manhattan that Chemda also happened to be on because hot girls are now doing stand up which is cultural appropriation.

After the event, I nervously approached her at the bar and told her how much her work meant to me.

And then we started talking.

It was an amazing conversation until the question of Palestinians was brought up and she, without hesitation, referred to them as animals and said they don’t deserve their own homeland….

Never meet your heroes.

This was worse than when I found out Woody Allen had left Mia Farrow for her daughter Soon-Yi, or as I refer to that scandal: ‘proof that Jews will stop at nothing to marry Asian women’.

I was in a serious moral conundrum:

How could I continue masturbating to this woman as she’s getting bukakkied by a bevy of dwarves dressed in dominatrix attire, while her husband watches gagged and bound in a corner of the barn, and still feel good about myself?

You already know the answer to this question.

But after a while, I just couldn’t do it anymore (often in life we find out we are better people than we think we are).

So I began scouring the internet for a porn star who had an actual nuanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, instead of one blinded by tribalism, dogma, and prejudice.

This turned out to be a difficult task. For one, this is not a category on Pornhub (though, surprisingly, Pornhub does have the category ‘Girls with a Comprehensive View of the Soviet Union Collapse and Big Clits’)

Desperate to find this elusive porn star, I remember paying to watch a woman on a web cam at one point.

“What would you like me to do, honey?” she asked.

“I would like you to place that silver butt plug up your butt and then sit on that big purple dildo on your shelf but first…what is your historical interpretation of the Oslo Accords?”

Her answer was disappointingly reductive. I by no means want to truck in the hurtful stereotype that porn stars are not well-educated, but she often confused the Oslo Accords with the Camp David Accords.

It was embarrassing.

I soon gave up on my quest.

It’s been five months now since I’ve watched porn.

It hasn’t been too terrible.

Instead of going on Pornhub, now I just masturbate to the faded memories of all the beautiful, sexy, women I used to watch on Pornhub.

But I don’t give in to despair.

Call me an optimist, but I still believe that one day in the near future I will be masturbating to a porn star with a balanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; a porn star who can hold both Netanyahu and Hamas accountable; a porn star who can condemn the illegal settlements in the West Bank but also the blatant antisemitism on the left; a porn star who cannot turn away from the immense, horrible, suffering in Gaza but that also doesn’t feel the need to criticize Jews for being worried about antisemitism (you cannot tell a Jew to not be worried about antisemitism when worrying about antisemitism is what being Jewish is all about). A porn star who understands the paradox that is Israel- a country that is viewed by Jews as a safe haven before, during, and after the Holocaust, and by Palestinians as a land they were displaced from.

In other words, a porn star who can recognize the humanity in Israelis and Palestinians, while also acknowledging the religious fanaticism that is poisoning both sides of this awful conflict.

Call me naive, but I know in the deep, recesses of my heart, where a broken, fragile faith still resides, that a porn star like this exists.

They must.