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| Odessa Pogrom 1905 |
When I was little, I knew my Russian grandmother came to this country to escape Cossacks. I knew she and her brothers had hid from the Cossacks, and pogroms were not exactly an out-of-the-ordinary occasion. I also knew we had family left behind in Russia, and that very few of them were alive. And I knew ours was not the only family like this.
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| auto-da-fé |
By the time I was in 2nd grade, I knew about Masada, the flaying of Rabbi Akiva, auto-da-fé at the Spanish Inquisition, Nazis, ghettos and gas chambers. I knew lots of other gory, gruesome stuff, too, but those were the biggies in my mind. I knew our neighbors had numbers tattooed on their arms when they arrived at Auschwitz. My parents assured me that wasn't going to happen again, not to me or my family or my friends, that America, with its Constitution and Bill of Rights was a safe place for Jews. That the lessons of the holocaust had been learned by the world.
As if.
I saw bits and pieces of anti-semitism growing up. I was confronted by it head-on in graduate school. But I believed that these were all outliers, that basically we were safe. Accepted as part of the fabric of American Society.
Until we weren't.
In the last 365 days, we have learned that we are not part of the American social fabric. Okay, maybe we're on the edges, but we are not safe. We all watched as American students turned against the Jews of America with their encampments, their slogans, their chants, and their desire to bring the intifada here. Do they not know Intifada is a form of terrorism, violent and bloody, indiscriminate in its targets? Do they think intifada is some sort of peaceful protest movement?
Apparently.
Do they not understand that Hamas, ISIS, Islamic State, Islamic Jihad, Taliban, and Houthis are all proxies? Do they think that 9/11 happened in a vacuum outside the support and encouragement from Iran? Or perhaps they're okay with the death of 2,977 people on that day? Or because my two cousins who died who in the the collapse of the North Tower were Jewish made it okay? Are the pro-Palestinian protesters now dancing at the site memorials for the 9/11 victims?
Possibly so, since some of them believe the Mossad was responsible for the attack....to make Islam look bad.
One year ago, according to the secular calendar, Hamas crossed the border to brutally murder at least 1,139 people. More than 240 men, women, children, babies, and elders were taken hostage. Of that number, it is believed about 100 hostages remain in the tunnels of Gaza. Of that number, it is unknown how many are alive and how many are corpses left to rot.
My world changed radically one year and one day ago. Gone is the belief that Jews are safe here, or just about anywhere else in the world...outside of Israel where they are, at the moment, decidedly unsafe, but at least they are in their own land speaking a language that has been spoken, read, and written for over 3000 years.
Israel is so small, 21,649 square kilometers, about the same size as New Jersey, that it's barely a percentage of measurable land mass on a globe....0.0139%. The number of Jews in the world, thought to be about 14,000,000, is 2% of the world's population. According to recent data, the Muslim population of the world is about 24%. According to the Pew Research Center, the landmass of all Islamic countries is about 20%.
Keep in mind, the number 14,000,000 is WORLD Jewry. Only about 7,300,000 of those Jews live in Israel, so the percentage in the Middle East is even smaller, by about half.
Here's a comparison by percentage:
There are so few of us, in such a small land area, why do they hate us? We don't take up much room. Maybe it's because we have survived for 4000+ years as a single, fairly unified identity? Have we poisoned their wells? Have we forced conversion to Judaism on them? Have we barred them from education, occupations, or the ability to earn a living? Have we told them they can't own land or livestock? Have we forced them to wear clothing that identifies them as Christian or Muslim?
Nope.
All we have ever wanted was to be left alone in the country where some tombstones written in Hebrew are over 3000 years old, a written testament that this is our country. The Temple Mount is called The Temple Mount because our temple was situated there long before Islam was even invented. We don't stop anyone from having holy sites....Al-Aqsa Mosque, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Bahá’í World Center, the Druze holy site Nebi Shu'ayb. Everyone gets to pray however they want....even Jews which is still not permitted in some countries.Our dream was to have a Jewish state, but one that would welcome all people.
We may be tiny, but we are fierce. For over 3000 years we have faced east to Jerusalem when we pray. Our most ancient prayers are directed at Jerusalem. We sat by the rivers of Babylon in exile and wept, crying If I forget thee, O, Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth....written almost 600 years before the Common Era.
But despite all the evidence, we have never been permitted to defend ourselves in our homeland. It took the birth of Israel to learn that skill. In over 70 years of statehood, we have NEVER started a war.
For a while, we were an amusing anomaly as we beat back armies bigger, stronger, and more populous than our own. During the War of Independence, the tiny Israeli Air Force ran out of bombs so they used empty seltzer bottles thrown from planes because the noise was terrifying and the bottles exploded on impact.
In this war, the IDF used exploding old fashioned pagers. Not exactly what one might think, but, like the seltzer bottles, it served its unique purpose...which is to defend the State of Israel from the monsters who come in the dark to rape and murder.
But here's the bottom line: what happened on October 7th is exactly what Hamas promised it would do. Their charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the removal of the Jewish people from that land. It does not matter to them that Israel decamped from Gaza in 2005, at which time the IDF removed everyone and everything, leaving Gaza to the Gazans. By September 22, 2005, disengagement was complete right back to the Green Line. There were no settlements, no IDF, no nuthin'.....including peace. By 2006, Hamas and Fatah were back to firing rockets at Israelis over the border. They have never stopped firing.
Don't we get to fight back? Don't we have a right to defend ourselves?
Yes.
When Hamas used tractors on October 7th, 2023, to break through the border, another kind of line was crossed. Tractors? Low tech. Seemingly innocuous.
Or not.
Israel did not ask for the massacre. Jews around the globe did not ask for the massacre.
This is Shiri Bibas with her sons as they were being taken. Kfir was 9 months old and Ariel was 4. They were kidnapped at their home at Nir Oz. No one knows if they are alive or dead. Her parents were also taken. They were confirmed murdered on October 21st. Her face, and the faces of her red-headed children are etched into our collective soul. We demand to know where she is, where the children are. She is us.
Hamas continues to hold citizens of the world hostage, both alive and dead. No one knows how many there are; no one knows how many are still alive. We are not apologizing for defending our citizens. Israelis in Israel come first, be they Jews or anything else. Of the approximately 100 hostages that remain in Gaza, not all are Jews, not all are even Israeli citizens. But that really doesn't matter. And the world thinks this is okay.
Apparently. Just ask the UN. And most student populations.
As news of the scope of the slaughter was still registering, and the tally of hostages still being made—the final count: 240 people from 40 countries carried off like barbaric spoils of war—progressive groups here at home and across the West began to celebrate.
More than 30 student clubs at Harvard put out a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the massacre. Israel. Not Hamas. Israel. This was on October 8, as Hamas terrorists were still roaming Israel’s south, and Hezbollah began its assault on Israel’s north from Lebanon.
Surely it had to be some terrible mistake, a sick prank. But the statement was sincere. And it wasn’t an anomaly.
In October 2023—just in that first month—George Washington University students projected the words “Glory to Our Martyrs” and “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” in giant letters on campus buildings. At Cooper Union in Manhattan, Jewish students had to hide in the library from a mob pounding on the door. At Columbia, Professor Joseph Massad called the slaughter “awesome.” At Cornell, Professor Russell Rickford said it was “energizing” and “exhilarating.” At Princeton, hundreds of students chanted “globalize the intifada,” which can only mean: open season on Jews worldwide. At NYU, students held posters that read “keep the world clean,” with drawings of Jewish stars in garbage cans.
I watched Hamas tapes of the incursion tonight. We know this attack was carefully orchestrated. The tractors, the gliders, the motorcycles, the scooters, and the trucks. The film crew. The sound crew.It was so coordinated. So on top of the attack. Like a movie set. And the editing! Masterful. That didn't happen on the spur of the moment. They had equipment ready. They had skilled operators on hand. The Leni Riefenstahl-esque quality of the shots...almost like a shooting script had been done in advance. And why not? They were planning this for months. Why not have a film crew ready to go? Ready to release footage of the carnage almost as streaming action? That's a whole lotta advanced planning.
And the crowd went wild. Or so it seems according to the media.
The global celebrations of Israeli deaths were the least expected outcome. My director-brain finds it very interesting that the protests and the encampments and the hate spread like wildfire almost immediately. All those identical looking tents. All those keffiyehs, All those slogans and chants shouted in unison across the country. I understand social media works fast. I understand grass-roots and groundswell. There was no lag, no time to foment. It was fast. Too fast. Too tidy.
Almost as if it were planned in advance.
If they can pre-plan a live-action war movie, why not a second, civilian wave? I remember Tommy the Traveler. Do you? Agent provocateurs are as old as history. With all that careful planning of murder and rape, why not plant agent provocateurs to make sure Israel is demonized in case we fight back?
They made sure no one heard about the tunnels under Gaza, the tunnels under schools, the tunnels under hospitals that had launchers on the roof. They hid their weapons amidst their civilians, knowing any action would sacrifice their own people...men, women, and children...and Israel would be excoriated.
They made sure no one heard about the relief funds pocketed by Hamas instead of allowing the Palestinians to build an economy. Whatever they did to structure that takeover of common sense and decency worked. Israel became the villain. The truth about the only democracy in the Middle East is rendered irrelevant. That Israel is a nation with successes and failures like any other nation is rendered irrelevant. That Israeli society is not defined by conformity is rendered irrelevant.
They who support Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis ultimately support Iran and somehow manage not to understand that unless they embrace Islam, they are next. Gays for Palestine?
Great. Go to see how welcoming they are to your community in Palestine. Like the Nazis, Hamas and Hezbollah will make sure you, too, are dispatched to the world to come sooner rather than later.
The post-Holocaust era of the last eight decades was defined by optimism about the Jewish future. However improbably, we had emerged, stronger than ever, from the event intended to destroy us. For all its fluctuations, the post-Holocaust trajectory pointed forward.
Through two thousand years of exile, the Jewish people were sustained by two dreams. The first – considered so fantastic that it was relegated to messianic times – was that a dispersed and powerless people would somehow reclaim its ancient homeland. The second was that, in the long interim before the coming of the Messiah, Jews would find a welcoming haven in the diaspora.
After the Holocaust, both dreams were fulfilled. Two great centers of Jewish life emerged – a sovereign Israel and a self-confident North American Jewry, the most successful diaspora in history. Together, Israel and North America contain close to 90 percent of the world’s Jews. These two centers presided over the post-Holocaust renewal of the Jewish people – which moved from its historic nadir to the peak of its military, economic and political power.
The post-Holocaust era may be waning, but that does not mean we won't grow into something stronger. We are no longer asking permission to exist. We are no longer relying on the UN to intercede on our behalf. We are not waiting for anyone to ride to our rescue.
Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah have demonstrated they give a damn about their own people. Oddly enough, we do. We want the killing to stop. We want the people of Gaza to find their way to a stable nation and economy that will contribute to the region. Therein lies all the difference in the world.
Or not. It's up to them.
Our anthem is HaTikvah....The Hope. I am supposed to leave for Israel in a couple of weeks. Just my usual trip to see friends. I don't know if I'm going yet. I can cancel, but that would mean giving up hope that I'm getting on that flight. I'm not ready to do that quite yet.
The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week
Never stop hoping
There's the rolling pin my Great-grandmother and doppelgänger Nechama brought with her from the shtetl near Minsk. We know it's milchig (dairy) because there's a notch on the end. My Aunt Yetta's shabbat candlesticks were passed to me by Aunt Rose (her sister) and Grandma Sarah (her sister-in-law) at her specific request, held by Grandma until I had a home of my own. And later, Grandma Sarah and Grandpa Moishe's 50th wedding anniversary Kiddush cup found its way to our table...along with other family cups.
