You do not simply move across the world at age 25 to a country with a foreign language you do not speak, whose bureaucracy is famous, and whose people are known to resemble a cactus that is sharp on the outside, and sweet only on the inside.
You do not simply force yourself to learn that language, answering over and over again in Hebrew even when people make it clear that their English is better than your Hebrew, sitting through professional meetings and coming out with a headache from the level of concentration needed.
You do not give birth three children in that country, figuring out not merely the maze of pregnancy, but of gestational diabetes and contractions and pain and epidurals, all in Hebrew.
You do not sit through years of ceremonies for fallen soldiers, sick to your stomach that you will one day cheer your children as they enter that same army, praying to a God you may or may not believe in that they will return home.
You do not bury your beloved father without your spouse and children, who are thousands of miles away, and fly 12 hours during a pandemic to get back to them, just days after you buried him.
You do not do these things.
You do not, unless you are mad. Madly in love, passionately enthralled, entirely overly optimistic.
My love affair with Israel is the longest one in my life, having begun in early childhood. I love Israel the way I love my children—beyond all reason, without logic, simply because it is mine. Israel is my home, the beat of my heart, the steps I take, and the glasses through which I see the world.
And just as if my children were to commit terrible crimes, I would take them to task, not with any less love, but because of that very love, so too do I criticize the state of Israel and its nightmarish government.
My Israel is an entirely different one than the one portrayed in the media today, and I worry that it is under deep threat. That specific level of fear and my love for my children are the only things that would move me from the place I love so deeply. The fact that I have left is a devastating loss I’m not sure I will ever fully recover from.
But none of that is the point.
The point is this: none of this matters if we become the terrorists.
October 7 was a horrifying day. It was a nightmare. I ran down two flights of stairs to the communal bomb shelter with my kids, baby at the breast, multiple times. We debated if we were safer downstairs in the safe room (potentially terrorists could get in?) or in our apartment (potentially rockets could get in?).
I panicked when I realized my host sister—an 18-year-old I had known since her first birthday—was living in Sderot. Videos of terrorists roaming the city left me short of breath. I waited, heart racing, for confirmation that she was safe.
I learned that my friends’s son had been murdered in his own home, and tried to figure out what on earth to whatsapp her.
I functioned like some sort of zombie that day, and in the ones that followed. How could such things happen? How could the world be silent, as our babies were murdered, families butchered in their own homes? HOW COULD THEY?
When just a week later, we left Israel on literally eight hours’ notice, arriving at the airport with no idea where we were going, only that we were on a flight, with four suitcases total, I continued on. What choice was there?
And in the weeks that followed, as we debated and wanted to be wrong to have come to the US, and decided to stay, my heart broke, and broke, and broke.
Leaving my home. Leaving my friends. Leaving Itzik, the man who stands outside his shop and we pass on the way to school every day. Leaving the scones at La Maison, perfectly fluffy and served with a different dose of friends walking by each time. Leaving the place where everyone raises each other’s children, where the air is ripe with shabbat on Friday afternoons, where I feel at home.
I tell you this only because I need you to understand the depths of my love for Israel.
Because what I am going to say is more painful to me than you can possibly imagine, and I need you to know that this pain only comes from love.
We are becoming the ones we hate.
Hamas is torturing the Palestinians, and we are their partner.
Before I go further, a reminder of my credentials: I have an MA in Government, specialization in counter-terrorism and homeland security, from Reichman University in Israel. I studied abroad in South Africa, learning about apartheid, restorative justice, and how communities break, and heal. I have written about the international laws of war, and studied criminology, finally understanding that different people and cultures respond in varying ways to crime. With a degree in philosophy, I can talk utilitarianism versus deontology until I’m blue in the face.
And I lived 14 years in Israel. I worked in the non-profit sector, with friends who were ultra-orthodox wig wearers, and proud Ethiopian Jews. My friends with tattoos outnumbered those who kept shabbat but when I sat shiva for my father for one day, and more than 80 friends came to visit, they were wearing and not wearing kippot, skirts, tattoos. They had voted for the left wing, and the right. They came from the West Bank, and from Haifa, and from Jerusalem. I was proud of how many friends I disagreed with. I still am.
We are becoming the ones we hate.
October 7th mattered to me because Jewish lives are important. But Jewish lives, as much as they matter, aren’t the only ones that do.
The Israeli government is currently taking actions against Palestinian people that undermine both Israel and the Palestinians. They are illegal, and they are disgusting. They are stupid.
After October 7th, the violence in the West Bank reached new heights. If you haven’t listened to this episode (link in comment) of This American Life, do that now. It will make you sick. Do it anyway.
After October 7th, when we were full of rage and righteous anger, we could have built an alternative. We could have imagined and built a secure future, for ourselves and our children. Of course we had to take down Hamas. Of course not all Palestinians are Hamas. Israel should have built up the Palestinians who oppose Hamas—and let’s be real, when Hamas was elected in 2005, the majority of today’s Gazans were not yet born.
And the government did the opposite: the NY Times published a scrupulously researched, devastating takedown (link in comments) of Israel’s massive governmental failures and the way the extreme right has come to power.
Between the podcast and that article, you will learn of children regularly stoned by settlers on their way to school, of masked settlers attacking Palestinians at home in the middle of the day, of murders of Palestinians and destructions of their home with absolutely no consequences for the masked Jewish terrorists perpetrating them, hiding their faces like the criminals they know they are.
Being Jewish does not make you incapable of being a terrorist.
Murders of innocents in broad daylight. Brutality against children. Unprovoked terror. October 7th, or the West Bank on a Tuesday? Writing that question makes me want to throw up.
None of this is even getting in to Gaza, and the absolute and sheer Hell being lived by millions of people. When they tried to rise up, when they protested the government elected before they were born?
Look at Odai Al-Rubai. At 22, he protested 18 years of Hamas’ rule in the Gaza Strip. He should have been hoisted on the shoulders of all who want a safe Israel, for wanting better. Instead, “In retaliation, Al-Rubai’s family says, he was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by members of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades. Then his body was dumped in front of the family home.” (Source in comments)
Hamas is kidnapping, torturing, and murdering. Both Jews, and those Palestinians who want something better.
People in Gaza are starving. I don’t care if your definition of starving matches the UN definition or anyone else’s. There’s very clearly not enough food, and I don’t care whose fault it is. If Israel decided tomorrow to get food into the hands of everyone in Gaza, it would be done. Why aren’t we doing it? Why are we letting children starve?
When the state of Israel was created, the Jewish people were the weak ones. After the horrors of the Shoah, Jews desperately needed a place to call home, and our ancient homeland was chosen. We made the desert bloom. We did that. I will never forget the pride of my husband’s grandparents. He barely survived Auschwitz, and they married in a DP camp, coming to Israel with less than nothing and building a beautiful family and life.
And now our people, “light unto the nations” that we are supposed to be, is sanctioning the economic, social, financial ruin of a people. We are not listening to our own army, (link in comments) whose soldiers are increasingly refusing to fight a war that’s become indefensible.
Our soldiers are literally dying by suicide in record numbers (link in comments). The war is starving them, and poisoning us.
We are hitting a point of no return.
I don’t have a catchy end to this. I don’t know what the solution is. I’d truly love to be proven wrong on anything I’ve written here. There are people who know so much more about all of this than I do.
But I know that my heart is aching, and that is why I speak up and out. Not because I do not love Israel, but because my love for Israel demands my voice.
