For months, I couldn't figure out what I wanted to say on the anniversary of October 7.
I want to explain to the non-Jewish, non-Israeli world just why and how October 7 and its aftermath have been so painful.
This wasn't "just" another massacre. It wasn't "just" another terrorist attack. This was different, and I want all of you to understand why.
Comments closed for my mental sanity.
THE PAIN OF FAMILIARITY
There are 15 million Jews in the world. About half of them live in Israel. We are just 0.2 percent of the world’s population. Just about every single Jewish person in the world has family and/or friends living in Israel. We are a tiny minority. When one Jew is hurting, all Jews are hurting.
Some 1200 Israelis were slaughtered over the course of several hours on October 7. Proportionally speaking, this would be equivalent to the slaughter of 50,000 Americans in a single day. But it wasn’t just murder. About 80 percent of the bodies showed signs of torture, including mutilation, decapitation, and rape. And while of course the very idea of this happening to 50,000 Americans is absolutely horrifying, Jews are also a family in a way that Americans just are not. We have been a family for 3000 years. This didn’t happen to strangers. This happened to family members.
Just about every Jewish person is one to two degrees separated from at least one victim, survivor, or hostage of October 7. Everyone in Israel knows somebody. Every single time I post something about a victim or survivor of October 7, I get a flurry of messages from my Jewish followers: “that’s my aunt,” “that’s my cousin,” “that’s my brother’s close friend,” “I met her once.”
As Jewish poet and activist Emma Lazarus wrote in 1883 when describing the violent massacres rampaging the Jews of the Russian Empire, “when the life and property of a Jew in the uttermost provinces of the Caucuses are attacked, the dignity of a Jew in free America is humiliated.” Likewise, the Talmud tells us, “All of Israel [the Jewish people] is responsible for one another.”
On October 7, all of Israel was responsible for one another. And yet we we were helpless to save 1200 of our brothers and sisters from the worst of humanity. That’s an intimate, personal kind of hurt that is difficult to explain.
THE PAIN OF GENERATIONAL TRAUMA
Entire Jewish families set on fire. Children hiding in cupboards from monsters who came to kill them. Killers shooting at Jews running across a field as though it were for sport. Jews begging for their lives just before being mercilessly executed, at point-blank range. Mutilated Jewish corpses paraded across the streets to cheering crowds of thousands of civilians. Kicking, spitting, jeering.
This depravity evoked the most painful memories of the Holocaust.
I tried to explain this to my therapist. “October 7 felt like a PTSD flashback to a trauma that isn’t mine,” I said. “A trauma that I never personally went through.”
It’s true. I’ve never personally survived the Holocaust, or any of the myriad of pogroms in Europe and the Middle East, or the Farhud, or the Inquisition. I hadn’t been born yet! But I carry those traumas in my bones, in my blood. On October 7, I felt all of it, for the first time, but also for the millionth time. It’s difficult to explain.
Jews believe that every single Jewish soul — past, present, and future — was present at Mount Sinai when Moses received the Ten Commandments. The suffering of our ancestors is our suffering; the joy of our ancestors is our joy. For example, we are commanded during Passover to see ourselves as though we, ourselves, were slaves in Egypt.
Maybe this explains what I felt on October 7.
THE PAIN OF WIDESPREAD COMPLICITY
As of the writing of this post, the Red Cross, violating its very own mandate, has not visited the hostages in Gaza once. You could argue, of course, that only Hamas and its terrorist allies have access to the hostages, and none of this is the Red Cross’s fault. This would be a valid argument, I guess, if the Red Cross was exhausting every possible avenue to reach the hostages. But they haven’t. They haven’t even tried. Instead, they’ve chastised the families of the hostages, telling them to put aside their agony and “think about the people in Gaza.”
It’s hard to describe the abandonment that you feel when the very “humanitarian” institutions that are meant to protect you betray you. During the Holocaust, the Red Cross toured Auschwitz and announced that they had not found “extermination installations,” an obvious bold-faced lie to anyone who has ever stepped foot in the Nazis’ largest death camp. After the Holocaust, it was the Red Cross, with the collaboration of the Vatican, that helped tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals escape to South America. The head of the Red Cross decried the Nuremberg Trials as “Jewish revenge,” as though there’s something nefarious about bringing Jew-killers to justice.
The United Nations, the supposed safeguard of human rights, was actively complicit in October 7 and has been complicit every day since. It’s impossible to get past the bone-chilling betrayal of seeing United Nations workers slaughtering and kidnapping Jews on camera, or reading as thousands of United Nations employees cheered on the massacre on Telegram. And that’s without even mentioning the weaponry and tunnels found disguised within United Nations facilities in the Gaza Strip, sometimes going so far as to share internet and utilities with a Hamas command center. They knew.
It’s one thing when the bad guys are the bad guys. But what happens when the “good guys” are the bad guys, too? Where do we feel safe?
THE PAIN OF INFORMATION WARFARE
Hamas has a tried and true war strategy, one they’ve admitted to themselves: because they can’t beat Israel through military means, they work hard to demonize the Jewish state in the media, hoping that such demonization will translate to immense diplomatic pressure. So far, the strategy has worked. It works because you’ve allowed it to.
It goes even further, though, than Hamas’s account of the events happening in Gaza. This is information warfare of the highest degree, an attack on the very history and identity of the Jewish people, a history and identity that predates this conflict by 3000 years. Blatant lies and distortions have been spread so widely that they are now taken as fact by professors at the most prestigious educational institutions.
Gazan “influencers” like Bisan Owda yield such enormous influence that they win Emmys and are nominated for Nobel Peace Prizes, despite the fact that media in Gaza is tightly controlled by Hamas, and despite their well-documented nefarious terrorist affiliations and their spread of blatant misinformation about everything ranging from Jewish history to the polio vaccination.
Al Jazeera, a well-established Hamas propaganda mouthpiece, accuses Israel of carrying out a war on journalists, all the while its own journalists participated in October 7, one even holding three hostages in his home as he published his think pieces.
Time after time after time, Hamas makes a claim, and the media runs with it, front page in big bold letters, only for it to be retracted a few weeks later, at the bottom of the page, in the fine print. But by then it’s already too late, because the media’s lies have inspired such fury that Jews across the world are punished for Israel’s invented sins. The media accepts Hamas’s lies as fact, and the oldest synagogue in Tunisia burns to the ground. The media accepts Hamas’s lies as fact, and a plane full of Jews is ambushed in Dagestan in an attempted pogrom. Wash, rinse, repeat.
THE PAIN OF DEHUMANIZATION
On October 7, former porn star, Mia Khalifa, tweeted, “Can someone tell the freedom fighters in Palestine to flip their phone horizontal?” Black Lives Matter Chicago posted a graphic in support of the Palestinian “resistance,” with an image of a paraglider, alluding to the terrorists that infiltrated Israel’s southern communities via paraglider. Someone else tweeted, “What did y’all think decolonization was? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.” All this while children were being set on fire. On camera.
The following day, thousands wrapped in keffiyehs and Palestinian flags gathered in the middle of Times Square to cheer the massacre. “By any means necessary!” their signs declared. The means in question? Children burnt to ashes.
If every single part of you doesn’t recoil at the thought of a small child being set on fire — especially intentionally— you are irredeemably lost. You, for some reason, have dehumanized that child to such a severe extent that you no longer see them as a living, breathing being. In this case, the reason is antisemitism. Genocidal, Nazi-esque antisemitism. For a year, so-called righteous social justice activists have ripped down the hostage posters of Kfir Bibas, a year-old baby who was only nine months when he was abducted. An infant. Innocent by every single metric.
I knew about the dehumanization of Jews in the Palestinian Territories, which is so heavily embedded into the Palestinian school curriculum, the speeches in the mosques, the programming on television, and the declarations of Palestinian politicians. I suppose I wasn’t shocked that the most hardened Palestinian terrorists would go so far as to do what they did. I wasn’t even entirely shocked that so many “civilians” participated in gruesome ways, such as by decapitating a Thai foreign worker whose only crime was working for Jews, or by purchasing a Jewish skull and storing it for months in an ice cream freezer in Gaza.
But you? In the west? I was well aware of the dehumanization of “Israelis” and “Zionists,” of course. I just didn’t think we were here yet. I thought it was more fringe. I thought maybe we still had a little time. The pain of realizing that it’s too late is indescribable.
THE PAIN OF LOSING TRUST
The other day, I was at the doctor. My doctor asked me if I was Jewish. I internally recoiled. My brain switched into panic mode, until I realized that she was asking me for medical reasons, because some genetic diseases are widespread among Jews. A few years ago, the question wouldn’t have phased me. This time, for just a split second, it felt like a threat.
I don’t feel safe around anyone. I no longer want to do the things I love to do, the things unrelated to my Jewishness, such as rock climbing, because I don’t trust that the people around me wouldn’t have cheered for my death — or at least justified it, excused it, or minimized it — had I been in Israel on October 7 (I had been in Israel about a week or so beforehand. It really could’ve been me).
I’m scared to meet new people because how am I supposed to know if they’re safe? How do I know that they haven’t dehumanized me and my people? Is it worth it to pursue new friendships, only to be met with crushing disappointment? Again and again and again and again?
And what about old friends? Friends I haven’t spoken to in a while? How can I trust that, in the time we’ve been out of touch, they haven’t drank the Jew-hate Kool Aid? If I don’t hear from someone for some time, I start to worry. Have they been swayed by the mob, at last? Is that why they’ve disappeared?
It feels really lonely, walking through the world like this.
THE PAIN OF IT BEING EVERYWHERE
There is no reprieve from the pain of October 7, and everything that comes with it -- the vile antisemitic rhetoric, the erasure of our history and peoplehood, the dehumanization of the hostages -- because it’s absolutely everywhere. Everywhere.
Suddenly, our favorite actors and musicians, who up until October 6 could not point to Gaza on a map, and probably still can’t, have become experts on the geopolitics and history of the Middle East. Our friends, who couldn’t be bothered to publicly condemn the burning of our children, now post terrorist propaganda daily, without an afterthought. Even some of our family members have drank the Kool-Aid. We can’t escape it.
When we walk down the street, the faces of our hostages are ripped to shreds, their posters torn and discarded. When we go to a bar or a restaurant, the bathroom stalls are defaced with pro-Hamas graffiti. Palestine -- this distorted, ahistorical, libelous, factually-inaccurate version of Palestine -- comes up in every conversation, online and offline, at all times. And oftentimes, it’s demanded of us that we answer for it. It’s exhausting, demoralizing.
The spaces that were once safe to us -- for me it was rock climbing; for you it was probably something else -- are no longer safe to us, because they’ve become spaces that have been entirely hijacked by this rhetoric. We are forced to withdraw into ourselves, but even among ourselves, October 7 and its painful aftermath is all we can think about.
THE PAIN OF LIVING IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE
For a year, I feel as though I’ve lived in a parallel universe, an alternative reality. A parallel universe in which rapists are freedom fighters and kidnapping infants from their cribs is decolonization. A parallel universe in which conquest makes you Indigenous if you just conquer for long enough, and land back makes you the colonizer. A parallel universe in which feminists believe women but only so long as they’re not Jewish women. A parallel universe in which multi-billionaires living in Qatari suites are oppressed. A parallel universe in which imperialism is anti-imperialism so long as it’s of the Islamic and Arab variety. A parallel universe in which a country the size of New Jersey is attacked on seven different fronts and is somehow still perceived as the aggressor.
A parallel universe in which the media and politicians insist protestors chanting to “globalize the intifada!” and “by any means necessary!” are anti-war protestors acting out of concern for human rights. A parallel universe in which the president of the United States sees protestors waving Hezbollah and Hamas flags and says “the protestors outside have a point,” despite the fact that both Hezbollah and Hamas are internationally-recognized terrorist organizations which have stolen countless American lives.
A parallel universe in which facts and independent verification don’t matter and “I ain’t reading all that, free Palestine” is considered a good clapback. A parallel universe in which the Jewish narrative and experience is dismissed for being that of the “white man,” when only 79 years ago we were being corralled by the millions into the gas chambers precisely because we were not white. A parallel universe in which the most blatant, vile, Medieval antisemitism is neither the world’s oldest hatred nor a cause for serious concern, but rather, nothing more than a tool to silence Israel’s “critics.” A parallel universe in which daily violence against Jews leads to condemnations of Islamophobia.
A parallel universe in which every day, I feel that I’m losing my mind. It’s all so blatant, so clear to me. How does no one else see it?
THE PAIN OF AN OPEN WOUND
Until all the hostages are home, we can’t even begin to heal. This started on October 7, 2023, but as long as this isn’t over, it’s still October 7, 2023. October 365th.
In Judaism, pidyon shvuyim -- the redeeming of the captives -- is considered a mitzvah (religious obligation/commandment), one that is even more important than clothing and feeding the poor. It is our obligation as the Jewish people and the Nation of Israel to bring our hostages home.
We cannot stop -- we will not stop -- until they are free.
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