As I write this, I’m on an El Al flight to Israel. It is my third trip since May. My 23rd trip overall. My third since October 7th and my first since the murder of Hersh Goldberg Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Carmel Gat, Almog Sarusi, Alex Lobanov, and Ori Danino.

I had fun going through El Al security. The security agent and I had a great conversation and she even spoke to me in Hebrew and I understood about 2/3 of it and got the entire gist of what she is saying. I still can’t speak Hebrew but she enjoyed my struggle to understand. I got a pass for the El Al lounge and my seat upgraded (which helps on a 10 1/2 hour flight). I ran into my friend James Cohen, the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Minneapolis, in the lounge. That’s what happens with Israel travel. You always run into somebody that you know. I talked a bit with my seatmates and have been working using the in-flight internet even as we are over the Atlantic Ocean. Pretty amazing.

I am both excited and a bit apprehensive with this trip. Excited because I love Israel and will get to explore the work of a client of mine, Dror Israel, a bit more. I get to see friends who live in Israel and spend time with colleagues who are also friends. I’m a bit apprehensive because it’s the first time since the murder of those six hostages. I still feel the effects of learning of their murder. It was a version of October 7th all over again. I’m not sure to expect or how I’ll feel when I land and while I am in Tel Aviv and around Israel.

Last night, a friend and client of mine invited me to join him to hear Douglas Murray speak in Miami Beach. I became a fan of Douglas when he was writing about poetry once a week for The Free Press. His writing helped me better understand and connect with poetry and for a while, I wrote about music lyrics the way he wrote about poetry. I’m no Douglas Murray, so I stopped. Since then, I have become a big fan of his public outspoken support of Israel, his clear understanding of what is really happening in Israel, Gaza, and with the war. His willingness to be on site and report and then take on those who know nothing and like to repeat the Hamas lies as facts. My friend and client knows Douglas personally so we got great seats and the invitation to meet him after the event.

He started his talk by showing videos of when he went both to the devastated Kibbutzim in the south that were attacked by Hamas. The videos were nothing I hadn’t seen before. To be honest, I watched the videos before to understand – having been to Kfar Aza twice and the Nova site twice, having heard from survivors of Nova, survivors from Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Alumim, parents of hostages, and leaders in the IDF, I stopped watching them. This was the first time I watched the horror since my visits to Israel resumed in May. They hit me differently this time. It wasn’t the videos. It wasn’t his description. It was a sensory effect I had. I could smell the area. I could feel what I felt standing in Kfar Aza and at Nova. The horror listening to the survivor from Nova and then months later visiting the bomb shelter she hid in, that 12 people were murdered in, where she hid under dead bodies and used them to protect herself from bullets and grenades. It was the look in my friend Yaron’s face when I saw him a few days after he left Gaza after the first four months of the war. It was a gut punch that I didn’t expect.

Douglas was then joined by Natasha Hausdorff, a British attorney who fights publicly for Israel the way Douglas does. Natasha and Douglas are an amazing team who debate together and fight to educate peole together about what is really happening.

Nothing that they discussed was new to me. Nothing was unexpected. Yet there were a few things that really resonated, that made me think and will continue to make me think.

The first was about the campus protesters and those who are anti-Israel and Jew haters. Douglass said, “They never find a terrorist they don’t adore”. That statement struck me very powerfully as I see it with so many people. I see it with the Hollywood celebrities who try to seem intellectual by repeating the lies of Hamas. Even when they say some of the stupidest things, they double down on it, because, as Douglas said, they never find a terrorist they don’t adore. There is no winning with these people because there will always be a new terrorist for them to support.

When talking about the terrorists, he said, “It is impossible to imagine these people.” He is right. When I spent time in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria, and met with leaders of Palestinian civil society, there were people I met who inspired me and gave me hope for peace. In May I visited with one and we had an intense 90 minute conversation. It wasn’t easy. We didn’t agree on everything, but it gave me hope for a future where we can find common ground. During that trip, I also met with people who I truly believe would have killed me that minute if they could have. I heard from the head of the community center in the Aida refugee camp (which is really a city, not a refugee camp in any way but the fact the world supports them) who bragged about the suicide bomber from his community center, the person who he taught, who he mentored, and who listened to him and killed himself and Israeli’s by blowing himself up. I’ll never forget the look on his face, the pride in his voice, and how happy he was when talked about this suicide bomber. I think the only regret he had was that there was only one who actually followed through.

On my two visits to Kfar Aza, I listened to people talk about the second and third wave on October 7th of people coming to the Kibbutz. They came to steal and loot. They took shoes off the dead bodies, stole jewelry, art, and anything of value. One man told us how he watched a man on crutches arrive from Jabalia, go into a house and take a TV off the wall, strap it to his back, and using crutches return to Gaza. The horror they shared of how the people they knew and the people they had at their dinner table and considered friends were the ones who mapped out the kibbutz for Hamas to attack and then came to loot and steal is something I will never forget. The anti-Israel crowd and those who want peace at any cost think it can happen because they think the terrorists want the same things we do. They don’t. As Douglas said, it is impossible to imagine these people.

The two of them were talking about the Philadelphi corridor the UN and the UN peacekeeping force that has been proposed. Douglas talked about how at the end of the war with Lebanon, Israel withdrew and there was a UN peacekeeping force put in place between Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Israel. He was there watching as they pulled out in their UN truck. Rockets then flew over their head, shot by Hezbollah into Israel. The ‘peacekeepers’ stopped, waited for them to pass by, and then turned around and sped back to their base. In his words, this “is not peacekeeping. It is war watching.” His point is that unless Israel maintains the security in the Philadelphi corridor, where there are tunnels big enough that trucks drive through them, where there is so much soot on the walls from the exhaust from these trucks that it is obvious what was happening and that this is how Egypt was supplying Hamas with weapons and rockets, it will simply happen again. The UN is not going to stop them. Egypt was culpable before October 7th, why would they be trustworthy now? Unless it is Israel monitoring that border, we will simply be back to war watching and rearming Hamas.

As they talked about about what they saw in Gaza, the facts were astounding. Every other house had either weapons stored in it or an entrance to the tunnel system. Every other house! They shared that what the IDF learned after going in and searching these houses is that there was no need to look for the weapons or the tunnel entrances in the kitchen or the living room. All they had to do was go to the children’s rooms. That is where the weapons were stored and found and that is where the entrance to the tunnels were found. The entrance to the tunnel where Hersh Goldberg Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Carmel Gat, Almog Sarusi, Alex Lobanov, and Ori Danino were kept and murdered was in a child’s room. You can see the Disney characters painted on the walls.

This is who Hamas is. This is what terrorism is. Use the child’s room for storing rockets, bombs, grenades and guns. Put the entrance to the tunnel system in the child’s room to ensure maximum protection for Hamas because they are being protected by children. As he said previously, “it is impossible to imagine these people.”

The last thing he said that really struck me was about the protesters on college campuses. He talked about how their goal is to be part of a revolution. It doesn’t matter what the revolution is about. It doesn’t matter if the end result is positive. They need to be a part of something. They need to find some connection and being part of a revolution is their way. I found myself wondering if they really are that desperate to find meaning in their lives. I wondered what we have done as a society to create people who need to live in hate to find common ground. People who don’t know how to connnect or find meaning so they search for anything they think will do it. It made me sad to think that the only way they gather and connect with people in person was to find an enemy to hate and through that hatred, they could find connection and meaning. This is the country we live in. This is the society we have built. I laugh with the friend I grew up with about how on weekends we could watch the morning cartoons and then we were kicked out of the house for the day. We drank from the hose because you couldn’t go in the house to get a drink – you had water right there! How we wandered the neighborhood together, rode bikes all over the place together, made up games to play to fill the time, and found meaning in being together. Can we ever get back to a place where our children learn that instead of video games and screens? What will we do to ensure they have meaning without hatred?

Douglas and Natasha brought a little more insight for me into what we are facing. It is evil. It is Jew hatred. It is ignorance. Perhaps it is also loneliness and a need to connect. Perhaps there is such a loss of meaning for this generation that they are willing to sell their souls to find that spark and that connection. While this is an existential threat to the State of Israel and the Jewish people, perhaps it is also an existential threat to our entire way of living. Douglas Murray’s bestseller, The War in the West addresses this. Are we willing to fight that war? How much do we really value our way of life?