Since October 7th not a day goes by where I’m not thinking of Israel. Thinking of my friends who are on the front lines. Thinking of the children of my friends who are fighting in the IDF against Hamas. Thinking of my friends still running to their safe rooms due to the rockets. Thinking of my friends on the moshav who need help harvesting the crops. Thinking of the more than 260,000 Israeli refugees who fled their homes more than 2 months ago and have been living in one hotel room for an entire family since then. I think about what it’s like to share a hotel room with my 2 adult children for a night or two and can’t imagine more than 2 months of that being our home. Without our things. Without a kitchen.
I use the term Israeli refugees instead of evacuees because I have been an evacuee. In 1979 we lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania when the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident happened. We evacuated to my grandparents’ home in Connecticut for a week and then returned home. Living in Florida, we have evacuated to my in-laws in Gainesville when a hurricane is coming. We’re usually there for a day or two and then return home. Spending more than two months out of your home, with no return in sight, is not being an evacuee. It’s being a refugee.
Israel is a small country, and everybody is family. I learn more about the cost of October 7th all the time. I have two friends who have family members who were taken hostage by Hamas into Gaza. Thankfully they were all returned in the last ceasefire. I have a friend whose cousin was murdered at the music festival. I have a friend whose son was an IDF soldier that was killed in the fighting on October 7th. Being Jewish isn’t about our religion, it’s about being part of a people. It’s being mishpacha, Hebrew for family. Every day when the names of the soldiers who were killed are released, I take a deep breath and then read the names, hoping and praying that they are not names that I know. And when they are not people that I know, I am deeply sad because they are people I will never get to know. People who paid the ultimate sacrifice to save Israel and fight for the Jewish people.
I learned today that there is currently a 60% dropout rate in Israeli high schools. Think about that – 60% of high school students have dropped out. Maybe they will return when the war is over. Maybe they won’t. How will this affect the IDF, where they normally join after graduation? What if they go back but are a year behind? That means that 60% of those who would normally be joining the IDF are not. How does this affect their long-term success, when military service and the unit you serve in is so integral to future opportunities?
A friend of mine is from Sderot, a town on the Gaza border that I have visited many times. The playgrounds are also bomb shelters. The movie theater is also a bomb shelter because why would anybody go to the movies if it wasn’t with the regular rockets fired by Hamas at Sderot. I’ve been to the police station there many times where they talk to us about the ongoing rocket attacks and show us the rockets that Hamas fired at Sderot. A friend who was in Sderot just a few weeks ago sent me a picture of the police station. It’s gone, completely leveled. My friend who lives there went back last week and told me that the town is empty. There is nobody there because it’s not safe. My heart breaks for my brothers and sisters who live on the border and are now refugees inside Israel.
My friends who live on moshav Bitzaron in southern Israel need help harvesting their crops. I think of how I can put together a mission to help them and how I can approach my wife and children about doing that since they don’t want me to go because they are in fear for my safety in a war. I haven’t figured out a way to bring that up in a way that wouldn’t get them angry at me for even talking about it, knowing how they feel.
I think about the rise of antisemitism that I have seen and been talking about for a decade. I wrote a piece with some colleagues in 2016 for the Seattle Times. That was more than 7 years ago and yet it has grown. And I think about the op-Ed disagreeing with me, saying that antisemitism wasn’t a problem and how frustrating it was then and how angry it makes me today. Over the past 75 years we have convinced ourselves in the United States that we are US citizens just like anybody else. That antisemitism was going away because of wonders of the United States and our freedom of religion. Our Jewish history is that we forget who we are due to assimilation. Here we are again.
In a piece by Daniel Gordis today, he wrote about how, as Jews, our history in the diaspora has always been based on the question, “How long are we going to be here until we get thrown out. Now, why would anybody think they were going to get thrown out? Because they always did.” Whether it was England in the 1200s, the Spanish Inquisition, the pogroms in Poland/Russia in the 1800s and 1900s, Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, or the many Arab states in the more recent past, this is our history. Once again, we are finding ourselves facing this hatred in the US and around the world. Only now we have Israel, our homeland.
I have had a number of people reach out to me to ask questions about what’s going on in Israel and to ask for clarity on many things that they are hearing, or friends are saying to them. It’s startling to me the lack of information that so many smart, well-educated people have. The number of people who don’t know that Gaza hasn’t been occupied since 2005 is shocking. Or that Gaza has a border with Egypt. Or that the blockade didn’t occur until after Hamas took over and started raining bombs and attacking through the tunnels they built. People don’t know that Israel has been sending in humanitarian aid and continues to increase it. There continue to be cries for Ceasefire Now, not understanding that what they are asking for is Israel to allow Hamas to restock, rebuild, and attack again, killing more Jews and resulting in the death of more Gazans. The lack of information is an incredible failure in Israel education. It’s why I volunteer my time as a board member for the Center for Israel Education. I’m proud of the work they do and we need much more of it. Check out the website – it’s worth it and the amount of information available is incredible.
I think about the word Zionism and how many people don’t know what it means. How many people think that it means you can’t criticize the government (I don’t know a single Israeli who doesn’t criticize the Israeli government!!). They think it means that only Jews get to live in Israel. They think it means that if you aren’t Jewish and are a citizen in Israel, you don’t have equal rights. They don’t know that it’s simply the right for Jews to have self determination and a state of their own.
Since October 7th, I think too much. Yet if I don’t think about these things and do whatever I can to deal with them, who am I? What do I stand for? Each of us has a role to play. We can speak out. We can educate those who don’t know. We can learn more ourselves.
What are you going to do?
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