I am an Israeli American, my family and friends in Israel are under Hamas rocket fire as I write these words. Many of my people have been murdered or injured. Many are mourning. Many others have been evacuated from their homes. Hundreds of men, women, children and babies have been abducted, leaving behind a nation in pain that is all too reminiscent of its harrowing past.
From my home in California I watch the horrors on television, my days and nights filled with frantic calls and texts to my loved ones in Israel. The palpable collective grief across Israel and the Jewish community is shocking to me, in spite of having grown up in Israel, post Holocaust, in a life cycled with war and terror.
I had just turned one year old when I took my first steps in the bomb shelter during the six-day war, when Israel was attacked by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The year I turned six, eleven Israeli athletes were murdered in the Olympic village in Munich, an act that didn’t result in a pause in the games or so much as a moment of silence. Just a year later, my parents fled our home with us three small children after a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria on Yom Kippur. I remember running down the stairs to the bomb shelter day and night, the sirens splitting my heart with unspeakable fear. The anxiety on the faces of my parents has haunted me ever since. Over the years, my country lived through terrorist infiltrations, murders, the hijacking of buses and planes, hostage taking, bus bombings, and suicide bombers. By the time I was nineteen, I attended many funerals of friends who will forever remain young. Death and I are no strangers, and I still have nightmares associated with those ruthless acts of violence. But none of that compares to what happened on October 7, 2023, when barbaric genocidal Jihadists broadcasted their atrocious crimes against humanity to the world live on social media. This is the first time I’ve ever heard Jewish people refer to anyone as being worse than the Nazis.
In the weeks since the attack however, some of my close friends have been silent. I wonder what happened to the “silence is violence” maxim. Instead, demands for “proof” of how many babies were murdered and exactly how they were murdered reverberate across social media platforms. I am confounded.
Photos of children that were murdered, burned alive, abducted, flood the waves of information, and flood my eyes with endless tears. I cry for the babies butchered in their beds in front of their helpless parents, I cry for the young women who were gang-raped in a dance music festival next to the dead bodies of their friends, then paraded half naked in front of cheering Gazans, I cry for the hundreds of hostages of all ages. It’s hard to write these words, and it should be hard to read them. But as heartbreaking as it is, we shouldn’t look away from the videos and photos provided by Hamas to document their own brutality against innocents. After watching, it shouldn’t be hard to discern who the bad guys are in this story.
Worse than the silence however, is the sudden outpouring of support for Palestinians, which feels eerily similar to the “all lives matter” slogan my liberal friends were so reviled by in 2020. Now, I am all for protecting innocent civilians in Gaza, and unlike Hamas, I believe in their human right to live in freedom and security. My problem? The many people who jumped on the “Palestinian rights” bandwagon on October 7, the day Jews experienced the worst massacre since the Holocaust. Yes, since the Holocaust. People that I have known for over a decade and had not posted anything about Palestinian rights on social media prior to October 7. Nor had they ever expressed any concern about what the Palestinians are subjected to by their murderous totalitarian fanatic Hamas government (which the majority of Gazans voted for in the one-time election back in January 2006). But, those same people found it necessary to show their support for Palestinians — and by extension, Hamas — at this of all times.
Israelis, myself included, are united in their ironclad resolve to protect their children from terrorism, and expect the Israeli government to go after Hamas with all force necessary to dismantle its murderous capabilities. Hamas and Israel cannot be compared. By the same token, Hamas and the Palestinians should not be conflated. Hamas is seeking to annihilate all the Jews (and if you don’t believe that, take a look at their own charter), but I don’t believe that goal is shared by all Gazans. So, we should not let Hamas terrorize us into a political debate sparked by their Jihadist atrocities. We should not let them put our children in the middle of this sick and dangerous game, and thereby legitimize the intentional and barbaric killing of innocent citizens in response to governmental policies. This is a time to stay on our guard and not let history repeat itself by denouncing terrorism and demanding the unconditional return of all hostages in the clearest of terms, for I still hope for a better future for our children, like my ancestors have done for millennia.
rikicarignan 