“Did they really decapitate babies?” My 14-year-old daughter asked me yesterday. She was pointing to a text message on her phone from a friend. “They’re saying they found Jewish babies killed, some burnt, some decapitated.” And I was taken aback. Not because I couldn’t find the right words to respond—although, truthfully, I was unsure of what to say—but because for a brief moment, I forgot which century I was living in. Suddenly, all the assumptions I had as a Jewish father, even one who grew up with the Holocaust just a few decades behind, felt irrelevant. Had I adequately prepared her for the horrifying reality of Jewish death, something that every child growing up in a shtetl would have been intimately familiar with?
Later that day, she asked me if she should remove the Hebrew necklace her grandparents had given her, out of safety concerns. She loves that necklace, but now it felt like a symbol that made her a potential target. The recent attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians shattered something within me. I had always resisted embracing victimhood. It seemed repugnant and self-pitying, especially in a world that seemed far removed from the horrors of the Inquisition and Babi Yar. After all, I live in the United States, where polls consistently show that Jews are the most beloved religious group. I wasn’t blind to anti-Semitism and the increased threats against Jews, or the constant fear my family in Israel lives with every time there’s a terrorist attack on a bus or in a café. Those sorrows have always been a part of my life. But I refused to adopt the sentiment that “They will always want to kill us.” I despised the idea that if people want to kill us, then we owe them nothing, not even our empathy. I criticized the Israeli occupation for the suffering it has inflicted upon generations of Palestinians, as well as its corrosive effects on Israeli society. While I felt pain when settlers in the West Bank were attacked, I also felt anger that they had chosen to live there in the first place. In short, I believed I had transcended the worldview of my survivor grandparents, and I considered myself superior for it.
But something inside me broke. As I was driving on Tuesday, I listened to a BBC interview with Shir Golan, a 22-year-old survivor of the recent attack at a music festival where over 250 people were killed. Her voice sounded just like that of my young Israeli cousins. She described, with breathless urgency, how the shooting started and how she ran for her life. She found a hiding spot in a wooded area, burying herself under dirt and leaves. Covered in filth, she waited. Terrorists arrived and called for anyone in hiding to come out. From her concealed position, she witnessed three young people emerge, whom she referred to as “children.” “I didn’t come out because I was scared. But those three children did. And then they were shot. One after another. And they fell down. I saw the children fall down. All I could do was pray. I prayed to my god to save me.”
My hands were shaking as I pulled over my car to listen. Her story transported me back to the stories my grandparents told me. My grandmother hiding in a hole in the Polish countryside for a year, also wracked with fear. My grandfather surviving months in Majdanek, a death camp, witnessing bodies piling up in a similar manner. Reports are emerging of families burned alive, children forced to watch their parents being killed before their eyes, bodies desecrated. How could this happen in the present day, on a Saturday like any other?
But it wasn’t these stories alone that shattered me. It was the chasm between what was happening in my mind and what was happening around me. Those who are meant to care about human suffering, regardless of its origin, seemed unable to see beyond their fixed perspectives of colonizer and colonized, evil Israelis and righteous Palestinians. The disconnect between their rhetoric and the reality of Jewish suffering was stunning. I witnessed callousness in various forms, from tweets that dismissed Jewish lives to statements by Harvard student groups blaming Israel entirely for the violence. Even the more subtly worded posts made it clear that Israel was somehow deserving of its fate. The real world echoed this callousness, with a Times Square protest organized by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, where speakers advocated for any means necessary to “retake the land from the river to the sea.” In the midst of all this, there were silences. Institutions that had swiftly condemned other acts of violence suddenly seemed at a loss for words. I watched my phone, waiting for messages from friends expressing concern for my family’s safety. Some did reach out with genuine care, but many did not.
I’m still grappling with this feeling of abandonment. Is it my own fault for being naive? Did I prioritize universalism to the point of neglecting the specific concerns of my own people? Even as I write this, I hesitate to believe it. However, if I can fault myself for anything, it would be not recognizing that the ideological hardening I had witnessed on the right in recent years, the blind allegiances and distorted narratives despite glaring reality, had also taken hold, to a greater extent than I could have imagined, on the left, among those who I considered to be aligned with my own values. They couldn’t see the moral abomination in front of them. They were so entrenched in their categories that they failed to distinguish between the Palestinian people and a genocidal cult claiming to represent them. They couldn’t acknowledge the hundreds of senseless deaths because the victims were Israelis, and therefore, the enemy.
As the days pass, the horrifying details of what happened—particularly the deaths of innocent babies—begin to sink in, carrying with them a level of disbelief and grief that is hard to comprehend.
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