Athena

When I was watching with pains squeezing my chest a 29-year-old Jewish woman named Arbel Yehoud be thrust through the streets of Gaza yesterday by her captors Hamas, and thousands of their civilian supporters, I thought of Athena. Athena was a Greek goddess who was supposed to represent justice, but she failed to live up to her purpose. When Medusa was raped by Poseidon in one of Athena's temples, Athena did not punish Poseidon. She punished Medusa instead. Once a beautiful maiden, Medusa was cursed and transformed into a Gorgon with snakes for hair, and if anyone looked at her, they would be turned to stone. I was thinking about the tale while watching Arbel, and it clicked: Athena punished Medusa instead of Poseidon, and today the world's leading “feminists” punish Jewish women instead of Hamas.

Arbel Yehoud, pale, terrified and thin, on her path to freedom from slavery was forced into a scene that the world's feminists turned their gaze from, and yet it is these scenes that they will reference all the time. They speak of the burning of witches, the Salem trials, the “hunting” of women famous and not, the denial of women into boys' clubs, etc, and they insist that they are doing heroic work, but yesterday we all watched as an army of men worse than 1,000 Andrew Tates on Andrew Tate’s very worst day appeared, multiplied and uninhibited, and they all came with weapons and iPhones and insults and spit, to surround Arbel in her final moments of captivity.

Arbel is not Blake Lively or Meghan Markle; she is not one of the Boko Haram captives recognized by Michelle Obama; she is not E Jean Carroll; she is not the French rape survivor Gisele Pelicot; she is not a woman screaming behind a keyboard about Elon Musk's “Nazi” salute, or Donald Trump's “war on women”. She is a Jew who has been in a dark tunnel by herself underfed with nothing but sea water to drink. Arbel held for almost 500 days; her first words upon her release to her family were: “I felt so lonely”. For almost 500 days she was kept by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, not Hamas, in complete isolation. The first time she met an Israeli was hours before her release, as she was united with Gadi Moses, an 80-year-old hostage, also released yesterday, whose picture below has been lauded for the notion of a Jewish smile of defiance amid a sea of terrorist savages.

Gadi Moses. They murdered his partner, Efrat Katz. They took Efrat’s daughter and two grandchildren hostage. They kidnapped his ex-wife Margarita. They incinerated his kibbutz Nir Oz and butchered his lifelong friends. There is only one man in the above picture. He survived it all.

But Arbel told a different story. Dragged through the streets of Gaza, Arbel held a look of fear on her face that reminds each and every one of us that it is still October 7. That's the noise that keeps us all awake at night. That's the dark circles under our eyes. That's the looming dread that accompanies even moments of joy in this time. It is still October 7. The men engulfed her, taking photos of her frightened emaciated figure, celebrating and jeering, screaming “Allahu Akbar” at her, praising their demented god for the terror that they deem holy. Before she walked her path to freedom, she was subjected to a kind of humiliation that was medieval. She was made to walk the plank in front of a baying crowd. And not only were they watching her, but people around the world watched her, and their silence suggests that they supported the men subjecting her to this barbaric scene, and not the single innocent woman who risked being lynched simply for walking to her freedom.

Never before have I seen such a scene, and I have witnessed many outlandish moments in my life, many of which have been historic.

Howard Jacobson wrote this more than a decade ago. He wrote this when pondering why Jews will never be forgiven for the Holocaust:

“The question is rhetorical. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust? Never. The shocking psychological truth is that man rejects the burden of guilt by turning the tables on those we have wronged and portraying ourselves as the victims of their suffering. The Roman historian Tacitus spells it out. “It is part of human life,” he wrote, “to hate the man you have hurt.” Those we harm, we blame — mobilizing dislike and even hatred in order to justify, after the event, the harm we did. From which it must follow that those who are harmed the most, as in the case of the Shoah — are blamed the most.”

Of course, any woman who has ever been punished relates to this quote. This is a quote about female survivors of abuse, of public humiliation, of rape. This is a quote about Medusa, and about what Athena did to Medusa.

This week began with International Holocaust Memorial Day, and the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The population of the Jewish people has never matched what it was in 1938. There are still fewer Jews alive in 2025 than there were 100 years ago. And yet, in the legacy media, and on political pulpits on Monday, nobody said the word “Jew” or “Jewish”. In fact, one news anchor said that “six million people” died in the Holocaust, in addition to “other ethnic minorities”. People? Random people? Never has it been more evident than in this post-October 7 living breathing nightmare that people may know something of what happened in the Holocaust but they have never been taught why or how it happened. The Holocaust no longer has anything to do with Jews for the majority of people who talk about it for their own political or strategic purposes. Juxtaposed with the bystanders who are seeing these scenes of abject Nazism live from Gaza by Hamas during the release of every modern day Jewish slave kept in captivity… It makes my bones freeze.

Eighty years is all it took.

On Monday I watched the world hijack the Holocaust for its own fake virtue, erasing once again the Jewish people from our own story, our own history, our own survival. What I find most extraordinary is that the Western world has been told to internalize shame and guilt over every single crime throughout history, from the American slave trade to British colonialism, but the same world expresses no remorse or true understanding of the biggest crime against humanity: the systematic murder of six million Jews.

Arbel Yehoud never once had the privilege of being recognized by an international women's group, by an organization such as Amnesty International, by a leading “feminist”, nor by the United Nations. She was ignored by them for 482 days. She is free but she did not go free without almost being lynched by hoards of terrorists and Gazan civilians before she was handed over to the IDF who returned her to her family at long last. I ask every woman I've ever advocated for: why don't you say her name?

Is that you, Athena?

Agam Berger was released on the same day as Arbel. She was forced to go on a similar stage to her four friends who were free’d five days before her: Liri Albag, Naama Levy, Karina Ariev and Daniella Gilboa. These five IDF observers were kidnapped in their pyjamas together, and survived their captivity mostly as a group, only to be cruelly separated moments before freedom. Alone, Agam went onstage, directed by Hamas to wave at the crowds. They filmed themselves directing her. Imagine if the moon landing had been staged by NASA and there was a cutaway shot broadcast to the world of a NASA engineer choreographing the moonwalk for a fake Neil Armstrong on a set? Hamas don’t care that they’re exposing themselves. They know nobody is checking. You can see it with your naked eye; witness Hamas humiliating a 20-year-old woman, staging this propaganda. It should sicken every single human heart because it is the sickest display we have seen via social media yet. But nobody will talk about it. Nobody will acknowledge it. Nobody.

Of course, this has all happened before. Babi Yar ring a bell? In the Soviet villages, the children didn’t watch the genocide of Jews on YouTube or X, or even their TV at the time. They went to the fields and they saw for themselves. Some of them were even tasked with bringing extra bullets for the Nazi officers who were mass shooting the Jews into pits in Ukraine in broad daylight.

There is something worse than never finding a voice to tell your own story. It’s telling your story and having the world continue to ignore it. The betrayal that accompanies this leaves a constant open wound. I’ve been staring at the keyboard all day, all week even, trying to find words to say that aren’t so abjectly bleak, given what has happened in the last seven days. And I got stuck on this idea about whether there’s utility to this… That’s not to say that I’m going to cease to do it, but does the idea cross my mind as to whether the doing it is the only way to recover from the pain?There has to be another way of surviving other than just trying to fight the avalanche of a world that hasn’t loved to hate us this extensively since this time last century.

I would love to put this question to all the trauma experts out there who have written the textbook and insisted that telling your story is the first step to recovery. To every expert in post trauma, to every advocate for women sexual assault survivors, to those who work in war trauma. This one is on behalf of the Jews. What happens when you tell the oldest story of survival and the world continues to ignore it? Were Holocaust survivors just your tools for research, or does Jewish trauma actually matter to you all beyond the depths of our suffering? Are we just rats in a lab, and you keep enough of us alive to keep testing us?

A lot of people are not ready for what we have to say, or what I have to say. I was discussing this at dinner earlier this week; the idea that you have to accept that people are going to take a long time to catch up to what you’re offering. They’re just not there yet. As I watched Agam Berger, Arbel Yahud and Gadi Moses in yet another Hamas grotesque spectacle in Gaza, my chest ached. How could it not? My heart is completely broken. And then there are moments when it beats despite this. Moments like this… Here are Liri, Naama, Daniella and Karina reunited with Agam in the Sheba Medical Center in Israel hours after Agam’s release:

In this hour, three more hostages are coming out of Gaza. All eyes will be on Yarden Bibas, who returns to Israel alone, without his wife Shiri and his two ginger-haired babies, Kfir and Ariel. We don't know their fate. We can only imagine. That is terror. Who needs Handmaids Tale when you have Gaza?

When I consider “Palestine” now, I think about how this subterranean hellhole is what Germany would have become in 1940-something were it not for the victory of the allies. The big reveal being that instead of a superlative German society, it would have become a cesspit of depravity. Only the spineless brain rotten Judenrein fantasists of the world who hate Jews so much that they can’t see the stench they bathe in would champion such a colony as Gaza; an underworld of rapists and child molesters.

It is the bystanders who have become Athena. We expect nothing more than this behavior from terrorists such as Hamas, but to the people who formed the organizations in the wake of the Holocaust that were intended to ensure that the world could never commit such a crime again (be it the UN or Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, or the practitioners of international law), we expected so much more than a complete capitulation to these psychopaths. They only deserve our wrath, and never our forgiveness.

President Trump may be the enemy of the “humanitarians” but he makes the most common sense to people who are invested in humanity. Not only has he signed an executive order this week to immediately deport all foreign visitors who are terrorism apologists attending or teaching at academic institutions in America, he has also told Egypt and Jordan that they will have to incorporate the 2 million Gazans into their populations whether they like it or not. Trump is finally a sitting President who understands that Israel cannot coexist with this savagery in the Gaza Strip. Romi Gonen’s sister Yarden stood in hostage square in Tel Aviv this week and said: “Thanks to President Trump, I can hug my sister again.” Yarden is right. Is someone going to tell Yarden Gonen, and the other hostage families who have said the same thing that they are wrong? Who would you be to do that?

I have stood in the wild and held lonely hands to make sure my sisters, Jewish or not, have never had to weather the storm of a cruel world alone, but this week seeing the most primitive spectacle in Gaza surround Jewish female hostages like witches at a Salem trial and having not a single fellow sister in this world take the hands of us Jewish women has crushed my soul in unforgettable ways.

Athena had to turn us into the monster to live with herself. But Athena was the monster all along.

As I publish this the Ubers arrive once more in Khan Younis to collect Yarden Bibas, Keith Siegel and Ofer Calderon. Did I say Ubers? I meant the Red Cross.

And while we await more potential scenes from the demons of modern Hades, Agam Berger celebrates her first Shabbat with her family tonight. She wrote this message on the helicopter that took her safely back to Israel yesterday.

“I chose the path of faith, and through faith I came home.”

Faith is the only answer.