Biblical

I have been in Israel one week. It has felt like a year. So it's hard to know where to begin.

Let's begin with the Torah. In the book of Leviticus we hear about Moloch. Moloch is the pinnacle of false idolatry. Moloch sacrificed children in the name of a God. But whose God? And what kind of God would demand the performance of such rituals? What kind of God would teach that joy and purpose would come from these practices? That the pursuit of control would demand such dire acts of dehumanization?

In Howl, Ginsburg cries against Moloch. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” he begins. And here we are again.

“Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!”

Ginsburg may have used Moloch as a metaphor for American capitalism, but there's a primitiveness to Western ideologues right now. They have branded themselves in a faux anti-capitalist manner and aligned themselves with barbarism. They have sworn themselves in to a cult seeped in everything they claim to be against, in the theft of power, disguised as resistance. They are marching in the streets with ISIS flags and burning down buildings.

They are the “savage” in Bertrand Russell’s famous essay – “A Free Man's Worship”:

“The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods: surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has been freely given, their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will not be required. The religion of Moloch--as such creeds may be generically called--is in essence the cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshiped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.”

Meanwhile, the Jews dance on our toes over hot coals. The world watches us as we try to make that dance soulful. The world is worshipping a Moloch. Progressivism chose Hamas. You couldn't find a lesser deserving idol. Gaza is precisely what the progressive claims to hate: it is sexist, it is racist, it is homophobic, it is autocratic, it is fueled by religious dogma, it is a police state, it is oppressive. And yet they love it more than they love themselves.

"I don't agree with you" they say - to me. Which part? The part where Hamas torched the homes of peaceniks? Or the part where Israeli festivalgoers had to run into forests for miles while being hunted down and shot? Or the part where Jews were burned alive like they once were in the gas chambers? Or the part where women were raped and tortured and mutilated till there was no humanity left? Which part don't they agree with?

Moloch the loveless has wiped their critical thought process, and robbed their hearts.

Last Tuesday, I spent a few hours at a place the peacenik residents said was 90% heaven and 10% hell. They chose their own heaven. Kibbutz Kfar Aza was an upgrade for the exiled communities of Eastern European villages such as Anatevka in Fiddler On The Roof or the expelled towns in the MENA region, but Kibbutz Kfar Aza ended the same way. It became a godless hellmouth. The Jews who lived in this idyllic commune, motivated by peace and life, could never have imagined their fate on October 7. The destruction and annihilation was guileless Nazism.

As we approached Kfar Aza, smoke billowed from Gaza, which is a mere seven-minute drive from this village. The roads of the kibbutz are still lined with Sukkahs, because time has stood still here. It is still Succot in Kfar Aza. It is still October 7. In fact, it is October 87 there. “It is the land of the walking dead,” said an IDF spokesperson who let us inside. There is only one couple who have returned here to live. The rest are dispersed throughout Israel. In my own hotel, 30-40% of the people staying are residents from dispelled towns. And while these people may have survived. In their minds, they are still trapped in their safe rooms. It will take us a lifetime to recover from this trauma. Along the road of death, we passed the house that four-year-old Abigail Edan was taken from, after she hid in the cupboard all day long. We entered home after home. Belongings are still strewn in the distress of these crime scenes, where innocents were butchered. A copy of 1984 in Hebrew. An unused packet of Colgate teeth-whitening strips. A cupboard full of un-drunk beer. One house has been converted into a memorial for a young couple who were due to get married. A house of horrors, in which there was a stream of bloodshed, and gunshots all over the ceiling.

I am pictured below in front of Gaza – and Gaza City is about the distance between Silverlake Junction and Hollywood and Highland from here. This is where Hamas broke into the fence and began burning down and tearing through three generations of Jewish mishpacha, Jewish socialism, Jewish art, Jewish politics, Jewish coexistence, Jewish prosperity.

Maya (below) is an IDF reserve who now spends her days telling people the story of her friends’ parents who died in this – their “safe” room. She has their names written underneath the lapels of her army shirt. Safe rooms are designed for protection from rocket fire, but not from terrorists with barrels of gasoline and the evil intent of burning down a village. The peaceniks of the South didn’t stand a chance. None of them. The cognitive dissonance - not that I, nor any of you, have any - would be banished the second any cynic arrived here to see how Hamas came to annihilate a community of people who believed in peace. Had they not believed in peace they would not have lived here. Honestly, I had to quell the critic in me who couldn't understand how the communities here ever risked their security like this. Because Hamas run Gaza and Hamas don’t believe in peace. I came here to document this. I challenge anyone who doesn't believe it to come and see it with their own eyes. They'll figure it out once they're standing in the rubble.

In Kfar Aza, the faces of everyone murdered in their homes or taken hostage are outside every house. The houses are marked by the IDF according to what happened. A circle with a dot denotes a death in the house. If that reminds you of smearing blood on the doorposts in the Passover story during Exodus… same here. Biblical. I found the house of Yotam Haim, a hostage in Gaza, accidentally killed by the IDF a few weeks ago, alongside two other male hostages. One of the only remaining things in this house is a poster of the band Gorillaz. Yotam was a drummer. I wondered standing in his bedroom, what it would take for frontman Damon Albarn to reconsider taking a stand, and calling for the return of the remaining hostages. I sent this video onto Damon's manager. So far, I’ve heard nothing back.

Landing in Kfar Aza is like coming to Anatevka after the Tsar decimated it. We should not have had to bear witness to this, and here we are:

Of all the kibbutzim I visited in the South, there was one I found the most difficult: Nir Oz. Nir Oz is less disturbed. It has been left as it was found, minus the bodies. There has been a little clean-up, but there's still a lot of blood.

The kibbutz is one of the top botanical gardens in all of Israel. You can imagine how blissful life must have been here. But I didn't have to imagine, because I had survivor Irit Lahav to show me. And Irit is, I suspect, a living embodiment of the spirit of Nir Oz. She is a Buddhist, and a jeweller. She's an artist, a thinker, a theologian. Her parents were founders of the kibbutz, and it was by chance that she even told us her survival story. By chance, aka, a desperate need for a toilet break. Given Irit reckoned she had “the cleanest house in the kibbutz” she let us in to use her bathroom. And while in there, she felt compelled to tell us the story of how she hid in her safe room with her daughter Lotus and their dog having barricaded themselves in with a contraption she invented out of a stick and the long vent of a Dyson hoover. This is the only person to ever get their money's worth out of a Dyson. The vacuum cleaner saved their lives, as Hamas terrorists visited them five times throughout the pogrom.

She made walls of books to hide behind as a second line of defense for the two of them to crouch behind, including - amazingly - a Hebrew copy of “The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich”. Over 10 hours, Hamas and eventually Gazan teenagers came to her house to try to break through the door. The only reason they didn’t shoot is because the wall opposite the door is too narrow and the terrorists would have been injured from ricochet. As a Buddhist teacher, Irit repeated her mantras under her breath the whole time they were crouched in the dark under a table. The dog didn’t bark once. She knew to be quiet. The whole day they were in there, the refrigerator beep was going off from the first round of terrorists who came in and raided the refrigerator, leaving it open. But Lotus told Irit, “Mom, don’t go out and close the door”, even though it was driving them nuts. Because the beeping told them that nobody was hiding out in the house, being driven equally nuts by the sound. As soon as the IDF showed up, Irit went to the entry way to make sure that her Buddha was still there. The Buddha remained untouched.

Now Irit lives in Eilat. But when she saw a pile of laundry from October 7 in her house, she started a load. The resilience and the hope in Israel among people like Irit and Maya is bananas considering what happened in these places.

Before the sun went down, Irit took us to many houses. We saw the house of the Bibas family; Shirel and Yarden Bibas, and their two children Ariel (4) and Kfir (11 months) were taken into Gaza. Nobody has seen Shirel and her two red-headed babies. I am not sure what “Jewish privilege” is; maybe it's standing in the front garden of the Bibas family while they're still trapped across the border.

The last house we saw was that of the Siman Tov family. The parents Tamar and Yonatan were killed, leaving their three children – Shahar 6, Arbel 6, and Omer 4 – to suffocate from smoke in the safe room as Hamas burned the house down. Tamar Siman Tov was a women's rights activist. She was 35, and was campaigning to be a local councilor in the upcoming elections.

In the wreckage from this house, I saw a dishwasher, and this mug. The door was open, ready to be unloaded at 6am.

“Hasbara” - literal translation in Hebrew: the process of explaining. Yet another word that the non-Jewish world has taken and demonized and reinterpreted in order to erase and diminish Jews, Jewish history and the truth. Hasbara is not propaganda. It is the truth. Kfar Aza and Nir Oz experienced a massacre. Hasbara is the process of going to these sites and hearing stories from survivors first-hand. That is Hasbara.

For years I thought it was an act of martyrdom to move to Israel but now I think the martyrdom might be clinging onto the West…

If and when you come to Israel to witness the atrocities, or become part of the war effort you will understand the scope of what needs to be done here, and the distortion between facts on the ground and reports in the Western world. You will see first-hand how a small but mighty people are doing everything possible to hold onto what we have -- our nation, our hearts, our collective sanity, our individual tools and the best placement for each and every one. You will see humility. You will see people wearing any and every hat they can to help, to extend themselves, to give their physical presence. There are little boundaries between us; everyone is family, everyone's tanks are running on empty, but the force of the will towards one another is keeping us afloat against a sea of hatred and intimidation and isolation from the outside world. If you prick a Jew, we bleed, and we unite in our pain. Our trauma bonds us but it does not break us. Our trauma teaches us how to love from the depths of hell; from the darkest of nights; from the hope that we have never been defeated by the same hatred, ignorance and humiliation as we are living through now. We have seen it wear many masks in many eras, dating back to the dawn of civilization. Typing these words and observations from the place where Jews walked in our footsteps and held the same fears many millennia before now is a rousing and profound experience that enables a total escape from ego. The history of the Jews is beyond any of our individual stories, but our individual stories are essential to the living, breathing narration of our enduring survival. I feel lucky to be a part of it and I know it doesn't end here.

I have decided to stay in Israel for a while longer because there’s too much to do, and I can’t do enough. Too much to document. Too many hugs to give. Too big a fight to take on. I’ll be honest that I’m also scared to return. I’m scared to go back to a diaspora that has robbed my light for the past few years. I’m scared to return to places that have turned me into a pariah. Being a Jew is like being part of a huge jigsaw. We are all individual pieces dispersed throughout the world. And without other pieces next to us our edges can be sharp and cold and highly exposed.

At the moment despite the war and the brokenness and the missing pieces of the jigsaw here in Israel, there’s far more cushioning and comfort than being a lone jigsaw piece in the place I currently call home. I didn’t realize until I was here how much my day-to-day survival in a hostile environment was robbing my spirit of light. The diasporic world is a dark, dark place for Jews now. We must unite like the Jewish people here in Israel to fight the war. Not the war in Gaza. The war in the diaspora. The war of words. The war of ideas. The war against Jew hatred. The war against Moloch whom the Jews refuse to be slaves to once more.