Boudicca

There is a quote attributed to Boudicca, the Celtic female warrior who revolted against the Romans.

I am not fighting for my kingdom and wealth now. I am fighting as an ordinary person for my lost freedom, my bruised body, and my outraged daughters.

I felt the searing defiance of the spirit of Boudicca in my loins this weekend. Awake my soul, and arise the daughters of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. Here we stand reminded perhaps for the first time of what it really means for us to be women of Judah, descendants of a matriarchy whose blood runs brighter and stronger than the combined ancient smears against both women and Jews. Warriors who withstand and endure generation after generation and wrote the manual for survival against the odds.

We the women of Israel value life, and they, our enemies and their gullible enablers in the West, value death. A video this week of Hamas shooting Gazans in the legs in broad daylight, executing their critics like they were vermin, circulated online. Not a single woman of the West spoke out against this, and instead continued to be pawns for their big-booted masters. We are not the same as the women around us. They don’t understand our strength. Many of them envy it. It’s becoming clearer to me by the hour. We have an unbreakable and unshakeable clarity, and compassion, and moralistic stubbornness that has come down the blood line of both fighting for our existence while being ready to sacrifice it all for our tribe.

The world cannot handle the strength and resolve of the women of Israel. The bravest women on earth. Survivors of thousands of years of attempted annihilation. Instead of celebrating us, they lie and jeer and spit and deny, but they have never had victory over us.

Today may be Holocaust Memorial Day, but it is not our day. We know that. We have a day called Yom Hashoah that is just for the Jews. HMD is for the non-Jewish world to universalize the story of the Holocaust, forgive itself and bastardize our history to suit their current political agenda: lassoing the Nazism of Hitler’s Third Reich onto the ‘Israeli genocide in Palestine’. It is so perverse there are few words in the English language that adequately describe this kind of erasure. Six million of us was not enough. It will never be enough. It matters not that the Holocaust is the most documented crime in all of human history, with scores of millions of documents proving that it happened. This weekend, as the Holocaust echoed all over the mainstream media and in the public squares of Gaza, the Jews stuck fast together to overcome the moment while the rest of the world conveniently forgot about us. They have learned nothing, even those who think they know do not know, cannot know, because they are the bystanders of yesterday today.

Let’s rewind to Friday when we learned that in the latest bout of sick pyscho games with Hamas, the terrorists would release four women from captivity: Liri Albag (19), Naama Levy (20), Karina Ariev (20) and Daniella Gilboa (20). Incidentally this was in breach of the ceasefire agreement, given these women are soldiers, and we were supposed to receive the civilians first, namely Arbel Yahud, Shiri Bibas, and the two Bibas baby brothers, Kfir and Ariel. But Israel is not going to refuse the receipt of four young women. This is what the Nazis did. The blood for trucks episode in 1944, for instance. (The Nazis said they’d let 1 million Jews leave Hungary in exchange for 10,000 trucks). Our enemies have always specialized in extortion and have never intended to live up to agreements. In their minds, they win every time. Hamas will release whoever they want whenever why want. The only control Israel has is how many prisoners we release. They hold the cards because they hold our people. But they will never get what they want.

Ahead of the announcement of the names, I had by coincidence written something about Naama on Twitter that was re-posted by her family’s account.

I said:

Every single hostage in Gaza is at stake, and some of the reasons differ. Of all the hostages, to me one is the ultimate emblem of October 7. For Hamas, she is the jewel in the crown, proof that if you can brutalize a young woman (and a soldier at that), you can brutalize the soul of a nation. For the Jews, she is the daughter of a people who believe in peace, who holds the whole future of Israel in her eyes. Her name is Naama Levy, and I pray with everything I have that she will see the light of her homeland of Israel at the end of Gaza's horrifying tunnels this weekend. We are waiting for you, achoti.

On October 7, it took hours of panic and horror before I literally fell to my knees in the street in Hollywood and I let out a guttural, audible howl, because news arrived of female soldiers at an IDF base taken into Gaza by Hamas and sexually assaulted. That was the moment my life as a Jewish woman changed. That was the moment that I realized what Jewish women have endured for millennia. The moment Naama was broadcast with her hair matted, her face cut, her pants bloodied, her Achilles tendon slashed, her hands tied, her body dragged by armed men into a strange car, paraded to crowds of celebrating civilians in “Palestine”, was the moment every innocent Jewish woman was faced with the renaissance of our deepest horrors. We simply could not be left with this as the lasting image of our sister, our daughter.

When identifying photos were released of Naama, our bowels dropped from beneath us. How was this the same young woman. What in god’s name had they done to her?

Naama, a former peace activist, who volunteered for the UN and the Red Cross. And what did they do for her when she was held in the dungeons of Gaza for 477 days? Kept in cages, denied sunlight or air for months at a time, tortured.

This footage was released last spring when I was in Israel with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I published the video at their request and my “feminist” world said nothing, and then I lost my mind. I will never forgive nor forget their silence. In that moment, I realized again what it means to be a Jewish matriarch; we are the leaders, not the followers.

[Trigger warning: extreme violence]

And so it began at midnight of Shabbat, and most of us have not slept a wink this weekend. How can we? Nobody understands. They don’t know what the Holocaust was about. They still don’t know. They will never know. They won’t know it when it’s broadcast to them 24/7 as it is now; the biggest hoax of a lifetime that there is a “genocide” in Gaza. The number one story in the world for a year and a half, and a complete lie; an obfuscation from the truth that Hamas was holding these four women against their will, that Hamas continues to hold 90 others, including two baby boys, and that Hamas is Gaza and Gaza is Hamas.

On a Gazan morning, Naama, Liri, Karina and Daniella were brought out to an audience of Hamas militants and forced to perform on a stage one last time. They were dressed in fake army uniforms (when they were released their initial testimonies have revealed that throughout their captivity they were mockingly referred to as “the soldiers” and had to learn how to speak Arabic to get by). They may have been drugged like prior released hostages as they smiled and waved to the crowd, holding their certificates of captivity for ultimate humiliation.

The deranged society of Gaza, children included, came for a day out to watch this spectacle. Behind the girls a wall with slogans read: “Palestine - the victory of the oppressed people over the Nazi Zionism” and “Gaza is the graveyard for the criminal Zionists”, the identical language used by groups such as SJP that have a presence on US college campuses throughout America. Just as well Trump has signed an executive order this week to deport all foreign students and staff on university campuses who support terrorism. (He also signed an executive agreement lifting Biden’s prior sanctions on providing Israel with arms, inshallah).

Again, similar to my reports last week, Hamas were sending a message to the West. They wore keffiyehs to speak to their new international fans. They were clarifying that this is a hoax. They were laughing at the international lawyers, and the journalists and the human rights advocates. And yet, the libels continue. Sky News reports and BBC broadcasters and the New York Times put this live feed out without context, doing exactly as Hamas wanted. (The Nazis deployed the same tactics, and this is the same demented “humor” as the sign above Auschwitz that read: “Arbeit macht frei: Work sets you free”).

477 days before it was October 7, 2023. On that day, in Nahal Oz these four girls watched their friends being raped and slaughtered before their eyes. They have been enslaved for almost 500 days. And on Saturday during a live stream to the entire world, the same terrorists who took them, who paraded their bloodied bodies on the streets of Gaza during October 7, paraded them again in front of a crowd and the idiots of the West believed what they were being sold, because they are stupid. We are witnessing a reality show, paid for by a multi-billion dollar terrorist network, lapped up by the Western media. There is no genocide in Gaza. There is a show in Gaza live-streamed to you ever since Hamas attempted a genocide on October 7, 2023.

Remember Daniella’s fake death in November? Her boyfriend proposed to her when they reunited in Israel. We wish them a lifetime of happiness. As the girls were taken i the helicopter, the IDF said they joked that everyone would have to speak to them in Arabic so they could understand. Jewish humor knows no bounds.

Agam Berger, the fifth IDF soldier taken captive from Nahal Oz base, was separated from the four other girls days before their release, as an added element of torture. She is now left behind in Gaza, but initial reports say it was Agam who braided all of the other released women’s hair; a sign of life. Netanyahu’s government have refused to withdraw from Northern Gaza while Agam, and civilian Arbel Yahud continue to be held captive, and Hamas have today declared that the two women are due for release this coming Thursday, with another third unnamed hostage. And that on Saturday, three more men will come out. And yet what does this mean for the Bibas babies? Again, we hold our breath.

As the girls came home, I thought of Shani Louk, her legs maimed into the shape of a Swastika, hanging out a Jeep half naked, paraded through Gaza, spat on by locals, only to be identified months later when the IDF found a piece of her skull somewhere in Gaza. I thought about Eden Yerushalmi, executed by a gunshot to the head last September in the tunnels of Rafah, after enduring almost a year in captivity, returned in a body bag to Israel, severely starved and emaciated. I thought of the girls who will never make it out of the pits of hell. And I wept and I wept and I wept. The joy of these four survivors ran oceans into the grief of all we lost and fear for what may or may not be for the fates of others, and the lasting effects of this trauma for generations to come.

This was the first shot of the four being handed over to the IDF and entering Israel:

And here was Liri Albag, throwing a heart hand gesture out from the helicopter before they landed in Tel Aviv to go to the hospital, followed by the reunion images that make everything worthwhile.

As I mentioned before, today is the non-Jews day to say something about the Holocaust, and they really said something in Ireland: the antisemitism capital of Europe. Tonight in Dublin, another of our Jewish sisters found out what it is to be a Jewish woman. On Holocaust Memorial Day, the granddaughter of a survivor who is pregnant was dragged out of an event for turning her back on the antisemitic President of Ireland, who insisted on showing up to an evening he wasn’t requested to be at, and then politicizing the event for his own gain by delegitimizing Israel, the world’s only Jewish state. She was pulled across the floor by two of the Irish gestapo.

I will never set foot in that Nazi country. And we will never forget how the world and our neighbors have treated us in this moment in history.

They told us to abandon our people. They told us that the IDF airstrikes killed Daniella Gilboa. They told us that the soldiers from Nahal Oz deserved it. They told us they were dead and we would never find them. What they don’t understand is that we never abandon. We don’t leave anyone behind, least of all our own people. We don’t care if the world hates us for wanting to survive, for valuing life over death, for shining light over dark. I will never forget this weekend so long as I live, and I will never take for granted the resolve that runs in my own DNA.

When all is said and done, Naama survived. She came home. Even though the whole world told us to leave her there. And you know who didn’t get to live? This guy.