Braveheart

A frail mind will force the pursuit of unearned power. There is no worse a feeling for the weak than sheer lack of control. Human fallacy often occurs when unchecked confidence meets with unpreparedness and reckless oversight. This is how the Titanic sank. Hubris is an ill-advised coping mechanism for the uncomfortable and often silent feeling of having no power. It can render people their own worst enemy. Yet after October 7, this was not the path Israel took. She refused to act rashly from fear.

Instead she remembered who she was – a warrior of Sir William Wallace proportions. Whatever truth comes to pass - and it will come to pass - about every event that led to that day, from UNRWA’s deception to Israel’s blind spots, the country united in one purpose: to bring every single last one of them home.

We around the world looked in the eyes of the family members of the 251 hostages - some of us in person, others through our phone screens - and we saw the despair in their faces. A look of being powerless. Powerlessness is a shadow that lingers, cold and vast, pressing against the chest until breath itself feels borrowed. And yet we did not give in to the feeling. Something shifted for all of us, myself included. We didn’t buckle. We rose up.

Instead of fighting to control an impossible situation, we accepted we could not, and we became believers. Robust and defiant. Despite the noise, despite the doubters, despite the deafening volume of opposition and erasure. We believed we could bring forth a miracle. We put yellow ribbons on our lapels, we set an extra chair at our Shabbat and Passover tables, we recited their names, we kept putting posters up, despite the defacing and the destruction of the losers who live among us. We never stopped. Not for a day.

We recognized the limitations of our brains and our understanding. We surrendered to the moment but we never gave up on the possibility. We trusted that the IDF and President Trump would do what they promised to do. We exercised a little something called faith.

The clock stopped on October 7 finally on day 843. The large counting monitor in Hostage Square in Tel Aviv ceased to tick. The IDF worked throughout the previous night in an unthinkable operation called Braveheart.

Over 24 hours, more than 250 bodies were exhumed and examined by 20 military dentists for the IDF, after Israeli intelligence acquired information about the location of the remains of Ran Gvili - the last hostage - in a specific plot inside a cemetery in Northern Gaza. Gvili died in battle on October 7. He was in the Israeli police special forces, but was on forced leave from work, nursing a broken collarbone. Despite this, he sprang to action, and was slain while defending Kibbutz Alumim. His body was dragged into Gaza as a bargaining chip for the monstrous Hamas.

At his eventual funeral in the land of Israel where Ran was finally laid to eternal and safe rest, Gvili’s mother said:

“Our pride is much, much stronger than our pain. The people of Israel live and are strong.”

It is a story that is as breathtaking as Israel itself. Finally, finally, finally, they are all free.

The message and success of the hostage campaign is the most noble of humanitarian exercises: leave nobody behind. It should be a universal prayer, but it was not because the rest of the world played Hamas’s game, and weaponized the only players in the war that they could for their own vanity - the perfect victims of Gaza.

Perfect victims don’t fight back. They are voiceless. Like the women and children of Gaza, whose stories were never told, but rather alleged by so-called “journalists” in Gaza, who in turn fed the wider mainstream media and the social influencers who facilitated and enabled. The hostages, however, were not perfect victims. They were dragged into Gaza kicking and screaming. Their families and by extension all of us cried out their names every day. Their faces could not be removed from the world no matter how hard the Free Palestine mob tried. To take down their posters was to keep the Palestinians in perfect victimhood, free of wrongdoing, free of criminality, purely resisting the sole oppressor Israel.

Powerlessness thrives on asymmetry. The oppressor, the perpetrator, the abuser counts on exhaustion, and the captor on despair. They rely on the slow bleed of resolve, on the moment when fighting back feels futile against empires of influence or networks of terror. But that asymmetry bends under one thing – relentless light. It is not sudden mercy that breeds vindication, it is the unyielding bearers of a truth that cannot be hidden. As we cried Bring Them Home!, the layers of grift, of paid amplifiers, of complicit headlines, the machinery of smear were all peeled away. As every single hostage has been brought home to recover or to forever rest, the truth stands naked and undeniable. Israel was never defeated; she was in purgatory. The hostages who stayed alive were not in despair, but in faith against all odds. Now the chorus swells, and a nation of survivors can reclaim the story of our people from the jaws of erasure.

This week we lived through another shambolic International Holocaust Memorial Day, in which every year the Holocaust becomes more and more de-Jewed. The trolls have been consistent since October 7 in berating all of us fighting with telling accusations that we are the ones abusing our “victim cards”. Again, a perfect victim doesn’t speak. We did. We became fair game. The memory of the Holocaust, however, has never been a monument to passive suffering or perpetual victimhood. It is a testament to human resilience, defiance, and the moral imperative to survive. As with October 7, it is also a reminder to bear witness. That transforms an individual’s personal trauma into collective responsibility.

Our survival and our history has never been perfect, because in every generation they stand up to destroy us, and in every generation we locate our courage, we take back our agency and we accept that which we cannot have power over. We are a people of hope. The Holocaust is not frozen in tragedy. Rather, it has been built upon. Let the world be mad about that. The reason they have to compare everything to the Holocaust is because they have to minimize the crimes that their great grandparents allowed to happen, and that were never buried in the sands of time.
The Jewish people refused to die.

Right now, our brothers and sisters in Iran are also rejecting perfect victimhood. They no longer want to be imprisoned to 47 years and counting of tyranny. For the West’s survival I hope as the horrendous news about Iran continues to come, we can begin to grasp how sinister it is that the media, and the humanitarians, have exploited the Palestinian victimhood narrative for three years and are now ignoring over 30,000 murders - perhaps more – by the Islamic Regime of Iran. They’ve supported Islamofascism this whole time. They don’t care about anyone except themselves and their own advancement. They have created further damage to Palestinians by empowering the regime that funds Hamas and keeps Gaza functioning as a terrorist proxy. They have enabled the biggest spike in Jew hatred since the Holocaust. And they don’t show any real consideration for humanity, only the optics that benefit their brand, at everyone else’s expense.

The exploitation of pain for profit or clout is never justice. Real advocacy lifts people up without keeping them trapped in victimhood. The progressives, the social justice warriors, the “feminists” are upset that the newly formed Board of Peace are planning a better future for Gaza. It makes sense that they’re crying over it. That would make Palestinians survivors, and not victims. Survivors can’t be bought and sold. Only victims who surrender in total to the regime, the abuser, the oppressor can be further controlled by the fake humanitarians of the West.

To all who perished on October 7 and in Hamas captivity - baruch dayan haemet.
Blessed is the judge of truth. It will come out. It always does.

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