Breaking: Terror in Tel Aviv

My heart is with Tel Aviv and every Jew who is shaken by tonight's UAV attack, which has so far killed one innocent, and injured many more. The Houthis have claimed responsibility for a drone the size of a car making impact near the US consulate on Hayarkon Street – the main drag of Tel Aviv.

This story is developing.

I have been offline for months. Couldn’t find a use for my voice. Didn’t know if I wanted one any more. I was feeling too much, and then I stepped off and suddenly I couldn’t feel much of anything at all. I was totally numb. I carved up time like an apple, and reduced the day to equal segments, and carried out tasks, crunching on the acidic flesh of the days, slowly. It kept me from losing the rest of what was left of my mind. I have felt so much of me falling away to this war. Nine months later, I still feel like pieces of me have just melted off the edge, like ice cream escaping a disintegrating cone. I have the same eyes, same ears, same mouth, same limbs, but when I look over my shoulder I don’t see anything familiar, and it’s hard to know who you are without any of it at all. I just want some of it. Something from before. Where did it all go? Can’t I have any of it?

The wave of antisemitism that those who wield power in this world are justifying as mere criticism of Israel/Bibi Netanyahu, is traumatizing an entire generation of Jewish people worldwide. And it is traumatizing anyone with a moral center who can understand very clearly that where there are 22 Arab nations in this world, there is but 1 Jewish one, and if you can just accept that the Jewish people will live in our homeland and that we are not leaving a country that is 8,630 square miles in total, then we will all live in peace.

I could say simply like a teacher addressing a room of acne’d adolescents: listen everybody, it’s just time to leave the Jewish people alone. But how could they? What else would they do all day to distract themselves during their recess. Free Palestine! is just so much fun to play. It’s a game without rules and everyone’s a winner, baby.

Every time a Westerner posts a Palestinian flag emoji, or walks around with a Palestine sticker on the back of their iPhone, or wears some t-shirt conflating Palestine with BLM or LGBTQIA issues or whatever the virtuous aneurysm their brain is having that day and wearing as fa-shun, they are emboldening Iran and its terror proxies. I stare at them like my eyelids have burned off. I think to myself: Strut along now. Curl those dumbbells. Sweat for Sinwar. Rave for the resistance. Work it like you’re empowering a ring of organizations that want to annihilate the Jewish people AND eventually the West. Dumb pricks.

What happened in Tel Aviv tonight will not stay in Tel Aviv. It will happen in London, in New York, in Paris, in Sydney, in Barcelona, in Los Angeles, in Rome. You name it, it's coming to a city near you. You better thank your lucky stars that Israel has the temerity to defend itself, and by extension the rest of the West. Israel has earned your support. She's doing a better job than the intelligentsia and the UN combined.

I, like many Jews around the world, find myself alone learning this news, tears filling my face, fear striking in my heart, pangs of October 7 running thru my veins, breath shortening, lungs collapsing, walls closing in, more people disappearing from view.

So here I am because I am too old to join the IDF and probably too angry. I am struggling with the anger still. I see a keffiyeh on a barely dressed white girl, or a watermelon emoji sweater on a man at a HIIT class, and my heart is thundering. I cannot contain the disgust. Revulsion is an action that requires the entire body, and I haven’t found the trick to shake it off yet. Their hubris, their ignorance, contaminates every space they occupy, and I cannot breathe in the same air. It’s all so suffocating.