Invasion of Trauma

Trauma can change everything forever. Or at least for a long time. Trauma, in fact, distorts time. What may feel like a long time for someone who isn’t post-trauma may feel like a few seconds for someone who is. Or the opposite could be true; events that just happened to someone with trauma could feel like years in the past and life before it could become unreachable. Trauma affects decision-making. Trauma affects community and relationships. Trauma affects concentration. Trauma affects future-building and imagination. Trauma affects trust in the world around us. It affects memory, too. It distorts what was real and what wasn’t. It inserts doubt into secure situations, and it strips away caution in dangerous situations. Often post-trauma can have the effect of turning reality on its head and landing a survivor in a puzzling maze where all the old pathways in their brain are now diverted and re-routed via unfamiliar feelings or disruptive “flashback” thoughts that are at times impossible to decipher, or simply too overwhelming to deal with.

Facing trauma is some of the hardest and bravest work a person who has survived atrocities can do. Trauma is an invader, like a body-snatcher. It takes hold of the host, who may seem like you or the person you knew, but who has become different. Those gripped by trauma can often appear unrecognizable to loved ones. Even voices change. Where a caring individual may naturally want to hug a person who has just been through a traumatic event, for the survivor, the hug could be actively painful. A friend of mine put it very wisely recently. A hug to someone with post-trauma could be as emotionally painful as it would be physically painful to someone who is a severe burns victim. With trauma, those taking care of a victim or survivor often have to do the opposite of what they are inclined to do, and it is at times impossible to know what support looks like at all.

When people say “trauma’s a bitch”, that’s actually unfair to bitches.

This is why it is crucial that people with complex post trauma get the professional help they need. And unfortunately many of the victims of October 7 are not receiving that help, for many reasons. Some of it is a lack of cooperation from victims. Some of it is down to limited resources. And some of it is due to the total disappearance of mainstream organizations and bodies that are designed to help people in post-trauma. Why? Because Israelis aren’t perfect victims/PTSD patients. What’s new?

A young survivor’s family wanted some devastating information to be shared today. Shirel Golan, below pictured, took her own life on her 22nd birthday. She was a Nova survivor. She lost 11 of her friends in the fields of Re’em on October 7. She is now the latest victim of that unspeakable massacre.

I have no words left for the perversion and blind stupidity of every perpetrator of gaslighting of Jews since this war began. They have contributed to a global abuse of power and disinformation around October 7 and the war in Gaza. Every last one of them is culpable for the continued traumatizing and alienation of those who survived these humanitarian crimes at the hands of a terror group. Why do they continue to refuse to open their eyes, and their minds?

Two weeks ago, myself and a few friends put together a fundraiser to get the urgent psychological needs met of Nova survivors. SafeHeart is doing life-saving work. Please donate if you have not already. Just today alone, I managed to raise $10,000 more via Instagram and Twitter. Let’s keep it going: https://causematch.com/safeheart

Part of the problem revealed itself to me last night. In a hotel in DTLA I spoke with 50 students from Stanford, the vast majority of them non-Jewish, who are in LA to see the Nova exhibition, and have traveled with Stanford’s Hillel. I was invited to come down at the last minute by my good friend Sarah Idan (also my favorite Muslim Zionist). Sarah was born in Iraq and came to America at the age of 19. She served as a translator in the Iraqi army and has had first-hand experience of Hamas and ISIS style terrorist groups in her home country. When she came to the United States, she was in Miss Universe, representing Iraq, and after meeting Miss Israel and sparking a connection, the two took a selfie, posted it, and Sarah’s life changed forever. She and her family cannot go back to Iraq. I met Sarah in Israel after October 7. We ran into each other one morning in our hotel’s breakfast lounge, before heading out to see massacre sites down south. I remember Sarah went to kibbutz Kfar Aza in her army uniform from Iraq. And I remember the next day, Sarah had to take some personal time because the smell of the burning bodies (which still heavily lingered even in December of last year) gave her flashbacks of being in Iraq. She suffers from PTSD.

Together, a Jewish and an Arab Muslim woman were able to offer what we witnessed to the students via our very different life lenses. And because we’re both able to narrate our stories on a personal level, we were able to create a circle of trust among otherwise doubtful Gen Zers. We spoke to them about everything we have bared witness to since October 7, and discussed the organization and funding behind some of the on-campus groups that are dictating viewpoints to them. I donated all my time last night, and we were with the students from 7pm until after midnight. The biggest takeaway for me personally was that during those hours of conversation, every single thing I said was something the students had not heard before.

Young people do not know what happened in Israel on October 7, and have immediately been pressured into joining Free Palestine rallies and encampments with zero understanding or awareness. If they don't attend the rallies, their omitted presence is used as a stick to beat them with and label them as bigoted. They have been actively discouraged from doing precisely what universities exist for: pursuing knowledge. Questions are discouraged, or else they may reveal some ignorance or bias (or rather reflect that nobody present has answers to important questions). I spoke to one exasperated student from Romania (half Christian, half Muslim) who came to the United States to study human rights and to escape being surrounded by Marxism and communism, only to find themselves even closer to the inflexible faux academic binary of oppressor and oppressed. And another student from Sudan, who was moved to tears by my testimony, having herself fled a genocide in her home country and is feeling outraged and alienated by the lack of care by anyone at her institution or in the wider media about an active, real genocide that doesn’t fit the news agenda.

The ignorance must stop. The hatred must stop. The refusal to gather information must stop. it is incumbent on everyone to be whatever form of activist they can be. Stop looking the other way. Have hard conversations with people. Ask questions. Hell, people in my own life haven’t even asked me what I saw in Israel. Ask.

We are all traumatized in some way by the last year of gaslighting and DARVO. But keep seeking the truth.

Here is a reality check for the critics of Israel. In 2002, my friend Yoni Jesner, 19, was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber on a bus in the second intifada while he was studying in Tel Aviv. When Yoni died, his organs were donated to a young Palestinian girl, whose life was saved by Yoni's family. In 2008, when Yahya Sinwar, the future leader of Hamas, was in prison in Israel, he developed a brain tumor. An Israeli surgeon operated on his head and saved his life. Earlier this year I visited a special medical center in Israel called Save A Child's Heart, in which world leading surgery is being offered to children born with complex heart defects who are flown from third world countries with their mothers to the hospital in Israel for stays of up to a year or longer while their children receive this life-saving treatment. Half of the patients in Save A Child’s Heart’s history have been Palestinian children. Here is a picture I took in the reception room — you can see on the chart the countries where all the current patients have been brought in from:

Every day in Israel, the ambulance service Magen David Adom, takes care of every single denomination of person in medical need; whether Jewish, Muslim, Christian or other. Throughout Israel's existence, Palestinian children have been brought from the territories into Israel to receive life-saving treatment by Israeli doctors. If Israel wanted to intentionally target and genocide Palestinian children and do any of the things that perverted accusers are alleging Israel has done during this war, the Jewish state would not have extended its medical services for its 75 year existence to its Palestinian and Arab neighbors, and communities far beyond its borders. Even criminals like Sinwar are treated as any other human being. Israel even built a hospital on the border with Syria while Assad was slaughtering his own people in order to help the wounded.

Teach your neighbors some things. Let them process the things they're learning. Ask them where their bias lies.

Israel is humanitarian on a level of no other country. The accusation of “genocide” in the face of world-leading extraordinary humanitarian work is rancid and absurd. It is Jew hatred.

And ladies, we have a lot of work to continue to do. We have to reclaim the word: feminism. Fortunately for us, it’s not just Jewish women who are identifying a problem. But we can lead the way to find a solution. A friend of mine - not Jewish – posted a video last week on Instagram about the self-implosion of feminist spaces. Her name is Dr Jessica Taylor, and she specializes in violence against women and girls, trauma, and psychology. Jess is brilliant, kind, supportive, goes above and beyond. I trust Jess. She identified an issue that I personally see relates to why so many “feminists” in the space are refusing to acknowledge what happened to Israeli women and girls on October 7.

When I watched Jess’s take, it proved to me that even for the non-Jews among us it is not merely the denial of rapes by Hamas and the lack of clarity on the Israel-Gaza war that is a tell-tale sign of how inherently toxic and hijacked feminist spaces are. In my advocacy for “imperfect” sexual assault survivors, I witnessed how ineffective feminist spaces were in protecting and supporting victims of abuse if they didn't meet certain criteria. If the agenda wasn’t quite right. Feminist movements and individuals fail survivors who are too controversial, or who pose a reputational risk, or who are subject to media smears. Some feminists have become especially savvy at jumping on a bandwagon after the fact and back-peddling to voice that they were with us all along (watch out for this later down the line re 10/7), when in fact during the height of a crisis they were nowhere.

Under the presumed veil of "sisterhood", individuals are playing a sordid game of chess to get ahead and actually cut down other women. The women who claim to be leaders in the space themselves use perpetrator tactics to bully others out of spaces, to eke out perceived fellow competition for personal gain and promotion, and to usurp power. So many of the self-proclaimed feminists who have stature and reputation are doing more to reinforce patriarchal values than they are creating an equal and inclusive space to women of all backgrounds and viewpoints to support and build with each other. They are taking advantage of women in their most vulnerable moments for their own career advancement. And like Islamism and/or Marxism, it is all about assuming power, and nothing to do with equalizing the playing field. Maybe that’s why they love Hamas so much, and hate Israel.

A week or so ago, I reported on the story of the Yazidi woman Fawzia Amin Sido who was kidnapped by ISIS at the age of 11 and kept by Hamas terrorists in Gaza for for ten years as a sex slave. She is finally telling her story, which includes unfathomable details about her starvation and the enforced cannibalism that she was subjected to. Again, I have swept the Instagram accounts of many of the women who claim to stand for freedom and feminism, but they have no interest in this story. They are silent. Instead they are participating in whataboutism (which they claim to hate) and focusing on non-stories about the IDF murdering “journalists” in Gaza, or about “75 years of war crimes by Israel against Palestinians”. Reader, my eyes are rolling.

If the agenda doesn’t fit certain women/victims, you can guarantee it may not fit certain other victims. So why does it fit whatever victim it does fit? What’s the bigger piece?

At the end of last week all normal people were commenting how incredible it was that Israel has taken out the mastermind behind October 7, Yahya Sinwar. The tin hat people however: “here is an illegitimate Instagram account that has all the information you need about "journalists" in Gaza being mysteriously targeted by the IDF!” To those people, let me fill you in on how "journalism" works in Gaza:

• Gazan wakes up on October 7

• Gazan gets dressed, puts on bodycam

• Gazan invades Israel, turns bodycam on

• Gazan puts bodycam footage on Telegram

• Western terror simps: “there's no evidence for October 7 and the IDF kills every journalist in Gaza!”

Many of the women screaming these nonsensical allegations take their lead from UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese (or as I like to call her: Albanazi), of course. Well the news on Albanese is that she has been so flawlessly antisemitic for an entire year-plus, that even FRANCE is now calling for her removal from her position at the UN. If France are calling you out on your Jew hatred, well then you really do have a problem.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, however, we have Erin Molan. The Sky Australia news anchor is the greatest broadcaster on air; her monologues get better and better, and last week’s was stupendous. I have zero notes. Except that I’m developing a crush.

Tomorrow is Benjamin Netanyahu’s birthday. It is also Kim Kardashain’s birthday. It is also mine. Tonight is the last day of year 37 for me. I am forcing myself to write this paragraph because it’s been tough and I have struggled with acknowledging a celebration at all right now. This last year, number 37, was not my favorite. It actually may have been my least favorite. But I did a lot with 37; a birthday I also didn’t celebrate, given it was two weeks after October 7.

In the last year, I put on a helmet and a flat jacket and I went to the Gaza envelope, three times. I went to the Northern borders of Israel. I made my own little documentary with the team at HonestReporting. I met with hostage families and returned hostages. I met with and interviewed survivors. I threw Blacklisted’s first ever public event and fundraiser. I started cooking again. I began to enjoy music again. I took care of friends in health crises. I spent more time in LA than I have in many years. I made a lot of new acquaintances, impressive friends, powerful people who want to get shit done. I completely re-upholstered my home and started buying art. I bought myself my dream wardrobe because retail therapy doesn’t solve your pain but it definitely feels like good temporary decision-making. I made my West End debut in London, and performed alongside REAL actors for a night of benefiting Kibbutz Be’eri and celebrating our heritage as Jews. I amassed hundreds of thousands of new followers across mediums, and many many thousands of new readers here. I spoke at events all over the place and filmed for three different documentaries. I found the best oversized 1970s Harley Davidson leather biker jacket I could never have dreamed up at a flea market and the vendor gave me it for $150 because it has a Vietnam war patch on it and the kids don’t wanna wear those. I read about 50,000 books, survived several dental procedures, and so far haven’t succumbed to a single Fatwa on my head from the Islamic republic of Iran. (Thanks Remi). I shaved half my hair off. Got some new tattoos and almost read all of Christopher Hitchens, but not quite. I lit my Shabbat candles every Friday night and sent prayers to everyone I love near and far. I embraced trauma. It was hard was 37. I hope 38 is a little easier.