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Ernest Hemingway once wrote: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.”

The world broke me on October 7, 2023, and I have become - to the torment of my enemies - pure steel in all those broken places. I believe my life has not been an accident, and that all roads have led me to this exact place. I believe that every experience I have had has given me this inherently unique perspective that only I possess, that bestows upon me an ability to see exactly where the storm is coming from and how we surpass it.

It has taken me my entire life to come to the moment today where I can write the following, and it has been brewing in me for years.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be the voice for the change you want to see in the world. It’s taken me time to say this out loud. I’m choosing my words with care and with respect - because this isn’t about rage or performance. It’s about truth, and truth demands patience.

You might be here for many different reasons. Some of you found me as the music journalist who broke and championed some of the world’s most exciting artists –Haim, Lizzo, Charli XCX, Billie Eilish, to name a few – and yes, the endless saga of bothering Taylor Swift. The person who gave the NME its last brilliant chapter as a print icon. Others came during 2022, when I spoke out during one of the biggest trials in recent history and refused to stay silent about what I knew. None of that can be erased. It’s all true, on record, and nobody can deny what I did or sacrificed. And many more found me after October 7, when everything shifted.

All of those threads – my work, my advocacy, my lived experience – have converged. These experiences are not random. They’ve brought me here, and I have a responsibility to use them to try to move the world, even a little.

Yesterday I spent all day reading a manuscript that took me back to the initial horrors of October 7. It reminded me of the moment I had no other option but to leap into a role I still feel imposter syndrome even claiming: I became a war journalist. I wore the bulletproof vest and helmet. I ran from rockets. I shook on the ground as bombs fell. Every single time, my heart stopped and I thought I was about to die. I had made a pact with myself that it was okay if I did – because by then I had already been stripped of everything: my career, my most important relationships, the private projects I was creating that I was proudest of. My life was unraveling, and I was being pushed into personal chaos I didn’t have space for while my head was filled with images of young women with burnt-off clothes and limbs contorted into unnatural shapes, faces collapsed by artillery, beheaded babies. My brain burned with rage and confusion at the Western women I had stood beside for years now actively trying to silence me and dismantle my reality. I didn’t have time to defend myself against people who should have understood. Who should have remembered me. Who should have offered a shoulder when I needed it most.

But

I still need them to understand. I need them to remember. I am fragmented. I am traumatized. I am still deeply distressed. I never had the time to be diplomatic because there was none: the Jews were being hunted and we were so far behind.

I’ve been writing about survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence since 2016. I know how society favors the perpetrator over the victim. I saw the same DARVO tactics - Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender - used against Jews long before October 7th. The script was written in advance.

After October 7, while I was begging to be remembered by the people I had defended and the artists I had championed, I went to a war zone not knowing what I was doing, convinced I might die. I ran from rocket fire, downloaded the app (Tzofar) that told me how many seconds I had to hide. I walked through homes that had been bloodbaths, stood in charred rooms where families were murdered together, where women were raped, where children were slaughtered. I wanted to throw the shoes I wore there in the bin. I inhaled the smoke. I looked into eyes that had seen things people may never be ready to speak about.

I knew what it was to hold hard testimony against a sea of lies. This was that -magnified beyond words. And while I carried those realities, a historic psyops played out across the world, denying what happened and painting the victims as the perpetrators. The Jews. The most targeted people in history. Against a Gazan society that trains children to hate as soon as they can comprehend language.

It has been deeply distressing to watch the mob steal the narrative so completely. To watch people passionately promote evil. It’s as distressing as when I watched the world do the same thing every time a woman spoke up against her abuser. The actual targets of this violence are now in a form of Stockholm Syndrome, seduced by what I can only call Palestinianism. It is the equivalent - with even worse stakes - of the world falling for the charm of a violent man. We are favoring savages over the most persecuted ethnic group since the dawn of time. I need you to break out of the echo chamber. It is a cage, and you are being exploited inside it.

Trent Reznor sings this song: “Why do you get all the love in the world?” I listened to that almost every day the first 12 months after October 7, thinking about how everyone had fallen head over heels for Hamas’s bullshit, while I ran 10 kilometre circles around my local reservoir, where hostage posters were being ripped down, and red paint was smearing lies about Jews as “genocidal baby killers” on the walls.

My friend Travis Hawley has begun exposing a gargantuan disinformation campaign -bot farms, coordinated smears (21 accounts pushed 137k posts to 5-10 billion views to an earned media value of $65m, read here) - that has convinced millions Israel is the villain while the Islamic Republic of Iran and all of its proxies, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, plays the underdog. The inversion is staggering.

I can’t stay silent about how this connects to what I’ve survived: the smearing, the physical and online stalking by alleged “feminist” advocates who stand up for survivors, the very people who should have protected me now trying to paint me as crazy. The irony is brutal. And I can’t stay silent while people claim places in every social justice lane - feminism, anti-racism, environmentalism, LGBT rights - while centering Palestine, dragging vulnerable people into an agenda that values death over every sweet thing life has to offer.

I’m appealing for conversation. This is bigger than us. If you have departed from me, please hear me now. Why are we still talking about a genocide when the ceasefire is active? Listen to Mosab the Green Prince, son of a Hamas founder who fled them: he says that at this pace it would take 800 years for Israel to commit a genocide in Gaza. The fictitious genocide narrative existed years before October 7. The playbook was already written. October 7 simply lit the match.

If I was uncouth in my approach before, it’s because I was in trauma. Within 36 hours of the attack I was a completely changed person. Alongside friends like Noa Tishby, I became one of the first voices relaying the horror to the world. By October 8 I had lived through thousands of minutes of searing fear. I hadn’t slept. I kept the lights on. Someone chased me with a car while I tried to go for a run on October 8 as the sun was setting - his eyes were locked on my Star of David. I watched the world turn against the Jews and I chose to fight, as I always have.

Since October 7, the Jewish people have been in an existential fight for our survival. Whatever you have done to advance the cry of “Free Palestine” or spread the antizionist lies of genocide has helped build the worst global gaslighting of our lifetime. I have seen this psyops before with female survivors. This one is big enough to unravel civilization itself.

So I’m asking you to see it for yourselves. Look at the cult of Palestine with clear eyes. Imagine, instead of the flag and the slogans, a charming man with a violent heart. The patterns are the same. The world has fallen for it before. We cannot afford to fall for it again.

I’m choosing to speak because silence has never protected anyone. Not the victims I’ve fought for, not the community I love, and not the truth that deserves to be heard. Thank you for listening. Now, truly look - and let’s talk.

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