Tomorrow is the Global Day of Jihad. (Fun!)
On Wednesday this week, Khaled Mashaal, the former leader of Hamas, released a video statement calling on insurgents all over the world to "Deliver a message through the squares and the streets, a message of anger, that we are with Palestine." It is a call for a worldwide day of violence and terror against Jewish people.
I’m going to take the day off from all of this. It’s Shabbat after all. And that’s the point.
For days, Jewish communities worldwide have been panicking, talking about closing down schools, synagogues and other centers. Some Jewish people are afraid to leave their homes. There have already been shock waves around the world this week: disgusting acts of antisemitic hate in the streets of London, in Amsterdam a Jewish memorial destroyed, on American and Canadian campuses frightening displays of hate towards Jewish students.
University of Michigan, Stanford University, Harvard University, Drexel University, Columbia University, University of Wisconsin, Madison, New York University, Brandeis University, Michigan State University.
I barely went outside this week. I haven’t moved. Since Friday night, breaking the news of attacks in Israel, I haven’t been able to rest my eyes. I haven’t used my body this week. I am an athlete, whose resting heart rate is usually 48bpm. This week it’s in the 60s. I am on edge. I slept with the lights on. After consuming the worst images I’ve ever seen, I felt uneasy. I hate the part of the day when it gets dark and quiet. When I was a kid, I used to be scared of the dark. I thought the SS were hiding at the bottom of the bed. (My Dad started me on WW2 documentaries early!) I feel like that kid again. Alas, I’ve learned to calm the worst fears, to not jump at sudden sounds. But suffice to say: our nightmares are coming alive.
I cannot advise what we all do tomorrow. Vigilance is important. Not trying to be a hero. Making sure you protect yourself for many, many more days. CST UK advised this morning that this call to action is only for Arab countries. And yet, we have witnessed all week how terror in the Middle East is a flashing green light to any politicized lunatic, of which there are many now organized and unified under the banners of social justice, to feel empowered to take out their rage on our communities.
This feeling of being hunted may feel familiar or brand new to some of us. For me, it’s old. I have walked around with one eye over my shoulder ever since my days at university. But I am not impervious to fear. I assess risk more than I’d like to admit when I am outside, among the world. It feels especially jarring this week, on the rare occasions I managed to make it over the door to run essential errands. It feels so jarring to see people discuss their days at work or complain about the price of gas. I see people smiling and I am envious of their ignorance. I don’t feel a part of their world. I feel inside my own. Totally inside it, moving through a place that feels taken from me, unsafe for me. I feel like I’m walking down the street but my feet couldn’t be further from the concrete. I’ve been here before.
Here is a note I found in my journal from the summer of 2020, just after George Floyd’s death:
Conditional privilege is the sensation I feel walking round my local reservoir which is now a 3-mile dedication to the names and images of Black Americans who have been killed by policemen, and the knowledge I have that this movement is slowly congealing against my people. Their names are tied to the fence around the perimeter of the reservoir in ribbon. And while I’m outside the wires now, I’m aware that I’ll be on the inside soon if I don’t endure, persevere, resist... if I don’t fight for this fleeting moment of our supposed freedom, which history knows is never unconditional. They’re waiting on me to trip up.
My conditional privilege is showing. Anti-racism’s imposing of a binary renders it prone to antisemitism by excluding Jewish oppression in its action.
"Friends" skipped to the polling stations in the UK on December 12 last year [2019] to vote for an antisemite because he was anti-racist. "For the many, not the few." And I destroyed my ballot!!!!
My conditional privilege is showing. “To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don't be.” - Golda Meir.
There is a house on the corner of the reservoir. Last week there was a sign in the window: “Topple the patriarchy!”. Now it says: “Black lives matter.” Interchangeable.
Identity politics is a zero sum game. Outrage is instinctive. It may even be easy. Match a donation, match an expletive.
Social media has created the mass spreading of misinformation, which requires more paternalistic governing by our political, educational and social institutions, and so we’re fucked.
I am not asking the Black community to protect the Jews. I also don’t find the hierarchy of oppression useful but that’s another conversation. I am reacting to instances of antisemitism that exist alongside and sometimes within the BLM movement. I am not asking for reciprocity. I am asking for condemnation of prejudice because this prejudice is anathema to “anti-racism”. I also disagree that now is not the time, that it’s distracting. It’s happening and our “privilege” is conditional. It’s stripped from us when we’re attacked for being Jewish. So in the binary of white v Black, we are fighting both white supremacy and leftist antisemitism. We have to be our own defenders.
The scenes I have witnessed and heard this week are living in my veins right now. The blood staining the concrete. The hostage children with strained smiles. The girls dragged as trophies through the streets. The endless rows of body bags. The burned children. The corpses on the ground. The car with the two incinerated bodies in it, mouths frozen mid-scream. The testimonies of the paramedics who went in to recover the dead. The cries of the kids stuck in the bomb shelters, hiding under their dead friends. The disbelief on the face of that man who watched as his girlfriend was taken from him on a motorcycle. I keep seeing that man’s face.
I stay up at night talking on the phone to Israelis I’ve never met. They have lost up to ten friends already. I talk to the families of the missing hostages. I talk to my friends. I know who they are now. It has been a week-long assault, a week-long effort. Fundraising, organizing, supporting, reporting, lending ourselves maximally to our people.
So tomorrow I am taking the day to remember the world that we Jewish people deserve to live in. We deserve to live in this world. And the lies they sell (the latest from Human Rights Watch is that Israel is using white phosphorous in its attacks on Gaza) are there to paint us as the bad guys. Bad people often blame you for the things they did because they can’t face the reflection in the mirror. That is not our reflection.
Friday 13th October, or the 28th of Tishrei if you live in Israel, is Shabbat. And Shabbat is a day of rest. Shabbat is a day of peace.
David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, once said:
What matters is not what the goyim say, but what the Jews do.
Let’s light our candles tomorrow. If you’re online post them. Burn them bright. Let’s show them how we shine.
שַׁבַּת שָׁלוֹם
Shabbat Shalom. I will still go to my local JCC tomorrow to work out. I will not hide from these thugs.
Thank you, Eva. I have benefitted from your free newsletters and I now am a paid subscriber to your site. We need your voice. What can we possibly say, not to the Hamas-supporting radicals but to our own Jewish children and grandchildren who have been brainwashed at college and have sunk to the level of self-hating Jews. Can’t they hear themselves? What is this insanity they have absorbed? This rationalization of Hamas, this denial of their own eyes, their lack of understanding of what it mens to be a Jew, and worse, their denial of atrocities against their own people. Quite honestly, in America, they grew up in Jewish neighborhoods surrounded by Jews at every turn. They have never met anti-semitism in person. They have been protected. They have no experience of living where they are not accepted, and the result is they don’t side with Israel! What is this insanity? My heart is breaking for those suffering in Israel, and it has been shattered hearing the unspeakable distortion our grandchildren were taught to believe at prestigious universities. We sent our children to be educated. They came back brainwashed. They also lost their humanity. How do we get it back when someone says insane justifications like, “Well, yeah they killed babies but they didn’t behead them.” In Boston, surrounded by the most prestigious universities, some Jews hold signs that say “Free Palestine.” They are destroying their own parents and cleaving families with this insanity. I am very afraid. My heart is broken.
Please continue your good work.
I am not in Israel. I am an octogenarian living in Florida, but I also cannot sleep. My heart is racing,and I’m panicked by what I see. My only hope is that as the news comes in, something will break that awful insanity that has been drummed into our own Jewish youth.