The Cursed Days

It’s now been 9 days since the unimaginable happened: Hamas terrorists infiltrating Israel from Gaza in the early hours of the Shabbat morning, and going on a rampage, indiscriminately murdering, torturing & kidnapping close to 1,500 people, Israelis & foreigners alike, the vast majority of them innocent civilians.

For all of Israel, and I daresay for the Jewish community worldwide too, those were the worst days since at least the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago, and perhaps since the Holocaust. The mere idea that 1,300 innocent souls could be murdered in a single day in such a cruel & senseless fashion should be horrifying for anyone in any country – but for Israel, with the population of less than 10 million, and the lingering trauma of losing so many less than a century ago weighing heavily on all of its people, these attacks were simply unfathomable.

In the last week, many of my friends & colleagues from Israel & the broader Jewish community had to draw parallels with 9/11, trying to put what happened into perspective for the rest of the world. If you adjust for population differences between Israel & the United States, Israel suffered an equivalent of more than 15 September 11th terror attacks in a single day. Every day I go to the office, I walk past The National September 11 Memorial in downtown Manhattan. The scars & pain from those days are now a part of Manhattan, NYC & the whole country, forever. In the same way, Israel & the Jewish people will have to bear the scars of October 7th, 2023, with them forever now.

There is nothing worse than terrorism in today’s world. It knows no borders, spares no innocents, serves no purpose. One might think that at the very least, it would mean that terrorism should also have no allies, except for the most vile regimes (such as Russia, Iran, and the likes of them) that rule their own people with the same kind of terror. And normally, this seems to be indeed the case these days – at least in the last few decades, it looked like the humanity has finally evolved to a point where we could unequivocally condemn terror attacks, and come together to fight the perpetrators & help alleviate at least some of the suffering of the victims.

And yet in the last week, it became apparent that so many view the terror Hamas inflicted on Israel as somehow different, and the Israelis somehow less deserving the unreserved compassion normally offered to the victims of terror. The unrelenting pro-Palestinian rallies (where at least some are openly voicing support & justifications for what Hamas did), the harassment of Jewish communities throughout the world, the so-called ‘Day of Rage’ that Hamas proclaimed on Friday, when Jewish people were afraid to go to their offices & send their kids to schools, while pro-Palestinian rallies continued – the list goes on.

Of course, there was also a lot of support for the plight of the people of Israel too. But the fact is, so many people have tried (and continue to do so) to vindicate these horrific attacks by arguing that they should be considered in the broader context of the struggle of Palestinian people for statehood, downplay the suffering in Israel, or deny Israel the right to defend itself, without spending a single minute to think of the additional pain they are inflicting by doing so. Not to mention that all they achieve by such rhetoric at this time is sow further divisions, reinforce the notion among Israelis & Jewish communities in the Diaspora that the large swathes of the world still hate them, and extinguish any possibility of peace (not to mention statehood for Palestinian people), perhaps forever.

There is a saying that everything that comes before the word ‘but’ means nothing. Condemning terrorism outright should be easy – there should be no ‘if’-s, or ‘but’-s in that discussion. After what Hamas did, the fact that Israel has no choice but to destroy them should be obvious. The fact that every country has to protect the rights of its citizens above all else should be obvious. And finally, the fact that right now in Gaza, there are not 150 hostages that need saving, but over 2 million such hostages, should be obvious. The sooner Israel rids the world of Hamas, the better of we would all be – Israelis, Palestinians, and the rest of the world alike.

One last thing I’d like to add is this: I’m Jewish; I hold Israeli citizenship, and I love Israel with all my heart. Does that make me biased? Maybe it does.

Or maybe what makes me biased is the memories from my childhood, when my Jewish grandfather spent 9 months chained to a radiator, beaten & tortured, when another group of alleged “freedom fighters” (in that case, they were Chechen rebels; but terrorism knows no nationality, religion or borders) thought a Jew would make for a good bargaining chip. My grandfather was ultimately freed, but he lost close to 50kg in weight during this ordeal and never recovered; he died in a few short years. And now, the families of more than 150 people in Israel & elsewhere will have to live with the same, or worse, memories.

So yes, perhaps I am biased – but I believe that the Jewish people could certainly use a bit of bias & sympathy towards us from the world, both in these dark days & in general, because God knows, we didn’t see much of it through most of our history.

Am Yisrael Chai!