The Home Front

Largest number of Jews murdered since the Holocaust. So much to process. 260 murdered at a music festival. It feels like 9/11, only worse as the end is unknown.

Our immediate personal situation is safe. Our apartment faces North-East, so we are well protected from anything coming from Gaza in the South-West. We have a safe room which we go into if there are sirens, which the kids sleep in. Quite a few sirens so we spend the days inside, other than a quick run around in the park below. We are physically safe but emotionally drained. We have friends and colleagues who have family members killed or kidnapped into Gaza from the music festival. I cannot begin to imagine the horror.?

Thanks to all you who have reached out. Sometimes it can feel isolated, like no one understands. It’s meaningful to be thought of. Thank you. If you are outside of Israel, check in on your friends and family.?

There is no school, but it's still a work day, and thankfully I’m not called up, so it's back to building. My company in Tel Aviv makes a device that improves the lives of hundreds of thousands and one day millions of people around the world. Israeli tech runs deep, even if it's usually below the surface. The safety of your car, the security of your bank account, the medicine that you take often has roots in offices like ours in the so-called Silicon Wadi. When I was looking for a job a few months back I called up an Israeli Venture Capitalist who has every reason to enjoy retirement. I was surprised when he said he was very busy. “Busy with what?” I asked. “We’re building an artificial kidney from carbon nanotubes.” Building.?

Or destroying. Imagine training for years for the chance to murder Jews. Knowing that you’ll soon be killed or arrested. That your home or neighborhood will be turned to rubble. What a senseless life. What a waste. A life you could have spent building. A peaceful normalized Gaza would become the fastest growing economy in the world. Mediterranean frontage between a tech-hub nation with the highest birthrate in the OECD and the largest Arab nation, a bridge between the Middle East and Africa. Don’t get hung up on the population density. Prosperous places like Singapore or Brooklyn are far more densely populated. Additionally, take a look on Google Maps. The majority of Gaza is actually farmland. The reason Israel destroys city buildings is because that is where Hamas chooses to operate from.

But the Occupation. But the blockade. We can, should and do criticize Israeli policy, but there isn’t anything that the Israeli government does that makes it justified to murder civilians. The West, particularly Liberals (and I am a proud Western Liberal), loves to infantilize Palestinians, to rob them of their agency. As though their actions are purely deterministic. But there have always been options. But what can they do, ruled by Hamas gangsters and walled in by Israel and Egypt (the Muslim Arab country that also enforces the blockade)? I don’t know. I know that in Israel we have hundreds of thousands of people protesting in the street every single week, and that's against a government that was democratically elected a year ago. So the answer isn’t ‘nothing.’ And it isn’t murder either.

This gets to a key misunderstanding about Israeli power. There’s a trend in some political circles that can only see things through the lens of the ‘powerful versus the oppressed.’ If you are powerful you are by definition wrong, as the oppressed are by definition right. Yes, Israel is powerful. In tanks and planes and soldiers and alliances and technology and all the ways I am thankful for its power. It could reoccupy Gaza, or turn it to dust, or do nothing. It can defend or fail to defend a certain border, but it can't change Palestinian culture. It has nuclear weapons and the most sophisticated missile defense system in history, but it still can’t prevent incitement in Palestinian textbooks and social media, or stop the glorification of murderers. Israel has tremendous firepower, but unfortunately it doesn’t have the power to end the conflict, even if it ended the occupation tomorrow.

While today may be a time for unity, this government must soon have its reckoning.?

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Oh how I wish that we could have a corrupt inept government, and that it wouldn’t matter. But it did matter in 2006 when I sat in a bomb shelter as missiles rained down from Hezbollah, and my friend’s elite combat unit was left in Lebanon without supplies. And it does matter, as though we hoped that gravity could be suspended, that our cabinet full of draft dodgers and messianists has led us down into this blood-filled abyss. Did Israel’s army suddenly lose its edge? Did our soldiers lose their skill and courage? Of course not. What has changed is the civilian leadership. I am under no illusions that all attacks can be prevented, but I believe that with a different response we would be mourning 100 dead, not 1000. In days to come we will hear more about how brigades were moved from the Gaza envelope to the West Bank to appease coalition partners. Of a minister boasting of how ‘Hamas is an asset.’ With an enemy whose aim is to draw us into overplaying our hand, we are burdened with a leadership least equipped to handle the challenges of the hour.

For the Jews, I ask you, don’t share gruesome images of dead and captured Jews. It’s an understandable impulse, to want people to understand your suffering. I used to feel the same. Unfortunately, it wont work. I learned that lesson from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book ‘Between the World and Me.’ Though I’m sure it was not his intention, and we doubtlessly disagree on Middle East matters, it took seeing the world through the eyes of a wonderful Black American author to understand our own predicament. There isn’t a measure of suffering sufficient to prove our humanity to those who would deny it. They will only hate you for your suffering.?

Still, I’m always optimistic, perhaps overly so. ‘The eternal nation doesn’t fear the long road.’ It was a long road to get here. A very long way home across millenia. The scarcity is not of land, but of mindset. 1000 people may die this week, maybe 10,000, who knows. But I went to get my son’s medicine Sunday morning, and the Arab pharmacist and I treated each other with respect. Life continues in this large mixed contested city. Despite the calls of incitement, 99.9% of all Jews, Christians and Muslims get up each day to feed their families, pay their mortgage, pass their exams. Yes, hatred stirs in the hearts of millions. But very few choose direct violence.?

I’ve spent time with Palestinians. I have no hatred. In fact I pity them. We had Ben Gurion to lead our national liberation. They have mafioso warlords, trading the lives of their own people and suitcases of cash from Qatari villas. Generations of lives squandered that could have been spent building. No, what I hate are the justifiers and the enablers. Those, and perhaps my own chauvinism makes me more sensitive when it happens in the West, who justify, excuse or at times revel in our slaughter. But it isn’t only our slaughter. Muslims and Christians, Germans, Americans, Canadians, Nepalis and Thais have also been murdered and kidnapped in the attacks. This is a battle of freedom versus fascism. Hamas must be defeated, just as Putin must be defeated in Ukraine. There’s a strange coterie of far-rightists, far-leftists, Islamists, Russian nationalists, crypto bros and the CCP cheering for the decline of US power. Let me say this as someone who moved my family out of the US, who carries a profound disappointment, frustration and at times disgust with the US:? there is no moral alternative. A multi-polar, post-Pax Americana world will be more violent and more oppressive than what we have known for the past generation. It doesn’t excuse the US for its shortcomings at all. It's merely an acceptance of reality.

Additionally, it shouldn’t take a war to remind us that it isn’t the Democrats, or the Republicans, or the Charedim or the Smolanim or whatever political tribes we disagree with that are our enemy. Our enemies are those who would murder us in our beds and boast to the world about it.?

From our balcony we can see the Dome of the Rock, one of the most culturally significant structures in the entire world. In the park below our apartment is a more modest monument, a Hasmonean aqueduct that brought water from the Judean Hills to the Temple more than two thousand years ago. Yesterday was Indigenous People’s Day in the US. It has become practice in American progressive circles to acknowledge the Native American tribe whose land you may be residing on. So let me say, I am from the tribe of Judah, and I live in the traditional lands of the Judeans. My people were driven into exile, and we have come back to rebuild.?

It's ironic that they call Israel a colony. Colonies are vassals of a homeland. India to Britain, Congo to Belgium, Mexico to Spain. If you see the Jews as colonists, there will always be justifications for killing them, in the hope that they will return to their homeland. But this is our homeland. We have returned. If anything, Gaza is more of a colony. It’s leader lives in Doha. Our leader, flawed as he may be, lives a short bike ride away in Rehavia. So your choices are, to try to kill all the Jews, an immoral and ultimately self-destructive approach that has been tried many times by many regimes consigned to history. Or to accept that the Jews have come home, and to live in peace and prosperity with us in this bountiful land.

Finally, to friends in the US, here’s one of the ways you can help. There are currently Americans being held as hostages in Gaza. American citizens who are still alive. We know this because unfortunately one of them is our friend’s son. Call your congressman and your senators and ask them what they are doing to free Americans in Hamas captivity.?

Od lo avdah tikvatenu. Blessings and love from Jerusalem.