365 Days of Awe
It’s been an excruciating year for the state of Israel and for Jews everywhere. On October 7, 2023, we experienced the most barbaric and vicious massacre of our people since the Holocaust. And since that devastating day, we have watched as the world has not only turned their backs on us, but actually turned their ire toward us. Since then, we’ve been living through the Great Gaslighting, a protracted Twilight Zone episode in which reality is entirely inverted and nothing, but nothing makes any logical sense.
The calls of “death to Israel” and generalized violence against Jews started before Israel had fired its first shot. The distribution of sweets and celebrations in Gaza and other parts of the Muslim world were mirrored by our supposed best and brightest cosplaying as Jihadis on college campuses in the United States and flooding the streets of major cities throughout the western world to cheerlead for terrorists, as the bodies of innocent victims were still being recovered and identified in southern Israel. And we haven’t had a moment of peace since.
The ADL has identified more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents in the United States, since 10/7 and that doesn’t include the countless acts that went unreported. So instead of sympathy and solidarity in the aftermath of this atrocity, we have had to watch our backs, take self-defense classes and increase security at our religious institutions.
And the inversion of logic hasn’t let up. We saw it in the deafening silence and rape denial from women’s groups and so-called feminists who among others, labeled the GoPro footage filmed by the terrorists themselves as Israeli propaganda, in the tearing down of hostage posters by alleged social justice warriors and when Queers for Palestine aligned themselves with radical Islamic terrorists who would sooner toss them from a rooftop than thank them for their support.
The international bodies and purported humanitarian organizations have also made their positions known. While the UN has long been an anti-Israel and antisemitic institution, the degree of their complicity has still been staggering. From the one-sided condemnation of Israel as the aggressor despite its being attacked by enemies hellbent on its destruction on seven different fronts, to the sheer number of UNRWA employees who participated in 10/7 and its aftermath, how can anyone take them seriously? Even the “benevolent” Red Cross dropped all pretenses by not bothering to pay a single welfare visit to our hostages, 101 of whom still remain in captivity.
We’ve learned many painful lessons in the last twelve months, including the fact that we Jews definitively do not control the media. From accepting as fact every claim and death toll reported by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, to falsely blaming Israel for civilian casualties that turned out to be caused by Hamas themselves including at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, to the lack of coverage of the plight of our hostages, to the abject silence as Hezbollah fired over 10,000 rockets, displacing nearly 100,000 residents of northern Israel since October 8, 2023. Outlets from Al-Jazeera to ABC News and everything in between, have done their very best to vilify Israel, ignoring the fact that Hamas embeds itself within the civilian population in order to perpetuate the narrative that the IDF is intentionally targeting civilians.
Not to mention what’s taken place on social media, the most insidious conduit for misinformation and propaganda — where all eyes were on Rafah, but suddenly turned away when six of our hostages were executed there in cold blood in a terror tunnel. But what should we have expected from an internet that saw Osama Bin Laden trend on tik tok?
It’s been a year where it’s not out of the ordinary for Jews, like myself, to be accosted on the street and called a Nazi. Or for South Africa of all places, to accuse Israel, a country whose Arab population continues to soar and thrive, of apartheid.
And to cap off a year of living in this upside down world gone mad, we witnessed the hijacking of the anniversary of 10/7, as calls to flood the streets and go “all out for Gaza” circulated in cities worldwide. But, if there’s a singular silver lining to be found, it’s the great awakening that has taken place among Jews, who’ve had no choice but to reckon with the stark reality of our place in the world. Jew hate isn’t new, but the proverbial cat is now completely and irreversibly out of the bag. It might be veiled as anti-Zionism, but we all know that what we’re facing is nothing but good old fashioned, tried and true antisemitism. And only our fellow Jews and a cadre of remarkable allies to whom we are eternally grateful, can truly understand the feelings of abandonment and disillusionment that we’ve experienced in the past year.
So, as we honor the memory of those murdered on October 7 and pray for the hostages who remain in captivity, we must also look inward and reaffirm our commitment to building a robust, interconnected community of Jews and our allies. We must come to understand the urgent necessity of standing together, as much of the world rallies against us. This is not a call for isolation; rather, it means cultivating an environment in which we can proudly embrace our identity, share our struggles and foster a sense of strength and solidarity that empowers us to confront a hostile world together. In doing so, we honor not only our past but also our future—a future where Jews can thrive in safety, dignity, and unity. In this moment of existential threat, going tribal may indeed be our most profound act of faith and resilience.