A Different Battle Cry

The past few weeks have flipped everyone’s life around.  For those of us living in Israel, this is true many fold.   Few of us expected Hamas and its various clones to leave us and our country alone, let alone at peace.  But none of us could have imagined the kinds of scenarios that are playing out on video platforms as this awful conflagration rages on.

For me personally, as the child of two Holocaust survivors, I am thankful that my parents are no longer alive to witness this ACT TWO.  My parents, especially my mother, talked to me a lot about her wartime experiences which included a stay at Auschwitz  and  forced, miles-long marches in the snow. As an empathic person, I thought that I could “get” what she went through. Now, after October 7, I realize that I was not even close. My thoughts and imagination could not capture that level of sheer, pure, evil when I was ensconced in a nice home in the US.

Having family living in dangerous areas in Israel, knowing a few of the young people who were at that dance rave (who thankfully survived), with family and children of friends serving in the IDF, the fear is raw.  It’s a bone chilling, deep dread.  It’s the knowledge that we have been here before that makes it difficult to hear comparisons to the Holocaust.  While this comparison is true, it helps set up a calcified retrograde image of the “poor, helpless Jews.” In case nobody noticed, we do not have a victim mentality.  That is why, when I noticed on my YouTube channel, that our ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, was wearing the infamous yellow Jude star of the Nazi era while seated in the General Assembly, the visual was a bit much. As is the cry of “Never Again!” which sounds to me like more of a slogan than a stance. We are not defenseless anymore, we are not cowed. We have created one of the most successful democracies on earth.

So now we cry, with conviction, “NOT THIS TIME!”