A Tisha B’Av reckoning: The silence of the center

I can’t explain why I love Israel so much. It hit me the very first time I came here to visit a friend in 2008. On the taxi ride from Ben Gurion to Jerusalem, I felt a strange, beautiful sense of recognition. It was everything: the way the light fell on the fields, the way the stone walls – filled with nooks and crannies – felt timeless, the way Israelis were so unabashedly, unapologetically themselves. No pretenses in this place. It was love at first experience.

Four years later, after the death of my brother, shattered, grieving, and utterly lost, I needed somewhere to heal. There was no question that the country I had fallen in love with would be my destination. I made aliyah. I knew this was a complicated country; I was well-versed in Israel’s history. But I came anyway. Israel became my permanent home and a place to start over.

I was so grateful to Israel for catching me when I was down that I made a promise to give back and be the best citizen I could. Sometimes that meant small acts of kindness, but also volunteering my professional skills. I helped young tech innovators pitch ideas. I taught Sudanese refugees how to build websites. I wanted to be exposed to many narratives; I went on coexistence tiyulim and met Palestinians and Jewish peace activists. I created a writer’s salon in Tel Aviv. And most of all, I tried to be an ambassador to the outside world.

My social media was filled with detailed stories of ordinary Israeli life. I hoped my non-Israeli friends could see this country as I did – layered, flawed, and beautiful. It was soft diplomacy, and to me, it felt like another way to pay Israel back for taking me in.

But when conflict arose, as it regularly did, and the discourse online turned toxic, I went quiet. I hate confrontation and didn’t have the stomach to argue with bad-faith posts and false narratives. So I sat those moments out. It became a pattern. When Israel was quiet, I shared. When there was war, I disappeared except to post that I was “okay.”

At the same time, I had a very public second life. Alongside my life partner, Holocaust survivor Gidon Lev, I built a large TikTok following – over 500,000 people – focused on Holocaust and Jewish education, and the joy of our daily lives together. People adored Gidon. But with that reach came hate. Every day, I faced a firehose of antisemitism. I filtered it so Gidon wouldn’t have to see it, but the exposure altered me. I was scarred by the sheer volume of hate I encountered.

Predictably, after October 7th, the hate metastasized. People even accused my beloved Gidon, an elderly Holocaust survivor, of genocide. It was too much. The vitriol finally broke my spirit. We shut the account down.

At the same time, I was living the trauma every Israeli knows: the horror of October 7th, thoughts of the hostages and their suffering, the booms of Hezbollah rockets in the north, the two Iranian missile attacks, and then the 12-Day War. Living in Israel since October 7th has been like living inside an IMAX theater, immersed in despair, fear, heartbreak, and yes, anger.

And then came the daily drumbeat of anti-Israel accusations and lies in the media: genocide, apartheid, brutality. I’d heard these claims before, but never with such unrelenting force and volume.

Some of my friends online – gifted thought leaders, journalists, and intellectuals – are outspoken critics of this war and this government. I admired their courage, and sometimes recoiled at what felt like fanning the flames of global hatred. Don’t they know how dangerous this is? I thought. Don’t they see how we’re being portrayed?

My American friends, family, and colleagues, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, know that I am not a good person living in an evil place. They aren’t reductive. They challenged me but also understood that I wanted to hold two things at once: to love Israel, and to see it clearly. They respected my love and knowledge of history, nuance, and complexity. In this respectful, loving space, I did my best to answer their questions. In private conversations, I shared links to what they weren’t seeing: critical Israeli voices, internal debates, heartbreak, and losses. Sometimes I admitted I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure what the war’s goal was. I wasn’t convinced that getting the hostages back was still the focus.

In the early part of the war, most media accusations were knee-jerk and malign, like the claim that Israel bombed al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, which it did not. The world, as the media portrayed it, showed almost zero empathy for the horrors of October 7th. Many seemed to celebrate it. For Israelis, seeing mobs of students in keffiyehs chanting “from the river to the sea” was another trauma added to the list. Unmoored and maligned, our suffering celebrated, we became battered, bruised, and constantly on the defensive.

Grains of truth

Over time, however, the unhinged media narratives began to contain grains of truth. But we Israelis – traumatized, hardened, and assailed daily – could not always detect them in the landslide of lies. We had become inured. We were sick of headlines that left out dead soldiers, grieving families, and instead repeated falsehoods handed over by the Hamas Ministry of Health.

Meanwhile, our government offered little to counter these narratives. The fog of war, compounded by trauma, left us directionless. In a state of defensiveness, when one’s loyalty feels on the line, it becomes nearly impossible to hold multiple truths: that there is real anti-Israel bias, that the reporting is often terrible, that the IDF’s communication is unclear, that the war drags on without a clear objective, that Gazans suffer, that hostages remain, that diaspora Jews are frightened, and that Israel has, in effect, become a pariah state.

Oh, my beloved, flawed Israel. What have we done? Who can we blame? How did we get here? And how do we get somewhere better, a place where a safe, just, and peaceful Jewish future is possible?

This is not about agreeing with clearly biased media. It’s not about being right, left, or center. It’s about calling out the one man – Netanyahu – and the inner circle steering Israel into the rocks. For what? Political survival? Legacy? Such a legacy.

Especially now, with the approach of Tisha B’Av, the day we remember how internal division led to destruction, we must speak freely and frankly among ourselves. Let us come together, left, right, and center, as Israelis, to sow seeds of hope in the darkest hour. Let us have honest, questioning conversations about who we are and who we want to be. We owe it to ourselves and to this country.

This isn’t about CNN or PBS. It’s about us. This is a family conversation. We know what the world thinks of us. But what do we think of ourselves?