After Iran’s Missiles

Since the days when they excused the atrocities of Oct 7 as ‘resistance’, I’ve unfriended former ‘friends’ who turned out to be virulent antisemites under cover of ‘human rights defense’. But I check their threads periodically just to see what lies they continue to spew.

The latest is that Iran’s barrage of missiles into Israel was ‘self-defence’. Thus is the torture and brutal massacre of almost 2,000 innocent civilians, most of them lifelong active pursuers of peace and reconciliation, and the kidnapping of 250, including babies, children, and the aged in both groups, equated with the killing of long-time murderous terrorists without any collateral civilian deaths.

True and legitimate movements for Palestinian rights and autonomy have been hijacked by those actively working for the eradication of Israel, and sometimes even of all Jews around the world. This is completely evident if one ignores the gaslighting; the public statements are quite clear, unequivocal, and unsubtle.

Welcome to today’s ‘progressive left’, heirs to Stalin and his murder of millions.
The betrayal is deep and dangerous.

I am so relieved that Israel was spared, thanks to US, European, and (most surprising) Middle East supporters and allies. But I am so sickened by the unending barrage of lies and demonization; alienated from so many of those places — intellectual, literary, political — that I used to call home and whose betrayal I feel intensely; and deeply despairing for the future.

I am being pushed back into a dangerous ghetto, after a lifetime of looking and living outward. For someone whose parents were both sole family survivors of the Shoah, this is horrifying.