Greta and her followers still have no idea who we Israelis are

When I watched the clip where Greta Thunberg calls for help from Sweden because she had been “kidnapped” by Israel, I felt overwhelmed with rage.

I’m sick that she was cosplaying as a hostage. As we’ve all seen in the news images, she was fed and watered and gently escorted off her boat so that she wouldn’t make a dangerous spectacle that would end in more death. She should be thanking the IDF for saving her life, rather than continuing to pretend that she’s doing anything other than virtue signaling for attention.

The literal chutzpah, to sail into a war zone just to make a point, knowing that it can never end the way you want it to, only to be treated with civility and rejecting it with disdain. The audacity to claim that you have been kidnapped by the IDF, while we have Israeli hostages still sitting in the darkness, starving, and wasting away and you are fighting for the side that refuses to let them go…

All this belies a level of delusion, of narcissism, of white savior performance art that is so offensive, disgusting, and sick that it’s hard to believe this is what the world has come to.

I read the comments on her video, and there are millions of people in the world who are championing her, congratulating her, supporting this madness, and I can’t make it make sense.

We are fighting for our lives here.

This new antisemitism is so rotten, so foul, it’s shocking how en vogue it has become.

Watching it unfold globally is surreal. Evil is good and good is evil.

History did not happen, and also they are glad it happened, and more of it should have happened.

We were never here, but we are everywhere.

We are no one and control everything.

The gaslighting of the Jews in our generation is the most mindbending phenomenon of our lifetimes so far.

* * *

The IDF stated that they were going to show the activists the 43-minute video of Hamas’s horrors from October 7th, before they sent them back to their home countries. Greta and her crew refused to watch the video.

In the end, they don’t want to know the truth. They just want to believe their own narratives that have been fed to them by radicals and extremists, and fight the wrong people because their “beliefs” are more important than “facts.”

So they took care of her, gave her a medical check up, and sent her home on an El Al  flight to France on the way back to Sweden. It looks like she had to sit next to the toilet. Been there, not fun.

But…

What if we had let her and her people stay with our guidance, and we took them to see Israel for real?

The way Jews and Arabs live and work side by side.

Let them talk to Israeli Arabs and hear about their experiences.

Let them talk to survivors of Nova, of the kibbutzim, of October 7th.

Bring them down south and survey the destruction; listen to the stories.

Bring them to Hostage Square and talk to the Families Forum.

Meet with the hostages who have been brought home and hear what they have been through.

And if we had then brought them to Gaza.

Let them meet the people who know that Hamas is the real enemy.

Let them meet the aid groups.

Let them see what is actually happening there with the aid distribution.

So many say, “Stop giving her attention. Why are we talking about her?”

Because the girl knows how to make a spectacle. 

We need to get better at our own PR. We need to be as good as the other side to fight the antisemitism that is unfolding in real time.

Maybe we had an opportunity not just to automatically shove the violence in their faces for 43 minutes, but to meet the people of Israel and Gaza and see the truth once and for all.

Bring a camera crew, make a documentary.

It could have been called, “I Was Wrong About Israel” directed by Greta Thunberg.

Of course, I wish they had watched the video. I wish we could have figured out a way not just to laugh (though we needed it) but to use this moment to our advantage. To meet her with not just scorn (which she deserved), and rage (which she deserves) but with our humanity- not just evidence about their inhumanity.

Oh well. She’s gone.

And everything is more complicated than I’ve stated above.

But a girl can wish that the world would truly see us for who we really are.

And not who people like Greta think we are.