I write what I see
The Grave They Applaud
Proof under glass, ignored like Evyatar digging his own grave. The Shulchan Aruch in Jerusalem, evidence as undeniable as Evyatar and just as ignored.
We all saw it. Israeli hostage Evyatar David in a Gaza tunnel, two years without sunlight, forced to dig his own grave. This is a video Hamas filmed, and now it has been broadcast into the world’s living rooms. And yet, instead of outrage, there was applause.
The applause came in the form of excuses—the street protests chanting “resistance” while Jews are tormented underground. The depravity continued with academics who call terror “decolonization,” and progressives who know Hamas is a death cult and still find ways to sanctify its crimes as liberation.
I’ve also heard it up close. My father’s old friend, an educated man who should know better, shared one of those slick videos made by a “former Zionist” turned Israel-basher. In his response to me, he wrote: “It’s not that I don’t feel for the victims of October 7, I just think the Gazans have it much worse, and I refuse to remain silent.”
And that line stung all the more because of who wrote it. This man’s father was once my father’s teacher back in South Africa, a bond that should have carried respect, even affection. My father admired him, remembered him with warmth. And now here was his son, a man educated, worldly, posting that Israel’s dead and Israel’s hostages simply matter less. A man who could look at a Jew digging his own grave and still find a way to tell me others “have it worse.”
I was alone in that comments section, drowned out by self-righteous lectures about Israel’s “atrocities.” So I decided to experiment. I posted images that are impossible to ignore—my husband’s family members murdered on October 7, including two children. I also posted burned bodies, charred bodies, and the bullet-ridden young woman lying on the ground at Nova. Images so brutal they should rattle the world. And yet not one single comment came back. Not one. Not even from the friend, who otherwise has a mouthful to say about Israeli “barbarity.” Silence for the Jews. Always silence for the Jews.
So what does my father’s friend mean when he says Gazans have it much worse?
Is anyone in Gaza locked in a tunnel for years, starved and forgotten?
Is anyone in Gaza forced to dig his own grave at gunpoint?
Are they dragged from their beds, slaughtered in front of their families, paraded as trophies?
Are they targeted because they are Palestinian? No. And you know it.
Israel does not hunt people for their ethnicity or kill Palestinians to erase their existence. Israel fights Hamas, and once again the obvious must be repeated: an army that hides behind civilians, thrives on their misery, and drags them into catastrophe to preserve its rockets and its rule. Israel’s response to a 21st century pogrom unleashed on its citizens is a full-on war—but not a campaign of annihilation.
And yet Hamas isn’t alone. They are aided by the very structures anti-Israel activists idolize: UN agencies that recycle their propaganda, and avert their eyes from terror, workers in Gaza who parade as humanitarian staff while doubling as guards for tunnels and hostages. And it continues with international NGOs that publish reports while ignoring schools and hospitals repurposed as barracks. I’ve written before about this cadre of UN workers who are not neutral at all but steeped in anti-Israel bias from the start, and about the international officials who arrive in Israel already armed with their verdict. Add this to the self-anointed genocide experts who literally pay a fee to sit on the panel and the picture is complete. The machinery of terror is greased by those who claim neutrality: institutions cloaked in relief and diplomacy that become Hamas’s launching pads. And when those launching pads ignite, Israel gets no warning, and you already know what happens next.
Meanwhile, Israelis were hunted because they were Jews. The young woman in the photo, which I added to that Facebook thread, was shot at Nova, she was not a combatant. The children burned alive were not soldiers. The hostages rotting underground are not “collateral damage” but trophies taken to prove a point: that Jews are killable, and that Jewish existence is intolerable.
And don’t tell me this hunt is confined to Gaza. Israelis are hunted all over the world: in Paris, in London, in New York. Recently Spain has banned entry to anyone it labels as participating in genocide; another one of those blunt policies that stops short of targeting IDF soldiers broadly, but signals how the veneer of solidarity can swiftly harden into punitive posture. My friends who emigrated to Israel refuse to post photos of their children in IDF uniforms, not out of modesty but out of fear that their kids will be targeted if they visit relatives abroad. It’s a fear that neighbors, colleagues, even classmates will mark them for retaliation. Think about this—Jews hiding their pride, erasing their own children from the public eye in the 21st century while crowds march around chanting about liberation.
Don’t you dare tell me this is an imaginary fear. I have friends who tuck their kippa under a baseball cap when they walk down the street in supposedly enlightened Western cities. I have friends who scrub their social media of anything Israeli, terrified that the wrong photo will make their families a target. Don’t you dare tell me Jews are safe while they are made to efface their identity in public, forced to hide who they are just to placate a world that has always found a way to justify hating us.
This is the parallel you refuse to face. Jews once hid their identity in Europe because mobs were waiting. Today, Jews erase themselves from social media for the same reason. If you wear a Star of David you risk being turned away in some establishments. And the self-anointed moral aristocrats tell us with a straight face that Israel is the aggressor, that Jews are the oppressors, and that somehow we deserve it. They posture as antifascists while normalizing the oldest fascism there is: Jew-hatred.
And what is it about Jews living in their own land and thriving that disturbs them so much? They can see it with their own eyes: there’s one Israel and twenty-two Arab states. One Israel, for heaven’s sake. And yet the existence of that one small state is treated as an unforgivable offense. They sneer that Jews claim a “2,000-year-old promise of return,” turning millennia of survival into a punchline, as though continuity itself were a joke.
They ignore Jewish life in this land, always, even under occupation.
They can ignore archaeology, because who needs evidence when ideology will do? They can wave away coins stamped with Hebrew inscriptions that were dug out of this very soil, dismiss ruined synagogues as irrelevant, pretend mikva’ot scattered across the hills are just decorative pits. They can pretend the travelogues of pilgrims who met Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias were all mass hallucinations. Even the manuscripts under glass in the National Library—scripture, poetry, commentary written here is shrugged off as myth. I’ll say it again, proof in ink is dismissed all the same! At the end of the day, reality is an inconvenience, and erasing it is so much easier than admitting the obvious: Jews have always been here.
For every other nation, history affirms identity; for Jews, history is derided as myth. And they call themselves progressives.
And still, after dismissing every coin, every ruin, every manuscript, they return to the same refrain: “But the Gazans have it worse.” As if denying Jewish history weren’t enough, they weaponize Palestinian suffering to erase Jewish humanity in the present. They collapse archaeology into casualty counts, manuscripts into propaganda, continuity into crime. Then they bury the evidence of who we are and excuse those who bury us alive.
That is what they legitimize when they say “Gazans have it worse.” They erase the difference between the tragedy of war and the sadism of terror. They elevate casualty counts above intent, as though statistics erase the difference between a strike on militants and a pogrom. And in doing so, they repeat the oldest pattern in history—the pattern that has always excused Jewish death by explaining it away.
The ones digging their own graves are Israelis. The ones wasting away in darkness are Israelis. And those people, smug in their slogans, intoxicated by their own virtue, dare call it justice.
And then comes the mantra: “But Gazans are starving.” As though this cancels out a Jew in a tunnel with a shovel in his hands. Hunger in Gaza is not fate and it is not Israel’s goal. It’s manufactured by Hamas—a leadership that hijacks aid, hides behind hospitals, and stockpiles rockets instead of bread. The world knows there is relief flowing in. The world knows there is flour, medicine, fuel. But Hamas and its collaborators choke their own people so they can film the misery and call it proof of genocide.
And what do you do with a society that elects such rulers, that celebrates their massacres, that hides hostages in homes and hospitals, that lets teachers drill their children in hate? What do you call doctors who guard kidnapped Jews instead of healing patients? What do you call classrooms where children are trained not in science but in slaughter?
Gazans are not fighting for freedom. This is a society conscripted into terror, taught to believe Jews cannot exist. And progressives who posture as moral visionaries have the audacity to legitimize them.
Yes, Gaza suffers. But it suffers because its rulers chose war and its culture sanctifies death. Israel didn’t start this war. Certainly Israel didn’t ask for October 7. It did not invade to conquer. Israel responded to survive, and still, they would have me believe that the hostage digging his grave deserves less pity than those who cheer his captors.
And this is how history repeats itself: in the Middle Ages, Jews were accused of poisoning wells during plague, and mobs cheered as communities were burned alive. In the 19th century, pogroms swept Russia while intellectuals nodded along about the “Jewish problem.” In Europe, polite society watched Jews shoved into cattle cars and said, “Yes, it is terrible, but the war is hard for everyone.” Today, the same script is recycled: anti-Israel activists acknowledge the cruelty, then explain why Jews deserve it.
Jews have never been left alone—not by Rome, not by Crusaders, not by Inquisitors, not by Nazis, not by Hamas. And today, not by activists—many of them are progressives who sanctify hate with the language of justice. Those who drape themselves in virtue while applauding the graves of Jews.
The obscenity is not only the shovel in Evyatar’s hands, but the world’s grin as he digs.
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