Witnessing Chaos: Fear and Hope for Tomorrow

Unpacking Israel’s VUCA Reality: Living Amidst Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity

I’ve been wanting to write for a while, but have been torn between feeling ignorant of all the facts, not wanting to embarrass myself with insolence and inaccuracy, and not wanting to give away too many of my personal feelings.

But we are all tired.

• Tired of living in the only tunnel in the world that, as yet, has no light at the end of it.
• Tired of not knowing (yet knowing) what the hostages are going through and wondering when they’ll be ‘home’, and simultaneously imagining what their families are going through.
• Tired of not understanding why every women & children’s organization in the world, and every peace mission, has not spoken up for the Israelis raped, mutilated, tortured, and slaughtered.
• Tired of not understanding why the politicians on both sides of the war don’t step down and say “my bad”.
• Tired of wondering how we were convinced all those years that the Israeli army can handle anything; nothing to worry about; Gazans don’t want a war……
• Tired of wondering why no one asks Egypt why their 12km border with Gaza is closed? How are they going to help their neighbors?
• Tired of not understanding how Iran is in charge of the disarmament committee in the UN.
  Tired of not understanding why all ‘normal’ countries are not leaving the UN, and setting up a new parallel organization that really does want to help the world.
• Tired of not understanding why people can say what they want about Jews, and even Zionists (should we rightly or wrongly differentiate between them).
  [Aside, If the word Zionist, or Jew, was replaced with any other minority in the world, the demonstrations and ‘free speech’ against them would be slammed before you could say ‘Jack Robinson’.]
  By chance I was in the middle of reading “Jews Don’t Count”, by David Baddiel on October 7 – a good choice under the circumstances!
• Tired of feeling guilty for continuing to live our lives, as best we can, while 130 something hostages are still imprisoned in Gaza, and while our kids’ friends and our friends’ kids are all fighting and giving their lives (physically and metaphorically) to prevent October 7 from happening again.
• Tired of wondering if our families and friends abroad are safe.
• Tired of wondering if it’s safe for us to go abroad.
• Tired of not knowing what is going on in our kids’ heads. Damn it, not even knowing what is going on in our own…
• Tired of seeing the destruction of the mental health of at least two generations of under-40s.
• Tired of hearing statistics about immigration in Europe and the USA, and how it is a planned program for making the world Shariah-compliant….
• Tired of seeing the destruction of people’s homes in Gaza (yes, that bothers even us Israelis – albeit less since thousands of them decided to enter Israel and slaughter our children and grandparents)
• Tired of seeing how the world news agencies always treat this conflict, how they always finish with pictures of destroyed Gaza, leaving that as the memory people remember, even if they mention Israel’s side briefly at the beginning.
• Tired of how the ‘journalists’ don’t exactly say “bad Israel” but they use terms and intonations to imply it, and anyone less than totally following the last 100 years of Middle Eastern and world history, would not necessarily see the truth and the games the agencies are playing.
• Tired of hearing the rest of the world tell us what bad people we are.
• Tired of that little voice that they have activated in my head that keeps asking me “What if something they are saying is right?
• Tired of wondering what will be if they do manage to take over the Western world? After all, that is their declaration, it is not really about Israel.

I don’t want to be the one that puts a damper on anyone’s mood, but we have lost.

Even if all the remaining hostages were returned alive, even if everyone could go back and live in their (rebuilt) homes in the North and South (and even the innocent Gazans in Khan Younis and Gaza City, etc.), the mere number of Islamic supporters – be they Muslims, Arab others, Christians or even self-hating Jews and Israelis – outnumbers the total global Jewish population 20-fold.

With the ‘advance’ of social media (or anti-social media, your call), there is no way 15 million Jews can out-post more than two billion pro-Hamas supporters.

Hang on you say, they are not pro-Hamas, they are pro-Palestinian… Sorry, I disagree. If they were pro-Palestinian, they would have been protesting all the time — before October 7. Not just from the minute Israel was attacked (before Israel even reacted), and they would have been disgusted by what was done by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, not to mention everyone else who jumped on the bandwagon on Oct.7 just because the(ir) government, Hamas, promised them houses and huge financial rewards for killing and bringing back Jews (dead or alive!).

We know from publicly available video and physical evidence that the attackers were both amped up on drugs and indoctrinated from childhood to hate Jews, from their years in UNWRA schools.

Unfortunately, asking protesters on campuses around the US and UK, on the streets of Europe, to put themselves, for one minute, in Israel’s place, to think about how would they react to such an attack on their only home? is a waste of time – because we know they think that what happened was our own fault; because of ‘how Israel treats the Palestinians’… The lack of critical thinking, or the lack of desire to try to see the truth, is unfathomable and frustrating. Add to that their lack of ability to separate what is happening in Israel from the mere existence of world Jewry just blows my mind (and not in a good way).

No one claims Israel is an angel, or perfect. No one says there isn’t room for improvement, but since we forcibly and violently dragged every last one of our own citizens out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, and left the state-of-the-art farms and equipment to the Gazans – which they subsequently destroyed, we have had no end of attacks; be it stabbings, flying burning ‘kites’ to burn our fields and homes, rockets, and vehicle ramming attacks at bus stops. We have made numerous peace offerings over the last 75+ years and every time we have neared an agreement, we have endured more attacks.

So even if we’re at fault (which I disagree with, but having seen international news, can understand why some uneducated people might believe that), there is no excuse for what ensued on Oct. 7.

So excuse me if I missed something, or if something here was slightly inaccurate. I still believe I can speak on behalf of many of my friends and family, my colleagues and neighbors, we are tired.

I wrote most of this yesterday, but since then I sat and watched an interview with Lucy Aharish, Muslim Israeli news anchor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LIcd7wHlCE&t=2s). We need more of Lucy in the world. Lucy verbalized what I have been feeling: On October 7 we lost.

Aimed at the weakest people; people who supported coexistence; families young and old, kids having sleepovers, on a sabbath and a holy day, the attacks were so barbaric and cold-blooded that they caused us to lose our compassion for the other side (and actually, were probably intended to accomplish just that).

I know I can’t even begin to compare my experience of the last 7 months with many others, who have suffered and continue to suffer so much more. I don’t even want to try.

I just hope that this time next year we will be posting about the new Singapore in Gaza (which is what we hoped might happen back in 2005). I hope we will be posting about how the people decided to rebuild and put all the aid money into building themselves schools, theaters, and hospitals (real ones, not weapon stores). Roads and beach resorts instead of terror tunnels.

I hope too that the hostages are home soon, safely with their families and friends, that the displaced northeners and southerners can go ‘home’ and try to rebuild some semblance of their former lives.

I hope that the world wakes up to the threat it is under, that it understands that the threat is not to Gaza, and not to Israel even. It is to the whole of Western society.

Wake up world. The threat is coming from the Islamic extremists who now not only control entities such as Hezbollah and Hamas, Syria and Jihad, but also an army of entitled, brainwashed, well-funded supporters that it has planted in cities all over the world, and especially all over the USA and Europe.

And despite how tired we are, this is our call.

Am Yisrael Chai.