A guy who once was a camper of mine many lifetimes ago when I was a camp counselor, now living in Orillia, Ontario, came home with his family the other day to find the words "Jews Die" and "slaughter" spray-painted on his garage. Taped to his garbage bin was a note that read "You and your Jewish family are going to die!"
The words "Krystal Nacht" -- presumably a new-agey spelling of Kristallnacht -- were written on a wall on the corner of Queen and Yonge streets in Toronto.
And a few days ago, in the neighborhood right next to mine in Ottawa -- like a 7 minute walk from my house -- someone spray-painted “Fuck Israel” and an X-ed out Israeli flag on the street.
I'm afraid.
I've written several times over the past few weeks about how I have always been aware of antisemitism. I've always felt Other. I've always felt a kind of cold suspicion from people who know I'm Jewish, and I've always felt cautious about saying anything related to Israel or Judaism around people I don't know well. What was I afraid of then? Being shunned, I guess. Having people impute values and ideas to me based on what they thought it meant to be Jewish, rather than asking me what my Judaism meant to me. Having my ideals and principles attributed by other people's assumptions. Not being able to define myself and my own identity. Having to explain that what Israel meant to me was a place where I would always be welcome, when I'd receive incredulous looks and "why wouldn't you be welcome here?" in response, as though by being a Zionist I was somehow dissing Canada, or misunderstanding what Canadian culture was all about.
Not only does it turn out that I wasn't misunderstanding anything -- and they most definitely were -- but that being afraid of being misunderstood is actually not a big deal. At all. In fact, I find that suddenly I don't care anymore what anyone thinks about who or what I am. Other people's assumptions, misunderstandings, or self-righteous high horse mounting, don't scare me. But their potential for violence is terrifying.
Because, while I had always been aware of the existence of antisemitism as a general feature of western culture at large, I never imagined that that cold suspicious presumptuous Othering was just a thin veneer painted over a deep, dark, hate-filled chasm that was lying in wait for an opportunity to gape wide open and swallow me and my family whole. I thought the violent in-your-face Jew-hatred that I saw at the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting 5 years ago, or in the swastikas and slogans on January 6 2021, or in tweets by unhinged celebrities, were just that -- fringe, isolated, unhinged angry people who found a convenient outlet in killing or threatening Jews. Because lashing out at Jews has always been a convenient outlet for unhinged angry people. I guess I just hadn't realize that so many people -- not fringe -- are unhinged and angry. I hadn't realized that the cold suspicious kind of antisemitism that I always felt, was just the top on a pot that was simmering underneath. And that the idea of Jews defending themselves in their own country -- or even having their own country -- could so easily remove that top, spraying everyone nearby with boiling venom.
Like so many other left-wing Jews who have been writing all over the internet as they search their souls for understanding what the hell is going on right now, I feel lost. The Jewish ethics with which I was raised emphasize compassion, generosity, and acts of loving-kindness (it looks funny in English, but there's a special word in Hebrew for that last one), and these have always guided my morals and my politics. I was always told as a child to put myself in someone else's shoes before I judged, to have empathy and to try to understand things from someone else's point of view. I have spent a lifetime doing that, and teaching my children the same. I side with the underdog, promote equal rights for all, advocate for the poor and disenfranchised. And I find so much of right-wing politics and politicians repugnant, that I was always willing to ignore all the red flags on the left, to set aside my distaste for The Squad and for the ignorance around definitions of Zionism while still standing up for the causes that I believed in. I condemn Netanyahu's policies on Settlements, and his fanatical ministers who promote violence and racism. I condemn any movements toward theocracy. And I condemn the deaths of civilians on any side of any conflict.
But now I'm scared of the left, and I'm scared of the right. I'm scared of the nameless, faceless unhinged angry people who spraypaint messages of hatred and vandalize the homes of Jewish people just because they're Jewish. I'm scared that the lid has come off the pot and it's too hot and too hard to put back on, and I don't know where all of that spraying venom will land. And I'm scared that the one place that we all know we can go if it starts to land on us, is fighting for its very existence, both physically and in terms of its legitimacy across the world.
So with my Jewish ethics, I get all the reasons why a "humanitarian pause" or even a ceasefire would be called for at this time. The images of the women and children that Hamas is keeping in northern Gaza as human shields -- precisely so that we will see these images here in the west -- are heartwrenching and horrible. No one (except Hamas) wants women and children to suffer. Civilians shouldn't lose their homes or even be forced out of them in the first place. People should not be piled up in refugee camps and dependant on aid trucks crawling across the border for food and water while their cities are being smashed to pieces by bombs and collapsing with the detonations of tunnels underneath their streets.
But what would you have Israel do? Not rhetorical, I'm asking because I want to know. Let's say 3000 armed men ran across the border into Canada or the US one fine morning and mutilated, gang-raped, beheaded, tortured, burned, and massacred 1400 of your fellow citizens in their homes and communities, while their compatriots sent thousands of rockets to smash buildings, roads, and cities all around you. Then these armed men bring back butchered bodies as trophies along with 240+ live hostages between the ages of 9 months old and 88 years old to their lands while bragging on the phone about how many they have killed and playing football with the heads of your dead along the way. Would you bomb their cities for a few weeks and then stop, figuring that they had learned their lesson? What if the official representatives of these 3000 armed men went on live TV at that point and swore that they would repeat this again and again until all of your people were dead? What if their mandate in fact called for the death of your people, not only in your land but around the world? Would you give up on getting those hostages back and reconcile with the fact that those who haven't been mutilated or raped to death will live out the rest of their miserable lives as sex slaves? Would you pause the bombing and the ground incursion so that the civilians Hamas is hiding behind can get a breather -- along with the terrorists themselves, so that they can regroup? Maybe get some more supplies and sophisticated weapons to keep fighting you for longer when you resume?
These are not easy questions, and judging from the many past feints and battles between Israel and Hamas (Hamas has sent a steady stream of rockets into Israel ever since they took over Gaza, killing, injuring, and causing widespread damage -- you just don't necessarily know about it because frightened, terrorized, or dead Jews in Israel are just not that interesting to the media on a regular basis), these are questions that have up to now always been answered with "yes." Yes we'll keep our defensive engagements short. Yes we'll cave to the humanitarian needs of the citizens of Gaza even though Hamas won't. Yes we won't commit to a full-scale ground invasion into territory that we withdrew from 18 years ago. Yes we'll try to keep our PR points higher with the rest of the world by giving into their demands -- even though an average 84 civilians have been killed every day in Syria for the past 10 years and no one is on their case; even though the civil war in Yemen has claimed almost 400,000 people's lives, almost a quarter of them children; even though Islamist violence in Africa kills tens of thousands of civilians annually; and I could go on, but you get the idea. The world only cares if the perpetrators of violence are Jews. Even in self-defence, even if they repeatedly warn the civilian shields that they must evacuate, even if they tell people exactly where not to be as they advance their attack, even if the very existence of the single place in the world that Jews can count on to retreat to in case their lives are threatened elsewhere (or they get kicked out) is in the greatest danger it has been since its founding.
And that's why this time the answer has to be no.
No ceasefire.
No one asked the Allies for a ceasefire when between 300,000 and 600,000 German civilians, and around 200,000 Japanese civilians were killed by Allied bombing in World War II. In fact, to do so would have been absurd, as it was well-known that sparing enemy civilians would result in the deaths of Allied civilians, and worse, the takeover of Allied nations by Nazis. The official death toll of the bombing of Pearl Harbor was 2,403 -- only 68 of whom were civilians. That was enough to bring the US into the war, and to justify the death by bombing of 500,000-800,000 civilians in Germany and in Japan. 1,400 Israeli civilians were not bombed, mercifully dying in one fell swoop, but instead were tortured, mutilated, butchered, burned alive over hours, and then 240+ of them were dragged off alive behind enemy lines.
I weep for the children of Gaza. But I'm terrified for what it will mean for the children of Israel -- in every sense of the term -- if the IDF stops the bombing. And I'm terrified for my own children, and what it will mean for them and for us if there is no longer an Israel to which we can return as the venom boils and spreads across our own neighborhoods at home.
If there is another way, tell me. I will be the first to advocate for a ceasefire, to spare more civilian deaths. But, like the Allies in World War II -- like any nation at war anywhere, any time -- if I have to choose between the enemy's children and my own, there is no choice.
So if you want to judge Israel's actions right now, try to understand what they're experiencing. Imagine your family murdered in hideous unspeakable ways. Imagine your 8 year old has been abducted to Gaza and not seen or heard from for almost a month. Imagine bombs falling daily on your cities. Imagine herding your children into safe rooms several times a day when the air raid siren or the terrorist incursion warning goes off. Imagine your sons and daughters on the front lines, waging a war for your country's right to exist. Imagine your parents or grandparents were refugees from exactly the same kind of horrific Jew-hatred -- from Yemen, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, Iran, Syria, Germany, Russia... the list could go on. These are the citizens of Israel -- all refugees from Jew-hatred all over the world. They established a country on the land of their ancestors so that they wouldn't be subjected to the venom that is always simmering in the pot. They were willing to share it and divide it with the Arabs who lived there too. Instead they were attacked, and continue to be attacked -- physically and also in the eyes of the world -- for their entire 75 year history. They are not perfect people. They have made a ton of mistakes and done a lot of things wrong along the way. But they are people who have no other country, and no other home, and haven't had one for 2000 years. And as they are defending it, people around the world are calling for the deaths of more Jews -- not Israelis, but JEWS -- and we are terrified. Where will we go when the western governments no longer have the backing of the people to stand up for us? Before you judge, or call for a ceasefire, put yourself in our shoes and tell me what you would do.