After speaking with her the other day, I invited my sister to try the writing-as-catharsis that I've been doing (at least up until last week, when I became too stymied by the exhaustion of my anger and sadness, and decided it was time to temporarily switch gears and write a conference paper... but I do have more to say, so stay tuned for some posts from me either later this week or early next week). While we are feeling a lot of the same things, she has actually been in Ottawa this whole time, experiencing the attack and war from afar while also trying to deal with the shock of subsequent attacks and mounting, emboldened hatred at home, in the city and at her workplace. She is in the line of fire that I have been grateful to be able to avoid, as it is painful enough experiencing it through the media. And while my children are older and understand exactly what's happening, hers are very young, which adds other layers to her struggles. So she said she would try to write down some of what she was expressing to me on the phone. I think what came out is a very valuable contribution to this record that I've been keeping of this scary, frustrating, and exceedingly difficult time. I'm grateful to her for being able to share the following with you.
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After a short rant to my sister, cutting myself off in the interest of time, she kindly acknowledged both my rage and how much I have to say and invited me to write this blog post. I have to admit that I was intimidated at the thought, because I’ve been duly impressed by her talent for writing on this blog and, despite having published a book earlier this year, I didn’t feel I could write a post that was up to the standards of her blog. However, I really need the cathartic release that writing gives me, so here goes.
I think it’s safe to say that all Jews, no matter our home country or political affiliation, have been feeling the pain and anguish of October 7th acutely over the past month. Many of us have personal ties to both the land and the individuals who were murdered, maimed, and kidnapped that day, but beyond that, ALL of us have a shared genetic trauma that was triggered by this 2023-era pogrom, and ALL of us share the fear of potentially losing our one safe haven in the world. It would be unfair to say, however, that this grief and hurt with which we’ve been grappling is the only challenge for us right now; compounding our hurt, terror, and grief is the daily assaults we suffer both on ‘legacy’ media (BBC & CBC chief among them) and on social media. Many, if not all, legacy media outlets have an inherent bias, most often aligned with either their senior editors’ leanings or what sells the most copy. In the Western world today, this bias is sadly often left-leaning, favouring “the underdog” under the guise of being pro human rights, frequently without any real knowledge as to who the underdog is or who is infringing on, and who is defending, human rights. In the case of today’s war, these well-meaning journalists portray an internationally-recognized terrorist organization as being “liberators” of the downtrodden Palestinian citizens, and even worse, many of our most senior politicians, our Prime Minister of Canada among them, are consuming this “news” as if it’s truth, and therefore are further disseminating it as well as adding legitimacy to the claims. To compound matters further, the younger adults for whom this fight is not personal are eating up the underdog narrative and are campaigning, openly and violently, for their peers to support the slaughtering of both Israelis (of all faiths) and, inadvertently, of the Palestinian people as well (they don’t realize that the Palestinian women and children who have been killed in the war were calculated losses by Hamas, a fact that many Palestinians have spoken about in Arabic, but which the ‘freedom fighters’ here in North America refuse to acknowledge).
One of the most frustrating and infuriating parts of this whole month has been how easily misinformation/ propaganda is spread and how difficult it seems to be to disseminate truth. While I am enraged at the rewriting of history (an acquaintance of mine in Ottawa justified her standing with Hamas and against her own community by stating that she understood the suffering of the Palestinian citizens better than other Jews because she had heard first-hand accounts from some of those people who had suffered through the ‘Nakba’; she conveniently forgot that the ‘Nakba’ was a mass exile of Arabs from British-ruled ‘Mandatory Palestine’, a segment of Jordan, prior to the establishment of Israel that was orchestrated not by Israel or the IDF but by the surrounding Arab nations who intended to wipe nascent Israel off the map and didn’t want the Christians and Muslims living in the land to suffer as casualties, and then did not allow them entry or citizenship to their countries once their attack failed), the sheer quantity of misinformation and its spread makes me despondent. One learner at the medical school at which I teach posted on social media that she was “upset that our schools don’t teach us the proper history of the middle east”, citing the fact that she “never knew that in 1948 Israel was simply plopped on top of Palestine”; these falsehoods end up taking root and in fact, replacing the true history of the region (i.e. that there has never been, anywhere in the world, an independent nation called ‘Palestine’; prior to 1948, the area in question was under British rule and was an offshoot of Jordan that the British called “Mandatory Palestine”).
As infuriating as these inaccuracies are, my rage is exponentially compounded when people redefine known terms; for example, proponents of the anti-Israel diatribe redefine established words such as genocide and refugee. One simply cannot redefine words to suit their political needs; this should be self-evident. However, our upside-down world seems to allow this to happen in this case, in the name of Jew-hatred. Genocide is defined by the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) as “the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular race or nation”; this would be aptly used to describe Syria’s Hama massacre of Sunni Muslims in Syria in 1980, when 10-40,000 Sunnis were slaughtered, or Iran’s genocide of up to 30,000 political prisoners, for expressing dissenting views of the radical Islamist regime, in 1988. It could even be used to describe Hamas’s deliberate rapes, slaughter, and beheadings of 1200 Israeli men, women, and children on October 7 of this year. However, using it to describe unfortunate collateral casualties, mostly due to Hamas’s refusal to allow Gazan citizens to flee to safety, by Israel while the IDF fights for its country’s existence is simply bad linguistics. Similarly, throughout modern history, the word ‘refugee’ has meant an individual who has been exiled from their country of origin, either by physical force or intimidation, and who does not hold citizenship of another nation. It had never, until the late 20th century, referred to the descendants of said exiled individual, nor referred to any individual or family who holds a passport of another country. However, thanks to UNRWA, we now hear of millions of Palestinian “refugees”, many of whom never lived in what is now Israel, many of whom were born long after British ‘Mandatory Palestine’ ceased to exist, and many of whom hold passports of countries such as Egypt or Lebanon. While somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1.2 million Arabs were forced to flee Mandatory Palestine in the ‘Nakba’, there are now well over 7 million ‘refugees’, according to UNRWA (a refugee organization created exclusively for these people, and which funnels money to Hamas and other terror cells under the guise of ‘refugee aid’).
As such, my rage is ongoing unabated. My angst and fear, however, are rooted not only in the unknown of what may happen to my people’s beloved homeland and safe haven, but more immediately in the situation here at home, where I no longer feel as safe as I once did. I was born and raised in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, returning after my professional training to make my life and raise my family here. Ottawa is an incredibly beautiful and safe mid-sized city, filled with national monuments and museums. The biggest knock against my home city is that it’s incredibly ‘boring’ for teens and young adults; the safety, ‘boring’ nature, and attractions combine to make it an ideal place to raise young children. This year, however, we’re seeing a darker side to Ottawa, and as a proud, community-minded Jewish woman who’s raising children I hope will one day be proud, community-minded Jewish women, I’ve been scared. There have been an increasing number of days where I elect not to go downtown because I’ve heard of a “Pro-Palestine” protest, when my children are kept inside for recesses at their school because of threats, or when I’m nervous going to work, either because colleagues have been posting vile hatred towards my people or because there was an incident of blatant antisemitism at my workplace; gasoline was spilled on the floor, with “From the river to the sea” written in fake blood. The police refuse to call the act a hate crime or even label it as hate speech; instead, they told media that “messaging left at the scene was not hate-related and spoke to the ongoing conflict in Gaza”. To say we shouldn’t have to live like this, in our country, seems silly because it really should be so obvious that in Canada, hatred of an entire people isn’t simply terrible but in fact unacceptable; I do have to say it, however, because the people at the helm of our most powerful institutions seem to be against hatred towards all ethnic groups except mine. What I’ve come to realize, over the past 5 weeks of angst, is that much of this (not all of it) is born of ignorance, which is the real fuel of my anger.
Like my siblings, I too am employed as an instructor at a university, although that’s not my primary position. 2 weeks ago, a student leader in my faculty, with whom I may have had to work, posted horrifically vile antisemitic tweets on X (formerly Twitter); these started on October 7, in the morning (EST), with a post of “Did I wake up to the news that Palestine has been liberated?” and progressed in a celebratory tone from there that day, before moving on to thinly-veiled threats to the small Jewish community at the faculty. Likely due to a tepid communication from the faculty about this incident, this was swiftly followed by 2 more students, at various levels within our faculty, posting hatred as well. When I was reading through the tweets to knowledgably advocate for the safety of Jewish students and faculty, I noted that one of the (less offensive) tweets posted by the 3rd student was the one to which I referred earlier, about Israel ‘plopping itself’ on top of ‘Palestine’ in 1948. To anyone who knows the actual 20th century history of the region, this statement is laughable, but it’s misinformation that is taken as truth by other people ignorant to the facts, and is also emblematic of the problem among students – when they don’t know the history, they choose the ‘truth’ based on their inherent biases.
I, like many of my peers, am working hard at educating as much of the public as possible (through social media, mostly) as well as those at the helm of institutions that can have an impact – be it major employers, government, or university administration (through directed communications, often coordinated with other Jewish advocates).
My rage here is two-fold. First off, between my grief, anxiety, and anger I’m already exhausted and the task of educating those who don’t want to be educated is putting me over the edge. Second, I’m irate that we, the persecuted, who are (and have been) supportive of other peoples against whom similar vitriol is directed, are left to self-advocate with no one standing with us. Why? Because we’re Jewish, and for some reason Jew-hatred has become normalized and “ok” in the Western world.
I would never have thought that in Canada in 2023 my husband and I would have a serious discussion of which of our non-Jewish friends we could trust and who would have the space and wherewithal to hide us and our kids if the Jew hatred boiled over, as it did in Germany and the rest of Europe in the 1930s. We’re lucky – we had lots of options to discuss and our final choice has agreed unequivocally to do it if/when the time comes. But now, how do we discuss the current state of affairs with our kids so as not to scare them, all while we’re scared for them? I honestly can’t believe the issues we’re grappling with and it all seems so spectacularly unfair. Can someone please describe to me another time in history where a nation and ethnic people who have been attacked, and are simply trying to protect their indigenous land and the people in it, are portrayed as the instigators and not given public support? It’s a very lonely place to be.