When I parted ways with my daughter at the airport in Athens on Monday, I was happy that she was able to find a silver lining and take the opportunity to visit her best friend who is on exchange in Edinburgh. But I was deeply worried about leaving her in Europe on her own. Not because she had to navigate the airports, taxis, etc on her own - she's a big girl. My concern stemmed from the fact that in the three weeks between October 7 and October 27, the UK recorded 805 antisemitic incidents - more hate directed at Jews in 3 weeks than there had been in the prior 6 months. And ever since October 7, my daughter has made a point of wearing her Star of David necklace every day, everywhere she goes. That was fine in Israel, and even in Greece. But in Edinburgh? I asked her to do me a favor. She looked up at me, wary. I asked her to take it off while she was there, or at least to keep it tucked under her shirt. She frowned at me. This seemed a particularly cowardly and unprincipled move and it did not compute for her. We discussed it and I did my best to persuade her that there was a real reason to drop external displays of our principles for the sake of safety.
So now I'm in Florida. Home of "don't say gay." Where the children's book Christian the Hugging Lion is banned, Michelangelo's David is considered pornographic, abortion after 6 weeks is illegal, and anyone over the age of 21 can carry a concealed firearm without a permit. But a house down the street has a We Stand With Israel sign, so while I don't have the right to bodily autonomy if I'm more than 6 weeks pregnant (a hypothetical!) and the risk of accidently cutting someone off on the highway brings with it the possibility that they might shoot at me, at least no one is likely to paint a swastika on the wall of my condo or desecrate the mezuzah on the doorpost. Incredibly, I actually feel safer here (mentally and physically) than I would at home, where a bomb threat was sent to my nieces' school the day before yesterday, and where Jewish students don't feel safe walking around campus. And it doesn't hurt that it's 28 degrees and sunny.
I have such a pile of work to tackle, but it's so hard not to spend my days scanning the news. Cities in south and central Israel continue to be bombarded with rockets at regular intervals throughout the day and night. Hamas has actually been caught confessing to stealing fuel and food reserves from civilians and hospitals. Houthis are shooting missiles from Yemen at the tent cities for Israeli refugees that have been set up in Eilat. Hezbollah terror cells are firing into northern Israel from Lebanon, and the heads of Hamas sit on their billions in Qatar while forcing the people they are supposed to govern to remain in the territory that Israel urged them to evacuate weeks ago. And the headlines? They are all about Israel's horrific ground war and the massive civilian loss of life in Gaza as the cruel Jews seek revenge and ignore humanitarian calls for a ceasefire.
Even though the numbers provided by Hamas' "Health Ministry" can't be taken at face value, there is no doubt that the loss of life in Gaza right now is horrific. The people of Gaza who don't necessarily support Hamas' Islamist brutality are suffering, as they have been since Hamas seized power in 2007, under a regime of terror. But if Israel stops the bombing and the ground offensive, what happens to the 240+ Israeli hostages being held somewhere in Gaza under who-knows-what kind of conditions? If Israel stops trying to eliminate Hamas, are Israelis just supposed to sit around and wait for the next mass-casualty terror attack? If you don't think that's exactly what would happen, watch this video -- which at the time of writing this, has only been reported by Fox News, the New York Post, and the Daily Mail.
I am still trying to understand the groundswell of media, university, and even governmental support for Hamas. Clearly there is misinformation being disseminated. There are deeply entrenched ideas thanks to very successfully marketed movements like BDS about Israel being an apartheid state, and thanks to the UN, about Zionism as constituting racism. But even with all of that, I just can't fathom why and how it is that such an obviously, blatantly, patently terrorist regime that stands for everything enlightened western democracies stand against, is being so widely praised for its wanton slaughter of 1400 men, women, and children, while using its own people as human shields.
Spending my days looking through the headlines, even though I can't get inside the mind of someone who would find Hamas' actions "exhilarating" and inspirational, I can see why so many people believe what they believe about Israel. So I am back to blaming the media and the educational institutions who should be countering and challenging the media narrative, because they should know better. I know I've written about this before, but I am still working through an attempt to understand it, so bear with me.
Why is it so difficult for media outlets (and university professors) to understand and publish the basic facts that:
(1) Israel doesn't occupy Gaza and hasn't since 2005. So when Hamas calls for an "end to the occupation" and is praised on university campuses (and in some governments) around the world for being a force of resistance against colonialism, Hamas is not talking about the occupation of Gaza. They are talking about the "occupation" of the entire land of Israel by the 9.364 million Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze, Circassians, and Armenians who are living there. They are calling for the removal of all of these people from the land, from the river to the sea. They are inciting a violent end to Israel's existence as the only sovereign Jewish state in the world (and also calling for the death of all Jews in the world). And they want to replace it with a fundamentalist Islamist regime on par with the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS. And they are coming for Europe next. That's what it means to support Hamas.
(2) Siding with Hamas is not the same as supporting Palestinian rights and freedoms. Palestinians do not have rights and freedoms under Hamas. Siding with Hamas is only about killing as many Jews as possible and reclaiming the land of Israel for an Islamist regime.
The question of media accountability is not rhetorical. I am really trying to understand how they can so completely abdicate any responsibility to report what is actually going on. It is not difficult to provide proper context instead of purposely omitting it. It should not be difficult to support the cause of Palestinian freedom without endorsing and legitimizing massacres of Israeli citizens by Hamas. I don't think people would have a hard time grasping this distinction if it were simply presented to them, instead of conflating a desire for the freedom of a people with a terrorist organization that has the genocide of the Jewish people as part of its mission statement.
Luai Ahmed, a Yemeni journalist, came straight out and stated why he thinks the media, and the masses to whom they are catering, are fuelling the fire of antisemitism/anti-Zionism instead of dousing it with facts and context. "Jew-hatred" he says, "or as I would call it, Hatred."
I don't want to default to this obvious conclusion that people just love to hate Jews, but I'm having trouble finding another explanation. The media is pandering to what it thinks people want to read about. So when journalists write Jews/Zionists/Israel/white apartheid-loving settler colonialists as the bad guys and the poor, defenceless, homeless and landless colonized brown Palestinians as the helpless good guys who need our compassion and support, their stocks are going up because they are portraying the world as they think the masses understand it: Jews are greedy, powerful, insidious and controlling forces that represent the worst of white imperialist powers (the grandest irony, since we actually only have one country and the UN itself doesn't think it has the right to exist, and people around the world are currently actively calling for its destruction or simply wiping it off the map), and Palestinians are colonized, helpless, landless, BIPOC refugees who need the help of good people from the west in order to be freed from oppression. The racism works both ways and fits the simple narrative that has become standard western history. And so instead of challenging it, the media repeats it and enforces it. And now antisemitic incidents -- already the highest reported type of religion-based hate crimes in Canada by a wide margin (for a demographic that comprises 1.4% of Canada's total population -- compared to 4.9% for Muslims, 2.3% for Hindus, 2.1% for Sikhs, for example) have increased exponentially around the world.
And I have to tell my daughter, like it's Germany in 1939, to hide her Star of David necklace and swallow her principles.