Remembering Why We Fight

For the first letter of the new year, I think it is worthwhile to reflect on what we are fighting for. Why are any of us here reading and writing and thinking on these issues? Why are we engaged in this discussion and arguing for the side we believe in, sometimes at great personal cost? Why does what we are doing here, now, matter?

We can never forget the events of October 7th, 2023. Our world was changed forever; as drastically as 9/11 changed it. Those of us who realized it sooner than others are the “lucky few”, for we gained an invaluable insight into humanity and human nature; and it is dark. We will never be the same again. We’ve seen things—I have seen things—that we can never forget. No amount of therapy can erase the brutality I have witnessed. It changed me fundamentally as a human being. And then I was changed again by the world’s response to the massacre.

The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust was already going to make the history books...but that wasn’t good enough for Hamas. They raped and tortured their way through homes, families, and the Nova Music Festival. They brutalized parents in front of children and children in front of parents. They systematically utilized rape and sexual assault as weapons of war; sometimes with such force that many multiple women’s pelvises were found broken along with their naked, dead bodies. Foreign objects were inserted into the genitals of women tied to trees, who were later murdered. If you haven’t watched Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary Screams Before Silence, you must. I am sorry, but you must. I am so, so sorry. To quote Elie Wiesel, when you listen to a witness you thereby become a witness. And you share in the responsibility to tell their stories.

Monsters did this. Anyone who stands with Hamas knowing full-well the crimes against humanity they committed is a monster as well. Anyone who supports UNRWA after seeing the results of their “education” on Jews and the Jewish state is either a fool or an outright Jew hater. Anyone “both sidesing”, anyone equivocating between Israel and Hamas, anyone claiming Israelis are committing “genocide” AFTER witnessing October 7th—you are the enemy of all Humanity. History will not be kind to you. After that darkest of Sabbaths, every decent human being on the planet stands with Israel UNCONDITIONALLY and UNEQUIVOCALLY. This is not up for discussion. This is a moral fact. Stand with Israel, or stand with the genocidal terrorists that massacred them.

We sane individuals who witnessed and absorbed the evidence Hamas shared of their unbelievable brutality are all bonded together in shared trauma and secondhand sadness, grief, loss, and suffering. Before this, we were for the most part ordinary people living ordinary lives. I had a middling career as a law clerk and then perhaps as a middling lawyer ahead of me. I was never destined to be anyone worth knowing. By all rights, I shouldn’t have been. I have tried my entire life to be mediocre. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.

October 7th woke something in me that I didn’t know I possessed. I never thought I could care so deeply about anything; let alone a place or indeed a people on the other side of the planet. I knew that I could not rest until justice had been found for the victims—and especially as the world seemed to turn against them almost immediately. It seemed to do so because it did do so. The Jewish people are the only people in the entire world that when they are attacked, the world not only justifies their attacker but encourages them to attack again.

I will not stand for this. I refuse to accept a world that accepts this as a “matter of course”. I will not allow history to repeat yet again with its ‘Dreyfus Affair’ and ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and blood libels and “racial purity” and all other false justifications the world has given through the millennia for attacking the Jewish people. Never again. I know history. I know where this leads.

And it all starts with lies. All the antisemitic conspiracy theories I just listed are fundamentally indistinguishable from the modern-day libels against Israel: “genocide”, “apartheid”, “ethnic cleansing”. Complete fabrications with no basis in reality, and they all just happen to target the only Jewish nation in the world. It is so, so obvious that it is the newest version of antisemitism manifesting in the 21st century. Yet, the people making those antisemitic assertions only ever double down on them. Either they don’t know or just don’t care for the truth.

And there’s the reason to fight. Because if the antisemites get their way, the world will bully, harass, injure, and eventually massacre Jews indiscriminately for the umpteenth time in history. What’s more, they will feel morally justified in doing so. This is history. This is what it has taught us. When lies against Jews become socially accepted, murder and atrocities against them become acceptable as well.

Why do we fight?

For Justice. For Truth. For Shani Louk. For Itay Chen. For Hersh. For all those who were victimized and brutalized by Hamas, including a number of Arab Israelis. For the one hundred hostages Hamas still holds. For the Palestinians who suffer for the delusions the world forces on them. For every Israeli still suffering from the aftereffects of October 7th. For all those who lost friends and loved ones on that day.

And we also fight for the future. For a better world. A world of coexistence. A world that understands there is nowhere else in the Middle East where Arabs have more rights and freedoms than in Israel. A world that won’t default to hating that which they do not understand. A Zionist world. It is not only possible but absolutely inevitable that the world will embrace Zionism and Israel’s right to exist. There is no other option. Because the Jewish nation is here to stay.

עם ישראל חי לנצח