Some points in time become historical with perspective. The Battle of the Bulge and the evacuation from Saigon come to mind. Others take on the gravitas of history while they are happening. This is one of them.October 7, 2023, or in sound byte talk – 7/10 (with the remarkable ring of the similarity to the 7/11 convenience store chain) – is already one of those times. It will join the quick code that these events immediately had: Pearl Harbor, The Twin Towers-9/11; they are shorthand and iconic to any one of the era.How do we know this? As Jewish World writer of The Jerusalem Post and Deputy Editor-in-Chief, Zvika Klein asked on October 10, 2023, “700 killed, and still no ‘Je Suis Israélien’ – Why the hypocrisy?”
That was written on Monday, October 9 when I was subediting articles for the night shift. I was lucky to get his article in my queue and identified with his question. Indeed, there have been many missile attacks and terrorist operations in Israel in the 43 years I have lived here. From my front-row seat in the Jewish Quarter where we lived for 35 of those years, I recall rocks thrown from the stock-piled heap in the Muslim holy place of al-Aqsa Mosque at the worshipers below in the Western Wall Plaza, knifings of neighbors, missiles from Iraq, and so many more incidents, most hardly making a ripple. I often asked myself, where is the world?
In recent Internet years, I joined the “Je Suis Charlie” campaign to identify with the murdered journalists of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The four Jewish victims were killed for good measure by the terrorists at Hypercacher kosher supermarket siege the day after. There was no pretense that their deaths were for the unassailable cause of freedom of speech.
Jewish victims were expected to suck it up. We were already the bad guys in the script: colonizers, rascists, apartheidists, land grabbers. We heard it everywhere from the UN to any social media venue.
Only it was all a lie; on the level of Goebbels, a big fat lie, so big the inverted world would rush to the defense of the poor benighted Palestinians who, since 1967, drilled into the head of everyone that they were a nation who had been terribly mistreated.
Indeed, it was really hard to deal with the stubborn facts of the Jewish people who had been persecuted brutally for thousands of years. Jews really are a problem.
I HAVE always been a supporter of coexistence. I think it is the only way but I have learned from hard experience to be cautious. I still support coexistence. The crimes of this past week have nothing to do with coexistence.
Hamas claims to be mistreated by Israel are now exposed for what they are: a way to twist and extort funds, endless amounts of euros and dollars from guilt-prone Westerners to line their coffers with the means to destroy for the sake of destruction. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have always been clear about their goals. Destroy the little Satan, Israel, and then destroy the big Satan, the US. It’s time we believed them.
After my shift late Monday night, I searched the Internet for tributes to the Israeli victims of the Hamas massacre that had just taken place in the South. There was very little. A Facebook friend who is a Holocaust survivor grandmother in the Gaza Envelop community, posted a photo of The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin lit up in blue and white. I do not need a prompt to recall that in World War II it was strewn with Nazi swastika flags. There was little else.
Today, Wednesday – day four of the week and day five since the world changed – the international community public buildings seem to be in a rush to identify with Israel. Hamas has unmasked itself as barbaric murderers. What was passed on from shocked survivors on WhatsApp groups and broadcast on local television in Hebrew is no longer our private national trauma.
The facts as they unfolded in the communities along the Gaza border are so beyond the abilities of the English language that people resort to words like unfathomable or impossible to absorb. Stuttering, crying, shaking, they relay the unimaginable.
A hundred international reporters were invited to witness the aftermath of the atrocity. The butchered – I don’t use that word lightly as infants were decapitated by knives – babies, the families killed in their beds or protecting their children in their hideouts or safe rooms, the nature concert-goers hiding (I pull up an image of Woodstock in my head as a reference), has been seen; the reports are going out to their readership.
They are not parallel comparisons by any means, so indulge me if I refer to General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s wartime call to bring in the journalists to see Buchenwald. I don’t know this from history books; my father was on the first jeep into the camp – as a native-German speaker, he had helped negotiate the surrender of nearby Weimar, considered a cultural treasure that should not be carpet-bombed as was the fate of Dresden.
Like then, the instinct may have been also that people have to see this because if they don’t see it themselves it will be too tempting to deny the evidence, the blood, the bodies. We know that is the case 80 years after the death camps.
The public support for Israel
AND NOW, after US President Joe Biden’s speech and the bringing to America’s front porch, the fact that 14 Americans were among the dead of the Hamas massacre and some more also kidnapped, the White House has joined in the identification with our dead; it is also aglow with the blue and white colors of Israel. This is more than lip service. Biden also sent a US aircraft carrier to reinforce his message.
At last check, the following countries have made a public display of their support for Israel. The blue and white lights also often include a Jewish Magen David from our flag. There are 14 sites so far: Brandenberg Gate in Berlin, Germany; Eiffel Tower and Hôtel de Ville in Paris and Toulouse, France; 10 Downing Street and the entire Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) in London, England; the White House, Washington, DC, the Empire State Building in New York City, and the Paramount Miami Worldcenter, Florida, US; Flinders Street station and the arts center spire in Melbourne, and Sydney Opera House, Australia; the flag of Israel was screened outdoors in Kyiv, Ukraine; and the Republika Srpska Palace in Banja-Luka, Sarajevo.
There is also a video produced by the European Jewish Congress titled “Europe Stands with Israel,” depicting the following cities and EU buildings either illuminated with blue and white lights on iconic sites or showing the Israeli flag next to their own national flag or the EU flag that is being widely circulated: Rome, the Bulgarian Parliament Sofia, Bratislava, Warsaw, Stockholm, Madrid, Vienna, Budapest, Brussels, Vilnius, Prague, Genoa, The Hague, Podgorica, Montenegro; the Berlaymont of the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Council. The soundtrack is the Israeli anthem “Hatikva” (The Hope). The video does not indicate for how long the lights were displayed, or whether the flags are part of a permanent display.
As far as the hashtag war, I personally have tried to tag my (many) Facebook posts either #aniyisraeli or #iamisraeli. It is not gaining traction as far as I can see. However, much more importantly, and still so early in this enormous effort, there is evidence of some backtracking from the usual suspects that publish the near-automaton language that we have become accustomed to hearing.
This has always been a war of semantics. One man’s terrorist is the other man’s freedom fighter has been the oft-repeated mantra. We are starting to hear some different words, although the venerable New York Times is cautiously writing them in quotation marks, attributing them to others. Perhaps that is how they become fit to print.
The writer is an artist and writer living in Jerusalem. Her graphic memoir, Life-Tumbled Shards, was published in 2023. Reach her at heddyabramowitz@gmail.com.