False Smears and Real Tears

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

Full disclosure: I wavered over whether to plan on holding our intimate salon gathering with Vanessa Hidary tomorrow, and a mishap with the poll only made that decision harder. I announced the time accurately in the newsletter itself — 4 pm Pacific time, which is 7 pm on the east coast — but I accidentally reversed the time zones in the poll, confusing a couple of people, who asked if there was more than one gathering. I didn’t understand the question until a reader let me know about the error. So I went back in to fix it, which erased all the votes that had been there, and which I hadn’t realized would happen.

I’m sure some people went back and voted again, but momentum was lost and it took hours to recover the previous total of voters. I was also told by a few people that they are planning to come but couldn’t get the poll button to work!

This, along with the very short notice, made me wonder if I should schedule for two weeks out (I’m out of town next week).

But then, this morning, a reader commented beneath the original post:

Hoping this is going to happen. These past few days have been really tough and we need it.

And because I couldn’t agree more, this decided the matter — we will gather with Vanessa tomorrow.

PLEASE NOTE:

Unlike other zoom events, I’m going to send the link directly to each attendee.

So if you’d like to come, please do two things as soon as possible:

1. Register your intent in the poll below for an accurate head count and then…

2. …email me your name at elissa_karen@msn.com.

I will then send the link to the email you used to ping me a few hours ahead of the event.

Please indicate in your email whether you’d like to ask Vanessa a question or express your appreciation to her directly at any point. Those community members will be scheduled to speak.

I could not be more excited about this and I so hope to see you there.

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So: to return to what the community member I mentioned above wrote to me.

These past few days have been really tough.

This is a very profound understatement. I haven’t felt this grief-stricken, dark and bleak since the Bibas children were murdered.

Part of the darkness of this moment has to do with the heart-mangling pictures plastered on seemingly every newspaper cover in the world, of skeletal children who look as if they’re on the brink of death.

Part of it is the sense that we have reached an undeniable turning point, where even the most Israel-loving Jews have joined the condemnation of this Israeli government and this war.

Part of it is fury over feeling cornered and manipulated, much as I did when Mahmoud Kahlil was arrested. That incident felt like the most infernal trap, given the reverence we all do — and must — accord due process vs. my conviction that Kahlil was truly a bad actor who was all for globalizing the intifada.

Just as I hated what Trump was doing but couldn’t muster a full-throated defense of Kahlil, my current fury toward the global media machine leaves me not wanting to do any kind of verbal dance for anti-Zionists regardless of my own private agony.

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By now, I am thoroughly sick of everyone saying, “Multiple things can be true at once.”

I would in fact be very happy to go the rest of my life without ever hearing it again.

Nonetheless, it remains as true as ever. My own multiple truths are tying me into tortured knots on an hourly basis.

On one hand:

The press has indulged in such a reckless smear campaign of Israel, and blared so many half-truths, incomplete truths, or outright lies so many times, that it’s easy to understand why we could have been slow to believe that dire hunger in Gaza is truly a pervasive problem at this point.

The photos on every newspaper cover around the world — blown up, in many cases, to nearly the size of the cover — is a perfect case in point.

Only after a tsunami of incalculable damage had been done in every corner of the world did more information about these kids trickle out. Both of the children in these photos have severe genetic disorders which is why they are skeletal. One of them — Osama al-Rakab — isn’t even currently in Gaza. Israel facilitated his transfer to a hospital in Italy so he could get the specialized medical attention he needs. The other, Muhammad al-Motawaq, was photographed next to his healthy, perfectly normal-looking sibling, whom the NYT cropped out of the picture before publishing it.

Today, they issued this weaselly non-apology, while praising their own bravery and sensitivity:

Moreover, they published it to a very limited account with 89K followers instead of their main account with 55 MILLION followers — the ones who received the misleading photo.

Now, no one doubts there is severe hardship and suffering and hunger in Gaza, as there inevitably is in any war, and no one I know is remotely in favor of starving children — but if this were the true state of the kids there, then needless to say, they wouldn’t have to scrounge up poster children with genetic disorders to show that.

They had to have seen the photos with the healthy sibling. They chose the most misleading and dramatically heart-mangling photo deliberately. They published a very quiet retraction to a tiny fraction of their following deliberately. They are stoking as much fury and hatred against Israel as they possibly can, when by any measure at all, our own government is causing exponentially more harm around the globe.

For the sake of a reality check: in two years of war, per Hamas, 147 Gazans have died of malnutrition.

Compare that with the 1400 who died of malnutrition in Los Angeles — that is, in just one American city — in 2022.

Compare that with the millions of children dying because Trump cut off USAID on a dime. Hundreds of thousands have literally died already — over the course of just a few months — as a result of those cuts. Which came from us. Killing children in Sudan and Afghanistan by starvation among many other ways. Why aren’t those photos on the cover of every paper? Why don’t Americans focus on the barbaric cruelty perpetrated by our own government?

This isn’t even to mention the millions more children who have died of malnutrition and terribly compromised health care as a result of our War on Terror.

It is crazy-making that westerners are making the case that Israel is the most demonic country on the planet — on par with Nazi Germany — when, even as I type, our own country is doing so much worse on such a vaster scale.

ON THE OTHER HAND.

Even my most trusted sources, with the most integrity and compassion, have concluded that the way Netanyahu is conducting this war can no longer be tolerated. The fact that he panders to the very worst elements in Israel — like Smotrich, like Gvir, like the sociopathic Kahanist settlers who just killed world-renowned Palestinian peace activist Awdah Hattaleen — and the fact that he can’t be trusted not to act according to his own personal benefit at the expense of Israel’s — has put anti-government sentiment at an all-time apex in Israel, left 80% of the population clamoring to end the war, and alienated many of Israel’s most ardent supporters. No one trusts him to even try to be ethical and humane within this impossible situation. And I agree that all this is simply not acceptable, and that even those of us most enraged by the world’s demonization, distortions and double standards need to now unite behind the majority of the Israeli citizens who want to end the destruction and vote him out.

Fam, this is an impossibly tangled snarl of yarn and as I said in my last full newsletter, there are no good choices for Israel. Let’s at least pull together and continue to fight for both the safety and soul of the Jewish nation in every possible way.

Again, I hope to see many of you tomorrow in our salon with Vanessa Hidary. I can’t imagine a better antidote to the pain we’re all experiencing than listening to her brave and beautiful voice, and taking comfort in our close community.

Much love and Am Yisrael Chai.