Within this Nightmare, Our Dream Team

Children of Israel are Never Alone

Hey, tribe.

How is everyone feeling this week? I’ll be real: for me, it’s been hard. This morning, especially, I felt resistant to re-entering the fray. There’s a line by the poet Stephen Dunn that came to me after I woke up:

…I’ve known the emptiness

of nothing to say, no reason to move,

those mornings I’ve built

a little cocoon with the bedcovers

and lived in it, almost happily,

because what fools

the body more than warmth?

The footage of those young women being terrorized by Hamas, frightened, bloodied, being explicitly appraised as sex objects — I haven’t seen a film clip more annihilating since the footage released in October. I have a 17-year-old daughter and I’d rather tear out my own throat than have her be, God forbid, at the mercy of those savages.

Then we have the baseless and outrageous ICJ ruling against Israel. We have several European countries formally recognizing Palestine as a state and we are hearing simultaneously that Hamas can’t be indicted by the same ICJ because Palestine is not a state.

Meanwhile progressive gestures of solidarity with Hamas continue apace. Students at Harvard enacted a “People’s Commencement” on Wednesday, where the podium was draped in a Palestinian flag and keffiyeh, and the speeches included gems like this:

The Institution’s Commencement views the paper of a Harvard diploma as an opening to the gates of enlightenment. But the People’s Commencement understands that it is the spirit of resistance, as exemplified by the martyrs of Palestine, who light the path forward for us all!

It’s easy to be overwhelmed. To not want to face the day. I get it. I’ve been there. I am there. I’ll be there again. Especially when all we see when we go online is another friend, acquaintance, artist, politician or celebrity coming out against us.

That’s why it’s so important to seek out the ones who will restore our sanity: the tribe members, the true allies, the unindoctrinated.

I promised you several more of these folks today, so I’ll get to it.

A woman I admire mightily for her depth of knowledge and blessed sense of clarity is Dr. Einat Wilf.

Dr. Wilf has had an illustrious career to date. She served as a lieutenant in the IDF before going on to earn a BA in Government from Harvard and a PhD in political science from Cambridge. She has served in the Knesset as a member of the Labor Party and then as a member of Independence. And 2020 marked the release of her book The War of Return, which made a very persuasive case against the right of Palestinian “refugees” to return to Israel.

Dr. Wilf writes and speaks beautifully and her presentation of complex topics is clear and accessible. For instance, in response to the news that Spain, Norway and Ireland had moved to officially recognize the statehood of Palestine, Dr. Wilf tweeted this:

So you want to recognize the state of Palestine? By all means. Go ahead. Just make sure to note that since Palestine is a state, no one living in it is or can be or will be recognized by your country as a "refugee from Palestine", that you are therefore defunding UNRWA, that there is no such thing as a "right of return" into another sovereign state in which one has never been a citizen or ever lived.

I highly recommend visiting her website, following her on Twitter / X, listening to her podcast We Should All Be Zionists, and catching her whenever possible during her guest appearances on the podcasts of others.

Another shining beacon in every storm is Haviv Rettig Gur, a senior analyst for The Times of Israel and a very regular guest on my favorite podcast, Call Me Back by Dan Senor. Here I have to say that HRG’s voice is like a drug to me. He’s so calm, so smart, so clear-headed, so informed and so incisive. If there were an HRG doll that would speak in his voice when you pulled its string, I would let it lull me to sleep every night.

I know I’ve mentioned him before but today I want to share my introduction to him, which came in the form of a Times of Israel article several years ago. It was one of the most gratifying pieces I’d read about the I/P conflict, and I have thought of it a thousand times since.

In it, he tells the story of two storied IDF generals on a visit to Vietnam, where they met with General Vo Nguyen Giap, whom HRG describes in this way:

Giap was one of the great strategic minds of the twentieth century, a former schoolteacher who played a central role in developing the strategic thinking and organizational capabilities that transformed ragtag rural provincials into a military force that would rout the most powerful nations in the world, from the Japanese occupation to the French and the Americans over three long decades of conflict culminating in the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

The two generals, who were devoted students of military history, spoke with Giap for many hours. And at the meeting’s conclusion, this exchange took place:

When the Israelis rose to leave, Giap suddenly turned to the Palestinian issue. “Listen,” he said, “the Palestinians are always coming here and saying to me, ‘You expelled the French and the Americans. How do we expel the Jews?’”

The generals were intrigued. “And what do you tell them?”

“I tell them,” Giap replied, “that the French went back to France and the Americans to America. But the Jews have nowhere to go. You will not expel them.”

You can follow Haviv at Times of Israel here, where you can also find links to all his social media.

A third advocate you should know about, if you don’t already, is Debbie Lechtman of roots metals, an Israeli and Latina writer and educator with a huge and very well-deserved following on Instagram.

I met and even got to hug Debbie at the ADL conference this spring and it was one of the highlights of my trip. Something that amazed me was this:

I was wearing a temporary tattoo that said Am Yisrael Chai. I don’t see myself ever getting a permanent tattoo — and somehow, the Jewish prohibition against tattoos figures into the reason, though there are so many other prohibitions that give me no pause. But I’ve been wearing a temporary one in the same spot that Holocaust victims bore identification numbers assigned by the Nazis (of course, the photo below represents a mirror image and is therefore backwards):

But to my amazement, and by sheer coincidence, Debbie had the very same tattoo in the very same spot, and I’m sure hers is real.

At any rate, I have learned an undreamed-of amount from Debbie, and her site is a treasure trove of information. She’s impeccable about her sources and lists them in footnotes accompanying every essay.

She has my very highest recommendation as an invaluable resource.

Okay, fam, I will be back on Monday to tell you about Natasha Hausdorff, Mandana Dayani and Mosab Hassan Yousef.

In the meantime, as demoralizing as this moment may be, I implore you to never forget who we are. We have faced far more formidable enemies than these a dozen times over and we are still here. Throughout time immemorial, the vastest empires this world has ever seen have continually tried to destroy us. All of them have long since crumbled into dust, and we remain.

The Philistines, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians are all gone. The ancient Greeks, the Romans, and the Byzantines are all gone. The Crusaders and the Spanish Inquisitors are gone. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are gone. We came before all our oppressors and we will leave after them.

Mir Veln Zey Iberlebn. We Will Outlive Them. Shabbat Shalom.

Am Yisrael Chai.