When I heard Esther and her dogs were being evacuated from Ya’ara, Israel, near Lebanon’s border, I thought about courage. In her novel, “News of the World,” Paulette Giles writes, “Life was not safe and nothing could make it so, neither fashionable dresses nor bank accounts. The baseline of human life was courage.”
I’ve only visited three times, but I imagine it takes courage to live in Israel, to step into each day, aware of a group’s charter’s clear call to wipe you off the map. But the joy of life in Israel propels them forward, in spite of the toxic hatred from so many directions.
Just 14 months earlier I sat at Esther’s kitchen table, eating my dinner with the family silverware her father brought out of Germany as he was escaping the Holocaust. Extended family members who may have once used that silverware were murdered.
On October 7th I messaged Anne whom I met during my first trip to Israel in 2013. “Any news from Esther?” I wrote. The reply was about her son. He’d been scheduled to work at the Nova music festival with a friend at 7 a.m. Things took a turn when a Jeep full of terrorists started shooting at his car — he was hit by two bullets, one in the kidney and one in the lung. They eventually stopped, got out, and ran through fields to a gas station filled with people who didn’t know what was happening. They turned off the lights, pushed everyone inside a safe room, but the door didn’t really close.
Next, they heard banging and shooting at the door, assuming it was the end. Suddenly, for some inexplicable reason the terrorists turned around and left. The group acknowledged the miracle, and later, when Esther’s son was sleeping in the hospital, a rocket hit near his bed. He again survived.
Esther tells me he’s changed since all this transpired. Nine of his friends were killed. Somehow, in spite of the horrors of that day, he has discovered dimensions of grace on his journey. I don’t know the intricacies of those dimensions, but from what I’ve observed over the last month, there’s a beauty in the resilience the Israelis and Jewish people around the world are carrying at this moment.
I can’t make sense of the story of October 7 — human beings can do such horrible things to other humans. And then the silence and indifference of women’s groups around the world. My heart trembles: Can these groups truly be for women, when they ignore horrific sexual violence against Israeli women?
With five higher educational degrees, I’ve always been proud of universities. Now, I’ve become baffled. Some university students are justifying and even celebrating the evil of October 7. I sense something is not working: that mission to equip students with critical thinking skills and moral and logical reasoning. When administrations condone those stealing the security and peace of their Jewish students while lauding efforts to “make all welcome” I sense hypocrisy.
I don’t like the divide between Pro-Israel or Pro-Palestinian groups — I say we unite in our condemnation of evil and agree that terrorist groups who murder and torture should be rendered unable to launch their cruelty on anyone so that the people of Israel and Gaza and the West Bank can live free of fear and violence. Israel’s leadership isn’t perfect, but it’s reasonable to support a liberal democracy’s (the only in the Middle East) right to defend itself from evil we haven’t seen since the Holocaust. The Nazis were intentional about their goal to destroy the Jewish people and eventually move on to other groups. Hamas has broadcasted a similar aim to repeat October 7 a million times, if “necessary”, and even beyond Israel.
It remains: my hope for peace in that country the size of New Jersey, the place in the Middle East where LGBTQ folks have the highest legal rights and freedoms and where Arabs make up 20% of the population. Several months before I visited Israel in July 2022, Judge Khaled Kabub became the first Muslim appointed to Israel’s Supreme Court.
Anne traveled to Jerusalem from France a few weeks ago. She messaged me the other day: “When are you coming?” The answer remains the same since the first time I visited Israel 10 years ago: Soon.
