hila-shifra

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No but it's telling how many of y'all think the only moral choice Israeli citizens can make is to move out of Israel, but yet when they're outside Israel, they're stabbed in the streets. Be real, you just want them to die.

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Agam Goldstein-Almog lives in Shefayim, Israel.

Growing up in Kibbutz Kfar Aza next to Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip meant a childhood that could be interrupted at any moment by sirens warning of a Hamas rocket attack. Sibling fights or quiet nights were instantly turned into a scramble for the nearest safe room. Hamas took control of Gaza a few months before I was born in 2007, so living in its shadow is all I have ever known.

Having 15 seconds to run to safety might not be a common theme in childhood nostalgia, but I convinced myself that it had made me stronger than kids from the comfortable Tel Aviv bubble.

Then came Oct. 7. Hamas terrorists charged into our home, shooting my father, Nadav, and sister, Yam, in a furious ecstasy of hate. I was dragged out of the house together with my mother and two younger brothers and forced into a car to Gaza. I see my father’s fading eyes when I close mine at night.

Arriving in Gaza, the car was surrounded by a mob, mostly people who appeared to be about my own age, 17, or younger. They smiled and laughed as I wept.

In Judaism, there is a tradition that baseless hatred — hatred divorced from all reason — is what led to the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70. I now know what it means to be hated baselessly — for all that I am and all I am not.

My Hamas guards hated me for being Jewish, so I was coerced into reciting Islamic prayers and made to wear a hijab. I was forbidden from mourning my father and sister, and often ordered to look down at the ground. Six female hostages I met in a tunnel told me about men with guns who came into their shower rooms and touched their bodies.

Hearing about these young women’s fear of sexual abuse was agonizing. When one of my guards told me that he would find me a “husband” in Gaza, and that I would live the rest of my life as a chained slave-wife, my mother interrupted, deflecting his advances. I was fortunate to be released, along with my family members, in a prisoner exchange after 51 days. But those six young women are still in captivity, held for more than 300 days, without their mothers. They all should have come home a long time ago.

Baseless hatred can lead a person to awful places, but when that hatred is shared by a group, it is terrifying to witness. One morning, my family was moved from our safe house to a school hall, filled largely with Gazan women and children. Strangers asked if I wanted anything to sit on, or if I was thirsty — a rare moment of human connection.

But then, in an instant, the low buzz of conversation was drowned out by Hamas launching rockets, just meters away from us, from inside the school compound. The hall erupted in joy, and as the Gazans celebrated, I realized that Hamas had moved us there to serve as human shields.

Shortly before my family and I were released at the end of November, a guard made a point of telling us that, in the next war, Hamas would return to kill us. There would be no hostage-taking, no more dealmaking.

When we were transferred to a Red Cross vehicle for our ride out of Gaza, a mob formed, just as when we arrived. But weeks of Israel’s intense bombing had changed the mood. Instead of laughing and taking photos, the Gazans banged on the windows and screamed at us: Die, die, die. The word is almost the same in Arabic as in Hebrew — but, then again, hatred sounds the same in every language.

In captivity, I had often filled the long, silent hours by fantasizing, trying to keep the dread and terrible memories at bay. One of my fantasies was that we would be freed and the world would embrace us.

But the world I came back to was deeply divided and seething with anger. The hatred that I thought I had left behind in Gaza was waiting for me online.

My social media feeds were flooded with trolls, falsehoods and conspiracy theories, all with seemingly one objective: driving hate. The comment sections of news articles mentioning my name were battlefields, as hatred from one side was met with hatred from the other.

I have watched as the movement in the West for a Gaza cease-fire sometimes devolves into full-throated support for Hamas and the hounding of Jews in public spaces. I’m sure my kidnappers still hate me, but when American students call for “intifada” or chant in praise of Hamas terrorists “Al-Qassam, you make us proud,” I’m reminded that many other people do, too.

Now a dangerous escalation in the war that began on Oct. 7 may loom, involving an Iranian regime that has long promised to wipe Israel off the map. Theirs is the same hatred that killed my father and sister. The same hatred that poisons too many campuses and too much of social media.

On Tuesday, news arrived that Israeli forces in Gaza had recovered the bodies of six hostages. It is unclear how many of the more than 100 hostages still held by Hamas remain alive. Negotiations for their release continue. I pray for their freedom, but I have no illusions about the world to which they’ll return.

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goyishe tumblr leftists seeing a quote from the torah: wow. i can’t believe they fucking mentioned israel. kind of problematic. fucking zionists.

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If you want to be an ally to the Jewish people, you’d better be ready to fight the antisemitism faced by all Jews.

Zionist Jews. Anti- and non-Zionist Jews. Observant Jews. Secular Jews. Reform Jews. Conservative Jews. Orthodox Jews. Israeli Jews. Ashkenazi Jews. Sephardic Jews. Mizrahi Jews. Beta Israeli Jews. Desi Jews. Convert Jews. White-passing Jews. Jews of color. Visibly-Jewish Jews. Queer Jews. Left-wing Jews. Right-wing Jews. Patrilineal Jews.

We are one people, and if you only fight antisemitism when it targets the Jews you like, you’re not actually an ally of the Jewish people.

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Jews logging onto tumblr:

"Hmm I wonder which slur I'll be called today"

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Interior of the Baba Tama synagogue in the Bukharan quarter of Jerusalem, ca. 1990s

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At the beginning of the meeting of the Democrats Club, I sat next to a girl we'll call Sage. I had met her before and I considered us friendly. We chatted, and I ended up mentioning that being Jewish is also an ethnicity.

"I guess, but I feel like people considering Judaism an ethnicity is kind of what caused antisemitism and stuff, right?"

"Well," I replied, "Antisemitism is never the fault of Jews. We've always been an ethnicity, and it's not our fault people have discriminated against us for it."

"That's fair," she replied.

After the meeting, Sage and I walked back together. I/P had come up very briefly, but the meeting had ended by that point and nobody really wanted to get into that anyways.

"So, what side are you on?" Sage asked me. I was a little taken aback.

"I wouldn't really say I'm on a side. It's not a game to me, so I don't consider myself 'on a side'." I replied.

"I guess…” she considered what I had said, before jumping back in. “But I'm definitely on Gaza's side. I don't support Hamas, but I mean, what Israel is doing... it's a genocide. And Israel has lots of money and is supported by the US and Gaza is really poor. I always root for the underdog."

I tried (to no avail) to explain how I didn't consider it a genocide. I tried to explain that both peoples' destinies were connected - that rooting for a "side" removes the humanity of everyone involved. I tried to explain that the US actually only funds the Iron Dome, not other weapons.

But Sage didn't get it.

"Well, I'm rooting for Gaza,” she kept saying.

Sage is not Arab. She's not Palestinian. She's not Jewish. She's not Israeli. She has no personal connection to this conflict. But she's decided she's on Gaza's "side" because they're the underdog.

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Kurdish Jewish women and Armenian women together in the same picture.

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Rosh Hashanah, from the Holiday Series. painting by Arthur Szyk, 1948. raised a Polish Jew in Łódź and attached to both his Polish and Jewish identity, Arthur Szyk was heavily influenced by medieval illuminated manuscripts early in his development as an artist. later, he would become most well-known for his political cartoons and illustrations.

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Watercolours of Greek and Turkish Jewish dress, illustrated by Nikos Stavroulakis

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Shoutout to "prehistoric dinosaurs" and "microscopic plankton" and "religious Jews" and other phrases that aren't as redundant as people think

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This shit is actually comical. If you are Israeli please start going around touching random objects so that these people due to their own moral code cannot use it anymore.

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Y’all need to learn that Judaism is an ethnoreligion. Like, a lot of you think it isn’t and use that to justify saying Jews aren’t native to israel. Because if we aren’t an ethnicity, it’s not possible for us to be native! Like, genuinely read a book.

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I’m ngl most of you are really antisemitic and you don’t realize it because you don’t know anything about Jews and the history of antisemitism. It’s so easy to say ha, that’s not me, when shit is so incredibly ingrained that you wouldn’t even notice if anything less than a sieg heiling-nazi hit you over the head.

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One day I will let this go but it is insane how Jews nowadays say "my political take is that I don't want my entire family and I to die" and the general response was "god, you're so fucking selfish. this is exactly why your entire family and you deserve to die"

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I think something goyim don’t realize is how long the Jewish memory is.

WWII ended 79 years ago. To someone else this may seem like forever. To a Jew, the shoah happened yesterday.

The entirety of Jewish history is inside us. We don’t experience time the way others do. And if you’re not a Jew, you cannot understand this feeling. You just can’t.