War Day #67 Letter to My Complicit Friend (where Fern loses the rest (the last) of her leftie US friends)

Tuesday, December 12

From Jerusalem

To my leftie US friend, who doesn’t yet understand that our post-Oct 7 world is different than yours,

I’m writing to you about your anti-Israel friends, the ones who claim they aren’t antisemitic. You know whom I mean: Those left-wing friends with whom you don’t entirely agree anymore about politics, but whom you don’t want to offend or upset. And you’re pretty sure if you share my Facebook posts, they’ll unfriend you. (Intersectionality, which somehow never includes Jews.)

I’ve posted about this war every single day. Did you think I hadn’t noticed that you write me sometimes offline, but never share my posts? Did you think I hadn’t noticed that you’re ok posting things by certain infamous segments of the press with their well-known anti-Israel bias, and posting authoritative statements on Gazan fatalities by the Gazan Health Ministry (a self-acknowledged Hamas affiliate) but you want me, your Israel-based friend, to verify and footnote my sources because you have a reputation, and need everything pro-Israel to be verifiable? And the Israeli sources are suspect, don’t I have some better (translation: Less Israeli/ less Jewish) sources?

I’m writing to you because you can not stay silent anymore.

They say that the adage, be careful what company you keep, is more important than people realize. That if you associate with successful business owners, your business is more likely to flourish; if you socialize with people who exercise, your exercise plan is more likely to succeed.

The same is true for politics and values. If your cohort encourages kindness and goodness, you are more likely to be kind and good. If your social milieu is evil, then it will be easy for you, too, to gravitate to evil.

Is evil too dramatic, too strong a word for what we are now seeing?

Look around.

There’s Hamas butchering babies, torturing innocent civilians, old people, infirm, babies. They video’d it. Torture. Dismemberment. Burning to death. Rape. Kidnapping. Beheadings. Hamas is gleefully sharing their carnage. We know the details because Hamas took selfies. Polls show that West Bank and East Jerusalemites strongly support Hamas. Jubilant Palestinians are handing out sweets all over the West Bank and Gaza in celebration. Gazan civilians chased Hamas into Israel so that they too could rape and murder. Gazan civilians stoned the ambulances transporting the kidnap victims home.

And your friends are choosing this moment to march in their support.

My Facebook feed is all death announcements, Israeli soldiers killed in battle, Har Herzl funerals, neighborhood shivas, volunteer efforts to support the displaced from both the south and north.

Your Facebook feed is a flow of all the marches and protests where you felt comfortable, because there were no blatant signs saying “Death to all Jews” and “Hitler was right”. (Just calls for international intifada. That doesn’t really mean that.) Your friends are still marching. And you’re still displaying your Facebook show of support of them.

Virtue signaling, displaying your self-righteous ‘morality’ so you’ll be palatable to the left wing. As if they’re the good guys on whose right side you want to stay.

As if they (not me) are the friends you want to keep.

Hamas is funded, supported, and encouraged by Iran, and Russia. Yemen Houthis, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Syria, maybe China, Turkey. Putin just welcomed a Hamas delegation to Moscow. Iran will do “whatever it takes” to assist Hamas, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps told Hamas’ Muhammad Deif. Iran is supplying Russia with missiles to kill Ukrainians.

There is an evil axis forming, and it is already too late to stop it.

Do you understand what side your friends are on?

Look at Iran:

Anti-women.

Anti-LGBTQ+.

Antisemitic.

Anti-secularism.

Anti-Democracy.

Just plain anti. Anti everything we all stand for.

Doesn’t it matter anymore?

Do your friends care that human rights advocates for the LGBTQ+ community and women would be stoned if they voiced their opinions in the streets of Gaza? Or that pro-Palestinian voices in the U.S. are expressing their politics by denying the many women raped by Hamas on October 7? Do they care that since 2007 Hamas has controlled Gaza, embezzling and diverting funds for the terrorists, while perpetuating the poverty of the residents, instead of funding Gaza's reconstruction? That yes, Gazan civilians are paying the price.

If you don’t want to think about Hamas and Iran, think about your own humanity. I’m not talking about wanting a Palestinian state. I’m talking about the day after a civilian massacre your friends made a point of marching for Palestinians and Hamas. (Many of those marches also sported swastikas and Nazi slogans). They call the Hamas slaughter “justified,” saying Israel was “solely responsible,” as 30 Harvard Palestinian-allied student groups just did. CAIR, the largest Islamic civil liberties group with regional offices throughout the US, was “happy” to see the events of October 7. They say calling for Jewish genocide is ok. It’s about context.

Is this really the world you want to live in?

Is it really time for Never Again already?

Look at Hamas, hiding behind their civilians, building their infrastructure in hospitals and schools and mosques because they know Israel are reluctant to bomb hospitals and schools and mosques. (Look at Shifa Hospital, built over a Hamas command center, that Israel had been begging civilians to evacuate.) Your friends say they are marching for the oppressed Palestinians, but is Hamas acting in support of those Palestinians? Or is it Israel, which warns civilians to get out so they won’t injure innocents?

Look at UNRWA, hiding Hamas weapons in children’s teddy bears.

Look at Jewish students, in lockdown at college campuses all over the U.S. Look at attempted lynchings at airports. At university presidents unable to verbalize the simplest of statements: That genocide is not context-sensitive, and is not ok. (Would they have this trouble if campus rabble-rousers were calling for death to Black People, death to women? Why is it only Jews that aren’t protected?)

And look at the ‘minor’ stuff. Jews being sidelined and dis-invited from groups ranging from academic to literary. Jews unwelcome in online forums. Jews suddenly dropped by long-time ‘friends.’ Jewish products being boycotted.

And the women stuff? Had you thought I wouldn’t notice that your friends, who champion the women everywhere in the world - suddenly are silent on whether the Israeli festival-goers were raped and mutilated? Or are actively denying it? Including international groups like U.N. Women. They are, you told me, waiting for more details, more proof. Really? Hamas themselves took video. It is widely available on the internet. You don’t believe Hamas itself when they claim these rapes and violations?

Can your friends really brush off horror - even though it is done to Jews - so casually? Do they really want to be that person?

Do you really want to stay friends with them if they are?

Around the world people are calling for a humanitarian ceasefire. But where are the calls for the release of hundreds of civilian hostages? Where is the acknowledgement that Hamas has fired literally thousands of missiles at Israeli civilian population centers since October 7?

And what sort of person, standing for what exactly, pulls down posters of kidnapped children?

*

Eighty years after the Holocaust, we judge those Germans who were ‘just’ silent. Maybe they didn’t do anything active to hurt anyone, maybe just some marching. But they were silent in the face of evil.

They were the ones who wouldn’t open their homes to rescue their Jewish neighbors.

There is a difference between war and evil. Like porn, you know it when you see it. This isn’t just war. This is evil. Don’t parrot the ‘cycle of violence’ trope; this is different.

If any war is just, if there is such a thing as a just war, we here in Israel are fighting it.

And not to be overly dramatic, but it’s rough, and your friends here in Israel may not all make it out of this one.

How will you feel if we don’t, and you were silent?

Rachel Goldberg, whose 23-year-old son Hersh was amongst those Israeli civilians kidnapped by Hamas, said in her talk to the UN: “When you only get outraged when one side’s babies get killed, then your moral compass is broken, and your humanity is broken.”

Your moral compass is broken.

The United Nations recently voted for a humanitarian truce in Gaza - without even mentioning the Hamas massacre. 120 votes in favour, 14 against and 45 abstentions. The UN Security Council this week would have, except for the U.S.’ veto, condemned Israel. There were more Israel condemnations in 2022 than against the rest of the world combined. The UN has proven, for once and for all, that its moral compass is broken.

And so is that of your friends, marching for Palestinian rights without condemning Hamas. (And no, it isn’t enough to condemn Hamas on October 7, and go back to business as usual on October 8.)

October 7 was a game-changer for us.

And your whispered sympathetic asides, while you carefully maintain Facebook objectivity and refrain from responding in public, are insufficient.

You think you’re being careful, and nuanced, and sensitive, to your leftier friends.

I think you’re being a coward.

If anyone has a good idea on how to combat an ISIS, please tell us. Our only new understanding is we can’t just continue to be naive and hope it all ends well. We’re not out for revenge. We also can’t let this happen again.

But there is no Swiss neutrality on this one. You can’t just stay out of it because you’re not political. If you are still marching with your friends, you are complicit.

If you don’t speak up now against this, you are complicit.

If you stay silent, you are complicit.

The world is making its choice.

You need to make one too.