As an American Israeli, I want to try to explain why, in the wake of Hamas’ barbaric attack on Israel on Oct. 7, so many Jewish people are posting a chain of horrors on social media, a flood of luminous faces and heart-wrenching accounts of the murdered or missing women, men, babies, toddlers and elderly of Israel.
I believe it’s because many of us feel so impotent and alone. I believe it’s because posting these faces is one of the few things many of us Jews here in America feel safe enough to do in protest.
These posts are our tiny, helpless, losing-battle effort to respond to the overwhelming, terrifying moral confusion and antisemitism brewing and bursting around us, expressed in the silence, ambivalence, complicity or worse of so many of our so-called leaders, college presidents, public officials, writers, singers and influential people from all walks whom we’ve always admired.
Those same people who roared with outrage and grief for the war-torn Ukrainians and the Black community after the George Floyd murder are eerily silent now. Where are all the full-page ads pledging solidarity? Where are the Israeli flags reflecting a simple humanity in the face of a sadistic, full-scaled massacre?
In part, we’re posting the stories of the people whose lives were brutally extinguished by Hamas terrorists to honor their memories. We want to lay our eyes on their faces, to give them one last surge of life. But mostly, we’re posting in a painful struggle to counteract the media’s swift turn in the narrative to once again portray Israel as a monster, when in fact these Israeli soldiers — our young cousins, fathers and mothers of little children, brothers and sisters — are being forced into the horror and trauma of doing the only thing they can do to defend their people and country from extinction.
These posts of faces and stories, most of which we don’t have words to even introduce, are silent, veiled pleas to people we’ve always thought were caring friends, but who we are now suddenly puzzled or stung by, through either their words or their silence.
We hope that by reading our posts, these friends and colleagues and bosses and neighbors and fellow students and human beings will see our pain and offer anything, a word or post of support, a check-in, a simple gesture to show they see what’s happening to the Jewish people, that they walk with us now, even for a few steps. That they just put their hand on our shoulder as we try to cope through a world in which so many people literally want us and our children dead — because we’re Jewish — a religion built around loving kindness, the sanctification of life above all else, and our obligation as Jews to dedicate our lives to “tikun olam,” the Hebrew word for repairing the world.
What would America do if these were our 1,400 citizens — babies, toddlers, elderly, whole families who had been burned alive in their own homes, raped, sat down and shot in the head, dragged bloody through the streets? What would America do if 199 of its citizens were kidnapped and to this moment held hostage by bloodthirsty terrorists who reveled in raping and killing mothers in front of their children?
Would countries, leaders and corporations stand in passionate solidarity, as they did on 9/11? Or would an army of media and influencers from every corner of the world obsess over Americans’ every move? Would we be excoriated and dissected at every turn, when our sole purpose was to keep our enemy from fulfilling its singular dream of killing us all and wiping off the planet the one, tiny safe haven for all Jews— while not a single one of the 24 Arab countries offers refuge to the Palestinians for whom they claim such deep concern?
When we try to protect the powerless Palestinian civilians from becoming casualties of a war — a war waged on us — by calling on them to move to the safe part of their war-torn region while we fight for our lives, would we be the ones blamed for urging them to evacuate?
Because we were doing everything in our power to compel them to move to a safer place — even as their own “government” was telling them to stay and die — to die as human shields and pawns in their plan to turn the world against us and move closer to accomplishing a second and final Holocaust?
So yes, I think that’s why many of us keep posting this chain of tributes and horrors. Because it’s the only thing we can do besides pray, let our families and friends there and here know they are not alone, and give money to causes that are helping to keep our people alive. But also, maybe this.
Maybe these posts are an expression of our hope and hopelessness that in seeing these faces, reading these heart-wrenching and heartbreaking stories, that the people around us, maybe even you, might pause and reevaluate your assumptions, silence, judgment and choices.
In every corner of the world, our Jewish hearts are clutching in dread. From the safety of our laptops, with heartbreak and hope, we post on.
This article was originally published in The Miami Herald.
