Coping with October 7

Learning from both hawk Douglas Murray and dove Rachel Timoner

Yahel Sharabi was brutally murdered along with her family by Hamas on October 7th.

October 7 this year made me sad and angry all over again. Why were pro-Palestinian protesters in the streets on this day, harassing Jews? It’s as if neo-Nazis demonstrated on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Or pro-Japanese protesters marched in support of Pearl Harbor.

And then there was Donald Trump’s response to this somber occasion:

“I think that Israel has to do one thing. They have to get smart about Trump, because they don't back me. I did more for Israel than anybody. I did more for the Jewish people than anybody. And it's not reciprocal.”

Classy. I don’t care if what I’m about to say sounds like a Hillary Clinton “deplorables” comment: Any Jew who votes for this “moron” (the description of his former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson) and fascist is either also a moron or a greed head — or both. P.S. By politicizing support for Israel — turning it into a partisan issue — Trump did serious harm to Israeli-U.S. relations and thus to the security of Israel. Moving the embassy to Jerusalem did not exactly compensate for that.

To further understand the fascist angle, check out Sidney Blumenthal’s report in the Guardian about Trump’s Hitlerian rhetoric being no accident: He has Nazi relatives. As Trump himself says, it’s all about blood. My own view on why Trump keeps talking about Hitler is in my new book, American Reckoning.

And my full Old Goats take on what October 7 did to American Jews is here. An excerpt:

I think we’ll look back on the Fall of 2023 as a time when Jews around the world were traumatized twice, first by the horrors of October 7th and then by essentially being blamed for the retaliatory strikes of the Israeli Defense Forces, whether we support them or not. Instead of sympathy after Jews were butchered, we heard a deafening silence.

And it’s disheartening that many supposedly well-educated supporters of the Palestinians are both ignorant of the history they’re spouting off about and morally confused…Otherwise thoughtful people are simultaneously seeing red and seeing everything in black-and-white. They fail to understand the simple and ancient truth that human beings are often perpetrators and victims at once.

Yes, it’s important to hold Israel to a higher moral standard and not to be hardened to the suffering of children. But too few recognize that the mass civilian deaths in Gaza are, in critical ways, the fault of the Hamas government, which has never built a single shelter to protect its people.

Since then, I’ve tried to listen to smart people talk about October 7, even if I don’t fully agree with them and they certainly don’t agree with each other. Today, that means Douglas Murray, a pro-Israel British combat correspondent and non-Jew, and Rachel Timoner, who is a progressive and the senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn. One is a hawk; the other a dove. Both of their speeches went viral.

It isn’t hard to imagine how each would critique the other. Murray would no doubt argue that Rabbi Timoner is naive about the level of Hamas support on the West Bank and —while highly critical of Hamas—she never uses the term “human shields” in this sermon. Rabbis don’t take potshots but Rabbi Timoner would no doubt think Murray’s heart has been hardened to the suffering of Gazan children. Despite all this, these excerpts seem complementary to me.

Murray became famous with appearances like this one last fall with Piers Morgan. 

Here’s part of a recent speech Murray gave in Canada:

Ten years ago, in the war in northern Nigeria, which I also covered, [people demanded] “Bring Back Our Girls.” There was no international campaign saying, “Bring Back Our Jewish Children.” “Believe all women,” we've been told for years, but it turns out not if the raped women are Jews. Israel is the only country in the world which, when it's attacked, gets attacked more. 

People around the world hate [Jews] so much [that] Israelis are attacked when they have hostages taken. Remember, the 100 hostages still in captivity in Gaza— if they were given back by Hamas today, the war would be over.

Jews are also attacked when they rescue their hostages. The Jews can never win, because historically, they've been hated for being rich and for being poor. They've been hated for integrating and for not integrating. They were hated for being stateless. Remember “ruthless cosmopolitans”?  That was what the far right used to say. Now they're hated for having a state. Today, the only really acceptable, tolerated form of antisemitism, aside from the sewers of the far right, is anti Zionism. Zionism is simply the right of the Jews to self-determination in their historic homeland. That's all.

Just a week ago, pro Hamas protesters tried to go through Jewish areas in this city [Toronto] shouting, not just Allahu Akhbar but, sorry for the language, “fucking filthy, fucking Zionist pigs, dirty Zionist rats.” 

This, in my mind, is not about Netanyahu. It's not about this war. It's about double standards. And one question hovers over it, the question of who would protect the Jews? Who would you trust to protect them? The Europeans, the Arab world? No, history shows that only one people protect the Jewish people —the Jewish people. That's what Zionism is.”

Here’s part of what Rabbi Timoner said this year on Rosh Hashanah:

We did not imagine decapitated babies. We did not imagine mutilated women. We did not imagine immolated families. We did not imagine the abyss of ruthless barbarity by Hamas. We did not imagine more than 230 innocent people—infants to elders—taken at gunpoint into tunnels. We could not imagine that one year later, 101 of them would still be captive somewhere in or under Gaza. We did not imagine the displacement of the entire north of the country under constant shelling by Hezbollah and Iran. We did not imagine, a few weeks ago, full-on war with Hezbollah and Iran, 180 ballistic missiles firing on Israel, all of our loved ones in bomb shelters as the missiles rained down, and that we'd enter Rosh Hashanah in a heightened state of war. This is a truly terrifying time for our wider Jewish family.

 We could not imagine the hellscape of Gaza —flattened to the ground, the massive scale of the killing: whole families, dead children, mothers—tens of thousands— a country of orphans, wounded, amputated, grieving, homeless, starving, fleeing again and again for a year now. We did not imagine that our neighbors here in New York would justify and celebrate the deaths of our people. We did not imagine swastikas in Times Square on October 8. Graffiti in front of our sanctuary steps, slogans carved into the wood of our benches. We did not imagine college encampments across the country focused on us. We did not imagine that Jews would be fearful to send their kids to college. We did not imagine that 79 years after the Holocaust, and months after the worst pogroms since the Holocaust, we would become the villain of the cause of this generation, many  of whom simply seek Palestinian safety and freedom; some of whom seek our people's removal from our ancient home. 

Our whole country, this whole world, is talking about us, the Jewish people. Though we are .2 percent of the world's population, and though Israel is .014 percent of the world's land mass, Jews and Israel are in the headlines every day. The right has people who blame us for the world's problems with recycled Nazi ideas of our polluting influence. The left has people who blame us for the world's problems, by making us the planet's uber-villain, by erasing our history and our humanity and distorting our people's existential need to go home into a “colonialist project.”

For years, we allowed right wing and Orthodox interests to claim the mantle of Jewish authority, to pull our national organizations to the right, to speak for us, to present a distorted picture of American Jewry and to support and fund reactionary theocratic and Jewish supremacist forces in Israel. For years, we looked away from antisemitism on the left. When people we thought of as allies were antisemitic or excluded Jews, we excused it. We avoided confronting it, we brushed it off, we looked away. And when our own people called it out, we said they were overreacting. 

When [Anwar] Sadat and [Menachem] Begin negotiated [in 1978], 60 percent of Israelis were against negotiations. We must not underestimate the power of dreaming. There will be peace between the river and the sea. We are the leaders of the future. No one else. We stand with Israel by standing with these courageous leaders and so many others like them, and we stand with Israel by criticizing Israel when it deserves criticism. Remember the Ad Council campaign, Friends don't let friends drive drunk. Well, friends don't let friends drive their country off a cliff. Criticism is what loyalty looks like.”

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