150 days have passed since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, ending the ceasefire that had been in place, and starting the current war.
For 150 days, Israeli civilians — and dual citizens of other countries, including the US — have been held hostage. We don’t know how many are still alive, or in what condition. Those who have been released have provided testimonies that are difficult to bear witness to. In the last week, Hamas has both claimed that 7 hostages were killed by Israeli fire and that they have no way of keeping track of where the hostages are or what their statuses are. These two statements cannot both be true, which isn’t shocking if you remember that terrorists’ goals don’t include truth-telling — but the media outlets still report Hamas’s statements as fact, and our social media outrage machine spins those facts into blood libels. This does not make the return of our people easier. That the hostages have become an inconvenient afterthought for much of the globe — even the governments whose duty it is to protect their citizens, even the activists who have spoken up relentlessly against other hostage situations in the past — is a moral stain our society will bear for eternity.
In the last 150 days, the lines between reality and absurdity have been completely blurred. Internet culture told us Osama bin Laden was right. Now, a man self-immolates and is touted as a martyr who may be very well be the only one among us not mentally ill. It is not just fringe people saying this. People I know and respect(ed) personally are championing Bushnell’s “resistance” as a sane method of ending a war. One of Time’s 100 most influential people of 2021 tweeted the following:
In the last 150 days, there’s been a surge of antisemitism that is too difficult to keep up with. Paul Kessler was murdered in LA for being Jewish and at a protest. Middle schoolers in Manhattan Beach were told that a classmate saying “All Israelis and Jews should be killed” isn’t hate speech, but a political opinion. Presidents at some of the most elite universities in the country testified before Congress that calling for genocide against Jews is only a problem in certain contexts. Meanwhile, students at universities across the country are harassed and beaten on their college campuses, and instead of finding recourse, they are often told to hide their Jewishness so as not to instigate it further. Jews across Europe have been burned and beaten. Synagogues have been vandalized. And the world tells us, no, this is not antisemitism. This is anti-Zionism, and we would punch Nazis for you, and by the way, we think you’re a Nazi which is why we can punch you, but actually, maybe the Holocaust didn’t happen, but can we still use the word Nazi because in the upside down logic of the last 150 days, nothing is real anyway except that Jews are bad.
In the last 150 days, feminists have either stayed silent about the rape and sexual violence that was committed on October 7 and to the hostages, or they have outright denied this truth, under the convenient guise that since the women who were raped to death haven’t come forward themselves to speak, it must not have happened. Believe all women, except Jewish women, unless those Jewish women can come back as ghosts to tell their stories, but come on, Jewish ghosts would probably cause a whole new level of blood libel about haunting “innocent” Hamas leaders and causing them to wage war on Israel so that Israel would “have” to fight back and commit its long-planned genocide1 that’s somehow so poorly executed that in one of the most densely populated urban areas in the world, their 150-day bombing and invasion campaign has only killed 1.3% of the population, and half the dead are the terrorists they were going after, but whatever, math doesn’t sell newspapers.
In the last 150 days, the destruction we’re witnessing in Gaza has been impossible to bear. The starvation, the lack of medical care, the lack of shelter and safety. It’s impossibly heartbreaking. Only a monster would be complacent with it. (For the Jews who are, it’s very un-Jewish to see that pain and not have your heart break. We need only turn to Pesach, coming upon us far too since when we’re still stuck 150 days ago in Simchat Torah, to understand that even in war times, we must mourn for human life lost. We don’t say the festive complete Hallel prayer out of mourning for the Egyptians who were drowned as we set free. We pour out wine from our festive cups to remember the plagues and the pain they caused. God does not want death and destruction to come upon any of his creatures, and we must not, cannot, do not, either.) 150 days in, we are all exhausted from this war. But to let Hamas win is not going to improve the conditions for Gazans, it will not move us closer to peace, and it will result in even more death for Israel and across western countries who would have shown terrorists that their heinousness is permitted. Instead of throwing our hands up, we must ask ourselves: why do we as a world infantilize the innocent Palestinian civilians so much as to take away their choice to leave an untenable war zone? Why do we ignore Hamas’s tactic of using civilians as human shields and of stealing aid? Why is it only now that the US is airdropping aid into Gaza? Why do we demand only black-and-white, perfect solutions when thousands of people are dead and exponentially more are suffering? In the last 150 days, why has the world reduced Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Gazans, to subhuman pawns, instead of allowing us to see our shared humanity?
Nearly 100 days ago, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the mother of one of the hostages, Hersh, who was last heard to have lost an arm to a grenade as he was being kidnapped, wrote the following poem:
There is a lullaby that says your mother will cry a thousand tears before you grow to be a man.
I have cried a million tears in the last 67 days.
We all have.
And I know that way over there
there’s another woman
who looks just like me
because we are all so very similar
and she has also been crying.
All those tears, a sea of tears
they all taste the same.
Can we take them
gather them up,
remove the salt
and pour them over our desert of despair
and plant one tiny seed.
A seed wrapped in fear,
trauma, pain,
war and hope
and see what grows?
Could it be
that this woman
so very like me
that she and I could be sitting together in 50 years
laughing without teeth
because we have drunk so much sweet tea together
and now we are so very old
and our faces are creased
like worn-out brown paper bags.
And our sons
have their own grandchildren
and our sons have long lives
One of them without an arm
But who needs two arms anyway?
Is it all a dream?
A fantasy? A prophecy?
One tiny seed.
It’s been 150 heart-wrenching, exhausting days, and the much of the world has given way to its crudest, most hateful instincts. The Jewish people are mired in a war, whether we live in Israel or not, and we are fighting largely alone. But we are strong. We can do our best to find the hope and join Rachel in looking ahead 50 years from now and seeing a better future. If we don’t, all we will see is the current darkness that surrounds us, and we will stay lost.
Yes, this is a real conspiracy - that Israel wanted October 7 to happen so they could have an excuse to kill Palestinians.