This post originally appeared on LinkedIn, in late 2023.
Tonight, my husband and I were driving and talking about Israel. He asked a hypothetical question: "If you had the opportunity to go back there right now to live, would you?"
And the answer to the outside observer would be so simple. Of course not. Especially not now. This perpetual conflict is one of the reasons we left several years ago.
But I was quiet. And then I said, "I don't know." And I asked him the same question and he gave me the same answer: He was silent. And then he said, "I don't know."
Because even though Israel is surrounded by hostile neighbors, plagued by constant war, by the threat of terrorist attacks and the belligerent indifference of a world that castigates it for self-defense and survival... even after terrorists infiltrated the country and brutally slaughtered, raped and tortured innocent civilians in an unprecedented massacre the likes of which have not been seen since the Holocaust... even after all that... I've never been afraid the way I am here in the United States. I felt safer being a Jew in Israel. Much, much safer than I do here.
That's really sad.
All over the world, people are chanting "from the river to the sea", "gas the Jews," and calling for the destruction of both the country and its people - including Jews in the diaspora. This is terrifying, but eerily familiar. We've been here before.
And while the world protests Israel's existence, I've never been more sure that the Jewish people are dependent upon its survival. People always say that Israel as a modern nation-state exists because of the Holocaust, but they got it backwards: The Holocaust happened because Israel did not exist.
(meme credit (below): Gil Baram via Facebook)
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