A Brutally Honest Letter to the Jewish People

The world hates us far more than we will accept. And it does not at all matter. This is not a popularity contest. Let it go.

The Western Wall in Jerusalem (photo: Joshi Milestoner/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay written by Gavriella Zahtz.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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After October 7th, I fell apart.

And that is not like me. For those who don’t know: I’ve been in hiding with four kids under the age of nine from violence, ended up homeless with said kids, got us safe and stable then spent almost a decade wheelchair dependent.

As I got sicker without diagnosis, I ended up in the basement of a nursing home with mold dripping down from the ceiling, legally blind, on liquid-only nutrition. I’ve had over 50 surgeries. I’ve been burned, cut, poisoned.

And yet I was not prepared.

And I feel so guilty that I fell apart. All four of my children are no more or less in danger than the rest of the world’s Jews. They are not being held hostage like rats in tunnels underground. They have all of their limbs. We have not had any immediate family members tortured or slaughtered.

And I am so deeply sorry to all of the families of 250-plus humans being held captive. I am so unbelievably sad for every funeral. I am overcome with grief and pain looking at every picture and hearing each testimony. I stand with you. I want them to come home. I want peace. I do not look away. I face the pain to stand beside you in this unthinkable unimaginable pain.

This letter is specifically to my Jewish friends and colleagues. Our non-Jewish friends and supporters are more than welcome to stay with us here. I am grateful for those of you who have been brave enough to engage in painful, difficult discussions during this time. But this letter is not to dialogue with you or find pathways of understanding, as important as those conversations are.

This letter is definitely not for the haters. I am not writing to dispute, argue, prove, defend, or otherwise engage with people who spew rhetoric about or take real actions towards my people’s destruction. I have heard you. You want me dead. “From the River to the Sea.” It’s got a memorable beat, so don’t worry — I’ve heard you.

“The whole massacre was made up,” or “it happened but only because we made them do it so it’s justified resistance to decapitate babies.” Got it. You want to “clean up the world” so you need those Jews to go into the toilet (another catchy image). I am not here to argue with you. I am not here to defend myself or my people. So save your comments, stop reading. I am not talking to you right now. You’ve taken up plenty of my feed and brain and air time lately. Thanks!

Instead, this is a family letter.

So dear friends, family, and colleagues, those I have known for years and those I have not yet met — pull up a chair, have a seat, let’s get down to brass tacks. Let’s talk tachlis (Hebrew for “bottom line”). Let’s start with naming the feelings.

First: Betrayal.

I feel it deeply. I hear it from so many of your posts and videos and messages. They start like this, “I do not usually (or ever) post about non-business/personal matters/Judaism/Israel/parenting, but…” And then it is some version of “how could you be silent?” Do you not see? Do you not know? Little children, whole families, Holocaust survivors, disabled children…

Like most of you, I would consider myself basically one of the good guys. I have spoken for the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. I believe everyone should be equal under the law regardless of race, economic status, gender identification, etc.

In my younger hippie days at The State University of New York Binghamton, I drafted the equality statement that added discrimination clauses across all of the New York schools — a joint effort between the Gay Student Union, the Black Student Union, and the Jewish Student Union — that are still used to this day.

I stand up for women’s rights internationally. My first company was a cause-related marketing agency. My second was for wellness in the workplace. Now I’m helping change financial incentives in the U.S. healthcare system so we can profitably pay for doing the right thing.

I have decent-moral-person cred.

And I thought the people I’ve worked with for years, the people with whom I’ve stood side-by-side advocating, the friends who have known me to be consistently decent and loving, I naively thought that they stood for all people. Not all people except the Jews. An old story, yet still so surprising.

Decades ago some terrorists with advanced skills at public relations attached the cause of the Palestinian people and their violent elected representatives and glued the entire package to the academic-liberal agenda.

This has been so successfully packaged that otherwise intelligent people who fight for gender-identity-equality and safety-from-sexual-violence and vegan-bioethical-sustainable-farming now completely miss that the very objects of their parade-ground affections are savages who gang-raped and mutilated other leftist farmers and gender-neutral kids who dance for unity, peace, and free love in the desert.

We have become a generation of cognitive dissonance.

Then there is the silence. The what-about-ism. The language of nuance and compromise. The looking-away. The refusal to look. I know you hear the silence. I know because I have heard you begging your intelligent, rational, decent friends, colleagues, and neighbors to remember that mass decapitation is not something the good guys do, and that it’s just off any moral barometer to throw a parade and party in the streets with women’s mutilated bodies.

I also know how much it takes to look. To look literally at the face of evil and not look away. And for many people, they just are not capable of getting so close to that much intractable pain.

I received a call from one of my non-Jewish friends. We cried together. We raged. He sat with me in the pain and for that I will always always be grateful. One of the ideas we shared is that most people cannot get that close to the pain. And even more people just simply lack the moral fortitude required to say, “I was wrong and I want to change my opinion and/or my actions.” Most people dig their proverbial heels in, defending themselves to themselves. That is how otherwise good people can look away.

The feeling of betrayal from people, leaders, and policies is as old as the rest of this story of the Jews among nations of people. Up to 90 percent of the early-20th century American Communist Party was Jewish. They shared a common thread with today’s academic Left of rejecting historical religious connections and holding on to what a deep belief in justice and freedom and equanimity among people looks like when one removes concepts like God and religious doctrine.

These American immigrants volunteered to fight side-by-side with Spanish workers in the Spanish Civil War. They were then absolutely devastated when communist Russia signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler — siding not with the workers’ rights and freedom for the everyman, but with fascism and terrorism. You can go forwards and backwards in history to find again and again Jews fighting for freedoms for all people to have those same allies in mission turn against them when Jews were more useful as scapegoats for a society in pain.

Then the Jewish psyche so oddly and so often turns to another deep emotion within: shame. If you say that I am a dirty Jew, maybe I really smell. If you say my ancestors murdered your Messiah, I guess I should pay the price 1,000 years later.

If 2,000 years later you throw a grenade at my home and I catch it, then I throw it back before dying, and then when it lands back in your backyard someone dies, and then if you tell me it is all my fault because I started it or because it was my hand that touched the grenade last before killing an innocent bystander, or maybe because my ancestors murdered your prophet — then, well, you must be right.

Surely the world wouldn’t call me a dirty Jew for thousands of years if there wasn’t some truth to it, right?

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Fear is the next stop on the post-October 7th emotional roller coaster.

We are the grandchildren of victims and survivors of the latest genocide of the Ashkenazi Jewish world, the Holocaust. Far less talked about in the American-European centric skewed view of the world: our Sephardic and Mizrahi families who lived for well over 1,000 years in relative peace and prosperity side-by-side the Muslim Arab majorities in Syria, Iraq, Persia (Iran), Tunisia, and Morocco. Whose existence and contributions in these countries have literally been erased in less than 50 years of genocide and expulsions.

Even more recently, our Jewish family members who grew up in the constant fear of being Jewish in Soviet Russia, over 1 million emigrating to Israel after the Iron Curtain fell. And our Ethiopian family members, persecuted until our Israeli family members airlifted them to safety.

We have grown up and raised our children to think about who would hide us or which child looks most Aryan to send for bread; we have committed to ourselves that we would be among those who risked life in a ghetto uprising or a partisan army, not among those who walked to their death.

As a student of history I will tell you that we have begun another genocidal event. The Jewish People will survive. The fact that we always do is truly the biggest thorn in the side of every civilization in all of history that has tried to destroy us. We have outlived every single group of people that sought to destroy us. Unquestionably we will survive this one.

But many Jews will die. And more than the danger that many other people’s will be under, more than the loss of all the good and inventiveness these now-dead Jews would have brought to the world, and more than the rewriting of history that will invariably occur after this genocidal period, each of the good human beings, the big bucket that makes up humanity will be irreparably damaged. Because every time there is a genocidal event against the Jews, it requires, just like today, that good people with decent-moral-person cred will look away.

Half of you reading are thinking that I am an alarmist. I may be well-intentioned but I am exaggerating the likelihood that we have witnessed the beginning of another dark, dark, dark moment in history. Surely these are isolated evil-doers. Again, I am not going to reiterate the evidence; you can find it online. I will sum it up with one fact: By the time they burn Jewish babies and the world looks away, it has already started.

So now what?

I know that many are thinking, “I hear you, but I’m not a smelly Jew because I wear the latest deodorant. I changed my name, I changed my clothes, I look and sound and smell just like the non-Jews. I am a tenured professor in their university. I am an atheist. My spouse is not Jewish. My Dad is not Jewish. I am not a Zionist. I don’t even believe in the modern State of Israel. I converted. I marched, boycotted, defended. I am not the kind of Jew they want to kill.”

“If only those Zionists would compromise. Give back a bit of land. Stop being occupiers. Take less. Meet in the middle. If only those religious zealots would act less like fanatics; this is all caused by fanaticism. If only Jews would be a bit less Jewish. If only they would wear more deodorant, the world wouldn’t blame the smelly Jews.”

So let’s go back to the historical origins of this “conflict.” Not 1948; go back much much further.

Quite simply, the Muslim Arab-Jewish conflict is literally the oldest sibling rivalry of all-time. A little over 3,900 years ago (yes, Jews have a long memory), there was this dude Abraham. He had two women who each gave him a son: First Hagar had Ishmael, then Sarah had Isaac.

The mothers were not besties. Abraham was pushed to choose, kept Sarah and Isaac by his side (leading to the creation of the nation of Israel also known as the Jewish People) and banished Hagar and Ishmael — who then became the first ancestors of the Arab-Muslim people.

So you know the aunt that no one will talk to and no one remembers why? The brothers who go to their grave hating each other? The divorced parents, three decades later, who make their children choose between them for the holidays? Now multiply that by 4,000 years and convince me that an upstart country of a bit over 75 years young can make a treaty that will solve this family rift.

Seriously?

The second point is a quick reality test in geography. For this I will need you to literally look at a map if you are not totally clear on the geography of the modern State of Israel, the Gaza Strip, and all of their not-so-friendly neighbors on all sides — except the Mediterranean Sea (the sea the chanters want to push the Jews into).

Since Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the people of the neighboring Sderot, of the neighboring kibbutz farms of Be’eri, of the many others whose name you may not yet have memorized, lived with regular violence: bombings that did not stop when Israel withdrew from Gaza but increased. Bloodshed and fear that were maximized, not eradicated, over the past 20 years. In Kibbutz Be’eri the preschool playground doubled as bomb shelters; just imagine the daily life that requires a farming community to build integrated toy turtles and missile protection.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews have been evacuated from both the north and south of Israel since October 7th. Many have no home to return to after this war. Even more will be returning to shells previously called home now overtaken by emaciated feral cats, insects, and vermin.

If these Israelis will not return to their home communities after the war, Israel will have to shrink into half of itself even if no more land is sacrificed in the name of peace. Without getting further into history, geography, and other mundane lessons, suffice it to say that if the devastated and traumatized communities of people who watched their families mutilated in front of them, communities that collectively were already living with daily PTSD before having their eyeballs ripped out or their limbs cut off and then somehow miraculously surviving — if these remaining families do not feel safe to return home, Israel as an independent modern state will cease to exist.

So there is no negotiating with a people whose entire organizational structure calls for the extermination of me and my family. There is no possible end to this war other than the total destruction of Hamas. In other words, there is no possible way for an end to this war until the people of Sderot and Kibbutz Be’eri and the rest of the evacuated south of Israel feel confident that they will not return to then be massacred a few months or years later.

By destroyed I don’t just mean dead. I mean so humiliated in defeat that their hungry Islamic Jihad brothers and sisters in arms think long and hard before trying again.

This is not about politics. This is not solely about land or religion. It is about the basic ability for the Jewish People to have a tiny place that won’t kick them out, and to have that in the middle of yet another time where across the world it is becoming more and more difficult to live anywhere else.

If you need a reminder of what got us into this, start with 4,000 years of sibling rivalry and end with burnt babies and decapitated peace-loving Holocaust survivors — and wrap it up in a bow of: There is nowhere else to go.

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Let’s go back to our emotional cornucopia and I will add another in: Pride.

Overwhelming pride of the young people who are fighting for my right to exist on this planet. Pride for the boys and girls who slept on the floors of airports and airplanes, dropping everything to fly back into war to serve. Unbelievable pride that there is a breed of Jew who says “never again” not because the world will not rise up to wipe us off the face of the earth again.

They say “never again” because never again will the genocidal enemy be met with silence from within. Never again will there be Jews who seek to compromise themselves away from our very right to exist. Never again will we be sheep to a slaughter.

The Jewish People have been a warrior nation for many years. With the creation of a modern state, we continued this tradition via one of the most elite forces in the world. And these soldiers — men and women so young that I can only still call them children, just barely getting started on living this life — they are not fighting just for land. They are not fighting only for conviction.

They are fighting for our very right to exist anywhere in the world.

It has gotten ugly. Very ugly. For now, accept that the IDF has no other option other than the destruction necessary to grant a peace of mind necessary for people to be willing to live within miles of Gaza again, because we still have some ground to cover today.

The world hasn’t heard about a humanitarian crisis of homeless Israeli refugees despite hundreds of thousands of people being dislocated right now. Why? Because other Israelis have opened up their homes and hearts. Just one example: Six-thousand families from southern Israel needed a place right away. Someone posted this on WhatsApp. Within 45 minutes, all 6,000 had been given free homes from other Israelis who took them in.

By this point in our conversation, I hope that we have at least set aside the incessant craving for the non-Jewish world to like, care about, or want to understand us. The world hates us far more than you will accept. And it does not at all matter.

Politically, economically, socially the world will support and protect those whom it needs. The world needs a strong Israel. The world needs smart Jews. This is not a popularity contest. Let it go.

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