Miriam

The great advantage of living one’s life in Hebrew is that your psyche isn’t constantly buffeted by their insane obsession with you. This urgency to deny the Jews the chance to mourn on October 7 isn’t some accidental mass-mobilization. It is purposeful and predatory. If the Jews are allowed to mourn, then the Jews are humanized, have a perspective worth noticing, dignity worth acknowledging, and a chance to recover. But the point of October 7 was to be the start of a great and permanent cleansing of the world from the psychic irritant of the Jew. This is it. The chips are down. The Jews must be tormented constantly and mercilessly, their suffering denied, their evils magnified. They must be massacred in Israel and abused in London, New York and Twitter. Nothing can distract these great holy warriors from the sacred task of erasing the Jewish narrative and experience, and eventually the Jew (it’s no accident that Nassim is also now obsessed with Jewish genetics). And it will only get worse - both because the overall West doesn’t yet fully understand the threat of these ideologies to itself and because these holy warriors are convinced they’re on the cusp of victory. So they torment the Jews, double down on the massacre, and defend and validate and call forth more of the same. Fellow Jews, don’t forget you have your own language and your own polity now. We in Israel do not hear this abuse, we are mostly oblivious to it. When we do notice it, we mostly see it as a sign of societal decline, a bravado and brutality borrowed from certain Middle Eastern political and religious cultures that do not signal courage or intimidating capability, but ideological childishness and cultural incompetence. It is the same basic backwardness that hangs over our region like a stifling cloud. My humble suggestion: Respond to this garbage as Israelis do. Turn off Twitter and go mourn with your own people. Find them in physical space, where you can see real faces and speak real words. That’s what I’m going to do. Let our enemies rage and strut and convince themselves of the righteousness of their hatred. This is, alas, their baseline state when the going gets tough. It is their curse. You don’t have to live in it. You don’t even have to notice it. Go find some Jews.

A Nasrallah account tweets in Hebrew, “Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe in a week.” Hundreds of Israelis respond in ways I can only describe as extremely Israeli: “Me starting a diet.” “The cable guy’s text message.” “When you ship your missiles by Israel Post.” “My wife when I ask for sex.” “Me about to study for an exam.” “His plan is to bore us to death, and it’s working.” (Some of these are paraphrases; check out the replies for many, many more and literal translations.) Going to war with Israelis is a bit like going to a movie with your dad. It’s hard to lose yourself in the dramatic tension once the dad jokes begin.