Opinion | Mourning My People and Defending Their Right To Exist: Being an Israeli-American at NYU
On the fateful night of October 6th, as I returned home from a heartening Shabbat dinner, the sense of connection to Israeli roots was profound. These Shabbat dinners served as a comforting link to home while being so far away. Little did I anticipate that, just around 11:30 pm EST (October 7th, 6:30 am in Israel), my tranquility would be shattered by push notifications heralding red alerts and rockets fired into Israel from Gaza. At first, I looked at my phone, annoyed. This has become so normalized in Israeli life that we’ve become numb to it. However, this time, within an hour, our world was thrust into chaos.
I am not the same since October 7th, nor is any other Israeli or Jewish person. Since that night most of my waking moments are consumed by the struggle not to cry and by an uncontrollable anger that makes it difficult for people to be around me. Israel was under attack; the south became a war zone and my Israeli brothers and sisters became sitting ducks. The atrocities unfolded - women were raped and burned, bodies were mutilated and paraded to mass applause, and 9-month-old babies were taken hostage as if they were a threat – while life in New York continued undisrupted. This dissonance between the horror unfolding in Israel and the normalcy elsewhere left me feeling nauseous.
Israelis are well acquainted with the hatred of their neighbors. The head of Hezbollah once said that he would rather all Jews gather in Israel in order to kill us instead of hunting us down one by one globally. Hamas openly declared its goal of annihilating Israel and slaughtering as many Jews as possible. Never did we anticipate a breach in our security that would unleash this devastating massacre.
“Every Israeli that I know, knows someone who was either killed, injured, or kidnapped. The entire nation was mourning, while simultaneously uniting together to defend our homeland and rebuild shattered lives.”
I, however, didn’t have time to grieve. I was immediately thrown into another war – The Media War. Instead of mourning the friends that we lost, our focus had shifted to defending Israel’s right to self-defense. Propaganda and false information were spreading like wildfire, with their main target being 18-24-year-old American liberal college students.
While NYU’s student body government swiftly offered condolences and mental health resources to Israeli students, they remained silent on condemning Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel. My non-Jewish friends, though trying to be supportive, urged me to see the conflict’s complexity and “both sides”. With this, the anxiety started creeping in, fostering a growing sense of isolation and loneliness on campus.
Healy Florentin Organizing A Demonstration for Israeli Hostages in Gaza
American college students were attempting to educate me on my country’s history and justifying Hamas’s attack. They were being brainwashed by American leftists who had never been to the region or understood the history. Over and over, my Jewish friends and I, heard people claiming Israel “is committing genocide and is an apartheid state”. The ignorance escalated and the narrative shifted to Israelis being “white people” who are oppressing brown people, despite its diverse populations from various Middle Eastern countries, such as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Morocco, and many more. Social media became a platform for spreading trendy but hateful terms, contributing to a 400% increase in antisemitism in just the past month. Shockingly, the social activists who were very vocal for BLM, LBGTQ+, and the Me Too movement didn’t come to our defense. The silence was deafening.
The Palestinian movement, once a quest for justice, has been hijacked by a terrorist organization, and American liberals seem to have lost sight of this distinction. On a daily, I hear the chants “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Long live the intifada.”
How can a group call for a ceasefire but in the same breath call for an ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people? Since when have elite universities lost their moral integrity and are not able to distinguish between freedom of speech and hate speech? How can a school emphasize diversity and inclusivity as its core values but hire anti-Semitic professors who harass and humiliate their Jewish students? These questions are running through my mind non-stop but again, I have no one to talk to.
Last Month, Protestors Chanting “Palestine Will Be Free” Outside NYU’s Bobst Library
The ignorance I am witnessing in a place that is supposed to foster the next brilliant minds of our generation sickens me. However, the Jewish community is more united than ever, and for that, I am thankful. My friends and family in Israel are in high spirits and are surrounded by love and light. For them, and for the 239 hostages being held captive in Gaza, we are never going to hide our Jewish identity and never stop fighting for Israel.
As someone with dual citizenship, torn between America and Israel, I now realize that I cannot truly live freely as a Jew without Israel. “Ayn li eretz acheret” - “I have no other land” – this sentiment has never rung more true than now.