Split screen

Two b’nei mitzvot, one graduation and a war  

by Patricia Carmel

Split screen references how on July 14, 1997, Israelis watching the Maccabiah Games sat stunned as TV screens showed a split screen. On one side: athletes competing in a sporting event; on the other side: horrific scenes of athletes falling from a collapsed pedestrian bridge into the polluted river.

We Israelis live in a split screen.

In one screen, our lives appear normal.

In the second screen, a protracted sadness, anger, and grief overshadow our days.

On October 1, 2023, my grandson, Hadar Moshe, celebrated his bar mitzvah on the second day of Succot and six days before the Hamas massacres in the south of Israel. We put our plans to have a bar mitzvah party in November on hold.

Click here to play the video of Hadar's bar mitzvah, held at a synagogue on a kibbutz in the Galilee

This morning, I visited a museum in Zichron Yaakov, a small, picturesque town about 15 minutes from Binyamina, where I live. In one exhibit, there were photographs of the aftermath of a pogrom in Romania in the late 19th century. The photos could have been taken in Israel, October 7, 2023.

Hadar’s party was eventually held in May, 2024. A few days earlier, it had been hot and dusty, what’s called in Israel, sharav. But on the day of the party, the weather was perfect, neither too warm, nor cold. I’d hired furniture for outdoor events and tables seating two or three people were scattered around the three small sections of my garden. There were some 40 guests, including some old friends who had been guests at Hadar’s father’s bar mitzvah in 1990. 

Hadar even had his own AI-created song.

Click here to play the video of Hadar's bar mitzvah party in Binyamina

It’s normal to be stressed when planning a party. But our lives are not normal. In this war, 18, 19-year olds, who a short while earlier had been stressing over their matriculation exams, were now soldiers, seeing things no-one of any age should ever see.

The endless anguish of the fate of our hostages is with us constantly. Who among them is still alive? Who is being beaten, tortured, raped? In the midst of our joy of planning the bar mitzvah party, we wanted - we needed – to say to the families of the slaughtered and those still in captivity in Gaza, we did not forget you.  

In Nahal Oz, a kibbutz in the south that was overrun by Hamas monsters, there were plans to publish a booklet of recipes created by the kibbutz members. Publication date was planned for October 7. In the invitation to the party, I included 11 of the recipes and asked guests, as a gesture of solidarity, to prepare one of the recipes.

The cakes in this picture with a yellow post-it are from the list of recipes from Nahal Oz.

Nahal Oz refugees are still living in temporary accommodations around Israel. Their coordinator told me how she, her husband and their two small children were in their safe room for 19 hours as terrorists burned, raped, and murdered their friends and neighbors. It was a miracle that the family survived. The trauma will be part of their lives forever.

Ten days after the bar mitzvah party, my family got together again to celebrate the bat mitzvah of my granddaughter, Yuval Malka.

The party included a series of fun events. We played virtual reality games. It’s odd that even though we knew that, in reality, we were not standing on a narrow plank high above the tallest skyscrapers, we all screamed. As if it were real. It was a legitimate reason to scream and it felt good. Other VR games were less fear-inducing and involved shooting down virtual colored squares or moving our arms and bodies to avoid crashing into virtual walls and other objects.

Some VR snippets from the party

On October 7, we switched on the TV to incomprehensible scenes. We saw 100s of people running. Over the following days, we learned that 3000+ terrorist thugs had broken through the fence separating Gaza from Israel, destroying sophisticated technological systems designed to forewarn of an incursion, and proceeded to

mutilate

behead

burn alive

bake babies in ovens

dismember 

gang rape

shoot 

800 Israeli men, women, children and babies. The terrorist scum murdered families in their homes in an orgy of unfathomable cruelty. Then they Whatsapped videos of their victims final moments and sent them to the contacts in the victims’ own phones.

350 young men and women were shot, gang raped, bombed and kidnapped at the Nova dance festival. 250 people were abducted to Gaza, among them Holocaust survivors, a baby, children, the elderly and sick. First responders, and military and security personnel were also killed that day, bringing the number of dead to around 1200.

These figures are not precise. Israel is still discovering bodies on the grounds of the Nova festival of people believed to have been taken hostage. We don’t know how many of the hostages are still alive. Up-to-date numbers of those believed to be dead and those still living can be found here. 

When the VR people had packed up their screens and equipment and left, we played a game popular in Israel where questions about someone’s likes and dislikes, in this case Yuval, are asked to test how well we know her. What a forehead-slapping disgrace it was for me, a grandmother, to get wrong a question about Yuval’s favorite food! 

It was a nice party, with fun games, an eclectic selection of Yuval’s favorite foods (yes, there’s more than one!).  But it was confusing and a little guilt inducing. Not every Israeli family can give themselves permission to laugh and play games as if life were normal. 

Before we’d even begun to comprehend the horror of October 7, we watched on social media the outpouring of unadulterated hatred against Jews and Israel in the UK, US and Europe. 

The language of human rights was adopted, twisted and abused to blame Israel for the depraved assault against us. The terrorists themselves provided evidence of their heinous and despicable crimes with their Go-Pro cameras, recording their glee as they committed them – and yet, the world demanded proof from Israel that babies were beheaded, and women – and it must be said, men and yes, children – were raped.

Womens’ organizations were silent. Me Too Unless You're a Jew became our outraged cry.

The travesty of the UN and other international organizations that were created to forge peace among the nations was on full display. Our allies pandered to their Muslim and so-called progressive electorates, paying only lip service to an Israel writhing in agony; on university campuses, seasoned provocateurs thrust placards into the hands of useless idiots who screamed From The River To The Sea and Free Free Free Palestine; schools, youth movements and ignorant people were brainwashed into chanting anti-Israel, Jew-hating epithets. 

We watched with horror scenes of people tearing down posters of our hostages.

Our hostages, at the time of writing 290 days suffering only God knows what horrors in the terror tunnels are always with us.

Click here to play the video. October Rain was originally submitted and rejected by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). A revised version of the song, Hurricane, was finally accepted.

October Rain by Eden Golan: full video

Verifiable historical facts, up to and including events of the previous day, are rewritten to defame the Jews and romanticize the terrorists. Media indulge in extraordinary verbal gymnastics that minimize attacks on Israel and obscure the identities of the aggressors. Lawfare is weaponized to force Israel to defend itself against baseless charges of genocide at the ICJ; the ICC conflates Israel’s democratically elected government with terrorist thugs.

On what planet is a country defending itself from a genocidal enemy enjoined to ensure the food security of the enemy’s civilian population? 

Barely any area of society, recreation or business is neglected in this orchestrated, well-planned and copiously funded assault on Israel and the Jews. 

Demonizing the Jews until the world is brainwashed into believing that the Jews are so evil, they have no right to exist – this strategy is right out of the Nazi playbook. The last piece of the jigsaw slipped into place, and I understood how the Holocaust happened. 

Life goes on. It’s too painful to dwell on the war so I go to work and grapple with complex technological concepts, chat with colleagues, go out to lunch, talk about vacations, children and New York Times puzzles. I meet friends, visit museums, eat in restaurants, go to movies, buy clothes and unnecessary household objects, and laugh. Usually on Friday evenings, I spend erev Shabbat with my family.

Intermittently we talk about the war and clash over politics, but regardless of what we’re doing and where we are doing it, there is an endless, pervading sense of discomfort, a disquiet that won’t go away. Tears flow at unexpected moments.

In the bucolic village of Binyamina, it’s almost surreal. The sun shines, the birds chirp, people jog. On October 8, some nice men from the municipality came to help me clean out my air-raid shelter, which I then equipped with water, tissues, cans of tuna, crackers, phone charger, fan, crockery and utensils, cups, coffee, etc. Gradually, I removed the utensils, the cans of tuna, coffee and the crackers back to the kitchen because no sirens shrilled in Binyamina. The rockets and missiles from Gaza are too far south; the volleys of rockets, missiles and drones from Lebanon are still focused on the north of the country, although the time will come when Hizballah will send volleys of projectiles that can reach every corner of the country.    

The regular irritations of the day don’t suddenly recede: dangerous drivers still speed and weave from lane to lane; service providers remain clueless; digital mishaps continue to frustrate. And then I berate myself for overreacting to the minutiae of life when our young men and women are fighting and dying for the country’s existence.

 ‘Released for publication.’ We no longer watch the news obsessively, but we hold our collective breath when the words we dread precede the names of soldiers, killed just hours earlier. The next morning, their living faces smile at us from the front pages of the newspapers. 

Who among us doesn’t know someone with a family member in the army in Gaza or in the north; someone who’s been killed or wounded; someone still held hostage; someone who was at Nova?

There are days when it’s difficult to distinguish between the screens. 

Yuval’s graduation celebration from primary school was the best, most relevant I’ve attended in all the years my children and grandchildren were in the national education system. It wasn’t just that the 12-year olds sang, danced and performed skits, it was the quality of the performance and the content of the skits. As they journeyed through their school years, their enactments becoming less frivolous, until in 6th grade, they took on the questions that exercise their elders. What does it mean to be Israeli? What is Zionism? As one of the pupils announced from the stage: There are about 500 people here and if you ask them these questions, you’ll get 500 different answers. We can view this as an acknowledgement and celebration of our diversity – or as a symptom of the profound fragmentation of our society. 

Click here to play the video of some of the choice moments from the graduation show (the video is a bit blurry)

I have a question, world. What did you think Never Again meant? 

Where’s your shame, Europe! 

How could you allow Jew hatred to become mainstream? How could you allow Zionism, the return of the Jewish people to their ancestral home after 2000 years of European persecution, to become a dirty word?

You continue to fund UNRWA, including the text books that indoctrinate Palestinian children to hate Jews and aspire to die as martyrs in the holy mission of killing Jews - everywhere.

Where’s your shame America, our closest ally! You talk from both sides of your mouth. On one side, you assert your ironclad support of Israel and indeed, you provide us with arms and protect us in the halls of the corrupt UN. But your support appears rusty when your senile, now lame duck, president imposes restraints on an Israel threatened with genocide, assumes a concern for the ‘innocent civilians’ that were never displayed in your own wars and fails to stem the sale of Iranian oil from 300,000 barrels a day in 2020 to two million barrels a day in 2024, earning the ayatollahs a whopping $80 billion a day.

The Red Cross has no shame! It never repented for turning a blind eye to the slaughter of Jews during the Holocaust. Nothing has changed. This deeply antisemitic organization made no requests or effort to visit our hostages. They were given medicines, clearly marked with the hostages’ names, that were found by the IDF, unopened, undelivered, in a hospital in Khan Yunis. 

When international media, broadcast, print and social, focus obsessively on the widespread destruction in Gaza without pointing to the Hamas shafts in schools, homes, hospitals and mosques leading to an extensive labyrinth of tunnels below;

When the international media rarely reference the hostages still remaining in Hamas captivity; or the thousands of Israeli refugees from the kibbutzim and villages in the south; or the more than 60,000 Israeli refugees from the north forced to flee Hezbollah bombardments; or the 2,700 and counting acres of fields and forest set on fire by Hezbollah rockets;

When the international media repeat false, improbable statistics from the Hamas-run 'Gaza Ministry of Health' of the number of Gazans killed without mentioning that 1000s of the dead were Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists; and fail to mention the civilian-to-combatant death ratio that is the lowest in the history of urban warfare;

When the international media accuse Israel of causing widespread starvation and ignore how Hamas shoots at the convoys of trucks and steals food for themselves and to resell on the black market; then fail to report on the booming business of trade in humanitarian aid among the Gazan clans, yet forgo to mention that Israel ensures deliveries of food to Gaza that exceeds 3200 calories per capita a day; 

When the international media twists and warps Israel's courageous and inspiring rescue of four Israelis held hostage in Palestinians' homes, where they were beaten, tortured and enslaved for seven months;

When the BBC refuses to call Hamas terrorists and insists that Tel Aviv is Israel’s capital; when Sky News’ Kate Burley rolls her eyes at the mention of Israeli hostages;

WHEN PROPAGANDA MASQUERADES AS NEWS...

Then I realize that the international media is complicit in the spread of misinformation and disinformation that slanders Israel and distorts reality to the benefit of Israel's enemies.

How can I tell my grandchildren that the existence of Israel ensures that the Holocaust can’t happen again? October 7 demonstrated in the most vile and graphic way that this is a myth. We have lost our trust in the government and security services, who failed the country and the people. Thousands of Israelis demonstrate for elections to replace the government; politicians squabble and bicker among themselves, the population is polarized. Do we try to reach a deal that will release 1000s of terrorists and allow Hamas to claim victory in order to bring back our hostages and ease the unbearable agony of the hostages’ families? Or do we intensify the fight to guarantee Hamas will never again control Gaza, even if that means more hostages might die in captivity until they are rescued?

My head says not to stop fighting the terrorists who have promised us October 7 again and again and again. But my breaking heart calls for a ceasefire and to bring home as many of the hostages as possible until the inevitable moment when Hamas will violate the agreement. In Islam, a ceasefire is called hudna, a jihadi tactic in which they use the hiatus to re-arm, redeploy, restrategize and break as soon as it is militarily advantageous.

Iran and its proxies, Hamas, Hizballah, the Shi'ite militias in Syria and Iraq, and the Houthis – they listen to our pundits, read our newspapers. They perceive our disunity as weakness, which drives up the price we'll have to pay to reach a deal, a deal that Hamas will break at any time.

The war in Gaza appears to be winding down, but I believe it’s the first salvo in a war that will eventually envelop the world. Obama’s flawed 2015 JCPOA, which purported to arrest Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, removed sanctions, showering Iran with money that they used to finance international terrorism and develop ICBMs capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The evil ayatollahs were given the wherewithal to create a ring of fire around Israel, training and arming proxy armies that threaten us from Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. 

Since October 8 to mid-July, Hizballah had fired 6,700 rockets into Israel, 360 drones, burnt 47,000 acres of land, murdered 29 soldiers and civilians, destroyed 947 houses and tried to infiltrate Israel seven times.

On April 13, Iran launched over 320 missiles, rockets and drones at us.

On July 19, a long-range drone launched from Yemen hit Tel Aviv, killing a man sleeping in his bed and wounding nine others.

On July 27, a Hizballah missile massacred 12 children playing soccer in the Druze village of Majdal Shams.

This is just a rehearsal for what is to come. And it won’t be only Israel in the line of fire.