A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

The alarm goes off.

It’s way too early. It’s always way too early.

I don’t want to get up. I never want to get up. I’m not a morning person. Never have been. School is not where I want to be. The court is where I want to be. But there has to be school first, so I get up.

I drag my feet down the long hallway towards the bathroom. Eyes crusted, half open, I slightly bump my shoulder into the wall as I walk past my sister’s room. She gives me a look. Something between annoyance and pity. She’d been up for a while now. Early riser.

I finish my business. Pee and brush my teeth. I then walk to the kitchen, eyes a little less crusty, but still, begudgingly.

My mother is already moving. She is always already moving.

She made me a sandwich. Two slices of white bread. Shachar. The Israeli Nutella. It’s the same thing I eat almost every morning. Thanks, mom. I don’t think about it. I sit down.

The TV is on.

It’s always on in the morning. Channel One. The only channel that matters in the morning. The same station. The same broadcaster. The same tone. Urgent. Professional. Clipped.

There’s been a bombing.

The broadcaster is walking through the aftermath. Location. Time. Method. A suicide bomber walked into a crowded area the night before. The camera cuts to the scene. Police tape. Glass on the ground. Ambulances with their doors still open. First responders moving through the wreckage. It then fades to now. The aftermath. A quiet street in the early morning glow that pretends to get back to normal.

We all learn to pretend to get back to normal.

The death toll is at six. They expect it to climb.

The injury toll is higher. People are still fighting for their lives in area hospitals.

They show the street. I know that street. I have been on that street. I do the math. How recently was I there? Last week? Two weeks ago? Where exactly on the street? Which side? If I had been there last night, just a couple of hours before it all happened, where would I have been standing? How close would I have been to dying without knowing it?

They report where the bomber came from. A town I have heard of. I try to place it on the map in my head. They compare the attack to one from three weeks ago. Fewer casualties this time but similar method. Like a sick game of Fantasy Football, I make the same comparison. I rank them without meaning to. This one is smaller than the bus. Bigger than the market. Somewhere in the middle of a scale no child should have in his head but every child in this country does.

This is not fear. It is survival calculus. Cold, deliberate, drilled into you by the necessity of staying alive in a country where this happens often enough that the math has become automatic. The comparison to other attacks is automatic. The geography is automatic. The ranking is automatic.

I take another bite of my sandwich.

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My sister sits down next to me. She is ten, maybe eleven. She is brushing her hair. Long strokes on her beautiful golden hair, absent-minded, the way she always does in the morning. She has a side conversation with my mom about something. I’m not listening.

She does not acknowledge what is on the TV. Not because she is ignoring it. Because it is just on. The way weather is on. The way traffic is on. The way anything that plays in the background of a household every single morning eventually stops being an event and starts being atmosphere.

We clock it in. We always clock it in, pause, shake our heads, perhaps mutter a word in frustration, then count our lucky stars, but we move on.

The pundits are on now. They’re discussing the ramifications. The likely response. The next steps. Their voices are serious. They are professionals doing their job. They have done this before. They will do it again. We all will.

My mother passes through the room. She glances at the screen. She doesn’t stop.

Sometimes she stops. When the numbers are worse. Double digits. When it’s a bus, or a restaurant during lunch, or a market on a Friday afternoon. Then she stands there for a moment. Then she keeps moving. There’s no other option. There are lunches to pack and children to get to school and a household to keep running while the country absorbs another wound.

The death toll is now at eight. They just got a word from the hospital. Somber announcement in a voice that feels somewhere between monotone and rehearsed empathy. They do this so often, how can you blame them, I remember thinking.

I open my notebook. I have homework I didn’t finish. I was at the basketball court until dark last night, which is where I am every night, which is why the homework is never done on time. I try to get through a few problems while the broadcaster transitions to the next segment.

A man is being interviewed. He was nearby. He heard the explosion. He is describing what he saw. His voice is steady. Everyone’s voice is steady. That is how it works here.

I finish two problems. Close the notebook. It will have to be enough.

I get up. I rinse my plate and grab my backpack.

My sister is ready. She has been ready. She is always more organized than I am.

We walk out the front door.

The street is quiet. Normal. The sun is doing what the sun does in Israel, which is everything, all at once, even at seven thirty in the morning. The walk to school is fifteen minutes. We know every step of it.

We don’t put on headphones. There are no headphones. There is a Walkman somewhere in my room, but I don’t bring it on the walk. My ears are open. They are always open.

I look at the people around me. Not with suspicion. With awareness. A quick evaluation. Who is here. What they are carrying. Whether anything about the street feels different than it felt yesterday. Whether the rhythm of the neighborhood is off by even half a beat. You don’t walk with your head down. You don’t stare at the ground. You can’t afford to, even in the safest areas in Israel.

You look. You read. You process.

This is not something anyone taught me in a classroom or a conversation. Nobody sat me down and said, “Here is how you walk to school in a country where people blow up in the street.” It is something that installed itself, the way language installs itself, by immersion and repetition until it’s no longer a skill but a reflex. By the time you notice you’re doing it, you’ve been doing it for years.

My sister walks next to me. We talk about something. I don’t remember what. Something small. Something about school or a friend or what we’re doing after. Something that has nothing to do with the eight people who died between last night and this morning while I was eating a chocolate sandwich and trying to finish my math homework.

We arrive at school. We walk in. The day begins. Only eight more hours until I can get back on the court.

Just get through it, I think to myself. Not the fear of terrorism. Not the mourning of the dead I never knew. School. That’s what my brain clocked as the monumental obstacle to my happiness.

Tomorrow morning, the TV will be on again. Channel One. Same broadcaster. Same tone.

Maybe nothing happened overnight.

Maybe something did.

Either way, there is school. Either way, there is breakfast. Either way, my sister will brush her beautiful golden hair and my mother will keep moving and I will sit there with my notebook open to unfinished homework and the volume up, filing it into the place where it goes, the place that is not fear and is not indifference but is something in between that does not have a name in English.

In Hebrew, we just called it life.

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This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

If you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready, you can join the early reader list.

If you want to simply follow along it as it comes together, you can subscribe.

Everything I’m writing lives on the feed.

Most readers find me through my Notes.

This is where the Notes find their roots.

A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

There is a scene in tomorrow’s piece where I am sitting in front of the television doing my homework.

I am twelve, maybe thirteen. My sister is next to me brushing her hair. My mother is somewhere in the kitchen. The TV is on Channel One. It is always on Channel One. The broadcaster is covering the aftermath of a suicide bombing. Casualties. Injuries. Location. Footage of the scene.

I am trying to finish math.

That is not a metaphor. That is a Tuesday morning in Israel during the First Intifada.

I have given you, my readers, the Gulf War. The Scud missile passing over the neighborhood. I have given them the bombings in my twenties. Allenby Street. Mike’s Place. I have not given you the mornings.

The mornings are where the calculus got installed. Before I was a soldier. Before I was scanning rooms in bars and doing exit-route math in restaurants. Before any of that, I was a kid eating a chocolate sandwich (Hashachar, if you know, you know) and watching professional broadcasters narrate the aftermath of an attack while my sister had a side conversation with my mom about something I cannot remember.

Nobody screamed. Nobody turned it off. Nobody sat us down to explain what we were seeing. It was on. We watched. We filed it. We went to school.

Tomorrow’s piece is about one of those mornings. It is written in the same style as the lock sweep. Present tense. Step by step. The routine of it. Because the routine is the point.

This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

If you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready, you can join the early reader list.

If you want to simply follow along it as it comes together, you can subscribe.

Everything I’m writing lives on the feed.

Most readers find me through my Notes.

This is where the Notes find their roots.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Language shapes thought. Thought shapes action. Action shapes reality.

Orwell understood this before anyone put it into practice at scale. He argued that whoever controls the language controls the thought. He built an entire fictional warning around the principle and called the systematic redefinition of words Newspeak. The people who built this vocabulary read him carefully. They just disagreed with his conclusion.

For decades, a specific vocabulary has been engineered to invert the truth. To make victim and aggressor interchangeable. To launder terrorism as resistance and occupation as genocide.

The words sound like analysis. They function as weapons.

This is the dictionary they never wanted written. First edition. We are taking the language back.

A

Apartheid is a term describing the inclusion of over 2 million Arabs into a so-called exclusive Jewish ethnostate, where they hold high-level positions in politics, justice, medicine, military, and law, carry the same ID and passport as every other citizen, and enjoy equal rights under the law.

The Apartheid Wall is a uniquely Israeli concept, not at all replicated on a far larger scale on the Egyptian side of the Gaza border, designed to keep benevolent, peace-loving, tree-hugging hippies from smothering Israelis to death with their kindness, much like the widely-documented October 7th love-fest. It has no functional merit, no history of utility, and no measurable effect on terrorism whatsoever, other than the inconvenient 90% reduction in suicide bombings that followed its construction. It is merely an eyesore keeping people apart for no apparent reason. The people it is keeping apart have never publicly stated any genocidal goals.

B

The BDS movement is a reputable movement full of thought leaders and productive members of society. It competes directly with Israeli products and services by offering superior market alternatives to its followers. It most certainly is not a grievance organization aimed at isolating Jews from global society while its members post their boycott content on Intel-powered devices running Microsoft software over networks built on Israeli technology. It is impervious to irony, and entirely dependent on the innovations of the people it is trying to destroy.

Blood Libel is a conspiracy accusation dressed as irrefutable evidence, immune to scrutiny under the threat of being labeled either complicit or on the payroll of its targets. It requires no logic nor evidence. It is self-evident, apparently, and stands on its own merits, however flimsy and demonstrably false. It then deploys itself as a silencing mechanism against its targets before they can offer a rebuttal, dismissing any response as hysterical, dramatic, or proof of guilt. It has been running successfully for approximately one thousand years. Pure genius.

C

Ceasefire is when a democracy holds back its overwhelming military power while a lone rocket fired at its civilians is dismissed as a rogue transgression still within the terms of the agreement. It is the uneven demand placed exclusively on a regional power to exercise restraint at the expense of its own civilians, while its opposition hides behind rogue factions and lone actors. It is a pause that one side uses to bury its dead and the other uses to rearm.

Collective Punishment is a mechanism apparently designed to stop a presumably peaceful population from broadcasting its real intentions on Facebook Live. It is the right of a sovereign nation to control its borders and determine who enters and exits. It is the position of a country that lost more civilians to terrorism in the last two decades than in its first fifty years of conventional warfare, deciding it will no longer be an easy target. It is a line in the sand that says: if you want access to what we have built, behave like a human being.

Colonialism is the return of a people with roots to a land they have had a continuous presence in for over 3,000 years. The legal purchase of land. The revival of a barren desert. The reestablishment of a civilization in a place where all you have to do to confirm its connection to one people is pick up a shovel.

Context is a privilege extended exclusively to opponents of Israel and deployed simultaneously as a weapon to silence the same argument when made by Israelis or Jews. It is demanded before the bodies are cold and abandoned the moment the evidence points in the wrong direction. It is position-dependent, evidence-shifting, proof-rejecting, and history-altering based entirely on the conclusion the user decided on before the conversation began. It is, in short, not context at all. It is a conclusion in search of a justification.

D

De-escalation is a request made consistently toward one party in a conflict created by another. It is the international outcry of faux-moral actors never aimed at the side firing rockets at civilians in the first place. It is a mechanism deployed exclusively against the defending party, always after that party has responded to aggression it did not start. It is the permission structure that allows one side to continue attacking while preventing the other from fully defending itself.

Decolonization is the belief that a people with biblical, historical, archaeological, genetic, and generational proof of continuous presence in a land must be removed from it to return it to people who arrived approximately 900 years after documented Jewish presence was already established there. It is a demand made of one people alone, with one goal alone: to keep them permanently disconnected from their homeland, stateless, and vulnerable. It has never once been applied to any other population on earth. Decolonization, apparently, is unique to Jews.

Disproportionality is a clubbing mechanism designed to provide cover for the aggressor while holding the victim’s response in check. It is the demand placed on one country alone to never fight a war to win, only to a draw. It is the rhetorical weapon used to villainize the most moral army in modern warfare for having to go through human shields placed there deliberately by the enemy it is fighting. It is the handcuffing of a democracy and the empowering of a terrorist organization that spent decades building that trap on purpose.

E

Ethnic Cleansing is an accusation leveled at a sovereign democracy that has protected its minorities since its founding, by a movement that has never once applied the same accusation to the Arab countries that expelled 850,000 Jews from their homes after 1948, without compensation, without apology, and without a UN agency dedicated to their cause. It is the projection of an actual historical atrocity onto its victims. It requires no evidence. It requires no logic. It requires only repetition loud enough and long enough until the lie displaces the truth.

F

Free Palestine is a recycled chant that calls for the elimination of Israelis while masquerading as genuine care for Palestinian humanity. It paints an aggressive population as eternal victims and removes all agency and accountability from a people who chose a terror organization to govern them. It misidentifies the oppressor, ignoring the leadership that has spent decades stealing foreign aid, building terror tunnels, and sacrificing its own civilians as human shields. It is the mechanism used to advance the goals of Islamic expansionism at the expense of the only Jewish-majority state on earth. And for the record: the original version of that chant never had the word Palestine in it.

From the River to the Sea is a Western-adapted version of an original claim that calls, verbatim, for the elimination of Jews from the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and their replacement with Arabs. The useful idiots chanting it are often uncertain which river and which sea they mean. But it does rhyme. The more knowing among its proponents use it as a battle cry on behalf of a population that the entire Arab world has deliberately refused to absorb, preferring to keep the grievance alive to fuel its ultimate, publicly stated, genocidal goal.

G

Genocide is the waging of a just, defensive war with the lowest civilian to combatant ratio in the history of urban warfare, where a military superpower, fighting an enemy deliberately positioned behind civilians, managed to minimize casualties and produce a net positive effect on the size of the population it was supposedly eliminating.

H

A Humanitarian Crisis is a situation in which a country that was invaded, attacked, raped, slaughtered, and had civilians taken hostage by a terror organization is being critiqued by outside forces for the quality of catering it provides its enemy. It is a standard never applied to any other nation fighting for its survival. It exists exclusively because the opposing side chose to spend billions of dollars in foreign aid on terror tunnels and weapons instead of food, hospitals, and infrastructure for its own people.

I

An Indigenous person is anyone who can claim an emotional connection to a land, regardless of whether other Indigenous inhabitants with older, documented claims to that same land exist. It is a designation valid for one group and dismissed for another, regardless of history, archaeology, genetics, or any other proof of continuous presence. It selectively picks winners and losers based on politics, revisionist history, and NGO influence.

If you are a Jew, you are not it. You are meant to be homeless and weak. As it turns out.

International Law is a hijacked framework deployed disproportionately against one of its most law-abiding members, at the behest of some of its most flagrant violators. It is the unambiguous, unapologetic application of one-sided accusations, smears, and sanctions aimed at one state, not because it is uniquely evil, but because the evil is running the show. If the mechanism were applied evenly, Russia, China, Iran, and Syria would have no seat at any table. The fact that they do, and Israel is perpetually in the dock, is not a flaw in the system. It is proof that the system has been captured.

Intifada is a call for random violence against anyone deemed a viable target by a terror organization and its supporters. It enables those feeling aggrieved to pick up arms and administer vigilante justice as they see fit. It is a permission structure for chaos, collective punishment, and the worldwide spread of terror. It is a permission slip to act out your sickest fantasies with a reasonable chance of escaping accountability entirely. It is an indictment of an entire education system across generations.

Islamophobia is the somehow irrational fear of an ideology which, when applied as written in its scripture, is responsible for some of the world’s most devastating atrocities and its highest body counts. It is the silencing mechanism through which bad actors with a stake in spreading that ideology deploy against decent people whose concern for their safety is based on irrefutable evidence and simple pattern recognition. It is the fundamentalist magician’s sleight of hand. Moral misdirection aimed at an audience too afraid to state the obvious for fear of being called a mean name.

J

Jihad is the spreading of ideas through civil discourse among friends who differ slightly in style, not substance. A salon of intellectuals seeking to expand minds, as well as ideological and political influence. A practice so harmless it single-handedly reshaped the entire Middle East, large parts of Asia and Africa, and is currently working its way through Europe. A goal through which the entire world must one day think the same way, worship the same deity, and treat all others with the kindness and respect that naturally follows. It is coming your way. Accept it with open arms.

K

The Keffiyeh is a purely Palestinian item of clothing, not at all originating in Kufa, Iraq decades before a distinct Palestinian identity existed. It is donned by elite university students throughout the West as a display of solidarity and most certainly not cultural appropriation, because that rule does not apply here. It serves as a calming device, as every Israeli who sees one is immediately filled with warmth and fond memories of whichever Intifada they were fortunate enough to witness. It is an identity you earn. Not one you can buy on Amazon for $9.99 with one-day shipping. You are truly moral if you have obtained one. Especially if you are gay, Jewish, or female, given how warmly those identities are received in the societies you are expressing solidarity with.

L

Legitimacy is a permission slip issued by self-appointed moral arbiters who face no reciprocal standard of their own. It is an accusation leveled in one direction alone, regardless of the many other plausible targets who consistently fly under the same moral radar. It is a call to erase an existing country by means that those who deploy it would never aim at any other nation, would condemn if aimed at any other group, and have no actual mechanism to enforce. It is purely performance-based. No consistent conviction required.

M

A Massacre is what a heavily regulated, morally guided army commits when it wages a defensive war of necessity. When the victims are Jews, a Massacre becomes complicated, contextualized, justified, or simply the inevitable result of their own actions. It triggers condemnation, sanctions, and international outcry for one side. It triggers understanding, coddling, and often open support for the other. The determining factor is never the body count. It is never the evidence. It is never the footage. It is only which side the bodies belong to.

O

Occupation is the necessary separation between a modern democracy and a genocidal neighbor whose stated goal is your elimination. It is the act of controlling your borders after your neighbors showed the world exactly what happens when they are busted open. It is the belief that Israelis of all ethnicities deserve to live in their ancestral homeland without rockets, suicide bombers, and weekly stabbings. It is the right of a country to prevent its neighbors from arming for its annihilation.

An Open Air Prison is a territory on the Mediterranean Sea where billions of dollars in foreign aid over decades produced poverty and terrorism instead of infrastructure and prosperity. A coastal territory with offshore natural gas reserves that borders two countries, only one of which is blamed for the so-called imprisonment. A place that until October 7th exported thousands of workers daily to Israel, not to its other neighbor, for the work opportunities its own leadership failed to provide. The only prison in the world where you go free the minute you stop trying to kill your cellmate.

P

Pinkwashing is the accusation of using gay rights as a distraction, leveled by a movement that actively supports governments throwing gay people off rooftops. It is the misdirection from documented atrocities inflicted on the LGBTQ community in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority, where the vast majority of that population seeks and receives refuge in the very country being accused. It is the inversion of reality dressed as advocacy, by people who have never set foot in either place and have no interest in the facts on the ground. It is the very definition of sawing the branch you are sitting on.

Proportionality asserts that Israel should have used precisely the same number of bullets as those fired at Israeli civilians on October 7th. It asserts that Israel should have raped precisely the number of people Hamas raped that day. It is the demand that Israel engage in moral mathematics and equation balancing before defending its borders and retrieving its hostages. It is the equivalent of a petulant child crying about fairness after pushing another kid down the stairs.

Q

Qatar is a small country that plays a very important and entirely unbiased role in Middle Eastern affairs. It does not provide safe haven for Hamas leadership in five-star hotels. It does not invest billions of dollars in American universities to promote any particular agenda. It does not fund organizations that oppose Israel. It sits perfectly between both sides, a model of impartiality. It has been extraordinarily successful in brokering peace agreements throughout the region. All of this is true.

R

Resistance is a permission structure for genocide. It is the rebranding of the most filmed, documented, and undeniable atrocities in modern history as legitimate political expression. It is the soft bigotry of low expectations, the quiet assumption that Palestinians are incapable of being held to the same moral standard as everyone else. It is the word the world uses when it wants to justify rockets, suicide bombers, stabbings, and the mass murder of civilians without having to say what it actually is.

Terrorism.

The Right of Return is a demand unique in human history, backed by the only refugee agency that passes refugee status down through generations indefinitely, with no endpoint and no resettlement mandate. It is a demand made exclusively in one direction, on behalf of people who are already citizens of other countries, as are their children, and their children’s children, in perpetuity. It is an erasure request dressed as a moral remedy, pursued by a population whose refugee status was created by a war their own side started and lost. A self-inflicted wound, kept open on purpose.

S

Settlements are the residence of Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, on land whose legal status is disputed by people who never apply the same scrutiny to any other nation on earth. They are used as a rhetorical bludgeon to hold all of Israel accountable for the actions of a fraction of its population. They are, most revealingly, the strongest argument a movement can muster against a democracy it has spent decades trying to delegitimize.

T

The Two-State Solution is a concept accepted by Israel on multiple occasions dating back to 1948 and rejected every single time it was presented to the other side. It is the plausible deniability clause that keeps a manufactured grievance alive while pursuing something far more sinister than statehood. It is the mechanism designed to keep Israel in a forever-conflict and Palestinians positioned as good-faith partners in a framework that obscures the only truth that actually matters. One side wants to live in peace. The other wants to eliminate it and has never been interested in being its peaceful neighbor.

U

UNRWA is, apparently, a humanitarian agency. A benevolent agency unlike any other, with no resettlement mandate, no definition of success, and no endpoint, resulting instead in the passing of refugee status through generations indefinitely until the elimination of Israel makes the whole thing moot. It operates with resources afforded to no other refugee population on earth. Perhaps unrelated, but worth mentioning, is the fact that it uses those vast resources to embed itself into Gazan society, employ terrorists who participated in October 7th, and educate children to hate Jews using materials that would not look out of place in Nazi Germany. It most assuredly is not just a perpetual grievance machine with a budget and a body count.

V

Victims are Palestinians. Regardless of anything. Full stop. They are incapable of victimizing anyone, as evidenced by the fact that they are welcomed with open arms everywhere in the world they have settled. They did not get expelled from Jordan in 1970 for attempting to overthrow its government. They did not trigger a civil war in Lebanon in 1975 by destabilizing its Christian communities. They did not launch the First Intifada. They did not launch the Second Intifada. They did not commit October 7th. How could they? They are victims. And as such, they lack agency entirely, while simultaneously being justified in whatever action they choose to take against their oppressors. The logic is airtight.

W

War Crimes is an accusation leveled unilaterally against Israel regardless of consistency or historical precedent. It is the deployment of a double standard aimed at kneecapping a democracy built on the moral defense of its people, using an ever-shifting framework of definitions to displace truth with a manufactured lie. The accusation itself serves as simpleton fodder rather than an honest attempt at accountability. It exposes those who deploy it in full hypocrisy, as they remain conspicuously silent about documented atrocities committed by Russia, China, Iran, Syria, and Hamas itself.

X

Xenophobia is the crime of noticing something that hits you directly in the face. It is the Scarlet Letter awarded to anyone who observes that not all societies share the same moral framework and is willing to say so plainly. It is, like its companion Islamophobia, a term designed to pathologize pattern recognition and shut down the observation before the conversation can begin. It is the mechanism that turns a statement of fact into a moral failing. And the person making the observation into a bad person. Regardless of whether the observation is true.

Z

Zionism is, apparently, a genocidal cabal of weather manipulators, money controllers, and world dominators representing less than 0.2% of the global population yet somehow pulling the strings of the rest of it. It is, apparently, not the belief that Jews ought to live in their ancestral homeland as a thriving, open society, as evidenced by over 2 million non-Jews living there today with full rights and religious freedoms under the law. It is, apparently, not to be confused with the ideology that has actually spent centuries conquering countries, forcing conversions, and publishing its goals of global dominance openly. That one gets a pass.

Volume I. The language is not finished being weaponized. Neither am I.

One more thing.

Everything you just read is the political layer of this story.

The memoir is what lives underneath it. Three generations of a Jewish family that survived everything these words are designed to erase.

I am 70 names away from 200 early readers. That number is what I bring into the next room with publishers.

No money. No commitment. Just your name on a list that says this story needs to exist.

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Language shapes thought. Thought shapes action. Action shapes reality.

Orwell understood this before anyone put it into practice at scale. He argued that whoever controls the language controls the thought. He built an entire fictional warning around the principle and called the systematic redefinition of words Newspeak. The people who built this vocabulary read him carefully. They just disagreed with his conclusion.

For decades, a specific vocabulary has been engineered to invert the truth. To make victim and aggressor interchangeable. To launder terrorism as resistance and occupation as genocide.

The words sound like analysis. They function as weapons.

This is the dictionary they never wanted written. First edition. We are taking the language back.

A

Apartheid is a term describing the inclusion of over 2 million Arabs into a so-called exclusive Jewish ethnostate, where they hold high-level positions in politics, justice, medicine, military, and law, carry the same ID and passport as every other citizen, and enjoy equal rights under the law.

The Apartheid Wall is a uniquely Israeli concept, not at all replicated on a far larger scale on the Egyptian side of the Gaza border, designed to keep benevolent, peace-loving, tree-hugging hippies from smothering Israelis to death with their kindness, much like the widely-documented October 7th love-fest. It has no functional merit, no history of utility, and no measurable effect on terrorism whatsoever, other than the inconvenient 90% reduction in suicide bombings that followed its construction. It is merely an eyesore keeping people apart for no apparent reason. The people it is keeping apart have never publicly stated any genocidal goals.

B

The BDS movement is a reputable movement full of thought leaders and productive members of society. It competes directly with Israeli products and services by offering superior market alternatives to its followers. It most certainly is not a grievance organization aimed at isolating Jews from global society while its members post their boycott content on Intel-powered devices running Microsoft software over networks built on Israeli technology. It is impervious to irony, and entirely dependent on the innovations of the people it is trying to destroy.

Blood Libel is a conspiracy accusation dressed as irrefutable evidence, immune to scrutiny under the threat of being labeled either complicit or on the payroll of its targets. It requires no logic nor evidence. It is self-evident, apparently, and stands on its own merits, however flimsy and demonstrably false. It then deploys itself as a silencing mechanism against its targets before they can offer a rebuttal, dismissing any response as hysterical, dramatic, or proof of guilt. It has been running successfully for approximately one thousand years. Pure genius.

C

Ceasefire is when a democracy holds back its overwhelming military power while a lone rocket fired at its civilians is dismissed as a rogue transgression still within the terms of the agreement. It is the uneven demand placed exclusively on a regional power to exercise restraint at the expense of its own civilians, while its opposition hides behind rogue factions and lone actors. It is a pause that one side uses to bury its dead and the other uses to rearm.

Collective Punishment is a mechanism apparently designed to stop a presumably peaceful population from broadcasting its real intentions on Facebook Live. It is the right of a sovereign nation to control its borders and determine who enters and exits. It is the position of a country that lost more civilians to terrorism in the last two decades than in its first fifty years of conventional warfare, deciding it will no longer be an easy target. It is a line in the sand that says: if you want access to what we have built, behave like a human being.

Colonialism is the return of a people with roots to a land they have had a continuous presence in for over 3,000 years. The legal purchase of land. The revival of a barren desert. The reestablishment of a civilization in a place where all you have to do to confirm its connection to one people is pick up a shovel.

Context is a privilege extended exclusively to opponents of Israel and deployed simultaneously as a weapon to silence the same argument when made by Israelis or Jews. It is demanded before the bodies are cold and abandoned the moment the evidence points in the wrong direction. It is position-dependent, evidence-shifting, proof-rejecting, and history-altering based entirely on the conclusion the user decided on before the conversation began. It is, in short, not context at all. It is a conclusion in search of a justification.

D

De-escalation is a request made consistently toward one party in a conflict created by another. It is the international outcry of faux-moral actors never aimed at the side firing rockets at civilians in the first place. It is a mechanism deployed exclusively against the defending party, always after that party has responded to aggression it did not start. It is the permission structure that allows one side to continue attacking while preventing the other from fully defending itself.

Decolonization is the belief that a people with biblical, historical, archaeological, genetic, and generational proof of continuous presence in a land must be removed from it to return it to people who arrived approximately 900 years after documented Jewish presence was already established there. It is a demand made of one people alone, with one goal alone: to keep them permanently disconnected from their homeland, stateless, and vulnerable. It has never once been applied to any other population on earth. Decolonization, apparently, is unique to Jews.

Disproportionality is a clubbing mechanism designed to provide cover for the aggressor while holding the victim’s response in check. It is the demand placed on one country alone to never fight a war to win, only to a draw. It is the rhetorical weapon used to villainize the most moral army in modern warfare for having to go through human shields placed there deliberately by the enemy it is fighting. It is the handcuffing of a democracy and the empowering of a terrorist organization that spent decades building that trap on purpose.

E

Ethnic Cleansing is an accusation leveled at a sovereign democracy that has protected its minorities since its founding, by a movement that has never once applied the same accusation to the Arab countries that expelled 850,000 Jews from their homes after 1948, without compensation, without apology, and without a UN agency dedicated to their cause. It is the projection of an actual historical atrocity onto its victims. It requires no evidence. It requires no logic. It requires only repetition loud enough and long enough until the lie displaces the truth.

F

Free Palestine is a recycled chant that calls for the elimination of Israelis while masquerading as genuine care for Palestinian humanity. It paints an aggressive population as eternal victims and removes all agency and accountability from a people who chose a terror organization to govern them. It misidentifies the oppressor, ignoring the leadership that has spent decades stealing foreign aid, building terror tunnels, and sacrificing its own civilians as human shields. It is the mechanism used to advance the goals of Islamic expansionism at the expense of the only Jewish-majority state on earth. And for the record: the original version of that chant never had the word Palestine in it.

From the River to the Sea is a Western-adapted version of an original claim that calls, verbatim, for the elimination of Jews from the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and their replacement with Arabs. The useful idiots chanting it are often uncertain which river and which sea they mean. But it does rhyme. The more knowing among its proponents use it as a battle cry on behalf of a population that the entire Arab world has deliberately refused to absorb, preferring to keep the grievance alive to fuel its ultimate, publicly stated, genocidal goal.

G

Genocide is the waging of a just, defensive war with the lowest civilian to combatant ratio in the history of urban warfare, where a military superpower, fighting an enemy deliberately positioned behind civilians, managed to minimize casualties and produce a net positive effect on the size of the population it was supposedly eliminating.

H

A Humanitarian Crisis is a situation in which a country that was invaded, attacked, raped, slaughtered, and had civilians taken hostage by a terror organization is being critiqued by outside forces for the quality of catering it provides its enemy. It is a standard never applied to any other nation fighting for its survival. It exists exclusively because the opposing side chose to spend billions of dollars in foreign aid on terror tunnels and weapons instead of food, hospitals, and infrastructure for its own people.

I

An Indigenous person is anyone who can claim an emotional connection to a land, regardless of whether other Indigenous inhabitants with older, documented claims to that same land exist. It is a designation valid for one group and dismissed for another, regardless of history, archaeology, genetics, or any other proof of continuous presence. It selectively picks winners and losers based on politics, revisionist history, and NGO influence.

If you are a Jew, you are not it. You are meant to be homeless and weak. As it turns out.

International Law is a hijacked framework deployed disproportionately against one of its most law-abiding members, at the behest of some of its most flagrant violators. It is the unambiguous, unapologetic application of one-sided accusations, smears, and sanctions aimed at one state, not because it is uniquely evil, but because the evil is running the show. If the mechanism were applied evenly, Russia, China, Iran, and Syria would have no seat at any table. The fact that they do, and Israel is perpetually in the dock, is not a flaw in the system. It is proof that the system has been captured.

Intifada is a call for random violence against anyone deemed a viable target by a terror organization and its supporters. It enables those feeling aggrieved to pick up arms and administer vigilante justice as they see fit. It is a permission structure for chaos, collective punishment, and the worldwide spread of terror. It is a permission slip to act out your sickest fantasies with a reasonable chance of escaping accountability entirely. It is an indictment of an entire education system across generations.

Islamophobia is the somehow irrational fear of an ideology which, when applied as written in its scripture, is responsible for some of the world’s most devastating atrocities and its highest body counts. It is the silencing mechanism through which bad actors with a stake in spreading that ideology deploy against decent people whose concern for their safety is based on irrefutable evidence and simple pattern recognition. It is the fundamentalist magician’s sleight of hand. Moral misdirection aimed at an audience too afraid to state the obvious for fear of being called a mean name.

J

Jihad is the spreading of ideas through civil discourse among friends who differ slightly in style, not substance. A salon of intellectuals seeking to expand minds, as well as ideological and political influence. A practice so harmless it single-handedly reshaped the entire Middle East, large parts of Asia and Africa, and is currently working its way through Europe. A goal through which the entire world must one day think the same way, worship the same deity, and treat all others with the kindness and respect that naturally follows. It is coming your way. Accept it with open arms.

K

The Keffiyeh is a purely Palestinian item of clothing, not at all originating in Kufa, Iraq decades before a distinct Palestinian identity existed. It is donned by elite university students throughout the West as a display of solidarity and most certainly not cultural appropriation, because that rule does not apply here. It serves as a calming device, as every Israeli who sees one is immediately filled with warmth and fond memories of whichever Intifada they were fortunate enough to witness. It is an identity you earn. Not one you can buy on Amazon for $9.99 with one-day shipping. You are truly moral if you have obtained one. Especially if you are gay, Jewish, or female, given how warmly those identities are received in the societies you are expressing solidarity with.

L

Legitimacy is a permission slip issued by self-appointed moral arbiters who face no reciprocal standard of their own. It is an accusation leveled in one direction alone, regardless of the many other plausible targets who consistently fly under the same moral radar. It is a call to erase an existing country by means that those who deploy it would never aim at any other nation, would condemn if aimed at any other group, and have no actual mechanism to enforce. It is purely performance-based. No consistent conviction required.

M

A Massacre is what a heavily regulated, morally guided army commits when it wages a defensive war of necessity. When the victims are Jews, a Massacre becomes complicated, contextualized, justified, or simply the inevitable result of their own actions. It triggers condemnation, sanctions, and international outcry for one side. It triggers understanding, coddling, and often open support for the other. The determining factor is never the body count. It is never the evidence. It is never the footage. It is only which side the bodies belong to.

O

Occupation is the necessary separation between a modern democracy and a genocidal neighbor whose stated goal is your elimination. It is the act of controlling your borders after your neighbors showed the world exactly what happens when they are busted open. It is the belief that Israelis of all ethnicities deserve to live in their ancestral homeland without rockets, suicide bombers, and weekly stabbings. It is the right of a country to prevent its neighbors from arming for its annihilation.

An Open Air Prison is a territory on the Mediterranean Sea where billions of dollars in foreign aid over decades produced poverty and terrorism instead of infrastructure and prosperity. A coastal territory with offshore natural gas reserves that borders two countries, only one of which is blamed for the so-called imprisonment. A place that until October 7th exported thousands of workers daily to Israel, not to its other neighbor, for the work opportunities its own leadership failed to provide. The only prison in the world where you go free the minute you stop trying to kill your cellmate.

P

Pinkwashing is the accusation of using gay rights as a distraction, leveled by a movement that actively supports governments throwing gay people off rooftops. It is the misdirection from documented atrocities inflicted on the LGBTQ community in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority, where the vast majority of that population seeks and receives refuge in the very country being accused. It is the inversion of reality dressed as advocacy, by people who have never set foot in either place and have no interest in the facts on the ground. It is the very definition of sawing the branch you are sitting on.

Proportionality asserts that Israel should have used precisely the same number of bullets as those fired at Israeli civilians on October 7th. It asserts that Israel should have raped precisely the number of people Hamas raped that day. It is the demand that Israel engage in moral mathematics and equation balancing before defending its borders and retrieving its hostages. It is the equivalent of a petulant child crying about fairness after pushing another kid down the stairs.

Q

Qatar is a small country that plays a very important and entirely unbiased role in Middle Eastern affairs. It does not provide safe haven for Hamas leadership in five-star hotels. It does not invest billions of dollars in American universities to promote any particular agenda. It does not fund organizations that oppose Israel. It sits perfectly between both sides, a model of impartiality. It has been extraordinarily successful in brokering peace agreements throughout the region. All of this is true.

R

Resistance is a permission structure for genocide. It is the rebranding of the most filmed, documented, and undeniable atrocities in modern history as legitimate political expression. It is the soft bigotry of low expectations, the quiet assumption that Palestinians are incapable of being held to the same moral standard as everyone else. It is the word the world uses when it wants to justify rockets, suicide bombers, stabbings, and the mass murder of civilians without having to say what it actually is.

Terrorism.

The Right of Return is a demand unique in human history, backed by the only refugee agency that passes refugee status down through generations indefinitely, with no endpoint and no resettlement mandate. It is a demand made exclusively in one direction, on behalf of people who are already citizens of other countries, as are their children, and their children’s children, in perpetuity. It is an erasure request dressed as a moral remedy, pursued by a population whose refugee status was created by a war their own side started and lost. A self-inflicted wound, kept open on purpose.

S

Settlements are the residence of Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, on land whose legal status is disputed by people who never apply the same scrutiny to any other nation on earth. They are used as a rhetorical bludgeon to hold all of Israel accountable for the actions of a fraction of its population. They are, most revealingly, the strongest argument a movement can muster against a democracy it has spent decades trying to delegitimize.

T

The Two-State Solution is a concept accepted by Israel on multiple occasions dating back to 1948 and rejected every single time it was presented to the other side. It is the plausible deniability clause that keeps a manufactured grievance alive while pursuing something far more sinister than statehood. It is the mechanism designed to keep Israel in a forever-conflict and Palestinians positioned as good-faith partners in a framework that obscures the only truth that actually matters. One side wants to live in peace. The other wants to eliminate it and has never been interested in being its peaceful neighbor.

U

UNRWA is, apparently, a humanitarian agency. A benevolent agency unlike any other, with no resettlement mandate, no definition of success, and no endpoint, resulting instead in the passing of refugee status through generations indefinitely until the elimination of Israel makes the whole thing moot. It operates with resources afforded to no other refugee population on earth. Perhaps unrelated, but worth mentioning, is the fact that it uses those vast resources to embed itself into Gazan society, employ terrorists who participated in October 7th, and educate children to hate Jews using materials that would not look out of place in Nazi Germany. It most assuredly is not just a perpetual grievance machine with a budget and a body count.

V

Victims are Palestinians. Regardless of anything. Full stop. They are incapable of victimizing anyone, as evidenced by the fact that they are welcomed with open arms everywhere in the world they have settled. They did not get expelled from Jordan in 1970 for attempting to overthrow its government. They did not trigger a civil war in Lebanon in 1975 by destabilizing its Christian communities. They did not launch the First Intifada. They did not launch the Second Intifada. They did not commit October 7th. How could they? They are victims. And as such, they lack agency entirely, while simultaneously being justified in whatever action they choose to take against their oppressors. The logic is airtight.

W

War Crimes is an accusation leveled unilaterally against Israel regardless of consistency or historical precedent. It is the deployment of a double standard aimed at kneecapping a democracy built on the moral defense of its people, using an ever-shifting framework of definitions to displace truth with a manufactured lie. The accusation itself serves as simpleton fodder rather than an honest attempt at accountability. It exposes those who deploy it in full hypocrisy, as they remain conspicuously silent about documented atrocities committed by Russia, China, Iran, Syria, and Hamas itself.

X

Xenophobia is the crime of noticing something that hits you directly in the face. It is the Scarlet Letter awarded to anyone who observes that not all societies share the same moral framework and is willing to say so plainly. It is, like its companion Islamophobia, a term designed to pathologize pattern recognition and shut down the observation before the conversation can begin. It is the mechanism that turns a statement of fact into a moral failing. And the person making the observation into a bad person. Regardless of whether the observation is true.

Z

Zionism is, apparently, a genocidal cabal of weather manipulators, money controllers, and world dominators representing less than 0.2% of the global population yet somehow pulling the strings of the rest of it. It is, apparently, not the belief that Jews ought to live in their ancestral homeland as a thriving, open society, as evidenced by over 2 million non-Jews living there today with full rights and religious freedoms under the law. It is, apparently, not to be confused with the ideology that has actually spent centuries conquering countries, forcing conversions, and publishing its goals of global dominance openly. That one gets a pass.

Volume I. The language is not finished being weaponized. Neither am I.

One more thing.

Everything you just read is the political layer of this story.

The memoir is what lives underneath it. Three generations of a Jewish family that survived everything these words are designed to erase.

I am 70 names away from 200 early readers. That number is what I bring into the next room with publishers.

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The people you march against invented the phrase you are marching with.

This is not complicated. It is documented. The archives confirm it. So does the organization’s name. So does the ship they bought to carry Holocaust survivors to the Jewish homeland.

You inherited Free Palestine from the people you are trying to erase.

In 1944, a Jewish Revisionist Zionist named Peter Bergson founded an organization in New York.

He called it the American League for a Free Palestine.

Its mission was to end British Mandate rule over the Jewish homeland and establish a Jewish state. It ran mass campaigns. It produced a play called “A Flag Is Born,” written by Ben Hecht, which drew the parallel between the Jewish fight for a free Palestine and the American Revolution. Hecht was one of the most prominent American writers of his era. The play ran on Broadway. Marlon Brando performed in it at the age of twenty-two. The proceeds went toward buying a ship, the SS Ben Hecht, sent toward Palestine carrying Holocaust survivors. The organization dissolved in December 1948.

It had won. The Jewish state existed. The phrase had done its job.

The organization’s archives sit at Yale. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency covered its campaigns. “Free Palestine” appears in the founding name.

It meant free the Jewish homeland from Britain.

There is context required to understand the full weight of that phrase. In 1939, Britain issued the White Paper, a policy document that capped Jewish immigration to Palestine at 75,000 over five years and then ended it entirely. This was 1939. Europe’s Jews were already being systematically murdered. Britain looked at the evidence and decided the answer was to close the door. Ships carrying Jewish refugees were turned away from Palestinian ports and sent back to Europe. Some of those passengers died in the Holocaust. “Free Palestine” in 1944 was not an abstraction. It was a demand to open a door Britain had locked from the outside while people burned on the other side.

In 1947, the SS Exodus carried 4,515 Holocaust survivors toward Palestine. British naval vessels intercepted it at sea, boarded it by force, and transferred the passengers onto deportation ships. They were returned to Germany. The images of Holocaust survivors being sent back to German soil by British soldiers ran in newspapers around the world. The public relations catastrophe accelerated the end of the British Mandate.

That is what the phrase meant when Jews said it.

This was not unusual. “Palestine” was Jewish vocabulary.

The Palestine Post, founded 1932, was a Zionist newspaper. It is now called the Jerusalem Post. The Palestine Symphony Orchestra, founded 1936, was built as a refuge for Jewish musicians fleeing Nazi Europe. It is now called the Israel Philharmonic. Jewish athletes competed as “Palestine” at the Maccabiah Games. Jewish soldiers served in the Jewish Brigade under “Palestine” insignia and a Star of David patch.

“Palestinian” meant Jewish. It was a Jewish civic identity. When American Jewish organizations used Palestine in their campaigns during the British Mandate, they were talking about their homeland.

Not someone else’s.

Palestine was freed in 1948. Freed from Britain. That was the point.

The phrase was retired because it worked. The PLO brought it back with a different map in mind.

In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in Cairo. Here is what the people now chanting the phrase either do not know or have decided not to say.

In 1964, the West Bank was under Jordanian control. Gaza was under Egyptian control. There was no Israeli presence in either territory. The occupation that now functions as the movement’s central grievance did not exist when the PLO was created.

Article 24 of the 1964 Palestinian National Charter made this explicit. The PLO formally disclaimed sovereignty over the West Bank, Gaza, and the Himmah area. Those were Arab-held territories. The PLO was not founded to recover them.

It was founded to destroy Israel. Article 17 of the 1964 Charter declared the 1947 partition and the establishment of Israel illegal and false. The 1968 revision named armed struggle the only way to liberate Palestine and repeated the concept thirteen times.

Look at what the 1964 map contained. Not the West Bank. Not Gaza. Not East Jerusalem. Those were in Arab hands and not claimed. The map showed Israel. All of it. The organization was not founded to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It was founded to replace Israel.

King Hussein of Jordan held the West Bank and never called it occupied. Egypt held Gaza and never called it occupied. No Arab government demanded Palestinian statehood in the territories they controlled. The demand for those territories emerged only after they were lost to Israel in 1967. The same international community that had been silent about Jordanian and Egyptian control suddenly discovered the principle of occupation when Israel held the land instead.

The 1967 borders the movement now demands Israel retreat to are the borders of a state the PLO’s own founding documents rejected.

The chant that now echoes across Western campuses is older than the campuses know. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. The geography it describes is the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. That is the geography of Israel. Not the West Bank. Not Gaza. Not the territories the movement nominally claims as the basis of a two-state solution. The chant describes Israel’s elimination. The 1964 charter targeted the same geography. The map has not changed. Only the people chanting have.

Same three words. Opposite target.

A note on the name itself.

The Philistines disappeared from history around 600 BCE. Conquered by Babylon, absorbed, dissolved. By the time Rome was a republic they had been gone for four centuries. By the time Hadrian crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, they had been absent from the land for more than seven hundred years.

Hadrian chose their name anyway.

After crushing the revolt, he renamed the province of Judea. He called it Syria Palaestina. He rebuilt Jerusalem as a Roman colony named Aelia Capitolina and barred Jews from entering on pain of death. He outlawed Torah study, Sabbath observance, and circumcision. He built a temple to Jupiter on the ruins of the Second Temple. He wanted the land severed from its people so completely that the connection would eventually become mythological rather than historical. A ghost story. A claim without geography.

The name was the instrument. Palaestina reached back seven centuries to a vanished people and used their memory as an overwrite. The message was administrative and punitive at once: this place was never yours. Rome has corrected the record.

It did not work.

Jews remained in the land through Byzantine rule, through the Arab conquest, through the Crusades, through four centuries of Ottoman administration. The continuity is not legend. It is documented. The Mishnah was compiled in the Galilee in the third century. The Jerusalem Talmud was edited in Tiberias in the fourth. The Sanhedrin continued to operate in the land under Roman and then Byzantine rule for centuries after the revolt. Ottoman census records from the sixteenth century document Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron, and Tiberias. When the first Zionist immigrants arrived in the 1880s, they were not arriving in an empty land. They were arriving in a land that already had Jews in it.

Jewish pilgrimage never stopped. Jewish legal and scholarly tradition anchored its entire calendar, its holiest prayers, and its geographic orientation of mourning and hope in the same land Hadrian had tried to rename out of existence.

The 1,800 years between Rome’s renaming and Israel’s founding were not a vacancy. They were an occupation. Of land that belonged to a people who never stopped saying so.

When Zionists said Free Palestine in the 1940s, they were not importing a foreign concept. They were taking back a name Rome had stolen and pointing it at the empire that currently held the land. The British. The logic was exact. The phrase was exact.

Palestine needed to be freed because it was occupied. The people demanding that freedom were the people from whom it had been taken. They had been saying so for eighteen centuries. In 1948, they proved it.

The machinery behind the inversion was not spontaneous.

After Israel’s 1967 victory humiliated Soviet-armed Arab states, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov launched Operation SIG. The name stands for Sionistskiye Gosudarstva: Zionist Governments. Its purpose was to recast Israel. Not as a refuge built by survivors and defended at birth against five invading armies. As a racist, imperialist colonial project. The last villain the post-colonial narrative needed.

The operation worked through a specific architecture. Soviet intelligence seeded the anti-Zionist narrative through Arab League networks and the Non-Aligned Movement, the bloc of post-colonial states that became the primary vehicle for Soviet influence in the UN General Assembly. The framing was simple and designed to travel: Israel was the last colonial project. The Palestinians were the last colonized people. Jewish historical connection to the land was mythology. Arab rejection of partition, invasion, and stated goals of elimination were erased from the frame entirely.

The vocabulary was manufactured for the campaign. Settler colonialism. Apartheid. Occupation. Genocide. These were not organic political descriptions that emerged from the conflict itself. They were political weapons, calibrated to resonate with post-colonial movements in the Global South, with left-wing parties in Western Europe, and eventually with the academic and activist frameworks that would carry the framing into the following century. The words were chosen because they had already done ideological work elsewhere. They arrived pre-loaded with moral authority. That was the point.

The U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center documented the campaign in its 2024 report on Soviet antisemitism. The Mitrokhin archive corroborates it in broad strokes.

The campaign produced the 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, passed 72 to 35. Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. Israel’s ambassador Chaim Herzog tore up the text at the podium. The Soviet bloc, the Arab League, and the Non-Aligned Movement had built the coalition. The resolution was repealed in 1991, when the Soviet Union no longer existed to lobby for it. The repeal passed 111 to 25.

The resolution did not need to survive to accomplish its purpose. By the time it was repealed, the framing had already embedded itself in international human rights organizations, in academic journals, in NGO frameworks, in the vocabulary of movements that had no awareness of where the language originated. The mechanism of transmission was not mysterious. Soviet and Arab bloc states funded international bodies that adopted the anti-Zionist framework as their operating vocabulary. Those bodies trained activists, published reports, lobbied governments, and built the institutional architecture that eventually produced the 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, where Israel was singled out as an apartheid state while the conference itself descended into open antisemitism severe enough for the United States and Israel to walk out. The Durban framework became the template for the BDS movement, founded in 2005. The BDS movement became the template for campus organizing. Campus organizing became the encampments of 2024.

Each step was presented as a grassroots moral awakening. Each step followed a line of ideological transmission that runs directly back to an operational framework designed in Moscow in the late 1960s.

The language did not spread because it was true. It spread because it was engineered to spread. The resolution was the distribution mechanism. The language was the payload. The payload survived.

The slogan survived the repeal.

Here is what you are being asked to hold.

The people who first chanted Free Palestine were the founders of the state you are marching against. The organization that made the phrase a liberation slogan was funded by American Jews, run by a Revisionist Zionist, and dissolved when its goal was achieved.

The organization that repurposed the phrase was founded while Arab states held the territories its name implies, targeted Israel’s pre-1967 borders in its foundational documents, and received ideological architecture from a Soviet apparatus designed to reframe Jewish self-determination as racism.

A UN resolution calling Zionism racism passed with Soviet-bloc sponsorship and was repealed when the Soviet Union no longer existed.

The slogan survived.

The USSR dissolved in December 1991. The KGB was disbanded. Operation SIG ended. The resolution was repealed.

The slogan outlived all of it.

A political apparatus built the inversion. The apparatus is gone. The inversion is not. It reproduced itself in a new host before the original carrier died. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the framing had been absorbed by Western human rights organizations, by academic departments, by student movements, by progressive political parties that believed they had arrived at their position independently, through moral reasoning, through solidarity with the oppressed.

They had not reasoned their way there. They had been handed the conclusion by a machine that no longer existed, through institutions that had absorbed its output without tracing the source. The vocabulary was Soviet. The distribution was institutional. The believers were genuine. That combination is more durable than any propaganda campaign its architects could have designed deliberately. You cannot repeal a belief. You can only repeal a resolution.

The phrase Free Palestine no longer needs Soviet funding. It no longer needs Arab League sponsorship or Non-Aligned Movement bloc votes. It runs on its own. It is taught in universities as moral clarity. It is chanted at demonstrations by people who have never heard of Operation SIG, who do not know that the UN resolution they implicitly invoke was repealed before they were born, who do not know that the organization whose founding documents targeted Israel rather than occupation was created while Jordan held the West Bank.

The architects of the inversion are dead. The inversion lives.

That is what successful propaganda looks like when it completes its work. It makes itself unnecessary. It transfers from the original carrier to a new host and replicates without the carrier’s involvement. The KGB did not need to survive to win this operation. It needed only to run it long enough for the framing to become someone else’s genuine belief.

It did.

Some of the people chanting Free Palestine today do not know this history.

Some do.

For those who do not know: now you do.

For those who know and are still chanting: you are not standing with the oppressed. You are holding a sign that Jews made, walking in a direction that Moscow pointed, repeating a phrase whose original authors built the state you are demanding be dismantled.

You did not find this cause.

It found you.

The slogan had a first owner.

You are not them.

If this resonated, you can follow the full arc as it unfolds.

I share:

• Daily Notes on Israel, Jewish identity, and moral clarity

• Weekly “Echoes” from the book itself

A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

I have now written the day my father died twice.

The first time was Echo 24. That piece opened with the driveway. The cars. Fifteen, maybe more, packed into our street. I recognized them before I reached the front door. I knew what they meant before anyone said a word.

That piece was about arrival. About the moment you understand what has happened because the evidence is parked in front of your house and there is no version of reality where this many cars means anything good.

This week’s piece is about what happened before the driveway.

The phone call. The locker room. The game. The bus ride home. The same afternoon, the same loss, but entered from the other side.

The craft question I had to answer this week was simple to state and difficult to execute: how do you write the same day twice without repeating yourself?

The answer turned out to be the entry point.

Echo 24 entered through what I saw. A visual. Cars. A driveway. The walk from the car to the front door. That piece is built on observation. I am outside my own body, reading the scene the way a detective reads evidence.

Echo 42 enters through what I felt. A jump ball. A game that slows down for reasons I cannot explain. A presence on the court that makes me lighter and everyone else heavier. That piece is built on sensation. I am inside my body, and something else is in there with me.

Same day. Same seventeen-year-old. Completely different piece.

I wrote the game scene myself this time. Present tense. From the center circle to the buzzer. That was a deliberate choice. The locker room and the phone call I could build from the manuscript and from recordings. But the game had to come from inside the experience, written the way it felt, not the way it looked from the stands.

Present tense does something specific to a game scene. It removes the safety net of knowing how it ends. The reader does not know I am going to dominate. They do not know my father is dying while I play. They are inside the tip-off the same way I was: not yet aware that anything extraordinary is about to happen.

The 5:30 reveal only works because the reader has spent the game not knowing. If I had opened with “my father died the afternoon I played the best game of my life,” every shot, every steal, every rebound would have been read through the lens of grief. The reader would have arrived at the game already carrying the weight of the ending.

I did not want that. Because I did not have that. I did not know he was dying. I just knew something felt different. Something was carrying me. I did not understand it until I got home and saw the cars.

That is the structural principle: the reader should know what the writer knew, when the writer knew it. Not before. The reveal earns its power from the delay. The game earns its strangeness from the reader not yet understanding why a seventeen-year-old is suddenly untouchable.

Two Echoes. One afternoon. Two doors into the same room.

The driveway tells you what happened.

The game tells you what it felt like before you knew.

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This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

If you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready, you can join the early reader list.

If you want to simply follow along it as it comes together, you can subscribe.

Everything I’m writing lives on the feed.

Most readers find me through my Notes.

This is where the Notes find their roots.

A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

I call the hospital before the game.

“I don’t have a lot of time today,” I tell him. “I’ll just come for fifteen minutes.”

He won’t let me.

“It’s not worth the drive,” he says. “It’s an important game. Focus.”

He always makes sense when you take the emotions out of it. The problem is I am all emotion today and trying very hard not to show it.

“Fine,” I say. “But I’m coming right after. Don’t go to sleep yet.”

“Deal,” he says.

I hang up. I grab my bag. I head to the gym.

Wooden benches. Gray and burgundy metal lockers. Sneakers thrown everywhere. Gym bags half-open on the floor. Someone is playing music. Most of them are just messing with each other, trying to get loose.

I can’t focus. All I can smell is sweat, deodorant, and anxiety.

We have not been playing well this season. Every game we lose pushes us closer to relegation. Every game has become do or die. This one is no different.

No one on the team knows my father is in the hospital. I have not told them. I am one of the captains. One of the two seniors. I need my space and my quiet before a game. They give it to me. They always do.

Tonight they do not know the quiet is holding something else.

I lace up. I stretch. I do not talk.

I walk up to the center circle.

Jump ball.

Locked in, I check that my toes are not crossing half court. I look the other guy in the eyes. He avoids mine, as if knowing that looking straight at me would be a mistake.

The referee steps up and tosses the ball.

The world slows down. I go up while he seems to be far below me, unable to reach the ball.

A strange sensation I cannot place envelops me. Like I am being swallowed into another dimension where I am the biggest, fastest, and strongest, and everyone around me is futile in their efforts to catch up.

The game slows down.

I can see the pass before they make it and I steal it. I bring it down the court fast. What am I doing? I never really dribble the ball that much, but today I am unstoppable. They cannot touch me.

They are passing me the ball again.

I am toying with the defense. Like a retired pro playing with his eight-year-old son in the driveway. I feel sorry for them. They cannot keep up.

Score.

Score again.

I miss, then catch my own rebound and score. Foul. I make the bonus.

They are now double-teaming me, which allows me to show off this new passing skills I did not know I had. I keep finding my teammates for wide-open shots.

Their coach calls a timeout. We are up fifteen at halftime and I have barely broken a sweat.

This feeling follows me the entire game. I am dominating like never before. Like I have something helping me while at the same time hurting the other team. Like I have flipped a switch I have never been able to flip before.

I do not feel alone out there. I feel carried. Something is on that court with me. It does not make me heavier. It makes me lighter. It makes everyone else heavier. Like a presence that has chosen a side, and it is mine.

I cannot hear the crowd. They are just a low hum somewhere far away. I cannot remember a single face in the stands.

By the time the game is over I have twenty-eight points, eighteen rebounds, and seven assists.

I have no idea. My coach cannot wait to show me the stat sheet.

I could not care less. I just need to go home so I can go see him.

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The buzzer sounds and I snap out of it. Just like that.

The trance breaks. The presence lifts. Whatever was carrying me through that game is gone, and I am just seventeen again, standing on a court in a sweaty jersey with somewhere I need to be.

I do not shower. I grab my bag. I change my shirt. I keep my shorts on. I need to make the bus.

My teammates are celebrating. I am already out the door.

It is getting dark outside. I am alone.

The only thing in my head is the promise. I told him I would come right after. He is waiting. He wants to hear about the game. Basketball has been one of the few things still keeping his spirit up. He roots from a hospital bed the way he used to root from the stands.

I want to tell him what just happened. I want to describe the feeling, the way everything slowed down, the way I could not miss. I want to tell him they could not touch me.

I want to keep my promise.

I make the bus. I sit down. The feeling from the court is already gone. The disconnection is sharp. Whatever was there is not there anymore. I am just a seventeen-year-old kid on a bus replaying a game in his head, planning what he will say to his father, picturing the look on his face when he hears the stat line.

Twenty-eight points. Eighteen rebounds. Seven assists.

I have never come to that.

He would love that.

He died at 5:30 that afternoon.

That was right around tip-off.

While I was having the game of my life, my father was dying, fighting off two consecutive massive heart-attacks.

While I was sliding past defenders who could not touch me, while every shot fell and every rebound landed in my hands, while something I could not name was making me lighter and everyone else heavier, he was leaving.

I did not get to keep my promise.

I did not get to tell him about the game.

But I think he already knew.

I think the thing that carried me through that game, the presence I could not explain, the stillness underneath the noise, was a man who could not get out of a hospital bed deciding he was not going to miss his son’s game.

Not this one.

He didn’t miss it after all.

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This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

If you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready, you can join the early reader list.

If you want to simply follow along it as it comes together, you can subscribe.

Everything I’m writing lives on the feed.

Most readers find me through my Notes.

This is where the Notes find their roots.

A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

There is a line in tomorrow’s piece that I said to my father over the phone, a few hours before he died.

“Fine. But I’m coming right after. Don’t go to sleep yet.”

I have carried that sentence for almost thirty years. It is the last promise I made him. I did not keep it. Not because I chose not to. Because he was already gone by the time the game ended.

I have written the day my father died before. Echo 24 was the driveway. The line of cars I recognized before I reached the front door. The walk from the car to the house that felt like miles.

That piece was about what I saw when I arrived.

This one is about what happened before.

The phone call. The locker room. The game itself, which remains the strangest forty minutes of my life. Something happened on that court that I have never been able to explain. I was not the best player on the team. I was never the most dominant player in any game I played. But that night, the game slowed down in a way it never had before. I was untouchable. I was carried.

I did not know why until I got home.

He died at 5:30. That was tip-off.

Tomorrow’s piece is about a game I won and a promise I lost. I wrote the game scene myself this time. Present tense. From the jump ball to the buzzer. Because some things need to be written from inside the body that lived them.

Subscribe now

This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

If you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready, you can join the early reader list.

If you want to simply follow along it as it comes together, you can subscribe.

Everything I’m writing lives on the feed.

Most readers find me through my Notes.

This is where the Notes find their roots.

A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

The manuscript has an entire chapter about my father’s hand.

It covers the accident. The machine. The sixty-five tons. The towel. The seven surgeries. The disability. The depression. The financial collapse. The odd jobs. The anger that followed him through the house for years. It is one of the longest chapters in the book, and it earns every word.

The Echo uses almost none of it.

That was the decision I had to make this week. What belongs in the chapter and what belongs in the Echo. They are different instruments playing the same note. The chapter tells you what happened. The Echo tells you what it felt like every time he shook someone’s hand after.

My first instinct was to start with the accident. The factory. The machine shuddering. The sound of his own scream. That is dramatic material. It pulls a reader in. It announces itself.

But it is also the wrong door into this piece.

If I open with the accident, the reader arrives at the handshake already knowing the full story. They have the context. They have the sympathy. They understand why the hand is damaged, and every detail about the grip and the graft skin and the missing finger becomes confirmation of something they already feel.

I did not want confirmation. I wanted the reader to feel the hand first.

So I opened with the lesson. A father teaching a boy how to shake hands. Warm grip. Certain. The kind of handshake that tells you everything about a man before he speaks. I wanted the reader to feel that hand working. To trust it.

Then I took it away.

The accident gets four paragraphs. Enough to know what happened. Not enough to sit in it. Because the piece is not about what the machine did to the hand. It is about what the hand did to my father every day after.

That is a craft principle I keep learning the hard way. The dramatic event is almost never the story. The story is what the event leaves behind. A war is not a story. Coming home from one is. A factory accident is not a story. Shaking hands with graft skin for the rest of your life is.

The nostril joke is the best example. It does not appear in the manuscript. I have never written it down before this week. It lived in my memory as a small, strange, almost embarrassing detail. The kind of thing you are not sure belongs in a serious piece about loss.

It belongs more than almost anything else.

Because the joke is where you see the man. Not the injury. Not the depression. Not the anger. The man. A father with a dark sense of humor who decided he would rather make a room laugh than let it pity him. That is not a detail about a hand. That is a detail about a person. And the person is always the story.

I pulled the phone call with my mother directly from the manuscript. Word for word. I did not change it. There is a version of this piece where that scene is cut entirely. The Echo would still work without it. But I kept it because of one line.

“There’s food in the fridge.”

That line has nothing to do with the hand. It has everything to do with my mother. And in a piece about my father’s loss, that single line tells you who was holding the rest of us together while we learned to live with what came home from the factory.

The chapter tells the whole story. The Echo tells the handshake. They do not compete. They do not overlap. One is the record. The other is the feeling.

The feeling is always shorter. It is also always what the reader carries home.

This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

If you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready, you can join the early reader list.

If you want to simply follow along it as it comes together, you can subscribe.

Everything I’m writing lives on the feed.

Most readers find me through my Notes.

This is where the Notes find their roots.

The first question they ask isn’t about the writing.

It’s about you.

They want to know if there’s real demand for this book.

Not from the industry, not from critics, but from readers. People who’ve already decided this story needs to exist.

So I’m asking directly: do you believe this book needs to be written?

If something you’ve read here made you feel less alone in what you carry, or more clear about what we’re all facing, I’d ask you to show that by signing up.

No money. No commitment.

Just your name on a list that says: yes, this matters, get it made.

I won’t dress this up. I’m still writing. No contract signed. What I have is a story I believe in, and a conversation with people who could help it reach the audience I believe it deserves.

Your name on that list is what I bring into the next room.

Help the book get published

Thank you,
Ido

A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

He taught me how to shake hands the way fathers did back then.

Stand up straight. Look them in the eye. Firm grip. Not too hard. A couple of pumps. Let go clean.

He made me practice on him. I was eight, maybe nine. My hand disappeared inside his. His grip was warm and certain. The kind of handshake that tells you everything you need to know about a man before he says a word. A twinkle of pride in his eyes as I rehearsed adulthood I only pretended to understand.

He was proud of his hands.

He had reason to be. They could do anything. in his twenties, he once rode his bike from the north of Israel to Eilat. Seven hours. When the bike broke down on the side of the road, he pulled a small blanket from inside the seat, laid the bike on its side, took it apart, fixed it, put it back together, and kept going.

He built me a room one summer. Sheet rock, plaster, electrical wiring. All of it. By himself.

He was an engineer. Brilliant with anything mechanical. We never had a technician at the house. Not once. Whatever broke, his hands could fix.

Sixty-five tons of steel came down on his right hand in a plastics factory on a February morning in 1990.

The machine was jammed. Protocol said shut everything down. Verify the safety was on. It was. He saw the obstruction, reached in, and the press dropped. Bone, tendon, everything his hands had ever built, destroyed in a millisecond.

He wrapped what was left in a towel and told the man next to him to call an ambulance. He did not yell. Later he said he did not want to scare his employees.

Was it adrenaline rushing through his veins that kept him focused, or was it pure shock. I will never know. All I know is that he was matter of fact about it, as he recounted the story to me once, and only once.

He was rushed to emergency surgery immediately. His middle finger trailed him there by a couple of hours, on ice. By the time it made it to the surgeons, it was too damaged and not worth reattaching anymore.

That was the first of seven surgeries.

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I never saw the hand before the first surgery, as he was rushed to the hospital. I was eleven. I came home from school. Latchkey kid. The phone was ringing.

My mother’s voice sounded distant. Controlled but distant.

“Ido, I am going to tell you something but I don’t want you to worry.”

“What?” I said, almost annoyed. I did not know yet.

“Your father had an accident, but he’s ok.”

“What happened? Is he ok? Where are you? Where is he?”

“He had an accident with his hand.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re at the hospital and he’s in surgery. I need to go talk to the doctor. There’s food in the fridge.”

There was always food in the fridge. No matter what.

I sat down in the silence and could hear my own heartbeat.

They saved the hand. Most of it. The middle finger was gone. All the way down to the knuckle. What was left was a small bump covered in tight, shiny skin that did not belong there. Grafted from somewhere else on his body. It was thinner than normal skin. Stretched. A little waxy. It did not feel like his hand. It felt like something constructed to look like a hand by someone who had been given a description of one.

Seven surgeries over the years that followed. Nerve damage. Tissue loss. Structural collapse. He never regained full use of it. Not even close.

When you shook his hand after it healed, the first thing you noticed was that it gave.

The index finger and the ring finger had nothing between them anymore. No middle finger to hold the structure. So when you squeezed, even gently, the hand would collapse inward on itself a little. Fold where it should not fold. The grip had no center. It could not hold.

It did not feel like a handshake. It felt like shaking the hand of a different man.

And in a way, it was.

He would not let me hold his hand for the longest time after the surgery, as if he had anything to be ashamed of. As if he chose to be this way. He felt that he had disappointed us, or that he was no longer good enough, or whatever might have gone through the head of someone who had just gone through severe trauma.

He left a big piece of him back in Poland. A childhood I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Now, another piece was gone. One that he could not easily bury inside.

It was out there, for all to see.

The man who had taught me to grip firm and look them in the eye could no longer do it himself. Not the way he used to. Not the way it mattered to him. Every new person he met, every introduction, every extended hand required him to offer something that announced his damage before he could say a word.

He hated explaining. He hated the looks. The slight pause on the other person’s face before they recovered and pretended they had not noticed.

He noticed them noticing. Every time.

It started grating on him. Over months. Over years. The frustration layered on top of the sadness, which layered on top of the depression, which layered on top of a man who had already been broken once before by a friend who stole his savings and vanished.

The hand was the last thing he had left that worked. And then it did not.

He had a dark sense of humor. Always did.

He used to take that knuckle, that little bump where his middle finger used to be, and bring it right up to his nostril. Pretended he had stuck the whole finger in there.

The setup was always the same. He would wait for someone to notice the hand, or for the conversation to arrive at what happened to it, and just before the weight settled in, he would bring the knuckle up to his nose with this look on his face. Like a kid pulling a coin from behind your ear.

A stupid joke. He knew it was a stupid joke. But he performed it like a party trick. A pity party nobody ever wanted to be invited to.

It was the only way he knew how to deal with loss. Laugh it off. I do the same.

That was his move. Turn the loss into a trick. Make the room laugh before it had time to pity him. Control the moment before the moment controlled him.

It worked. It always worked.

Until it did not. Until the joke wore thin and the hand was still there and the finger was still gone and the next stranger’s handshake was just another chance to feel it all over again.

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I think about that hand more than almost anything else he left me.

Not the accident. Not the surgeries. The handshake.

The handshake he taught me. And the handshake he could no longer give.

He taught me how to meet the world with a hand that could no longer meet it itself. That is the kind of thing a father passes down without meaning to. The lesson survives. The man who gave it carries the cost.

Firm grip. Eye contact. A couple of pumps.

I still shake hands exactly the way he taught me.

Every time I do, I feel the ghost of two fingers that had nothing between them. And a man who performed a magic trick so no one would see what it cost him to extend his hand at all.

This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

If you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready, you can join the early reader list.

If you want to simply follow along it as it comes together, you can subscribe.

Everything I’m writing lives on the feed.

Most readers find me through my Notes.

This is where the Notes find their roots.

A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

There is a moment in tomorrow’s piece where my father takes the knuckle where his middle finger used to be and brings it up to his nostril.

A stupid joke. He knew it was stupid. But he performed it with the timing of a man who had rehearsed it a thousand times. Because he had. Because every new room, every introduction, every extended hand was another chance for someone to notice what was missing. And he wanted to get there first.

That detail has lived in me for over thirty years. I have never written it down.

The Echo series has spent forty pieces circling what gets passed from one generation to the next. Silence. Vigilance. Objects carried in pockets. Words never said. But this week I wanted to write about something that gets passed down through the body. Not a behavior. Not a ritual. A physical act.

My father taught me how to shake hands. Firm grip. Eye contact. A couple of pumps. Let go clean. The way fathers taught sons back then, before screens replaced most of the situations that required it.

Then he lost his middle finger in a factory accident. Sixty-five tons of steel. Seven surgeries. And every handshake for the rest of his life became a reintroduction to the damage.

Tomorrow’s piece is not about the accident. It is about what came after. What the hand felt like when you shook it. What his face did when a stranger noticed. And the trick he invented to make sure the room laughed before it had time to feel sorry for him.

I still shake hands exactly the way he taught me.

That is the Echo. The lesson survived. The man who gave it carried the cost.

Subscribe now

This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

If you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready, you can join the early reader list.

If you want to simply follow along it as it comes together, you can subscribe.

Everything I’m writing lives on the feed.

Most readers find me through my Notes.

This is where the Notes find their roots.

A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

The ‘Yalla’ piece started as a fourteen-minute speech. Five acts. A bookend structure built around a man at my gym wearing a kaffiyeh and a Star of David hanging from my neck. I had delivered it. It worked. The room responded in the places I needed it to respond.

When the collaboration prompt arrived, my first instinct was to adapt the speech. Take what I had already built and reshape it for the page. It sounded efficient. It was not.

A speech and an essay are not the same instrument.

On stage, you earn your argument with time. You build ten minutes of emotional trust and then you make the case. The audience gives you that runway because they are in the room with you. They can see your face. They hear the pauses. The silence does half the work.

On the page, the silence doesn’t exist. The reader is alone with the words. There is no face to read, no pause to feel, no room to sit in. Every sentence has to earn the next one without the benefit of presence.

The first thing I cut was the signposting. In the speech, I say, “I’m going to come back to him.” That line tells the audience the bookend is coming. It builds anticipation in a room. On the page, it’s a spoiler. The reader does not need to be told the kaffiyeh guy is coming back. They need to feel the return when it arrives.

The second cut was the explicit thesis. The speech has a line that names anti-Zionism directly and defines it. On stage, that line lands because twelve minutes of personal story have earned it. On the page, surrounded by two other writers already making political arguments, it would have pulled my piece out of the personal register and into the editorial one. The Groucho Marx section does the same work with more texture. I kept Marx. I cut the thesis.

The hardest cut was the ending.

The speech closes with a universal call to action. It asks the audience to do something. Resist. Attach. Hold on. It’s a strong closer for a room. But on the page, in a piece about my specific journey, the universal register felt borrowed. It sounded like a commencement address. My readers do not come to me for general wisdom. They come for the specific thing. The lived thing.

So I ended where the story ends. The kaffiyeh disappeared. The Star of David is still on. The yalla was never what I was running from. It was what I was made of.

That is the craft principle I keep relearning.

The specific is always stronger than the universal. The scene is always stronger than the sermon. And the closer that trusts the reader to draw their own conclusion will outperform the closer that draws it for them.

I have given that speech to (small) live audiences and felt it work. I have now written it for the page and felt it work differently. The speech asks a room to respond. The essay asks a reader to sit with it.

Both versions are mine. But the one on the page is closer to the bone.

That is usually how it goes. The first version of anything I write is the version I am willing to say out loud. The second version is the one I am willing to leave behind in writing, where I cannot control who reads it or how.

The second version is always scarier. It is also always better.

Subscribe now

This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

If you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready, you can join the early reader list.

If you want to simply follow along it as it comes together, you can subscribe.

Everything I’m writing lives on the feed.

Most readers find me through my Notes.

This is where the Notes find their roots.

A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

Early 2024.

The war in Gaza was raging. There was a man at my gym who wore a kaffiyeh around his neck. White guy. Pale. Culturally appropriating the cause of the season with the commitment of someone who had found a new personality and was not yet ready to give it up.

We crossed paths many times. He never said a word to me. I never said a word to him.

I was wearing a Star of David.

Yalla.

One of the most used words in Israel. We borrowed it from Arabic. That happens when two cultures spend a significant amount of time next to one another.

It means many things. Motivational: “let’s go, come on!” Dismissive: “get out of here, get to the point.” If you break it apart, “Ya Allah,” it is pure awe and surprise.

It is everything I was excited to leave behind when I moved from Israel to San Diego, California in 2003, at almost twenty-four years old.

That word was a microcosm of Israeli culture to me. Harsh. Abrupt. Dismissive. Cold. I felt I was above it. That I would thrive in an environment that allowed people to wax poetically, dive deeper philosophically, and take the roundabout way to arrive at a destination.

I was wrong.

The Second Intifada had just torn through my early adulthood. I had narrowly missed the bombing at My Coffee Shop on Allenby Street, watching from across the street as it happened. I was not at Mike’s Place on the Tel Aviv beachfront on the night of April 30, 2003. A Wednesday. A place I went every week. A suicide bomber walked in and killed three people. One of them, the bouncer, I knew.

I had grown up watching Iraqi missiles pass over my neighborhood during the Gulf War. Standing on a balcony at twelve years old, watching a shadow the length of what felt like a football field glide overhead while the ground shook.

I needed to walk into a room without scanning it first.

I needed to stop doing the math.

What I found in San Diego felt, at first, like interacting with people from another planet.

No wars. No real threats.

September 11 had happened two years earlier. But there was nothing imminent. Nothing that required exit-route calculations or profiling the person near the door with the heavy bag. It felt like I was moving among people who had lost contact with reality. Because insecurity, and preparing for the worst, is what most of humanity has managed throughout history. Not San Diego in 2003.

I went shark hunting with my bank manager.

I remember sitting in that boat thinking: this is insane. Not the sharks. The fact that in Israel, my bank manager had never once seemed to have a life outside the branch. Dull. Institutional. Contained. This man was taking his customer into the ocean to hunt apex predators on a Tuesday afternoon.

The contrast was stark. And for a while, I mistook it for a superior way of living.

The San Diego bank manager was not more evolved. He was less burdened. His lightness was not wisdom. It was the absence of weight.

I envied it anyway. For a long time, I envied it.

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So I did what made sense at the time. I disappeared.

My name, Ido, was going to start a lot of conversations I did not want to have. I was not going to change it. But I built a quick pivot: “Yeah, I’m originally from Israel. Where are you from?”

I did not want to be the Israeli guy. I wanted to just be Ido.

I dove headfirst. College life in San Diego. The nightlife scene in New York, where I lived for seven years after. All American friends. Barely one or two Israelis anywhere I lived. I married an American Jewish girl. The first Jewish girl I had seriously dated since arriving. We had three kids. Beautiful American kids of Jewish heritage.

I never really spoke Hebrew to them at home. Something I regret. My mother kept reminding me. I was always too busy. Too tired. Too something.

Life goes by you when you have more excuses than conviction.

For years, when I heard Hebrew spoken in public, in New York or anywhere outside Israel, I would not respond. I would not acknowledge it. I would not “out” myself.

I was proud of my country. I have always been proud of my country.

But I did not want to be its spokesperson. I did not want to explain or defend the abrasiveness, the bluntness, the urgency I had spent years trying to leave behind. The Israeli identity felt, in certain rooms, like a liability I was not ready to carry in public. I had made a life in America. I was building something here.

So I hid it. Not the pride. The visibility.

There is a difference, and I told myself that difference mattered. I was proud on the inside. I was quiet on the outside. I was done with the math.

I never lost the vigilance. The scanning of rooms. The reading of exits. That never left. But I allowed myself to believe that distance meant safety.

I made it out. Nothing could touch me here.

I wanted to own the lived experience without living the living experience itself. Existing as an Israeli Jew in America, not an American Israeli.

I lost perspective.

That distinction held up until October 7, 2023.

Then it collapsed entirely.

I wanted to run back into the fire. Not metaphorically. I wanted to be in Israel, in person, doing something that mattered instead of watching app notifications about missile alerts from American safety. My sister was still carrying the uneven load while I watched from the wrong side of an ocean.

The guilt was real.

I knew what I had left. I knew what it cost to maintain the thing I left. And I understood, finally, that the hiding was a form of running I had not fully named until that afternoon in October when the notifications started coming in.

There is no outside. There is no room where the math is permanently quiet. There is only the question of whether you carry the weight visibly or keep it private and tell yourself that it’s the same thing.

It is not the same thing.

For twenty years I told myself the hiding was about not wanting to be reduced.

I did not want to be just the Israeli in the room.

But there is a difference between refusing a label and letting someone else fill it.

When the world started insisting on defining what Zionism is, what Israeli means, what Jewish identity stands for, and getting it so criminally wrong, the silence stopped being neutral.

Staying quiet was not modesty. It was concession.

I spent my whole life rotating between atheist and agnostic. Nobody who knows me would have predicted what happened next.

I put on a Star of David.

My wife grew up in Massachusetts as one of the only Jewish kids in her school. She heard the comments. She knew what it cost to be visibly Jewish in a room that was not built for you. I had never experienced that. In Israel, being Jewish is not visible because it is universal. It is the air. You do not notice the air until you leave it.

I put the necklace on in front of a mirror. It felt completely out of place. Like a costume from someone else’s life. I walked into the other room without saying a word.

It stopped my wife cold.

I wore it to the gym. I was nervous. No reactions that day. Some since. I kept wearing it.

Not because God told me to. I am still not sure what I believe about God.

I wore it because my people were under attack and I needed the world to know whose side I was on.

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There was a Groucho Marx line I used to hide behind. “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.” It turned out to be the operating system of an entire generation of Westerners who have been taught, from the classroom up, that pride in their own civilization is evidence of its worst impulses. They do not want to belong to the club of Western culture because Western culture, they have been told, is the villain of every story.

A generation that belongs to nothing, stands for nothing, and falls for anything.

A generation that reaches for the nearest available identity. A kaffiyeh. A cause. A hashtag. Whatever the algorithm is currently rewarding.

They do not hate Zionism because they understand it.

They hate it because it reminds them of everything they were told to abandon and cannot get back.

Zionism is not a theology. It is a declaration. It says: we are here, we belong here, we are not disappearing, and we are not ashamed.

About a year ago, the kaffiyeh disappeared.

He had moved on. The algorithm had moved on. The fad had run its cycle and he had found something new to wear around his neck, or perhaps nothing at all, which is the natural resting state of a person with no particular reason to stand for anything.

My Star of David is still on.

That is the difference between a fad and a principle. Between a cause you adopt because it is available and an identity you carry because it is yours. Between people who perform belonging and people who have it.

I spent twenty years hiding the Hebrew. I ran from the abrasiveness, the bluntness, the urgency. I built a life in America and envied the lightness of people who had never been asked to carry what we carry. And then I put on a Star of David and walked into a gym in North Carolina, and understood, finally, what I had been running from and why it had followed me across an ocean and would follow me for the rest of my life.

Not because I can’t escape it.

Because I don’t want to.

The yalla was never what I was running from.

It was what I was made of.

Yalla.

This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

If you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready, you can join the early reader list.

If you want to simply follow along it as it comes together, you can subscribe. Everything I’m writing lives on the feed.
Most readers find me through my Notes.

This is where the Notes find their roots.

Subscribe now

A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

There is a line in tomorrow’s piece:

“I wanted to own the lived experience without living the living experience itself.”

That line existed in a speech I wrote months ago. I have delivered versions of it to live audiences, mostly friends and family, as I have not taken this on stage yet. It always landed. People nodded. Some confide in me afterwards and tell me it described something they had felt but could not name.

It never made it to the page.

A few weeks ago, a writer named Melissa Brodsky invited me into a writing exchange with Kile B. Jones and Behind the Narrative. The premise: how where we grew up shaped our relationship to Jewish identity and Zionism. Melissa wrote about growing up Jewish in Michigan. Comfortable. Assimilated. Safe. Then October 7 shattered the safety she had never been asked to question. Her piece is called “Wrapped in an American Skin.” It is the story of a woman who woke up.

I read it and knew immediately that my answer was not about where I grew up. It was about where I left.

I had the speech. I had the material. But a speech is built for a room. It earns its argument with time, with pauses, with presence. The page does not give you any of that. Every sentence has to carry its own weight without a face behind it.

So I rebuilt it. Cut the signposting. Cut the universal closer. Kept the scenes. Kept the Groucho Marx. Kept the bookend that holds the whole thing together. What came out is not the speech. It is not from the manuscript either. But it is from the same life the manuscript is built from. The hiding. The running. The return.

This week’s Echo is called “Yalla.” It is about the word I was excited to leave behind, the twenty years I spent hiding the language it came from, and the afternoon in October when I understood that the math I had been running from was never going to stop.

It goes up tomorrow.

This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

If you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready, you can join the early reader list.

If you want to simply follow along it as it comes together, you can subscribe.

Everything I’m writing lives on the feed.

Most readers find me through my Notes.

This is where the Notes find their roots.

Subscribe now

A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

I’m participating in a writing exchange with a few other Substack writers. The premise focuses on Zionism and Judaism, digging into how where we grew up shaped us into the adults we are today. I’ll be sharing this space with Behind the Narrative 📣 Kile B. Jones from Inverted World , and Melissa Brodsky . They’re both incredibly powerful writers and prominent voices in this space, and I’m honored to be part of this collaboration.

Here is my contribution to this conversation.

Early 2024.

The war in Gaza was raging. There was a man at my gym who wore a kaffiyeh around his neck. White guy. Pale. Culturally appropriating the cause of the season with the commitment of someone who had found a new personality and was not yet ready to give it up.

We crossed paths many times. He never said a word to me. I never said a word to him.

I was wearing a Star of David.

Yalla.

One of the most used words in Israel. We borrowed it from Arabic. That happens when two cultures spend a significant amount of time next to one another.

It means many things. Motivational: “let’s go, come on!” Dismissive: “get out of here, get to the point.” If you break it apart, “Ya Allah,” it is pure awe and surprise.

It is everything I was excited to leave behind when I moved from Israel to San Diego, California in 2003, at almost twenty-four years old.

That word was a microcosm of Israeli culture to me. Harsh. Abrupt. Dismissive. Cold. I felt I was above it. That I would thrive in an environment that allowed people to wax poetically, dive deeper philosophically, and take the roundabout way to arrive at a destination.

I was wrong.

The Second Intifada had just torn through my early adulthood. I had narrowly missed the bombing at My Coffee Shop on Allenby Street, watching from across the street as it happened. I was not at Mike’s Place on the Tel Aviv beachfront on the night of April 30, 2003. A Wednesday. A place I went every week. A suicide bomber walked in and killed three people. One of them, the bouncer, I knew.

I had grown up watching Iraqi missiles pass over my neighborhood during the Gulf War. Standing on a balcony at twelve years old, watching a shadow the length of what felt like a football field glide overhead while the ground shook.

I needed to walk into a room without scanning it first.

I needed to stop doing the math.

What I found in San Diego felt, at first, like interacting with people from another planet.

No wars. No real threats.

September 11 had happened two years earlier. But there was nothing imminent. Nothing that required exit-route calculations or profiling the person near the door with the heavy bag. It felt like I was moving among people who had lost contact with reality. Because insecurity, and preparing for the worst, is what most of humanity has managed throughout history. Not San Diego in 2003.

I went shark hunting with my bank manager.

I remember sitting in that boat thinking: this is insane. Not the sharks. The fact that in Israel, my bank manager had never once seemed to have a life outside the branch. Dull. Institutional. Contained. This man was taking his customer into the ocean to hunt apex predators on a Tuesday afternoon.

The contrast was stark. And for a while, I mistook it for a superior way of living.

The San Diego bank manager was not more evolved. He was less burdened. His lightness was not wisdom. It was the absence of weight.

I envied it anyway. For a long time, I envied it.

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So I did what made sense at the time. I disappeared.

My name, Ido, was going to start a lot of conversations I did not want to have. I was not going to change it. But I built a quick pivot: “Yeah, I’m originally from Israel. Where are you from?”

I did not want to be the Israeli guy. I wanted to just be Ido.

I dove headfirst. College life in San Diego. The nightlife scene in New York, where I lived for seven years after. All American friends. Barely one or two Israelis anywhere I lived. I married an American Jewish girl. The first Jewish girl I had seriously dated since arriving. We had three kids. Beautiful American kids of Jewish heritage.

I never really spoke Hebrew to them at home. Something I regret. My mother kept reminding me. I was always too busy. Too tired. Too something.

Life goes by you when you have more excuses than conviction.

For years, when I heard Hebrew spoken in public, in New York or anywhere outside Israel, I would not respond. I would not acknowledge it. I would not “out” myself.

I was proud of my country. I have always been proud of my country.

But I did not want to be its spokesperson. I did not want to explain or defend the abrasiveness, the bluntness, the urgency I had spent years trying to leave behind. The Israeli identity felt, in certain rooms, like a liability I was not ready to carry in public. I had made a life in America. I was building something here.

So I hid it. Not the pride. The visibility.

There is a difference, and I told myself that difference mattered. I was proud on the inside. I was quiet on the outside. I was done with the math.

I never lost the vigilance. The scanning of rooms. The reading of exits. That never left. But I allowed myself to believe that distance meant safety.

I made it out. Nothing could touch me here.

I wanted to own the lived experience without living the living experience itself. Existing as an Israeli Jew in America, not an American Israeli.

I lost perspective.

That distinction held up until October 7, 2023.

Then it collapsed entirely.

I wanted to run back into the fire. Not metaphorically. I wanted to be in Israel, in person, doing something that mattered instead of watching app notifications about missile alerts from American safety. My sister was still carrying the uneven load while I watched from the wrong side of an ocean.

The guilt was real.

I knew what I had left. I knew what it cost to maintain the thing I left. And I understood, finally, that the hiding was a form of running I had not fully named until that afternoon in October when the notifications started coming in.

There is no outside. There is no room where the math is permanently quiet. There is only the question of whether you carry the weight visibly or keep it private and tell yourself that it’s the same thing.

It is not the same thing.

For twenty years I told myself the hiding was about not wanting to be reduced.

I did not want to be just the Israeli in the room.

But there is a difference between refusing a label and letting someone else fill it.

When the world started insisting on defining what Zionism is, what Israeli means, what Jewish identity stands for, and getting it so criminally wrong, the silence stopped being neutral.

Staying quiet was not modesty. It was concession.

I spent my whole life rotating between atheist and agnostic. Nobody who knows me would have predicted what happened next.

I put on a Star of David.

My wife grew up in Massachusetts as one of the only Jewish kids in her school. She heard the comments. She knew what it cost to be visibly Jewish in a room that was not built for you. I had never experienced that. In Israel, being Jewish is not visible because it is universal. It is the air. You do not notice the air until you leave it.

I put the necklace on in front of a mirror. It felt completely out of place. Like a costume from someone else’s life. I walked into the other room without saying a word.

It stopped my wife cold.

I wore it to the gym. I was nervous. No reactions that day. Some since. I kept wearing it.

Not because God told me to. I am still not sure what I believe about God.

I wore it because my people were under attack and I needed the world to know whose side I was on.

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There was a Groucho Marx line I used to hide behind. “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.” It turned out to be the operating system of an entire generation of Westerners who have been taught, from the classroom up, that pride in their own civilization is evidence of its worst impulses. They do not want to belong to the club of Western culture because Western culture, they have been told, is the villain of every story.

A generation that belongs to nothing, stands for nothing, and falls for anything.

A generation that reaches for the nearest available identity. A kaffiyeh. A cause. A hashtag. Whatever the algorithm is currently rewarding.

They do not hate Zionism because they understand it.

They hate it because it reminds them of everything they were told to abandon and cannot get back.

Zionism is not a theology. It is a declaration. It says: we are here, we belong here, we are not disappearing, and we are not ashamed.

About a year ago, the kaffiyeh disappeared.

He had moved on. The algorithm had moved on. The fad had run its cycle and he had found something new to wear around his neck, or perhaps nothing at all, which is the natural resting state of a person with no particular reason to stand for anything.

My Star of David is still on.

That is the difference between a fad and a principle. Between a cause you adopt because it is available and an identity you carry because it is yours. Between people who perform belonging and people who have it.

I spent twenty years hiding the Hebrew. I ran from the abrasiveness, the bluntness, the urgency. I built a life in America and envied the lightness of people who had never been asked to carry what we carry. And then I put on a Star of David and walked into a gym in North Carolina, and understood, finally, what I had been running from and why it had followed me across an ocean and would follow me for the rest of my life.

Not because I can’t escape it.

Because I don’t want to.

The yalla was never what I was running from.

It was what I was made of.

Yalla.

This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

If you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready, you can join the early reader list.

If you want to simply follow along it as it comes together, you can subscribe. Everything I’m writing lives on the feed.
Most readers find me through my Notes.

This is where the Notes find their roots.

Subscribe now

A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

The hardest thing to write in this echo was the moment before the car stopped.

Not the DoorDash resolution. Not the conversation before the car came in. The two seconds between seeing it and moving. The moment where something happened that was faster than thought and left me in front of a car I knew nothing about except that it shouldn’t be there.

I have thought about how to write that kind of moment before. The cars echo, the body knowing what the driveway meant before the mind could argue. The mask piece, the body learning a name and living inside it. The physical detail as the shock itself in the cars piece. What I keep finding is that the body acting faster than the mind is one of the central experiences of this book, and it keeps requiring a different approach each time.

This time it was simpler than the others. The instinct was not mysterious or uncanny. It was trained. I grew up in a country where you learn to scan a room before you sit down in it, to read a street before you cross it, to notice the car that doesn’t belong before you’ve consciously processed why. That training does not expire when you leave. It travels with you and waits.

The craft question this echo raised was how to write the usefulness of that training without making it sound like an endorsement of the conditions that made it necessary. I am not grateful that I grew up under terrorism. I am not glad my body learned to do math on threats automatically. I did not choose to have those instincts and I would trade them for the alternative, for a childhood where the math was not necessary, without hesitation.

But they were there. And in that parking lot, they were useful. And my children were inside.

Writing that required me to hold two things at once: the genuine horror of the conditions that produced the instinct, and the genuine usefulness of the instinct when the conditions arrived again. I did not want to collapse one into the other. The instinct is not proof that the conditions were acceptable. The conditions are not undone by the usefulness of what they produced.

This is a version of the distinction I try to hold throughout this book. The inheritance is real. The inheritance does not justify the suffering that created it. You can carry something useful from a terrible place without being grateful for the terrible place.

I ended the piece on the lockdown drills. My children come home and ask why people hate them.

I don’t have an answer.

There has never been a good answer to that question. If there were, the question would not still be current in 2023, eighty years after a war that was supposed to have made it obsolete. And it would not be asked by children who are seven and eleven years old and have done nothing except exist in a school that is not visible from the street.

But I can stand in the parking lot.

That is not a solution. It is not even close to a solution. It is the only form of presence available to me when the question becomes physical, when the math becomes a car coming in fast with tinted windows.

I stand in the parking lot.

And I wait.

And I hope the answer is always DoorDash.

This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

If you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready, you can join the early reader list.

If you want to simply follow along it as it comes together, you can subscribe.

Everything I’m writing lives on the feed.

Most readers find me through my Notes.

This is where the Notes find their roots.

A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

The first time I was near a suicide bombing, I had my hand on the metal push bar of a door at a bar I was working at on Allenby Street across from a coffee shop. The explosion happened across the street. I felt the concussion before I heard it.

The second time, I was late to Mike’s Place because I got pulled over. The bomb went off at the entrance. Three people were killed. More than fifty were wounded.

Both times, I was near the center but not in it. Both times, the geometry of the moment had placed me just outside the blast radius by minutes, meters, the specific accident of timing that survival sometimes is.

In the days after October 7th, 2023, I walked into the center deliberately.

The school is not visible from the street.

It sits in a small, quiet neighborhood in North Carolina, tucked behind trees, accessible only through two or three turns that you have to know to make. Of course, Waze and Apple Maps will get you there, but you get the point.

It’s small enough that we know every car in the parking lot, every parent, every administrator. Anything unfamiliar sticks out immediately, which is either the comfort of a tight community or the particular vigilance of people who have learned to read parking lots the hard way.

The school had brought in a police officer for the entrance and had their regular security doing rounds, moving through the building and around the perimeter without stopping.

I was additional. Unarmed.

No one asked me to come. I just did, because that’s what you do when your people are being attacked across the world.

All three of children were inside, in class, shielded from the aftermath of October 7th, as children ought to be.

My wife was there, too, teaching.

My entire world was in that small building. Where else would I be?

You show up where you can. In whatever way you can.

Because it matters.

Standing at the edge of the lot with another Israeli father who also had three kids at the same school, watching the cars come in, doing the thing my body has been doing since I was eight years old and the world started teaching me to watch.

My friend had served in Flotilla 13. The naval commando unit. The Israeli Navy SEALs. He had been seriously injured during the Second Lebanon War and had made a full recovery. He was not standing in that parking lot by accident.

Neither was I.

We were talking about how crazy it all was.

Not the school, specifically. All of it. This week. The world. The specific and nauseating experience of watching October 7th happen and then watching the global response unfold, which was not the response either of us had expected and which both of us understood immediately, in our bodies, before we had words for it.

Protests breaking out on university campuses celebrating the attack. People who had never been to Israel and had no stake in the region suddenly possessing strong opinions about whether Jewish people deserved what had just happened to them. The reframing, within hours of the massacre, of the victims as the aggressors. The specific vertigo of watching this happen in real time while you were trying to process what you had just seen.

We were talking about what it meant that we were standing in this parking lot. Two Israeli men in our forties, both of us with children inside a Jewish school in America, scanning the entrance to make sure nobody was coming for them.

Why would anybody want to come for them?

Eighty-plus years after my father had to flee Poland and hide under a false name because the world had decided that Jews didn’t have the right to exist, here we were in suburban North Carolina doing the math again.

Not because of anything we had done. Because of what we were.

For what? we were saying. For existing? For being the victims of an invasion of our sovereign homeland? How is it possible that this is still the sentence, still the condition, still the reason a man has to stand in a school parking lot and watch the entrance?

Then the car came in.

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Black. Beat up. Old civic or something close to it. Tinted windows. Music blasting loud enough to hear from across the lot.

It came in fast, then slowed down, then sped up a bit again, the way a car moves when the driver is looking for something. Not the way a parent drives in. Not the way anyone who had been to this school before drives in.

No parent had that car. No administrator had that car. I knew every car in that lot and I did not know that one.

I said something, I don’t remember exactly what. My friend moved to the side. And I ran at the car and put myself in front of it.

I had no weapon. I had no authority. I was a forty-four-year-old man in a school parking lot in North Carolina with nothing between me and that car except the decision that it was not going to move another inch closer to the building where my children were.

The car stopped.

I told the driver to roll down the window.

She rolled it down. She was a woman, alone in the car, and she said “I’m sorry, I’m DoorDash, I’m delivering breakfast to someone here.”

I saw the bag. I saw the food.

Behind me, one of the teachers was already walking out of the school. The police officer was watching closely at this point. “I think that’s my DoorDash,” she said.

The driver delivered the food and left.

My friend and I stood there for a moment.

I had been near two suicide bombings and survived by the grace of proximity. My Coffee Shop. Mike’s Place. Each time the specific accident of where I was standing (or not) had kept me outside the thing.

Standing in that parking lot, I understood that I was done waiting to find out whether geography would save me again. I had three children inside that building. My wife was in there. I was not going to stand at the edge of the lot and watch to see what happened.

That was not a decision I made in the moment. The moment was too fast for decisions. I saw the car and my body was already moving, the way a body moves when it has been paying attention for over forty years and finally has something important to do again.

The instincts I learned growing up under terrorism in Tel Aviv did not leave me when I left Tel Aviv. They came with me to San Diego and then to New York, and Boston, and North Carolina and they have been waiting in my body ever since, patient, ready, looking for a parking lot where they might be useful.

October 7th woke them up.

I think about that a lot. The specific usefulness of knowing how to be afraid efficiently. The men I grew up around who could scan a room and do the math in under a second. The particular education that terror provides, not just in fear but in the management of it. What to do with the information your body is giving you. How to act when the window is two seconds wide.

The raining I’ve received in not being concerned with feelings, profiling, kindness, or any other noise, because those are privileges you don’t have when you need to make a life or death decision.

They don’t matter. Only action matters.

My children do lockdown drills at that school. Not for fire, or active shooter, like most schools do.

For people who want to kill Jews.

They come home and ask me why people hate us.

I don’t have a good answer. There has never been a good answer to that question.

But at 47 years old I can stand in the parking lot to try and protect them from that answer.

That is the only thing I know how to do.

So that is what I do.

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Related stories:

This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

If you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready, you can join the early reader list.

If you want to simply follow along it as it comes together, you can subscribe.

Everything I’m writing lives on the feed.

Most readers find me through my Notes.

This is where the Notes find their roots.

Subscribe now

A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

On the morning of October 8th, 2023, I didn’t go to work.

I went to a school parking lot in North Carolina where my children were inside a building that you cannot see from the street.

The school is small and tucked away. You have to make two or three turns to find it, and even then you have to know what you’re looking for. Because it’s so small and so contained, we know every car. Every parent. Every administrator. Anything out of the ordinary sticks out immediately.

I volunteered in the days after October 7th as additional, unarmed eyes on the parking lot. The school had brought in an officer at the entrance and security roaming the perimeter. I was extra. Standing at the edge of the lot, watching the cars come in, doing the thing my body has been trained to do since I was eight years old growing up under terrorism in Tel Aviv.

A friend was there with me. He’s also Israeli. He served in Flotilla 13, the naval commando unit, the Israeli equivalent of Navy SEALs. He was seriously injured in the Second Lebanon War and made a full recovery. He had three kids at the same school. We were standing there talking about the insanity of it, two Israeli fathers in a suburban North Carolina parking lot scanning the perimeter of a Jewish school, and what it meant that we had to be there.

Then a car came in.

Black. Beat up. Tinted windows. Blasting music. Coming in too fast, then slowing down, then speeding up again, the way a car moves when the driver is looking for something.

We didn’t know this car. No parent drove that car. No administrator drove that car. Nobody who belonged there drove that car. We didn’t know that driver. Hell, we couldn’t even see them.

I ran at it and put myself in front of it.

Tomorrow I am writing about the conversation that car interrupted. And about what it means to stand in a parking lot in America and feel, for a moment, like you never left a war zone.

Subscribe now

This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

If you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready, you can join the early reader list.

If you want to simply follow along it as it comes together, you can subscribe.

Everything I’m writing lives on the feed.

Most readers find me through my Notes.

This is where the Notes find their roots.

A quick note: if you found me through my writing on Israel or antisemitism, that’s still a core part of this publication. Echoes is the more personal lane, where those public themes meet memory, family, identity, and the book I’m writing.

The sharper commentary is still on the main feed, and it remains free.

My grandfather was not an easy subject.

Not because of any particular darkness or complexity. Because he was a man who operated entirely outside my register as a thirteen-year-old and only partially within my register as an adult trying to reconstruct him on the page. He was salt of the earth in the way that phrase actually means something: permanent, unglamorous, essential. He didn’t perform warmth. He didn’t narrate his love. He got on the tractor and drove to the fields and expected you to follow.

Writing him required me to stop looking for the things I look for in a portrait and start looking for the things he actually was.

The temptation in writing someone like him is to find the hidden softness. To locate the tender moment that reveals the whole person. To do what memoir often does, which is trace the complicated path to love between two people who didn’t speak the same emotional language.

That is a real thing and it belongs in the piece. But it can’t be the whole piece. If the only thing I show you is the moment at the end where I say that is also a kind of love, I have made him into a thesis rather than a person.

The person is the dominos on Saturday afternoon. The marble pieces slammed on the plastic table. The Moroccan friends who came and the language I couldn’t follow and the scene that was so loud it filled the entire yard. That is him without the thesis. That is him when he didn’t know I was watching and wasn’t performing anything for me.

The craft principle I keep returning to: the person at rest tells you more than the person in relationship with you. The relationship tells you about the relationship. The person at rest tells you about the person.

He was a man who worked every day of his life and on Saturday afternoons sat outside with his oldest friends and slammed marble pieces on a table and was so loud you could hear it everywhere.

That is the line I trust most in this piece. Not the ending. That.

There is a second thing worth naming. The fear in the field. The moment he went pale. I could have written that scene as a piece about tension between Jews and Arabs in the early 1990s, about the political landscape of 1994 Israel, about inherited distrust and what it looks like from the inside of a farming community that has been navigating that tension for decades. All of that is real and I have written about it in other lanes, in the Then They Came essays, in the political clarity pieces.

I chose not to write it that way here. This was a memoir piece, not a political one. What mattered in that moment was not the politics. It was my grandfather’s face. The color that left it. The fear that was not abstract but personal, immediate, aimed directly at me because I was the one who had disappeared into the trees.

The political context was there. It shaped the fear. But the fear was his, and his alone, and in a memoir piece that fear belongs to the person who felt it, not to the argument it might illustrate.

That is what I wrote.

That is the only thing I had the standing to write.

The rule I keep learning: in memoir, you write from the inside of the moment, not from above it. The political piece requires distance and argument. The memoir piece requires proximity. You can’t do both at the same time without losing one.

He went pale.

That is the memoir.

Everything it implies about the world we were living in is the political piece.

They live in separate lanes for a reason.

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This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

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