Americans, especially the younger generation, need to be spoon fed information. We need to start at very very simple things such as, what is terrorism? why is Hamas considered a terrorist organization? etc.

We made the mistake of assuming they have, what we consider, basic knowledge. but instead the extreme islamists swooped in and got to lie and redefine all the terms because the Americans didn't have any knowledge of them in the first place.

IDK how to write today's update post. There were so many things I meant to include info about, but now everything pales in the face of the terrible news we got this morning.

At least 24 Israeli soldiers were killed in the last 24 hours in Gaza.

Here are the faces of some of them:

The terrorists responsible for most of these deaths, attacked in a spot just 600 meters (0.37 miles, with the border breached on Oct 7 in the middle) from a southern Israeli community, Kissufim.

[this paragraph is for the people spewing hate, on and off anon : if you read the news and smiled to yourself, or felt any kind of joy, I want you to know that's vile. It's devoid of any morality or humanity. You can tell yourself and others that you're for human rights all you want, but if you feel joy at the death of human beings, human beings who had the right to live (and would have lived, had it not been for the terrible massacre Hamas carried out on Oct 7, which the terrorists promised to recreate repeatedly, targeting Israelis and Jews alike), then you're not for human rights. It's just an excuse you use to be able to publicly celebrate the death of Jews, and of non-Jewish citizens of the Jewish state who defend their fellow Jews. It's just the same, age old antisemitism under a new guise]

IDK how to explain what that number does to me, as an Israeli, as a Jew, as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.

I still remember the morning of Oct 7, as the news started pouring in. First, just talking about the rockets, they had no confirmation of casualties yet. Then, we got the news of one elderly woman, killed by a rocket as she left her home to open the communal bomb shelter for others to use. Then suddenly it was 5 dead, then 10, then 22, along with the news that Palestinian terrorists from Gaza have invaded Israel's south.

And I knew then that the number is going to be higher. The way it normally goes with news of terrorist attack, is you first get a big number, those killed immediately or shortly after the attack, and then there are a few more wounded who don't make it. Basically, there's a big number, and then a small adjustment. Something like... first hearing about the 10 immedaite casualties of an attack, then the number is adjusted to 12 or 13 in the following hours, or days. But here, the jump in the number of dead from 10 to 22 told me we're not in the "small adjustment phase" yet. We're still in the "counting the initial big number phase."

That was so hard, because 22 was already hard to deal with. Up until Oct 7, if I remember correctly, we had lost 38 people in 2023 to Palestinian terrorism. That was already considered the bloodiest year in terms of terrorism victims since the second intifada. People were already grieving, asking questions about what was going on, talking about how the renewal of certain (American) funding to Palestinians (such as the Palestinian Authority's Pay for Slay program) was causing this surge in murderous activity, and what can be done to change the situation. To lose 22 people in one day meant that the number of 2023 terrorism victims was almost doubled already... and we were not yet done counting our dead. The grief and loss of almost 9 months and change almost doubled in a day... and it was likely about to grow.

The number of dead kept rising. We jumped from 22 to 50. From 50 to 100. Then 200. Still no sign of getting to the "small adjustment phase" and it was hard to breathe with every new update. We got to 300, and it was almost unbearable. Then 450. A jump of 150 dead. There was no way to process it, no way to really comprehend it, and the worst was always that the jumps in numbers between updates meant we're still in the "counting the initial big number phase." Somewhere after 600 and before the next update, I realized from an interview (nothing official, just the implication of what one person, who was in the know, said) that it was not going to be less than 1,000 people killed. And I no longer felt like I could contain any of it. The horror, the grief, the shock, the struggle to comprehend that this is real, and not the worst nightmare I've ever had.

At least 1,200 people were murdered during Hamas' massacre. It's been over 3 months, and when I write that I didn't know how to contain everything I was feeling back then, I still don't. So you might think, what's 24 people in comparison to 1,200 dead? But that's not how it works. The death of one person does not pale in comparison with the death of the many.

When I work on Holocaust research, and I work on the testimony of one Jewish girl, who had to watch her father being beaten in front of her eyes by Nazi-collaborating Italian fascist soldiers in a concentration camp in Libya, in northern Africa, when I try to process what the murder of just one parent, just one person means to her, I know it's the destruction of her whole world. It doesn't lessen the pain, that the number of Jewish Holocaust victims outside of Europe is "just" in the thousands, while in Europe it's in the millions. One death can in itself be impossible to bear.

And here's the thing. Those deaths and their impact accumulate. We didn't just learn today that we lost 24 soldiers. We lost 24 worlds (because as the Jewish saying goes, "He who kills one person, it's as if he killed the entire world, and he who saves one person, it's as if he saved the whole world," Mishna Sanhedrin 4.5) and we lost them as a part of now over 220 soldiers we lost in this war (see below a map of Israel with a red dot for every place where at least one soldier was killed), which was forced upon us with the murder and destruction of over 1,200 worlds, which comes after 75 years of a conflict we didn't want, in which we lost 28,000 worlds, and that followed a genocide in which we lost at least 6,000,000 worlds, and that in itself is the peak of almost two thousand years of persecution, during which the full and total number of Jews lost, of worlds destroyed just because of antisemitism, will never be known. All I know is that the Jews we know today, we're not the Jewish people. We are what's left of the Jewish people. And we will live. Am Yisrael Chai. Always. In the face of countless attempts at our destruction, we're still here. But we remember them all. Every single soul lost. Every world destroyed. Every child that had been murdered, every child that will never get to be born. We have lost 24 worlds today, and the fact that we have lost so many before, only makes the loss worse.

And we would not have lost a single person in the fighting in Gaza if we had actually been guilty of the crimes they accuse us of. We could have wiped out all of Gaza from the air, without risking the life of a single soldier on the ground. Every one of the Israeli soldiers killed, died to protect Israelis, as well as to save Palestinian civilians.

The way I feel right now, I think about the words of one member of Kissufim who I heard today: "We are broken, but strong."

May the memory of those lost be a blessing, every single one of them, every Jewish person, and non-Jew killed for standing with Jews, in every generation.

You're all still with me, I carry all of you in my heart, always.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)