Arise and go now to the city of slaughter; Into its courtyard wind thy way;
There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head,
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay/The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead.
In the City of Slaughter, Chaim Nachman Bialik following the 1903 Kishinev pogrom
It was the Saturday morning of Thanksgiving weekend when I came into the kitchen to find the ashen faces of my husband and sons looking up from their smartphones, where a modern pogrom was playing out in real time in southern Israel.
So began, for me, the single deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust — and the year of watching everything I once held as steadfast and true die in its wake.
Terrorists became heroes, the indigenous people of Israel were branded colonizers, a persecuted people for millennia fighting a war they didn’t start nor asked for were recast as genocidal Nazis and being Jewish in Canada meant being ostracized within your profession, openly vilified on the street and abandoned by your own government.
In the Jewish tradition, we sit shiva, or mourn, for the dead for seven days. Since Oct. 7, it’s felt like I’ve been sitting shiva for a year — for the murdered, the fallen, the abducted and the sense of safety I used to know here at home.
It was the Jewish Sabbath, and the holiday of Simchat Torah, when thousands of gleeful Hamas terrorists from Gaza breached the sleeping Israeli border using bulldozers, jeeps, motorcycles and hang gliders.
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Horrific images of the surprise Black Saturday massacre haunt my nightmares — baby nurseries at Kibbutz Be’eri splattered with blood, crib sheets soaked red, girls dragged screaming from their boyfriends, bullet-riddled cars strewn along the road of the dead who had tried to flee the slaughter unfolding at the Nova music festival just after dawn.
In the kibbutzim, families were incinerated in their own homes: hiding in their safe rooms — because living in Israel means alway needing to have somewhere to escape –– comforting their crying children as the shouts of “Allahu Akbar” neared and the spray of bullets ricocheted off the concrete walls and then the sound of grenades tossed inside.
Rescue workers told of babies burned alive or butchered in their beds. A pregnant Bedouin woman on her way to the hospital who was shot in the stomach, her baby girl delivered alive only to die hours later. A father who threw himself on a grenade to save his two sons; his executor then interrogating the man’s screaming children while helping himself to a Coke from their fridge.
Naama Levy, kidnapped from Nahal Oz military base, her hands tied behind her back, the rear of her sweatpants soaked in blood. Female bodies that arrived at morgues with bloodied underwear, butchered breasts, mutilated groins.
And the perpetrators of this savagery? The jubilant barbarians livestreamed themselves committing the most abominable atrocities with what a witness would call “crazy joy in their eyes.” One terrorist called his proud parents from the phone of a woman he’d just murdered to joyously boast that he’d killed 10 Jews with his bare hands.
More than 1,200 were butchered that day and more than 250 men, women and children were kidnapped and taken back to the dank tunnels of Gaza. In the November 2023 ceasefire, 105 were released. About 100 hostages remain, and among them ginger-haired baby Kfir Bibas, who turned one in captivity.
But the monstrous Oct. 7 attack was only the beginning of this dark year.
It was waking up in the following days, numb and grieving, to find people actually justifiying what happened and unabashedly tearing down posters of the kidnapped. Where was the outrage? The Red Cross? The United Nations? The international demand for the release of the hostages? The women’s groups condemning the sexual violence?
The silence was more than deafening. It was stunningly shocking. It was as if I’d been thrown into an alternate reality where up was down, left was right and evil was celebrated as “resistance.”
Israel was under attack — not only from Gaza but from Lebanon, where the similarly Iranian-backed Hezbollah began their barrage of rockets into northern Israel — causing the forced evacuation of tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes. Tens of thousands remain displaced from the south.
What other country could stand for that?
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So like any nation fighting for its very survival, where its innocent citizens have been murdered, captured and rendered homeless, it fought back. Its foe is a jihadi terror organization that has the elimination of Israel in its very charter, a “government” that has misappropriated millions of dollars of international aid meant to improve and rebuild the lives of 2 million oppressed Palestinians in Gaza only to use them as human shields while constructing a subterranean network of military tunnels and an arsenal of weapons in hospitals and residential buildings to achieve its diabolical goals.
It is Hamas which has brought endless suffering upon its civilians by refusing to return the hostages and end their rocket attacks.
Yet it’s Israel who is the pariah?
As the executive director of UN Watch Hillel Neuer recently noted, “Only Israel can be attacked by terrorist armies on seven fronts and be labelled by the UN as the aggressor.”
And Zionists are the villians for daring to believe in the legitimate right to a democratic homeland in that narrow sliver of land surrounded by vast autocratic enemies on all sides, a country we have yearned to return to from exile for 2,000 years, legally established in 1948 by the UN?
I’d foolishly thought anti-Semitism on a wide scale was done, a historical relic. My wise father, whose grandparents, aunts and all but one uncle were murdered in the Holocaust, thought me naive. For years, he’d been warning his more liberal daughter about the radical left indoctrination going on in universities, unions and political parties. I thought he was alarmist. I thought he was exaggerating.
How sadly right he was. Anti-Zionism is simply the newest acceptable iteration of anti-Semitism.
Just days after the massacre, the streets of Toronto erupted in mass protests with a mob of mask-wearing, pro-Hamas radicals — but where did they march? Not to the Israeli consulate but to a Jewish neighbourhood in North York. For far too long, our mayor and police looked the other way.
Protestors set up intimidating university encampments with their glorification of terrorism and their no-go zones for Jewish students. And for far too long, weak administrators looked the other way.
Social media became a depressing cesspool of hateful anti-Semitism so soul crushing that, for my mental health, I had to look the other way.
Which brings me to a brief interjection here for the clueless TikTok generation: Gaza is not occupied territory. Israel unilaterally withdrew from the area in 2005, even forcefully evacuated settlers who didn’t want to leave, in hopes of a future Palestinian state that would live peacefully next door.
Instead, within two years, Gaza was in the clutches of the ruling Islamist radical, Iranian-funded Hamas they so admire — the same monsters who treat women as third class citizens and lynch members of their LGBTQ+community. Once in control, Hamas promptly began raining rockets on Israel mere kilometres away.
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But never let the facts get in the way of a viral post.
Being a Jew today in Canada is to be demonized on all sides. Jewish professors, teachers and doctors are isolated and shunned. Neighbours look the other way. Synagogues are firebombed. Jewish schools require police patrols. University codes of conduct and Canadian laws go unenforced.
Hate crimes against Jews in this city have increased by an astounding 69% since January.
Meanwhile, my government ignores people like me. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Foreign Affairs sidekick Melanie Joly pander only to their NDP bedfellows and the much larger Muslim-Canadian vote.
And I wonder: Was this hatred really here all along, just beneath the surface, now free to spew with impunity?
There have been allies who have bravely stood up: I’ve never been more grateful for our Toronto Sun writers — Warren Kinsella, Brian Lilley, Joe Warmington, and Bryan Passifiume — and for the great Rosie DiManno at the Star.
Support has also come from unexpected corners — Indigenous leader Karen Restoule spoke at our synagogue last week of the flak she and Harry Laforme received for their National Post column describing themselves as “Anishinaabe Zionists” who reject “the words ‘colonizer,’ ‘settler’ and ‘decolonize’ to justify terror, violence, kidnapping and rape and targeted civilian massacres.”
So we are not alone. A recent Abraham Global Peace Initiative study found 77% of Ontarians reject the violent anti-Semitism directed at Jewish communities. Toronto Police have stepped up enforcement and are now charging protesters waving flags of illegal terrorist organizations.
A year on and the heaviness in my heart is a dull ache I’ve come to know well. The blinders are stripped away. The seismic shock has slowly given way to a determination to stand tall, proud and unafraid. Tonight, together with thousands of others, we will rally to mourn the dead on this grim anniversary, demand the hostages’ return and pray for peace — for everyone.
Bring Them Home. Am Yisrael Chai.