October 7, one year later: On feeling alone within the left, and everywhere else
Why is it so hard to find a place to grieve for Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians at the same time?
As October 7 approaches, I find myself getting anxious.
But not for the reasons you might think.
It’s not the anticipation of the grief or pain I may feel reliving the horror of that day a year ago.
Nor is it the anticipation of the grief or pain I may feel contemplating the horror of what has happened for a full year since.
It is the anticipation of this October 7 being a day where I have no place to fully feel and honor both.
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Before I go on…
I know you’re probably nervous to read further. I don’t blame you. No matter what I say next, it’s probably going to stir some feelings in you.
But let me just say this first, to get it out the way. Perhaps assuage some of your fears (or maybe give you advance warning - though I hope that, whatever you may believe, you’ll stick with me on this).
Everything I’m about to say exists within the context of the following:
I believe Palestinians deserve freedom and self-determination. I believe Netanyahu should be tried for war crimes. I believe that the attacks in Gaza (and now Lebanon) are horrific, and stopping them is urgent. I am anti-war, anti-violence, anti- people dying. I am against antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and all forms and systems of oppression. I want all people - including Jews, Israelis (no that’s not the same thing as Jews, though it can be), and Palestinians - to be free.
I also want to say that I know that the most important issue at hand is not my feelings. After all, to quote Kourtney Kardashian, “Kim, there’s people that are dying.” But I do think that my feelings may be representative of many people’s feelings. And that what I have to say has some bearing on the tactics, efficacy, and integrity of the Free Palestine movement - or at the very least, on helping some people feel less alone.
So. Now that we have that out of the way…
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Last October, after spending several weeks crying and in shock, and after making a few emotion-driven public mistakes - the most notable of them: posting inaccurate and unvetted information condemning Jewish Voice for Peace (a decades-old and well-respected political advocacy group I had somehow never come across before) as an untrustworthy organization - I set about the business of trying to better educate myself about the situation in Israel and Gaza, and also to find a place to process my complicated feelings and ask my complicated questions.
About the attacks and the circumstances (historical and current) surrounding them, of course. But also, many of those feelings and questions were about how people across the world had responded to the attacks. With celebrations. With parties. With calls for the extermination of the Jews. And about how people in my world, on the left, had responded too, with swift and immediate support for Hamas, and with almost none for Hamas’s victims.
I sought a place to sort it all out, and so I found a group holding an online gathering for anti-Zionist Jews to express “overwhelm, grief, rage, terror, numbness, alongside so many other emotions” in community.
To be completely transparent, I’m not always comfortable with the term anti-Zionist, as it has different meanings depending on who you’re talking to (including the idea that Israel as a nation should be dismantled with a haste and fervor that we somehow aren’t applying to any other nation-state, or that all Israelis should leave the country and “go back where they came from” - whatever that means). But I do agree with the fundamental tenet of anti-Zionism, which is that the founding of Israel, like the founding of many nations, was flawed or unjust in some way. (Many ways, in fact, to, you know, understate it.)
And so I thought this would be a place for me. A virtual minyan of leftie thinkers, trauma-informed and social justice-minded, with similar life experience, culture, and identity to me. A place I was safe to feel all the feelings - or at the very most basic level, to feel simple grief about the largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust.
But no.
I was stunned to discover that every single reading, prayer, speech, offering, or personal share focused only on “overwhelm, grief, rage, terror, numbness, alongside so many other emotions” as it related to Palestinians. Or, if there was grief related to being Jewish, it was grief that Jews could perpetrate such evil upon Palestinians.
(FWIW, this was also before Israel’s retaliation had risen to the level of being called genocide. It was still somewhat within what one might even, if you squinted, and believed in military action at all for any reason, consider a reasonable response, given the October 7 attacks.)
It became very clear very fast that this was not a space where I could show grief for Jews who died or were in captivity, nor anything even bordering on confusion or disorientation.
I was so surprised, and felt so isolated by this strange paradox and stark omission, that it made it hard for me to lean in to the grief I did feel for Gaza.
It is difficult, I have learned, to fully express only half of your emotions, while keeping the other half safely sealed up.
And so, when we were invited to take a moment to either share, or to simply feel our feelings in each other’s company, I let myself cry. Sob even. Microphone off, video on.
But my tears, rather than being for Palestinians or Israelis, as I would have hoped, and desperately needed, were mostly for myself.
Here I was, in a room full of Jewish lefties, theoretically my people, people who are known for their ability to hold intellectual paradox and nuance, and yet even here, as I had begun to find on social media and amongst friends, I had to keep my mouth shut. Could ask no questions. Get no answers. Show up only halfway.
And so began a year of struggling to find my way. Find my place. Find a way to engage with all of this, with the grief, with the activism, with my friends, in a way that feels authentic and emotionally unblocked.
I can’t say I have done a very good job at any of it, though not for lack of trying.
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As I think about all of this, of October 7, of the response to October 7, of the left and the Free Palestine movement, I keep thinking of 9/11.
I think about how many of us, in the aftermath of that tragedy, instinctively understood what about America, specifically, and The West, more broadly, might inspire people to hate us so much, and feel so helpless in the face of more formal diplomatic channels, that they would both form terrorist networks and commit such horrific acts against us.
We also (rightfully) feared that our government would overreact, and take retaliatory action that would only make the whole situation worse (and prove the terrorists justified and righteous).
And yet.
I don’t remember any of us celebrating the attacks on the Twin Towers or the Pentagon.
I don’t remember any of our anti-war protests being planned specifically for the day of September 11.
I don’t remember anyone tearing down pictures of the missing, the way Free Palestine activists have torn down posters of hostages.
In fact, what I remember is that we were able to hold space for people’s deep grief around 9/11, and fear around possible further terrorist attacks, while also passionately opposing our country’s response to that tragedy.
Now, of course, I acknowledge the situations are different.
For one, the specifics of the 9/11 attacks were uniquely… cohesive. Visual. Cinematic, even. And so obviously provable (what with the towers being there and then, you know, not). We watched it all happen on the same three or four channels. One set of images. One narrative.
October 7 was, by design, chaos. It was a guerrilla attack using multiple tactics and weapons on a variety of seemingly unconnected targets in a variety of places. Propaganda campaigns on all sides made getting accurate information difficult. Our brave new world of social media made misinformation easier to find than the truth. It was easy to believe anything, or to not know what to believe at all. And since so many of us now get our news according to our specific, personally tailored algorithm, literally no one was seeing the same thing at the same time.
Secondly, the relationship between attacker and target on 9/11 wasn’t quite so clear as on October 7. As in, yes, America has caused harm to people in the Middle East, but how we’ve hurt Saudi Arabian Islamists through a series of shady and violent and often surreptitious diplomatic dealings and wars is a more indirect line to draw than the line between how Israelis have hurt Palestinians by seizing their homes and land and forcing them into settlements.
And finally, we weren’t talking as much back then about colonialism, imperialism, capitalism… not like we are now. Like, sure, of course we were discussing those topics. I was there in 1999 at the WTO protest in Seattle with all the other idealistic young grunge anarcho-hippies yelling at the cops to “march with us.”
But Occupy Wall Street didn’t happen until 2011. The Land Back movement didn’t start in earnest until the late 2010s. Black Lives Matter, first in 2013 and then more broadly and powerfully in 2020.
The way we understand and discuss the violence of our institutions is much different now, both on the left, amongst ourselves, and in the general mainstream, than it was then.
So, there’s that.
But I also can’t shake the feeling that there’s something else at play here. (And no, I don’t just mean the possible flavors of internalized and unconscious antisemitism on the left - though I believe that’s there too, and maybe I’ll get into that another day.)
That part of it is: 9/11 involved us. Directly. And so we were able to see its victims and those who mourned them as… people. In a way that we (and by “we” I mean my friends on the left) somehow aren’t seeing the victims of October 7.
Of course we weren’t going to circulate anti-war materials that glorified Al Qaeda, or call the plane hijackers “freedom fighters,” because we identified more with the victims of 9/11 than “we” do with the victims of October 7.
Back then, we might’ve lost people in the Towers, or know people who did. And even if we didn’t, we remembered the horror, the terror, the shock, the fear of that morning. Wondering what was happening. If it was over, or if more was coming. If it would happen here, in the big populated city near us, or maybe in the next town over, where there’s a military base. Was it safe to send our kids to school? Was it safe to be in a mall? At Disneyland? Anywhere crowded? Anywhere with a power plant, a plentiful natural resource, a transportation or communication hub? Anywhere someone in the Middle East might be able to find on a map?
We would never disrespect the pain and loss people felt on that day. Nor our own trauma.
Even if the terrorists had a reason.
Even if our own country’s actions had contributed to the conditions that created - and even armed - those terrorists in the first place.
Even if we couldn’t quite stand our own country, and all its embarrassing post-9/11 patriotism.
9/11 was a sacred day of remembrance and mourning. In many ways, it still is.
All the other days of the year were for railing against the government that inspired such an attack.
And yet… I fear it will not be so for October 7.
That somehow, the movement won’t have the same room, the same grace, the same compassion, the same ability to hold two things to be true (that October 7 was terrible, and so is both what led to it and what came from it), as we did back then.
I fear this because it wasn’t even so on the first October 7.
On that day, within hours of hearing the news of the brutal attacks at the Nova Festival and multiple kibbutzes and communities and homes across Israel, I began to see social media posts of people celebrating. Celebrating brutal assaults, rapes, kidnaps, and murders. Congratulating the perpetrators on a successful mission.
Within days, everyone on the left seemed to be calling the kidnappers freedom fighters.
Several local branches of Black Lives Matter posted memes in support of the attacks, with the outline of the paratroopers who snatched young festival-goers and forced them into trucks and then into months of captivity (the ones who weren’t killed, that is) as the hero image. Some eventually removed those images, under pressure, but the general sentiment remained: October 7 = Good.
Or at the very least, October 7 = Worth it. Collateral damage. A necessary evil. By any means necessary and all.
But can you imagine someone saying that about 9/11?
That those people burning alive in those buildings was okay, and not worth mourning or mentioning because oppressed peoples deserve to resist their oppressors by any means necessary?
Because, and I’m sure you already saw this assertion coming, for some of us, October 7 felt like 9/11.
It felt close. Personal. Traumatic.
It shook us on a deep level. With grief for people we know or who feel like people we could know, and for a place we feel an affinity for, whether rightly or wrongly. With fear for what this could mean for not only Israelis but for Jews, there and everywhere. With echoes of epigenetic trauma.
For me, with my Jewish face and my Jewish name, I felt fear deep in my bones, in a way I’ve never quite felt before, that I might be unsafe. Right here. In my house in California. That this might be the beginning of the end of the part of my life where antisemitism only affected me in ways I could mostly duck and dodge - offensive jokes, assumptions made by other people that I might never even hear about, maybe having to be a little extra cautious in certain parts of the country or the world.
October 7 was the day I really understood what it feels like to be afraid for my life, because of who I am and how I look. (And yes, I am aware that it is a great privilege to go 46 years without having that understanding. But I would not mind having gone longer, thanks.)
And so October 7, like 9/11, was a really big fucking deal. Like, personally. To me. To a lot of us. And not just the “brainwashed Zionists” among us. But to radical lefties who happen to just have or feel ties to Israel as much as they do/did to New York.
And though it was such a big deal, I didn’t feel like I could talk about it. Not openly. Not messily. Not freely. Not on social media. Not with many of my friends.
Imagine not feeling allowed to express your grief or fear about 9/11.
Not being allowed to talk about the people who died in the towers or on one of the planes. Not feeling safe to process how, for awhile, you were afraid for your life or the lives of people around you, except in whispers, behind closed doors, in private messages on Instagram, started gingerly, in code, until you’re sure the person on the other end of the phone can hear your grief without calling you a Nazi or a Zionist.
Imagine, in the days and weeks after 9/11, feeling like you are only allowed to talk about the (admittedly terrible) horrors done to people in the Middle East, to what may have driven the jihadists into those planes, to what might befall Afghanistan.
Have friends in New York you can’t reach? Too bad. Having a visceral trauma response to seeing people jumping to their death out of a burning high rise? Get over it. If you can’t, you must not be a good enough activist. You might as well be a Republican. You’re either a part of the problem or a part of the solution. Are you crying? Those tears better be for Muslims.
It sounds absurd - and it is.
But it’s what happened a year ago, and it’s still happening.
And what’s sad is that it doesn’t just hurt me, or people like me, but I think it hurts the movement too.
Those of you who may have noticed that I can be so vocal about some topics but have been strangely quiet on this one, except for the occasional post or mention or “like” ?
This is why.
It doesn’t feel safe to say all of what I want to say, and so I don’t feel honest saying much of anything at all. I keep my feelings, and my activism, mostly to myself.
But you know me. I prefer to share. I prefer community. I have a megaphone and I like to use it. And I’d like to think the cause can use me. Can benefit from me, and people like me.
If only it would make room for me.
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I expect that tomorrow - which will probably be today by the time you read this - there will be a million posts about the weekend’s protests. Further calls to action and more protest. Powerful and heartbreaking montages marking a year of atrocities committed against Palestinians.
And I expect that none of my leftie friends will also be posting about the hostages still being held by Hamas. None posting montages marking the year anniversary of those attacks. No reels saying prayers for the Jewish dead, nor naming the many scary incidents of antisemitism committed around the world either in the name of Palestine or simply because bigots can now seemingly get away with it.
I also have not been able to find a virtual gathering - or even an IRL one (not that I could attend, but it would be nice to know one exists) - that seems to have space for the full expansiveness of what I’m feeling and want to discuss and have reflected back to me.
Even the synagogues on the list my friend posted, of High Holidays services that are friendly to anti-Zionists, used language that suggests what I’d find there might more of the same of what I encountered in that group last year.
No matter where I turn tomorrow, I expect to feel the same I have all year: forced into one of two spaces - spaces that align with my politics in every other way, but where I can’t express my grief about October 7, or spaces where I can express grief but people are otherwise not aligned with my politics.
Neither is what I want. Neither feels comforting. Or inspiring. Or politically activating. If I can’t enter the space without damming up half of my emotions, it’s hard to see why I should enter at all.
And so I don’t know what I will do tomorrow, or where or if I will seek community.
Perhaps I will light a candle. Perhaps I will sing the mourning prayers myself (or, since I’m such a half-secular and half-educated half-Jew, I’ll sing whatever Hebrew songs I can remember, and hope that God and the dead know what I mean).
Perhaps I will reach out to the few friends I know who can hold me, and this.
Perhaps I will avoid social media altogether. Or perhaps I will be glued to it - hoping I’m wrong about this all. Hoping that I will be invited back into the fold of the left.
All of me. With my grief and my grappling.
I hope this for all of us. Those of us in the shadows, mourning and struggling alone.
I hope this for those like me, who just need a little space and a little compassion in order to take my place beside my friends, to advocate for peace with my whole chest.
I hope this for those, too, who have been pushed farther to the right on this issue because they felt forced to choose between grieving and activism, and so they chose the side that allowed them to grieve. Those possible allies, alienated, unnecessarily.
I hope this for Gaza, who needs as many people feeling full, unfettered compassion and support for them as possible.
And for Israeli and Jewish victims of violence too, who need the same.
I hope this for all of us, for only through this can we find each other’s hands in the dark. And only through that can we find our way to something like peace and liberation.
For all those feeling alone right now, I see you. I love you. I’m here. I’m safe. Reach out.
And for everyone else, I still love you too. I hope you still love me.
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P.S. I am always up for discussing hard topics, as long as the other person shows up in good faith, seeking to understand and find common ground. If you would like to discuss this with me, in comments or in private messages, I am more than willing, as long as you come in the spirit and energy of open-heartedness, compassion, kindness, and respect. In fact, I very much welcome it. I simply ask that you be honest with yourself about your emotional state and your intentions, and to be gentle with me. Writing this post was vulnerable and scary, and I have limited energy for emotional stress and conflict. xo, M
On a planet where we all have so much in common, it can be damn near impossible to find a corner to fit in and feel our own mix of feels together. Humaning is just hard.
Proud of you for facing your fears, thank you for your vulnerability and sharing your experience.