I don’t feel like I am allowed to cry. But I can’t help it. I remember the sunset on October 6, 2023. It was a peaceful night. I was alone and I went for a hike. I felt an ease.
By Eve Barlow [evebarlow.substack.com]
I came home and sat on the couch, and then while I was sitting on the couch, in the same position, unmoved, events began unfolding with incremental videos and tweets and images of sheer horror and the room didn’t change, the couch felt the same, but the invisible thread that held our whole world order snapped, and all the compartments of our lives tumbled, and there was a white noise in the otherwise still and silent room, and that white noise grew louder and more deafening, and I could no longer hear anything else. It was as if a million atoms exploded, and I didn’t know how to put the universe back together again.
I am sitting on the same couch now, in the same spot, with the same stillness and the white noise remains. I am almost envious of those who can’t hear it. But I’m not sure the bliss of ignorance is the best option these days.
Today I have approached with dread the second anniversary of the 10/7 massacre. I could not find a single word or a complete sentence that could hold the magnitude of every feeling, nor the scope of those feelings. There was a before and we live in the after. I’m used to it here, but I don’t like it. Gone are both the people I knew before October 7, and gone is the person I was. I can’t even remember a time before all this. My memory is just this, it seems.
A rusty burned table in the middle of a blown-out room with a low-hanging light fixture swaying over the table in the wind, due to the exposure from the collapsed walls turned to rubble beneath my feet. On the table, charred knives and forks, the color of clay. And an ashtray with cigarettes that were somehow intact, next to an identifiable Lurpak packet. The butter inside had melted. The kitchen chairs were wonky. The house eviscerated. I wondered who sat at that table that October 7 morning. What were they about to have for breakfast that could be made more delicious with Lurpak? Would they smoke the cigarettes before or after coffee?
“We are standing in the Holocaust,” said Guy. Guy Nattiv is a film director. He was there with me, in Kibbutz Be’eri two months after October 7. He kept saying it over and over. “It’s the Holocaust.” His head in his hands. I’d look at his eyes and his mouth agape as we went around all the massacre sites, and I felt my eyes and my mouth were likely doing the same thing as his. He was correct. We were in the Holocaust. It had flown out from behind the museum displays. It had become real again. We were standing in it on a December morning in 2023, 80 years almost since the Holocaust in the Jewish land of Israel; the land of promise for those who survived.
The Holocaust. The destruction of the Jew. A kitchen decimated. The cornerstone of a family. The most intimate wreckage. The erasure of innocence. The dismantling of our homes. House after house. Street after street. Village after village. Kibbutz after kibbutz. A systematic, excessive hunt for Jewish people.
There is a display in the Holocaust museum of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem of civic life in Europe before the Nazis came to power. A picture of Jewish boys in an athletics team in their uniform, who later succumbed to the camps. The same picture hangs in the still standing community welcome center of Kibbutz Be’eri. The faces are slightly different, but the uniforms mostly the same, and it’s in color. I thought, I wonder if all those boys survived October 7.
I know what October 7 was. That’s not the problem. The problem is that so many of our neighbors do not. The beast was asleep, and it has stirred from its 80 year slumber.
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Tomorrow the people of the West will celebrate October 7; the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The only reason it did not go further in the land of Israel itself is because there the Jews have an army, and for two years that army is working to ensure that there will never be another October 7.
But what of the rest of the West? Why is it not also securing its future against an October 7? Do they think they’re special? That these Nazis will spare them? It’s curious to me how nobody admits that the West has been bought by the same Islamism that violated the south of Israel one morning two years ago today. Some do know that it’s happened but they won’t say it. To say it is to risk one’s life. Doesn’t that sound a little worrisome?
The people attending the below events commemorating the “martyrs” of October 7 are off to celebrate the militants who desecrated innocent civilians to such a degree that for weeks after October 7 the Israeli authorities were still searching for nails, teeth and bits of bone to identify the victims. These people are not protesting a “genocide”, they are advocating for the one that already happened. Six million was not enough for the Free Palestine maggots. To think this is about politics is to make a critical error for your future. This is not about politics at all. This is about survival.
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October 7 has transformed every single thing for me. The unthinkable horrors of the day were compounded by the urgent battleground that emerged with the shock of the world’s celebratory, gaslighting response. Which was then brutally elongated by the taunting, betraying and backstabbing of the people who ultimately failed to rise to the occasion. The never-ending acts of attention-seeking from the self-aggrandizing celebrities and intersectional Instagram activists have become nauseating, tedious and exhausting. To summarize what all of it has taught me is impossible. I can say that it’s revealed to me what true humanitarian advocacy is. It reaffirmed to me that the truth is wildly unpopular and that the people left standing next to us are the ones who value life, who value love, and who value the clearest kind of integrity and honesty – the type that can and does save people – more than they value the shallow facade of performance. October 7 was the test. What remains is what is real.
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I am sorry that we are in this new world. I wish we were not. Most of all, I wish for the 48 hostages for whom October 7 has truly never relented to be free from captivity, if not today, tomorrow, or the next day. Now.
Today, please join me in sending all of our light and strength to the families of fallen IDF soldiers, to the families of the hostages still in Gaza, to the released hostages, to the memories of the victims, and most of all to the survivors of the massacre who carry a trauma we do not carry. I want to acknowledge people who have wielded a superhuman strength in the day and weeks and months and – yes – years since, including a survivor who I love dearly, my friend Noam Ben David. We met in December 2023. As soon as Noam could walk again she traveled across Europe and America, including this Spring to spread the truth. These special souls are heroes who have never given up in the darkness.
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The list of people I could thank for their unparalleled bravery is far too long, but I will mention some for being guiding lights, and giants of thinking. They include Hillel Neuer, Natasha Hausdorff, Brendan O’Neill, David Collier, Lee Kern, Elica Le Bon, Douglas Murray, Remington Franklin, and my oldest friend, Ben M Freeman.
“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” The most popular line from Anne Frank’s diary. The line that the non-Jewish world popularized to let itself off the hook for the shame it carried for what it did to the Jewish people not even 100 years ago. If she hadn’t died of typhus at the age of 15 in Bergen-Belsen, I do wonder if young Anne would stand by those words now.
