The Lies That Blind

Israel Denied, Gaza Betrayed

History’s most devastating weapons are not always made of iron and fire. Often they are words, repeated until they harden into myth. When lies settle into the soil, they bind generations in suffering: Israel denied, Gaza betrayed.

The Lies That Erase

In 1947, a boy stepped onto the docks at Haifa. His coat still carried the smoke of Europe’s chimneys, and in his hand was a newspaper scrap announcing the United Nations vote for partition. For him, it was not an act of politics but an act of permission—to live, to breathe, to stand again in a world that had nearly ended him.

And yet, from the first day, he was told his story was false. He was accused of being a colonizer in Jerusalem, where his ancestors had prayed for centuries, a usurper in Hebron, where his forebears lay buried. The lie demanded that he surrender the thread his people had carried through exile: the psalms, the tongue revived on the lips of children, the ancient promise recited each year—Next year in Jerusalem.

Another falsehood spread: that Israel was born only from guilt, a gift of Europe to atone for its crimes. But history refutes this. Long before the Holocaust, Jewish farmers had tilled the Galilee, drained swamps, and rebuilt villages.

Long before smoke, there was song.

And then came the most insidious denial: that Jews are not a people, only a creed, undeserving of a nation. But no other faith preserved its language, its law, and its memory for two thousand years in exile. The boy understood what the lie refused: he had not arrived as a conqueror but returned as a son to his father’s home.

The Silence in Gaza

Seventy years later, in Gaza City, a shopkeeper shuttered his store against hunger. Bread was costly, lentils thin. In 2019, he joined a march called We Want to Live. He carried no weapon, only a cardboard sign.

For this, he was beaten. Masked men pulled him into a van, cracked his ribs, and left him in silence. His children learned the same lesson he already knew: in Gaza, speech is punished more swiftly than crime.

Still, those who ruled claimed to be defenders. They launched rockets from schoolyards and rooftops, drawing inevitable fire upon the people they governed. Whole neighborhoods were lost in the exchange, the price paid not by militants but by families.

And too often, the rockets failed even to cross the border. They fell instead into markets, into clinics, into apartments—turning neighbors into casualties. Yet the tunnels multiplied: not for bread, not for medicine, not for shelter, but for weapons.

The shopkeeper’s quiet question lingered: Why are there tunnels for guns but none for food? Why are there shelters for rockets but none for children?

The silence that answered him was its own reply.

Two Lives, One Thread

The refugee stepping onto Haifa’s shore and the shopkeeper limping home through Gaza’s alleys are joined by an invisible thread.

One was told he had no past.The other is told he has no future.Both longed for the ordinary—for bread, safety, and a place to belong.

What Must Be Seen

Blindness is easy; it spares us the effort of facing what is uncomfortable. But to deny Israel’s legitimacy is to breathe life into the oldest hatred dressed in new slogans. To excuse Hamas is to consign Gazans to the rule of those who exploit their suffering.

The truth is not complicated:

• Israel is not a historical accident but the homecoming of a people.

• Hamas is not Gaza’s protector but its jailer.

Peace begins not in rhetoric but in clarity—clarity to name lies for what they are, and courage to insist that dignity belongs equally to Jew and Arab alike.

The Last Word

The refugee’s hunger and the shopkeeper’s silence echo one another across decades. One was denied his history. The other is denied his hope. Both wait for the same future: not constructed on myth or manipulation, but on memory, truth, and the fragile, enduring belief that reality, however difficult, is better than illusion.

A Personal Note

The world feels as though it is hurtling forward at a pace none of us can keep. Violence in the Middle East and Ukraine, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the steady chorus of lies that uphold a misguided cause have left me shaken in ways I never expected.

As a Jew, Ancestry.com tells me I am 99.9% Jewish, with roots stretching back thousands of years—I can no longer set aside the truth of who I am. It rises in me now with every headline, every conversation, every silence where I once hoped for understanding.

What I feel most is loss. Not only for lives torn away overseas, but here, in my own small world. The people I once trusted—the neighbors, the colleagues, the friends I thought I knew—now look different to me. Their words, their excuses, or their silence have redrawn the map of my life. Gatherings where I once felt welcome now leave me hollow. A dinner table, a passing comment, a glance unreturned—each carries a weight I can’t ignore.

There is a loneliness in this that I had never imagined. Walking down the street, I wonder which side of the divide the faces belong to. I feel it in the empty pauses of conversations that used to run easy, in the hesitation before I speak my heart. Even the most ordinary rhythms—shopping, writing my stories, sitting in a café—are touched by this new awareness. It is as though a veil has been torn away, and the world I thought I knew is no longer the same.

I mourn that. I mourn the friendships that have slipped through my fingers, the simple trust of belonging that I can’t recover. I mourn the silence of those who know better but choose to turn away.

And yet, in this hollowing-out, something endures. I feel the thread of my people, stretched taut but never broken. It connects me not only to ancestors scattered across centuries, but to Jews living and grieving and enduring now. That thread steadies me when everything else feels fragile.

It is not comfort, not yet. But it is company. And in the ache of this isolation, I begin to sense the outline of something that might be rebuilt—new bonds, forged not out of ease, but out of truth. Perhaps out of this loneliness, a truer kind of community can take root: one bound not by convenience, but by conviction, by memory, and by hope.