The Hamas attack on Israel has opened deep historical wounds

Centuries of trauma have been laid bare by the current conflict

When I was young, we used to sit around my grandmother’s kitchen table and ask her about the Holocaust. We’d try to get her to talk about the war, how she survived, what happened to her family. She wasn’t interested; she only wanted to talk about Israel.

“When are you going to Israel?” she’d ask me and my sisters. “Why go on vacation to anywhere else but Israel,” she’d say. She told us repeatedly how important Israel was, how she wanted to be buried in Jerusalem. Israel was one of the few subjects she would talk about—that and why we weren’t dating someone Jewish.

When the Hamas attack on Israel occurred on October 7, my grandmother was one of the first people I thought of. I was in the Baltics at the time, on a speaking tour sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, trying to figure out what was happening amid all the misinformation and disinformation in my newsfeed (more on that in a subsequent newsletter). As the shock subsided, and the horrific nature of the attack became clear—victims burned alive, pregnant women stabbed in the stomach then shot in the head—my grandmother came into focus. If she’d been alive, seeing such images would have broken her heart. Perhaps it was better that she was no longer with us.

My grandmother died five years ago, after which I wrote about how she survived the Holocaust. Forced to leave her home in 1939, she did not settle permanently in Canada until 1949. She was on the run for ten years. During the war her family fled first from her hometown, where she had lived all her life, into the countryside, thinking they’d be safe from the advancing Nazis. After her family were murdered, she fled again, to a farm. Betrayed by a local resident, she fled again, into the forests. After the war she returned home, only to learn that Poles had planned to kill her for trying to take back her family’s property. She fled again, across Europe, eventually winding up in a Displaced Person’s camp in Germany. She wanted to go to Israel, but my grandfather preferred Canada, where he had relatives.

Ten years on the run. Ten years without a home. Ten years escaping people trying to kill her.

In many ways, my grandmother’s story parallels Jewish existence. Each year on Passover, we recall being on the run for forty years in the desert trying to find a home. Once we reached the Land of Israel, we built a home, only to have it destroyed first by the Babylonians and then by the Romans. We were forced to flee into the diaspora. Jews were forced to flee England in 1290. Jews were forced to flee Spain in 1492. The Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam (later New York) in 1654 were actually refugees from Brazil who were fleeing Portuguese Inquisition. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, repeated terror attacks against Jews in the Russian empire spurred millions to flee to the United States and Palestine, first under Ottoman rule and later under British rule.

(Note: Jews have had so much violence directed at us that it, literally, has required new words to be invented. The word pogrom was invented in the 19^th century to describe the rape, murder and torture of Jews; the word Holocaust was invented in the 20^th century to describe the systematic mass murder of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators).

One could make an argument, then, that an interpretation of Jewish history is that of continually being on the run from those who want us dead. To have a home where we do not have to run, where we can live and worship freely, has been a central theme of Jewish existence for 2,000 years. That’s, in part, how Zionism emerged; a nationalist movement of the 19^th century that envisioned a home where Jews would no longer have to run. It’s why the last two lines of the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah, written in 1886, translate to “to be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.”

In the first part of the 20^th century, that dream became a possibility. The mandate that British Palestine would eventually become a location for a Jewish homeland gave hope to Jews worldwide that they and their children would one day be a free people. In 1948, that possibility became a reality with the creation of the State of Israel. Jews from Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Cyprus, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Dagestan, Uzbekistan, Germany, Austria, France, England, the United States, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, India, Ethiopia, Argentina and more would immigrate to Palestine and Israel throughout the 20^th century—hundreds of thousands before WWII, and hundreds of thousands after—in search of the peace and security that had eluded them and their ancestors. That was why Israel was so important to my grandmother; it symbolized the safety and security that she never had.

Those who are not Jewish may not be fully aware of this traumatic heritage. But such is one reason why this attack has been so triggering for Jews around the world. As the Israeli author Yuval Harari said recently in an interview with CNN, through a Jewish lens, October 7 is laden with historical resonance. Once again, someone has resorted to unspeakable violence in order to force us from our homes. One of the iconic images from the Hamas attack was Israelis running from a music festival where 260 people were slaughtered. That’s not supposed to happen in Israel. Israel is supposed to be the place where Jews no longer have to run. Where we can simply live, in our homes, without worrying about the next person who wants to slice our throats. That explains, in part, the ferocity of the Israeli response. Israel seeks to send a message to Hamas that despite any terror it chooses to unleash, it will stand in place. It will never run.

For those who are not Jewish, perhaps this offers a window into why this attack has felt so different from prior terror attacks in Israel, of which there have been many. (When I visited Israel in the 1990’s, Hamas and Islamic Jihad were in the midst of blowing up buses). Apart from the sheer barbarity of raping women and executing babies, this murderous rampage sent Jews running in ways that opened deep historical scars of past pogroms and expulsions. Israelis know that the goal of Hamas is to drive them from their homes; the slogan “From the river to the sea” is code for liquidating all Jews from Israel via displacement or slaughter. Israel’s goal is to ensure that never happens. So long as that conflict remains unresolved, the bloodshed will continue. Hamas will resort to violence, Israel will do the same, and innocent people on all sides will suffer.

In Lithuania, I heard a story of an 85-year-old Jewish woman who was evacuated from Israel. She was a Holocaust survivor, and as a child she had been on the run during the war, eventually settling in Ukraine. When Russia invaded Ukraine, she escaped to Israel. When Hamas attacked Israel, she was evacuated to Lithuania, where her daughter and son-in-law live. Even in her twilight years, she was still on the run.

To be Jewish is to live with the knowledge that any of us, one day, may have to flee our homes escaping those who wish to do us harm. The dream is that one day, none of us—of any religion, race or ethnicity—will have to run anymore. All of us should hope that day comes soon, where all people of all faiths and cultures can peacefully coexist, free of bloodshed and violence, living freely side-by-side.

Despite all the horrors, my hope is not yet lost.

-JS

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P.S. – There is so much to understand about this conflict, far too much for one article.

As someone who has studied the situation in the Middle East for many years, I’m cognizant that the Muslim world has a very different interpretation than do Jews. As a former administrator in academia, I am also keenly aware of the alarming antisemitism within American universities. And our online information ecosystem has been rife with misinformation and disinformation, revealing the ways that e-history operates in these fast-moving, highly emotional conflicts.

Each of these subjects is worthy of a newsletter article, which I hope to write in the weeks ahead.

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