At the beginning of the war, someone from my synagogue waiting for orders on the border with Gaza sent me a series of agitated voicenotes, asking for proof of goodness in the Palestinian people. Can you find me ten righteous Palestinians? Five? I sent him a batch of screenshots, concerned and loving check-ins from colleagues and friends in the West Bank who wrote to me on October 7th. Were these messages public? No. Dissatisfied, or maybe relieved, he went into Gaza to protect his people against what he believed to be an entire nation of monsters.

In the middle of the war,  a particularly dark stretch of footage came out of Gaza. Some of the worst videos and photos penetrated the protective cocoon of grief and anger over What They Did To Us. 

In the office, I stood with one hand pressing my phone tightly against my ear, my back to the door and my face to the window. 

“I’m sorry,” I said into the phone. I was staring through recently cleaned glass at a side street in Ramat Gan, but I was seeing a child’s face in what had once been a street in Beit Lahiya. “I’m sorry.” 

“Habibti,” said my friend on the other side of the line. “I have been waiting for this call for a long time. I have been waiting for you to see.” She meant, to see the child. 

Tears rolled down my face and I wiped them away quickly. I understood that my tears were irrelevant. She wouldn’t even have a screenshot of this conversation to send her friends, when they asked her to justify the existence of Israelis. 

“I love you, my friend.”

I hung up and stared out the window, counting breaths until my face could pretend that it understood the amputated timeline of our homeland again. 

In October, somewhere between the second and third week after the massacre, a Hebronite from our youth project wrote to me to say: what happened was wrong. 

I’m sorry I didn’t........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)