The Magical Umbrella Comes Soon

It's Friday in my beloved country...and Israelis are experiencing emotional overload. We are carrying our grief, as we have carried it now for 2 years, for 80 years, for thousands of years. Sometimes that grief settles within us, and other times, it burns like acid in our stomachs.

And with our grief, we are filled with resentment that we don't know how to process. We told you from the beginning, but you chose to believe the lies. We told you what they did, how they lie.
We told you how they raped our girls, desecrated their bodies. How they burned people alive, women, men, children, babies. Now the UN has concluded there is indeed evidence of systematic sexual assaults.

We told you that we were not the ones who committed genocide. Their numbers are lies, fabricated, exaggerated, manipulated. Lies. Once again the UN has lowered the actual number and more importantly confirmed what we knew all along. The majority of casualties were combatants, to a ratio of combatant to civilian deaths unheard of in modern warfare.

 
We told you they were starving our hostages, abusing them, torturing them, putting them in cages, chaining them. Now our hostages have come home and testified to the truth of the agonies they suffered, the sexual assaults that Muslims kill people for...the terrorists themselves committed.
Our hostages repeatedly tell of how their guards had food, while they were intentionally starved. How they could smell all that their captors had to eat. And now the UN admits there is food in Gaza and people aren't starving.

We told you they were depraved, brutal savages, and now the evidence has been shown to the world...as they return pieces of our hostages, the body of a soldier they held for 11 years, the bodies of Kfir and Ariel Bibas which show these babies were strangled with the bare hands of their captors.
We told you and yet you chose to believe them...the monsters that came on October 7, the people who voted in Hamas and even today a majority still support.

 
And as you believed their blood libels, nonsense stories that typically matched what they were or had done to us...with no physical evidence. You believed them. And so we are filled with disgust, resentment, and a need to re-balance ourselves.

It's Friday in Israel, the challah is rising. Soon all the food will be cooking. A quick vacation up north last week yielded the most amazing pictures. Some I will post and write about. For now, I turn inward, to my country, my children. I cook and clean and organize. 

Soon I will light the candles and the magical umbrella of Shabbat will be lowered from the heavens and you, those of you who believed them, those of you who said that we were the ones committing genocide, those of you who ignored our starving hostages while Gaza laughed at your gullibility...soon, you will not see us or more exactly, we will not see you.

You see, the magical umbrella reflects back only our light, our world. You are gone from it. For 25 hours, you don't exist. And we recharge our batteries, we talk with our friends as if we don't have a care in the world. We feed our children and replenish our strength so that when the magical umbrella lifts Saturday night, we won't be sick at the sight of you.

 
Instead, our patience will be back and we will try again to tell you, to show you, to demand that you see who we are...and what they have become.

For now, go away. Shabbat is coming. Peace...the precious peace of the Sabbath.

Shabbat shalom.