A Rocket Hit My House. Now BDS Wants Me Out.
In January 2009, a long-range missile from Gaza was fired into Israel. This has been a common occurrence ever since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. As a child, I was taught at school to immediately run to a bomb shelter if sirens go off, so I did that.#YouNeverToldMe is our fault. #WeNeverToldYou
I was home alone in my room and quickly ran to the shelter we had in our house. It was 9:30 a.m. Normally, I would stay in the shelter and wait for the sirens to stop, as rockets rarely reached my town of Gedera. Unfortunately, this day was different. A mere two seconds after I entered the shelter, I heard a loud boom, and felt my home collapse. After leaving the shelter, I saw the rocket had hit my bedroom and killed my dog Rosie. I was only 12 years old.
The story of my home in Gedera is not unique. It resonates with tens of thousands of Israelis who have been under a constant threat of rockets from Gaza over the past 18 years. According to the Israeli Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, 40 percent of the children in the Israeli border town of Sderot suffer from PTSD. This is what happens when, at any moment, you could be given only 15 seconds to run for shelter. The rockets often come unprovoked, as we witnessed as recently as two weeks ago: A long-range missile was launched from Gaza and flew over Tel Aviv, hitting the community of Mishmeret and wounding seven Israeli civilians.
But rockets are not the only threat from Gaza. In 2018, hundreds of hectares of Israeli fields were burned in the area surrounding Gaza because of burning kites and explosive balloons released from Gaza. In the poverty-stricken Gaza Strip, where 1.8 million Palestinians are crammed into 140 square miles and unemployment is over 50 percent, Hamas brags about having a tunnel system twice as large as the Viet Cong. Hamas is said to have spent between $30 million and $90 million and used 600,000 tons of concrete to build these tunnels. In 2006, Hamas used the tunnels to kidnap the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. In July 2014, Hamas militants used a tunnel to prepare an ambush in the fields of Kibbutz Nir-Am, but the Israel Defense Forces stopped them.
These examples are not meant to compare suffering with suffering, or military might with military might — a framing the BDS movement relentlessly tries to push. The people of Palestine are suffering, and deserve a chance at a peaceful life with dignity. They need a country, but it doesn’t have to replace our own.
Purporting to speak for young American Jews, IfNotNow, and other radical organizations are running the #YouNeverToldMe Campaign, accusing Jewish institutions of not sharing the full story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a Jewish educator, I feel guilty as charged.The Arch of Titus
As a proponent of this campaign put it on Twitter
“The #YouNeverToldMe campaign was born out of a pattern of realizations that the education we receive about Israel is one-sided and incomplete. @IfNotNowOrg has developed a syllabus that includes Palestinian narratives and an honest look at the Occupation.”
Indeed, we Jewish educators are guilty of not sharing the full story. This is why I decided to launch the #WeNeverToldYou campaign, for Jewish educators and professionals, to help alleviate this crisis.
#WeNeverToldYou that in 1948 just three years after the end of the Holocaust, Palestinians joined a proud campaign that openly declared it wanted a second Holocaust, to annihilate all the Jews between the river and the sea.
The Jewish people have over a 3000 year connection to the land of Israel. The Arch of Titus in Rome, which showcases the Romans expelling the Jews after destroying and looting the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, serves as one of the main pieces of evidence that the Jews have an undeniable long history in Israel.