As I was preparing to go to sleep during the early hours of Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023, I received a stream of alerts from Israeli news sources, identifying a barrage of rockets that had come from Gaza and were being sent toward Israel. Initially, I was not incredibly concerned when I saw this news. Rockets are often sent from Gaza toward Israel and usually inflict little damage on Israel itself due to both the Iron Dome, a rocket interception system used by the Israeli military, and the availability of bomb shelters. Knowing this was probably one of many similar instances in the ongoing conflict, I simply turned my phone off and went to sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, I realized that I had been incredibly wrong. Reports of rockets being used as a distraction to allow for Hamas terrorists to infiltrate into Israel, along with the news of vast amounts of Israelis killed and taken hostage, flooded my social media. I was beginning to sense that what was currently happening — and what was going to continue happening — in Israel was unlike anything I had ever experienced, and, to say the least, I was scared.
Over the past week, my friends and I, both in Binghamton and literally around the world, have been in a state of shock. Every single Jewish person I know, including myself, is close with someone who is currently missing and being taken hostage, fighting in combat or has been brutally murdered. This shock is a collective feeling among the Jewish people I speak to — the inability to focus on anything except the rapid-fire news coming out of Israel, the death toll and the constant checking of social media and WhatsApp to make sure that your family and friends there are safe and okay. It has been the only thing anyone has been able to talk about. It is exhausting, and there is a collective sense of grief that is too large to describe.
And yet, we feel as though we are not doing enough. Donations are being made to emergency services, families devastated after their communities were demolished and soldiers needing equipment. But how can any of our struggles here compare to what the Israeli people themselves are going through?
I have seen the Jewish community come together in an unimaginable way. Binghamton University’s Jewish community held a vigil the following Monday night after putting a program together in under 24 hours — over 600 members of the Jewish community and allies came to show their solidarity with Israel. We read prayers, sang and shared personal stories on the verge of tears. The sentiment of the week was said best by Emily Lillian, Hillel at Binghamton’s Israel fellow who has since been called back to go fight in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — “Israel is my family.”
The larger Jewish community has come together to pray for peace, and yet, even in places we are supposed to feel safe, on our college campuses and in our schools, there are calls of “long live the intifada,” “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and in Sydney, Australia, “gas the Jews.” We understand the enormous privilege we have in the United States of America, and every single person I have spoken to wants to make sure innocent Palestinian civilians are protected during this time, in addition to condemning the deaths of innocent civilians in Gaza. These calls, however, of “long live the intifada” are simply reprehensible disguises that call for the destruction of the state of Israel and ask for continued acts of violence against the Jewish people, proving to us again that there is simply nowhere for us to feel safe.
In addition, the language being used surrounding the conflict right now lacks any sort of context or understanding of the history that led to the creation of the State of Israel or of what the Jewish people have gone through. To simply label the state of Israel as a “colonial state” ignores the basic fact that the Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel. It also compares the Jewish people who started the state of Israel to incredibly powerful empires during the 18th and 19th centuries, at a time when Eastern European, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews were experiencing pogroms — violent riots started with the goal of massacring Jews — at the hands of these very colonial empires and who also experienced violence at an unprecedented level. The state of Israel came about after the systematic genocide and destruction of the Jewish people by the Nazi regime, and labeling it a “colonial state” in an effort to undermine what the Jewish people have gone through is incredibly ignorant and dismissive of the actual history and generational trauma we share.
The Jewish people right now, myself included, feel incredibly alone. I am not defending the incredibly right-wing government of Israel or extremist Israelis calling for the destruction of Gaza, both of which contain serious issues and contribute to the very real lack of rights that Palestinian civilians face. There is, of course, a legitimate call to make sure that innocent civilians everywhere are protected and receive basic human rights from their governments, but that does not justify the rabid calls of anti-Semitic language that have arisen and the lack of condemnation for Hamas as a terrorist organization that subjugates its own people.
I am grateful to the Jewish community, all the non-Jews that have supported us and to my friends that have stood up and come together during this time. But it is not enough for us to only stand together. This incident is sadly just one of many that has made it more than obvious that the Jewish people are alone — antisemitism has always been and will probably continue to be the form of hatred most accepted by the world. Your Jewish friends — and the Jewish people as a whole — are not okay.
Samantha Rigante is a sophomore majoring in philosophy, politics and law.