Two assassination attempts and other challenges to our sanity

Events in the US and Israel today are enough to make you feel like you're losing your mind. I'm here to help you keep your head on straight amid these crazy times.

I am experimenting again with video today. I was traveling between meetings and felt a lot of thoughts racing through my brain and decided to stop and share. Transcript below. Would love to hear your thoughts, on form and content.

Thanks for watching/listening/reading. And good luck getting through this day and all your days.

Best,

Elana

TRANSCRIPT:

I'm here on the Yafo Beach, Park Midron Yafo one of my favorite places in Israel. I just passed by here in between work meetings and I thought, this is such a strange and crazy and just weird and blood-filled day, and I just, these things are sitting in my brain as I'm trying to function in normal everyday life. And I just thought I really just want to say something and comment on all this. So I stopped here in one of my favorite places. I just finished at an organization called Arous Elbahar which is a women's empowerment organization in Yafo that I work with. And so we had a long marathon meeting and now I'm just stopping here for a second to collect my thoughts and share them with the world.

I'm sitting not too far from -- I don't know if you can see it -- the Peres Center back here, which is kind of symbolic of a lot of what's on my head. The Peres Peace Center is a little bit of a misnomer because the Peres Peace Center was built on a Muslim Cemetery which is sort of the opposite of what peace is supposed to be. You know, the first aspect of peace is sort of respecting, sort of listening and respecting the basic things, like, "Oh the people you're trying to make peace with have a cemetery here? Oh why don't we just build something big and ugly on there." By the way it's a really ugly building. It's very hard to do something ugly on such a beautiful space. This is one of the most beautiful spots in Israel, all beach, and the Peres Center is dark it's all dark. You go inside and there's tiny little windows, except for in their main hall where they have a nice big window so speakers can be seen in front of the sea. But besides that the place is dark. And so I'm thinking about the Peres Center and I'm thinking, that sort of like symbolizes a lot of what I'm feeling now about like the world being so not what it says it's supposed to be. And everything is backwards and things are just not what they they're supposed to be or what our leaders say they are.

So what do we have going on here today? We have stuff in Israel and we have stuff in America.

In Israel we have a situation in which Bibi and his government decided to try to assassinate some big guy -- a bad guy, okay, no disputes that he's a bad guy. They decided to try to assassinate him. They apparently missed and instead killed 70 Palestinians. Right. So we killed 70 Palestinians just like that.

So let's say this guy Daff does deserve to die, okay, let's and let's say that for some reason Bibi has the right to determine that this guy deserves to die -- maybe he does deserve to die, he probably does deserve to die -- the 70 Palestinians did not, okay?

So how is that a just and decent decision how is that good decision-making? The answer is it's not. And it's a complete lack of respect for human life, that is what it is that we're doing.

And then what makes it worse is, if it get any worse -- this is what we've been doing all along; we've been doing this since October 7th, deciding that lots of people deserve to die just because we say so -- okay, so Bibi gets up there, his first press conference in a very long time, he gets up there and he says, "Well, this is the only way to get back the hostages." And it's like, "What?? What??!!"

He's trying to make this claim about the military pressure, meaning this relentless killing, this relentless bombing, THAT is what what's going to get back hostages! And it's like, first of all NO! That hasn't worked yet. That hasn't worked yet. In over nine months of war, we've gotten back exactly four five hostages through this kind of attack, during which time we also killed hundreds and hundreds of Palestinians. So that's what bombardment did. As opposed to talks. Talks, negotiation got back 50 hostages. So this idea that it's the military bombardment and the pressure, this "military pressure" what they call -- they call it "military pressure", that sanitized language for random bombarding and killing of human beings as if this is really what's going to work on Hamas -- and it's like, NO. That is the exact opposite of the truth.

Not only that not only that this failed assassination attempt is going to make Hamas dig their heels in further. It's going to have the exact opposite effect. The exact opposite effect. That is what's happening.

So it's this sense of, like, we're living in this Twilight Zone, of this leader saying the exact opposite of the truth.

I mean, we know this about Bibi. Bibi has been lying forever about everything always. And he just get gets up there at this press conference, and, you know, speaks to a million people, and it's like, "Okay okay we hear you." And it's like, No no no no no! It's the exact opposite of the truth!

So that's happening here. And this lying is for the purpose of real loss of life! Loss of life and loss of hope and loss of peace efforts and negotiation efforts. And the hostages are not better off. They're worse off. Okay so that's happening.

And meanwhile the other bit of newsy news that we woke up to was this assassination attempt against Trump. All of this bloodshed. All of this these guns. And of course I just read now that the assassination attempt was done by a Republican. But of course I'm sure we're going to keep hearing from the Trump World about how somehow it's you know the Democrats' fault and Biden's fault and all these, all of us snowflakes who like to insist on things like gun control, who like to raise things like the tens of thousands of children in America who have been victims of gun violence. How crazy insane America is with their second amendment stuff. What what what are we doing?

And so you know that's like this whole crazy thing. But again somehow like the the texts in America are so backwards and so twisted. And again you feel like you're in this like Twilight Zone of things.

So these are my feelings this morning of being like we're living in this world of nonstop violence and bloodshed that is backed by words that are just there to twist our brains.

And it's so hard for people who listen to this -- now for years and years and years -- it's so hard to keep your head on straight. And that's the biggest challenge. Our biggest challenge here is to somehow keep our head on straight.

A little thing also -- not a little thing, a big thing -- the other bit of news that I woke up to this morning was that a beloved Aunt of mine has been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I'm trying to decide if I should say her name or not. She reads my substacks and stuff but I didn't ask her permission, so I'm not going to say her name. But I'm sad.

So I'm reading about the 70 Palestinians who were killed for nothing, that are going to further endanger the lives of the hostages who are already there for 9 months, more. I'm reading about the insanity in America and gun violence and all of that. All of that, but also at the same time I have my like private sadness about my aunt I'm just sad.

So it reminds me how all of this is personal.

Every single person who dies or is injured is personal. Every single one of the 120 hostages who are left there -- it's personal for somebody. Every single one of these is personal. And yet these leaders keep talking in these, you know, grandiose policy terms. Like, you know, all the words that Bibi loves to use, like "victory" and "absolute victory" or "absolute defeat of Hamas" or all kinds of words that like mean nothing. They mean nothing! There is no actual definition. There is no victory here. There is no defeat. There is no defeating Hamas. Hamas is never going to go away. Certainly not this way. We're creating more Hamas recruits every minute of every day that we're continuing with this policy. So everything that we're doing now is having the exact opposite of making Hamas be defeated. It is growing Hamas. Even if we destroy tons and tons of tunnels and we destroy weapons, we are making Hamas more popular because we're getting more and more people to absolutely hate us -- and for good reason because we're doing terrible things.

So what I'm trying to say is that we have this sanitized language, and language of "policy" and language of grandiose things -- when in fact every single loss, every single death, every single injury, every single destruction of a home, is very personal to someone.

And at the end of the day we're dealing with our own personal mourning, our personal anguish, our personal sadness. It's always personal. These things are personal.

And so it's just a reminder of that. One of the things that I keep hearing in different like settings that I've been in since October 7, I keep hearing Palestinians say things like, "65 members of my family have been killed in Gaza, of my extended family." These are numbers that are, like, incomprehensible.

So our government says, "Oh they're lying about how many people have died. The Palestinians they're just making up numbers. It's not what they say." And it's like, what difference does it make what the exact number is? Is it 33,000, is it 35,000? What does it matter even what name we call it? Do we call a genocide? Do we not call it genocide ? Who cares?

I mean tons and tons of innocent people are dying in ways that are entirely preventable and entirely wrong. We shouldn't just be randomly killing 70 people. We just shouldn't. We just shouldn't. You know we think of them as like numbers and policies and titles and definitions and stuff. But at the end of the day every single one is personal -- on their side and on our side also. Every single death, every single injury, is personal. It's all personal and it's all bad.

I keep thinking about that. I just keep thinking about how language of policy is there to depersonalize it and to make it hurt less but...

Anyway this is just crazy. These are just absolutely crazy times. And it's really hard to keep your head straight. And it's really hard to remind yourself of like truth and morality through all this. But I'm really trying.

Anyway this is my second time experimenting with the video sharing instead of writing. I told you all last week that I've started a new podcast called Women Ending War it's with my co-host Eva Dalak a Muslim Palestinian Peace activist from here from Yafo. She lives in Costa Rica but she's originally from Yafo. We've recorded half our season we've recorded five sessions they're all in editing now. I hope that sometime in the next couple of days we'll be able to release a few of them.

I'm really excited about these conversations because it's all we can do is to keep pushing just pushing the idea that there is another way. There is another way of thinking. We need new leaders. We need new people around the table. We need new ways of thinking. We need less ego. We need less, you know, washed out words that don't mean anything. And we need to be talking about people's real lives.

So that's what the podcast is about. I'm really excited about it. Women Ending War. Stay tuned for more more and thanks for listening.