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Toby Simon is a proud Zionist living in southern Maine who has been working in and managing nonprofit programs for decades.
I recently returned from a solidarity mission to Israel, having traveled there with a group of Canadian and U.S. Jews. I have a few take-aways.
For decades, Israel has been under constant threat of attack from the Islamic Republic of Iran’s proxies in the region, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories, Hezbollah in Lebanon in the north and the Houthis in Yemen. One thing consistently keeping Israelis and visitors safe is the miracle of the Iron Dome.
Until recently, Hamas was sending a daily barrage of rockets into Israel from Gaza, which has only stopped due to the Israeli Defense Force incapacitating their rocket capability in the war. Hezbollah in Lebanon regularly launches rockets into Israel’s northern region, which has forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents in northern Israeli towns. And a week after my return from Israel, in an unprecedented move, the Islamic Republic of Iran launched its own attack on Israel sending 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles and 120 ballistic missiles toward Israel. Incredibly, Israel and its allies successfully intercepted 99 percent of these weapons and averted a disaster.
In spite of these constant threats, since the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, there is a record number of Jews traveling and volunteering in Israel, and hundreds of new immigrants have moved there. I traveled to Israel to bear witness to the events of Oct. 7, to show support to Israeli citizens and fellow Jews, and to experience the extraordinary resilience of Israelis in the wake of the worst massacre perpetrated upon Jews since the Holocaust.
For most in our group we were, frankly, exhausted by the torrent of antisemitic, and now physical attacks at home, and the everyday calls for the annihilation of Jews in our ancestral homeland. Watching Jews being gaslighted, harassed, physically attacked and isolated on college campuses and being harassed personally in our communities and places of work has taken a toll. I was myself the target of what I believe to be a hate-crime when the occupant of a car behind me at a stop light in Saco hurled a large coffee drink at my car and screamed something unintelligible when he saw a sticker with a star of David on my rear window. Still, traveling to a country under constant threat of actual rocket and suicide attacks seemed less frightening than the growing Jew hatred at home.
The first day of our trip was spent in the Gaza envelope, the southern region of Israel that borders Gaza, and the area most severely impacted by the attacks of Oct. 7. We visited Kibbutz Kfar Aza and the site of the Nova music festival and witnessed first-hand the irreversible horrors that are wrought by Jew hatred. Hamas terrorists slaughtered 61 residents of Kfar Aza on Oct. 7 and more than 360 people total were murdered at the Nova festival. Other kibbutz residents and festival attendees are still being held hostage in Gaza. I stood inside what’s left of their homes and on the grounds where so many were shot, mutilated, tortured, raped, burned and beheaded. I’ve lived in a state of never-ending grief since Oct. 7.
I’ve realized that most non-Jews do not understand that Jews everywhere in the world are viscerally linked to Israel’s existence. We are only 0.2 percent of the world’s population. There are about 15.7 million of us in the world, which is still less than the population of Jews prior to the Holocaust (17 million). We never completely regained those numbers. There are more Jews identifying as Zionists now than prior to Oct. 7. We recognize, now more than ever, that Jews will never be safe and we need our homeland and the safety of our tribe to survive.
