literally just my journal entry from October 7, 2025

guys it fully is, I typed out what I hand wrote in my journal

Today marks two years since Hamas attacked the Nova festival. Last year, I believe, we went to a museum exhibit, which had a ton of artifacts from the massacre. It was harrowing, they were my age. To see all the items left behind, never to be collected again, to see the porta potties people hid in, riddled with bullets, to walk through bomb shelters where others did not walk out of. I think they said that the way most people survived it was by just hiding in the bushes. I’ll always remember the man who was at the front of a bomb shelter and threw back the grenades that Hamas threw in. He tossed out seven, the eighth exploded in his hands and killed him. His name was Aner Elyakim Shapira. He was two years older than me, but now he’ll forever be the age I am now. He saved the lives of seven.

Or the girl who Hamas murdered and then paraded her lifeless body around while spitting on her and yelling “G-d is magnificent!” Her name was Shani Louk, she was twenty-two, I am now twenty-two.

I’m not saying that Israel is a perfect place that’s never done anything wrong to Palestinians or Gaza, I’m not an idiot. I just think that what Hamas did and continues to do is wrong and I don’t understand it. I can hold two truths in my head at once, sometimes even more!

Since the October 7 attacks, antisemitism has been on the rise worldwide. I know logically that antisemitism has always existed, way before Christianity was even around,. Even back in Roman times. It just wasn’t something I’d ever experienced before this war started. To me, it always felt like something that existed mostly in the past, by and to people who lived long ago.I knew it hadn’t disappeared, and I knew that lots of people still hated Jews as a whole, but it took a while before it sunk in that they hate me.

My family, my friends, me.

There was a man in Hamas who used a dead Israeli woman’s phone to call his Dad. He told his Dad “Look how many Jews I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” to which his Dad replied with pride, before calling over his wife to hear her son’s words.

Words that should’ve never been uttered.

Past Rae was naive, but not stupid. I always knew there were people out there that hated us, I just didn’t realize how deep that hatred ran, or in how many.

I’ve always believed in G-d, even when I felt silly for doing so. But I’ve never ever thought less of someone who doesn’t or who believes in a different deity than me, Whatever gets you through the night and makes you happy is good by me. As long as your beliefs do not harm others.

That seems like an unpopular opinion now, in a world leaning more towards black and white thinking, where you aren’t allowed to not care what others believe in (or don’t). Right now, today, the black and white thinking seems to be “Jews bad, Israeli’s evil, Hamas good, Palestinians great”. There’s no ability to see that all three groups are made up of tons of individuals who each have their own thoughts and feelings and loved ones and dreams. (Hamas has made it clear what their whole group thinks and feels so I’m excluding them from that one.)

Sincerely,

a girl who’s seen more swastikas in the last two years than the previous two decades

(in real life and outside of World War II documentaries and movies)

May their memory be a blessing.