Shortly after our plane landed at the Philadelphia airport while on vacation, a woman angrily marched toward my family. When she spotted a shirt that read “Israel, stand with us,” she slammed her 17-year-old brother on the shoulder and glared at my family in anger.
“If you support Israel, you support genocide,” she spat.
Then she stomped away. After getting a few feet away, she turned around, pointed at my family, and called us “baby killers.” She gave us her middle finger as she left.
We froze in a bewildered haze. The woman’s hateful words and hateful gaze were etched deep into my heart, and I felt like I was being slapped in the face with the reality that anti-Semitism is now inescapable.
Four words written on a shirt is enough for someone to come up to my family and spew hate at us.
She left so quickly that we didn’t get a chance to question her statement. We wanted to hear what she meant by “genocide.” Why are we “baby killers”? Why do we deserve her middle finger? Why did she feel it was okay to publicly criticize us at the airport?
Instead of a civil discussion where we could all have learned something from each other, this woman spouts angry statements without questioning the truth of her words, leaving us with nothing to say back. I didn’t care.
As social media permeates our culture, it’s easy to be seduced by misinformation. Without proper research, it is impossible to separate truth from fiction. I strongly believe in the power of face-to-face conversations to solve this problem. If the woman had given us a chance to speak, we might have learned how she developed her beliefs and calmly shared ours. yeah.
As the war rages on in Gaza, it has become common to classify Israeli self-defense as genocide, and Jews around the world are often told that their own people are committing genocide. Social media only perpetuates this misinformation. People see this accusation against Israel and are drawn into a false narrative without understanding the important facts.
Genocide is defined as “an act committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” Israel has not committed genocide. The country has allowed and continues to allow humanitarian aid to arrive, despite recently withdrawing troops from the Gaza Strip. While there is no denying that civilian lives were lost in Gaza, civilian deaths are by no means an Israeli goal, as they were Hamas’s goal when terrorists stormed homes and an open-air festival on October 7. It’s not a goal. Hamas inevitably puts innocent people at risk. Like other countries, Israel is causing civilian deaths as it defends itself against Hamas.
As a Jew whose family was imprisoned in concentration camps during the Holocaust, when the Nazis committed genocide against Jews, the woman’s heartbreaking comments at the airport reopened a wound that has cut through generations of my family.
When she tried to trot away from us, we tried to talk to her to respond to her false statements. She didn’t listen to her. She kept walking, didn’t look back, and cut off all of our words. We had so much we wanted to ask her and wanted her to know about the roots of our beliefs. We wanted to tell her about our baby cousin in Israel. We wanted her to know that children are taught to listen for rocket sounds for their own safety. They are so used to hearing this sound that they become frightened when they hear rockets near their homes.
We wanted to know how a woman would react if she heard about her cousin who leaves her family every day to lead a police force into war. Did she hear? Could she see the world as we see it?
i don’t think so. What I felt was her hatred that closed us off to her and made us different people. That woman’s words resonate in my heart. This encounter is the last thing I think about before I go to sleep, and the first thing I think about when I wake up.
Now I want to spread awareness about the effects of discrimination and anti-Semitism. No matter what you believe, it’s not okay to approach someone for no reason, yell at them, belittle them, or walk away without listening.
You need to be open to the conversation, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. We must be willing to listen to other points of view and accept well-sourced facts when presented. I wish someone would have stood for us at the airport. I wanted someone to say something about Israel, about terrorism, about hostages being held while their families wait for their return. But no one spoke up for us. They just watched her condemn us and left us to fend for ourselves.
That’s why I want to be the one to speak up. I want to say that I stand proudly as a Jew and as a supporter of Israel. We are not ashamed of who we are or what we believe. No words or hatred can change that.
The next day, my brother wore the “Israel, Rise with Us” shirt again.
Sarah Moskowitz is a sophomore at Hockaday School.
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