Today is the three-year anniversary of October 7, 2023. There are people that are not aware it was the largest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Thousands of terrorists from Gaza poured into Israel and slaughtered, raped, tortured and kidnapped men and women, Jews and Arabs, children and adults — and the world changed forever. Mainstream media has focused on their top four favorite lies: occupation, territory, apartheid and genocide.
First, it’s important to refer to the area correctly. Today it’s Gaza, not Palestine. Golda Meir was the first female prime minister of Israel. I read her 1973 autobiography, My Life, in 1980 and again last year. Her lack of pretense was a breath of fresh air given politicians today. I love her famous saying “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” When Golda Meir moved there in 1921 from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, it was Mandatory Palestine under British administration. After the rule of the Ottoman Empire ended World War I, the British took control. The League of Nations officially approved the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922; the modern State of Israel did not exist until it was founded 27 years later in May 1948. Golda Meir was one of two women who signed the Israeli Declaration of Independence. She helped ensure the survival of the nascent Jewish state.
Like Meir, I also embraced the socialist lifestyle when I moved to Israel when I was twenty years old. I didn’t know anything about it. I don’t think I understood what socialism was back then. I was picking grapefruits, working in the communal kitchen baking desserts and enjoying those banana breads while gaining a lot of weight and working with the school children. I had a place to live for six months in exchange for work and Hebrew classes. It worked for me in my early twenties but the lack of privacy living in a kibbutz certainly would not work for me now.
Fast forward — October 7, 2023. Before the Israeli army had entered Gaza, in an attempt to retrieve the 251 stolen hostages, protests started in the United States at universities like Columbia and UCLA. Those protests were not organic as ‘Genocide’ signs were clearly professionally made. I’ve done enough garage and estate sales to know what handmade signs look like.
Israel launched its ground offensive on October 23, 2023 yet students were protesting a fake genocide the day after the attacks, long before the response began. This was a counter attack in a war, not a genocide. Current numbers are 70,000 killed, more or less, with half killed being terrorists; this simply does not constitute a genocide. Those who so vociferously support Hamas tend to leave out crucial details–if they know them at all. For example, the map of Gaza that Angelina Jolie shared on her Instagram a few days ago doesn’t describe the need to destroy the terror tunnels underneath. The media is no better than the marchers and campers themselves; The Islamic Republic of Iran murdered between 40-80,000 on January eight and nine this year which the media seems to have remained mostly silent.
The masses were bamboozled by propaganda by CNN, BBC, reading the NY Times, and by attending Tik Tok University. They were counting on people to not do any of their own research. This has not been different from the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda minister Joseph Goebells hiring in 1933 independent artist and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who was commissioned to capture the 1993 and 1934 Nazi party rallies, creating the infamous propaganda film ‘Triumph of the Will.’ By the time there was a meeting on January 20, 1942 and the “Final Solution” to the Jewish question was decided at the Wannsee Conference outside of Berlin, Germany, the propaganda had been in place since 1933. It was decided by 15 high-ranking Nazi officials and SS leaders that every Jew in Europe must be murdered because every problem was because of the Jews. They discussed the details such as transport with the extensive train network, and how to implement mass exterminations. The propaganda worked then. It’s working now. Israel lost the war of truth, which is that the enemy in Gaza is not Israel, it’s Hamas.
Social media is Joseph Goebells on steroids.
Israel is not an apartheid state. Arabs, Bedoins, Druze, Muslims, Jews and Christians live together. In contrast, there is no permanent Jewish civilian population inside the Gaza strip. In fact, in 2006, Israel unilaterally left Gaza in an attempt at peace. Eight thousand Jewish residents evacuated from their homes. Two synagogues were dismantled and even the 48-grave Jewish cemetery. All the bodies were removed. That’s the truth. A terrorist group, Hamas, was voted in, and there has rarely been peace since.
I have personally traveled to Bethlehem. I tucked my Star of David necklace behind my shirt as I crossed in. My father didn’t raise a dummy. I have seen the heavily fortified buffer area along the northern border. I researched how violent acts of terrorism went down after the wall went up even as I initially judged the wall as barbaric. Which is more barbaric, the wall or the constant terror attacks?
Yes, there was a military occupation after the war broke out on October 7, 2023. There is no country that would not counter attack. In fact, the war was triggered by Hamas’ design.
I could not have imagined when I read Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present in the summer of 2023, how spot on she was. Yes, everybody loved reading about Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl but that’s because she was dead. We aren’t supposed to stand up and fight back. Horn’s mission was to “unravel, document, describe, and articulate the endless unspoken ways in which the popular obsession with dead Jews, even in its most apparently benign and civic-minded forms, is a profound affront to human dignity.”
Because I have published a photography book, and have more to come, I was active on social media. If the attack on Israel wasn’t grotesque enough, the voices that popped up in support of terrorism, would have been nearly impossible to believe if I hadn’t seen it happening in real time. The onslaught of Jew-hatred has, if anything, intensified. Just three days ago, on October 4, 2026, the Green Party of England voted 1,022 votes to 813, declaring to formally define Zionism as a form of racism. That is, in fact, a racist attack on the Jewish community. Britain has failed itself.
Nothing shocks me anymore.
I felt so helpless after October 7, 2023 that I was compelled to do something, so I flew to Israel a year and two months later to volunteer to help displaced dogs and cats from the north. Here’s the blog:
https://hannahkozak.wordpress.com/2024/12/21/shanti-animal-rescue-farm/
On October 7, 2026, I am grateful for the Jewish Community support group I found two years ago. The group has helped me to deal with the horror of the direction in which the world is going and has helped me to assuage these fears.
I can only wonder what my father would say to me if he were alive today. He survived eight Nazi forced labor camps. His entire family was murdered for the crime of being Jews. He immigrated to the United States because it was the land of the free and the home of the brave. How can it be that his beloved USA has become a land of cowards who feel free to embrace the same ancient hatred that led to the Holocaust? I will never be the same person I was before October 7. I suspect most Jews won’t be, either. The harsh lesson has been safety is an illusion but I always knew this as a former stunt woman. The questions that haunt me are where are we going? And will it only continue to get worse?
