Share their stories. Share the truth.

Between Fauda coming out with a season about Oct 7th and the fallout, and "NAZA" getting a 25-min standing ovation at an international film festival in Venice, I think many of us are reeling.

Fauda is now number one in Lebanon. Charting in many Arab nations around us, and around the world like Jordan and UAE, Bahrain and Qatar, Egypt, Morocco, Oman and Turkey. It was also reported in the Top 10 in 43 countries worldwide. There are millions of people who are learning the story of Oct 7th for the first time.

NAZA is a "documentary" by Israelis Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, accusing the IDF of knowingly permitting massive civilian casualties in Gaza, based heavily on anonymous testimony and disputed claims. The IDF says key allegations are false or unverifiable and has called the film a blood libel, while the film has been celebrated abroad as an exposé.

Firstly, I can speak for myself when I say my feed is inundated with conversations about Oct 7th, footage, images, videos, stories. Fauda clips are now flooding my reels making me queasy; too real, so soon, so important.

We also have pictures of the filmmakers of NAZA receiving praise for betraying their country and portraying Israel as a horrible evil- which makes my blood boil.

And we are just weeks short of Simchat Torah again. Of Oct 7th again.

I think many of us can feel it in our bones: the memories of horror that still live in our nervous systems.

Everything we've been through. Everything we've seen and learned.

I know I'm not the only one who is thinking about it all the time. Who can't feel it on the edges of our current reality, creeping in?

The grief. The gaping maw of shock and betrayal and revulsion that has lived with us ever since.

There are so many people who have commented on all of this- in our agony. Voices crying out at the rising antisemitism and the inversion of reality that's been turned into propaganda against us.

I think one could get lost, drowning in a sea of rage and outrage and hurt and disbelief at how a massacre of our people, our people taken hostage, and our fight to free them and protect the rest of us has been manipulated by our enemies.

But seeing the agony and rage of the hostages in response to NAZA has ripped open a wound that had barely even begun to close.

Liri Albag said, “On October 7, if you were near Gaza, none of the terrorists would have stopped and said, ‘Hey, leave him alone… we don’t hurt him.’ … You sold out your people for people who wish for your death.”

Liri was held by Hamas for 477 days in Gaza.

Rom Braslavski commented on Twitter that the directors were “traitors” and that “they should be sent to prison.”

He was held in Gaza for 738 days.

Eliya Cohen said, "Wow, I am angry on a level I cannot even describe. For two days, I have been crawling out of my skin over these two idiots who flew to Venice to accept a prize for the film they made about the State of Israel. It is impossible to process that these two people can come back tomorrow from Venice to the State of Israel, walk around Dizengoff Center and Yehuda Halevi, and eat at restaurants here....

We need to go out into the streets, hang posters of them, and spread their pictures on every possible media platform. So that when they walk down the street, and they are allowed to walk here, we will not do anything that violates the law, but when they walk down the street, they will feel ashamed.... Because in this country, they cannot go and humiliate my brothers, my friends, and the people who fought every single day to bring me home, and who fight every single day so our families can live here, and then go spread lies about them. And what, we are just going to let that pass..."

Eliya was held hostage for 505 days in Gaza.

This is the part I cannot get past.

These are not people arguing about October 7th from a comfortable distance.

They were there, dragged into Gaza.

They spent hundreds of days underground, starved, tortured, threatened, isolated from their families, wondering whether anybody would ever come for them.

And now they are watching Israelis stand on an international stage, receive applause for a film that they believe strips away the context of what happened to them, indicts the soldiers who fought to bring them home, and hands an already ravenous world another story in which Israel is once again the monster.

Can we understand what that must feel like?

To survive Hamas, come home, spend months trying to stitch yourself back into a life, and then watch the story of the war that followed your kidnapping be received abroad with a twenty-five-minute standing ovation, while the massacre that began it recedes further and further from view?

That inversion is making so many of us feel sick.

There is something profoundly broken about a world that seems infinitely more interested in constructing the moral indictment of Israel than in remembering what was done to Israelis in the first place.

And as Simchat Torah approaches again, I think that is what is sitting so heavily inside so many of us.

We are not only remembering what happened.

We are watching it be rewritten while we are still living through the aftermath.

Watching October 7th become background information.

Watching the people who came to murder us disappear from the story.

Watching the people who fought to save us become its villains.

Watching audiences thousands of miles away stand and applaud.

And then watching the people who actually came out of those tunnels scream:

You are telling this story backward.

It is obscene that the people who survived October 7 now have to fight for the truth of October 7 too.

Share their stories. Share the truth.

Listen to them.