Is this the future you desire?

Because the world is asking for it — loudly and silently.

It is said that a picture tells a thousand words. Well, this photo says everything every woman in the world needs to know. Yet, I wonder, will it change anything, because nothing else has thus far.

Yesterday three Israeli women — hostages for 471 days in the tunnels of Gaza — were released as part of a temporary ceasefire deal. Romi, 24, was one of them. She was kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival on 7 October 2023. The other two were Emily, 28, a dual British and Israeli citizen and Doron, 31, an Israeli citizen, both abducted from their homes on the same day.

But here’s the thing. Not only were they set free yesterday, but the truth of what has been/is still going on in Gaza for 15 months was also set free…for all to witness, should one choose to.

The first thing I did after waking was to grab my phone. To ensure that these three had arrived home safely.

I saw the photos of the girls hugging their mums for the first time. And I cried.

I saw the propaganda shots taken by Hamas, forcing them to smile while handing them ‘show bags’ from their time in Gaza, as if they were a happy family just returning home from a day out at a Disneyland. And I felt a rising heat surface in my chest.

Yet this photo of Doron was the one that stood out the most. Observing it made me shake to the core. Doron surrounded by Hamas men fully donned in their militant gear and carrying weapons. Not a starving civilian in sight. Rather thousands of mocking and jeering militants and onlookers, including some in ‘press’ vests. Even the Red Cross guy didn’t try and protect her with his arms. Oh, may I not forget that this is the first time — the first time — Red Cross has even seen her in 471 days.

Rather than looking like the day of their release, it looks like the day of their capture. She is visibly terrified. If you took away the actual differing dates, one couldn’t be dismissed for saying it looks like 7 October all over again.

I assure you that this won’t be the photo you see on mainstream media channels. They’ll show the forced at gun-point one with the smiling faces behind the Disneyland certificates, or the way they smile when they see their loved ones.

Now let me try something else. Take out the reference to Israel and Hamas and say it again. A woman, a pale, obviously distressed, woman, trying to get out of car, enclosed by thousands of mocking, jeering and angry men with masks and pointed guns. Imagine the uproar if this sentence was used on its own. With no mention of Israel or Jews.

How? What? Why is any of this possible?

I feel so naive — still — asking myself these questions. Had I been duped too?  How can I get angry at other women around the world if that photo still surprised me?

I sat with it for a bit before I realised it didn’t surprise me, rather what surprised me was how emboldened they’d become. Again, that probably shouldn’t have surprised me either, but I still, and will always, have a hopeful view of the world. And perhaps, maybe, a tiny, weeny bit, I wanted to believe that some of what their fake and false war PR campaigns had been communicating was true.

But last week should’ve prepared me for this photo. Like this shot below, taken by a Gazan himself. How smart he looks. A barista-worthy coffee in his hand. Nice haircut. The rubble behind him just looking like the backdrop of a Zoom screen. And check out the caption.

And like all the videos of men, women, children, celebrating in the streets. Fleshy women. Fiesty kids. Men with a death call in their eyes. All chanting Allah Akbar. There is no genocide. There is no famine. There never was. Yes, there may be a war, initiated by them on 7 October, and yes there are casualties of war, but nothing like what the average person has been set up to believe.

I can tell you with 100% certainty that none of my family and fellow Jews had guns in their hands, nor lattes, or nicely shaved face, when they were finally liberated from the death camps of Europe. They were barely bags of bones, emaciated beings, with many, like a relative of mine, actually dying when fed upon liberation. Their starving stomachs not able to take the food offered to them. Imagine that, surviving Auschwitz, only to die from excess food.

I mean I knew the genocide claim is false. And so do they. So do they. The only people who don’t believe it are the western activist woke community. And everyone who has a bug to bear with the Jews. Well, not really the Jews, because many people don’t even know a Jew, but with the ‘idea of a Jew’. The idea that Jews are to blame for all the wrong in the world. That the white colonialist oppressors can somehow be the dumping ground for everyone’s shame and projection.

Tell me does Doron in this photo look like a white oppressor colonialist?

[Silence]

I didn’t think so.

Who are these men in the photo you may ask? I’ll tell you who they are. The poor journalists, the poor doctors, the poor teachers, the poor Gaza health department, that the mainstream media and social media have been rallying around, allowing their posts to go viral and make the world believe some fantasy like genocide has been occurring. Oh and let us not forget the actors, the ‘dead men’ who have now been proven over and over again in their Pallywood style videos. You can track them if you choose to. These men who were parading around as something else to win over the west, were quick to pick up their uniforms again once Israelis were out of site. The same men hiding under the hospitals, the schools, the houses where Israel was told to stay away from.

I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, because it is. As harsh as it can get. That photo did it to me. As did the background to that photo — the deal Israel had to make in order to bring this woman home.

The deal is this…

For those three woman, civilian women, kidnapped from their homes and a music festival, 90 Palestinian prisoners were released. 3 civilians for 90 prisoners. Three civilians whose only ‘crime’ was being Jewish for 90 prisoners who have committed actual crimes. Some are small crimes, and yes, you’ll hear today on news channels, such as the biased ABC, that they are primarily women and teenagers, which is true, but it doesn’t mean that women and teenagers don’t commit crimes. And that small crimes aren’t crimes.

However, many of these prisoners have committed some of the most horrific terrorist attacks in Israel in the last few decades, including those serving multiple life sentences. One is even serving 48 life sentences.

Some of the crimes of these convicted terrorists include: the rape, beheading and murder of a 19 year old girl, the stabbing in the neck from behind of a man in a grocery store, the murder of 45 Israelis in two Jerusalem bus bombings. And the list goes on.

All up, there will be 1904 prisoners (alive) released in this first stage for 33 hostages (dead or alive).

And no Israeli or Jewish person around the world will ever forget that the mastermind of 7 October, Yayha Sinwar, was released in the last hostage deal made for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli who was held for five years in terrorist captivity. 1025 prisoners, 280 serving life sentences, were released for Gilad.

It’s been coined ‘a deal with the devil’ and so it is. Some even more accurately referred to it as extortion.

The irony of it all is that if the Jewish people and Israelis were really white colonial oppressors we wouldn’t be in the situation right now where we are needing to ‘trade’ one woman for 30 not just prisoners, not just murderers but terrorists. We wouldn’t be needing to break one family’s heart in order to maybe, just maybe mend another’s.

Why did Israel agree to this? Because the life of the hostages was always paramount in this fight. To save one life is to save a world is a well known phrase in Judaism.

And, more importantly, because they were given no choice. The world decided to take a blind eye on 7 October and have continued to do so. Decided to fall for a well instrumented PR campaign, funded by a multi-billion dollar terrorist organisation, over the facts. Exactly what happened in the 1930s in Germany and Europe. Hitler and his Nazi party ensured everyone thought the worst of the Jews so no-one would argue when he decided to implement his final plan — the extermination of all European Jews.

So it all comes downs to this…

If you’re a modern day woman and you’re not horrified by this image, there is prejudice at play.

If you can look at this photo and not see what’s coming, there is prejudice at play.

And, finally, if you can look past this image, there is prejudice at play.

And this prejudice is leading to the downfall of our free, liberal democratic society.

It’s as simple and as terrifying as that.