A year ago, I had a vivid nightmare about apocalyptic war. As someone who normally dreams about things like discovering a cheese shop I hadn’t known existed, this startled me to say the least. I woke up and realized this was either some kind of unconscious communing with the Jewish people or that I had (I don’t think this was it, but cannot rule it out) glanced at my phone in the middle of the night, forgotten this, and fallen back asleep.
Nothing is the same since Oct. 7, 2023. Not globally, but globally is beyond my expertise, even if I have studied Hebrew and spent more time in Israel than some freshly-minted experts. This being The Canadian Jewish News, I am going local.
Immediately, my West Toronto neighbourhood of Roncesvalles Village was covered in flyers, some with paraglider imagery, supporting the freeing of Palestine by any means necessary. While I knew from non-flyer-based interactions with friends and acquaintances that the entire area was not hell-bent on the destruction of the Jewish state, the feeling I got upon leaving the house was that… how to even put it? That Jewish lives don’t matter, that Jews are a people who cannot be microaggressed or macroaggressed.
After the flyers, and the graffiti, so very much and still ongoing (shout-out to Mr./Ms./Mx. “Shame On Israel” graffiti artiste who apparently thinks whoever’s doing Israel’s military decision-making shops at the Dundas West Loblaws), came the signs. First from homes, signs and Palestinian flags. “Parkdale-High Park for a Free Palestine,” so prettily-illustrated that you could hardly blame every store up and down the main drag for popping one in its window. It was just the thing, something to put up alongside all the other righteous and generally-accepted (two overlapping categories) cause-related paraphernalia.
I look for counter-signage and find occasional Sharpie-annotations on the existing signs. Someone put up some handmade-looking stickers in Hebrew, which registered for me but at most like three other people who ever pass that intersection. Visually, the neighbourhood is all-in, a sea of white people (some Jewish, possibly, but can’t be many) in keffiyehs or so it can feel. This entire time I have seen exactly one printed yard sign from ‘the other side’ if you could even call “Bring Them Home Now” the other side, but you know what I mean. I am not including a photo because I want to applaud them for their courage, not get them grief.
I questioned life choices. In September 2023 I became a Canadian citizen. I’m still an American citizen as well, but I found myself informally tallying incidents, wondering whether I’d been a fool. Why didn’t I just stay in New York City where I’m from? Then Columbia University’s role as encampment central happened and it was like, oh.
I wondered what I’d been thinking, living in a neighbourhood with Jews, yes, but somehow no Jewish presence. No synagogue, certainly, which isn’t a daily-life issue for a secular Jew like me, but still. When the area’s sole bagel shop put up its Free Palestine sign, my hunch was that this was not the decision of antizionist Jews (who exist, who are still Jewish) but rather of the white gentile hipsters.
I became a local go-to Jew, expected to have something to say about the only news story that matters, or even (in the least pleasant case) to somehow account for Israel’s every military decision, as if this is something I can make sense of, let alone am the point person for. I learned that a surprising number of people assume if you’re Jewish, you have family “back” in Israel. It is, I suppose, a way of looking at it.
I muted, unfollowed, blocked. Along with processing all of the horrors, I found myself mourning, in a smaller but still important way, my own ability to just go through the day and not think about any of this stuff.
Mostly, I tried to make sense of how symbols and professed membership in culture-wars teams lines up with policy positions. It has occurred to me that what I would like to see happen—for everyone to stop killing one another, and the Israelis and Palestinians each to have an autonomous state—might not differ from what everyone on ‘the other side’ demands. And I consider myself a Zionist!
It is unfortunate how things have shaken out in North America, that the pro-peace side and the no-peace-till-Israel’s-gone side present themselves interchangeably. What do you MEAN by “Free Palestine”? I want to ask various entities, stickers, posters, when I encounter them every few minutes, as I do whenever leaving the house. What do you envision happening to the existing Jewish population of Israel, or is this not something you’ve considered?
Because that is, I believe, the Jewish position in all of this. Not a monolithic view on Zionism (clearly!), nor on any particular Israeli policy, nor on how countries that are not Israel should relate to it diplomatically. The Jewish position is to care what comes of all those Jews, however that caring manifests itself. It’s easy to forget, if you run mainly in Jewish circles, that for non-Jews newly (or not-so-newly) into this topic, the question may not even come up.
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The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
