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Oct. 7 siege, I know Israel will survive this war — America, not so much
By Reuven Fenton Published May 21, 2024, 10:07 a.m. ET

... everywhere I go, I can’t get those Columbia kids out of my mind. Everything I see reminds me of them, and everyone I meet reminds me who they are not — neither heroes nor victims, but cowards and frauds unworthy of the headlines they made around the globe.

... “For some reason I can’t understand how in America, in the most important universities, the leaders of tomorrow, the top 5 percent of the smartest people, supposedly, are rooting for them.(Hamas)”

JERUSALEM — As I weave my way through the forest of pole-mounted portraits commemorating the 364 victims of the Nova Festival massacre in southern Israel, I study their dewy, youthfully confident faces and come to a startling realization.

The portraits of the dead — with their dreadlocks and septum rings and TikTok-perfect makeup — are facsimiles of the very population I jetted 5,700 miles to the Middle East to get away from.

But when I line up the common denominators between both sets of kids — the youth and progressivism and infatuation with influence — I can only assume the Nova crowd and the Columbia crowd would have gotten along fabulously under different circumstances.

One Nova victim, a young man named Zur Saidi, even wore a Palestinian keffiyeh around his neck in his portrait.

I’m in Israel this week with other journalists on a tour sponsored by the Jerusalem Press Club, an organization that assists local and foreign press in covering the country. We’re mostly visiting locations relevant to October 7 and its aftermath, and Day One has been a doozy: Aside from the Nova Festival site, we’ve gone to Kibbutz Kfar Aza — 64 dead, 19 kidnapped — and an automobile graveyard stacked with cars Hamas incinerated along with the bodies of murdered Israelis still inside them.

But everywhere I go, I can’t get those Columbia kids out of my mind. Everything I see reminds me of them, and everyone I meet reminds me who they are not — neither heroes nor victims, but cowards and frauds unworthy of the headlines they made around the globe.

It took an 11-hour flight to realize just how backwards their wildly disproportionate influence on politics, academia and the media really is.

After all I’ve seen today, I’m confident Israel will survive. America, not so much.

Here, in beleaguered Israel, I see a quiet determination among its stoic and sun-burnished sabras to rise above this calamity the way they always have — by burying the dead and soldiering on. Because here, unlike at Columbia, survival is on the line. Political activism is a luxury few have time for.

When they read about the pro-Hamas activism in America and Europe, they cannot believe it.

At the Nova site in Re’im, we heard from Israeli cop Remo Salman El-Hozayel (a Muslim), who worked security at the festival and is still haunted by the teen girl in the short blue dress who dashed toward him when a bullet to the head felled her.

For 15 hours, El-Hozayel fought Hamas and rescued revelers — and nearly died five times. When it was all over, he learned that half his unit of 32 brothers in blue had died.

I pictured him in an NYPD uniform dismantling tents on the Columbia quad and receiving spittle to the face and being called a fascist — because that’s what they do over there.

We heard from Nova survivor Mazal Tazazo, who recounted how, covered in blood, she played dead between two of her friends who were actually dead.

She described how she used to naively believe that if only Israeli and Palestinian leaders got together, they could work things out. Now she feels terrible guilt over her fear of Arabs, whom she felt comfortable with before October 7.

Again, my thoughts drift to those Columbia students and their “trauma” when the cops came for them. I think of the backward media culture that gave these ignorant children — who haven’t a fraction of the wisdom Tazazo gained in one night — a photo spread in The New Yorker and a cover story in New York Magazine in the same week.

In Kfar Aza, amid a backdrop of artillery explosions and rising smoke from Gaza some three miles away, we chatted with Batia Holin, a 50-year resident, who told her harrowing story of survival while showing us around the devastated kibbutz.

I toured the bullet- and shrapnel-riddled home of Sivan Elkabetz and her boyfriend Naor Hasidim. I read Elkabetz’s frantic final texts with her father before the terrorists filled her body with bullets.

I thought of the Ivy League’s best and brightest frantically tweeting live updates to X — as if leaving their last will and testament — as the NYPD stormed Hamilton Hall.

Uzi Dayan, a retired IDF general and former Knesset member who accompanied us on our trip, remarked, “If the students from Columbia saw this, maybe they’d change their mind.”

To which a member of my group responded, “Not at all.”

I asked Holin, whose daughter and grandchildren made it out of Kfar Aza by the skin of their teeth, what she thought of America’s social justice warriors rallying for Hamas.

Impatient with the question, she answered with the pithiness of a true kibbutznik: “The war started because they murdered us and butchered us, and because of that, we had to make this war. We had no choice.”

Later, we stopped by the haunting car cemetery where some 300 scorched automobiles were stacked to form a grisly wall.

Using a custom chemical agent, Hamas burned the cars so thoroughly that the bodies inside burned to what amounted to 300 bags of ash, plus the odd bone — a deliberate throwback to Auschwitz, officials believe.

All to fight for a regime that hoards foreign aid to become billionaires while letting its citizens starve.

And even here, in this rust- and dust-filled hellhole, I’m back to Columbia — kudos to our guide, IDF Capt. Adam Ittah:

“For some reason I can’t understand how in America, in the most important universities, the leaders of tomorrow, the top 5 percent of the smartest people, supposedly, are rooting for them.”

https://nypost.com/2024/05/21/world-news/israel-will-survive-hamas-war-but-america-might-not/