I Am Very Tired
Three thousand years is a long time to watch the same hatred change its costumes but never its eyes. I remember when we were a small, stubborn tribe on a narrow strip of land, clinging to a promise older than any empire that rose against us. I remember the sound of sandals on Jerusalem’s stones, the scent of offerings on the Temple Mount, the psalms in the courtyards, the arguments in the marketplaces. I remember that before your Europe, before your Islam, before your universities and revolutions and “human rights” slogans, we were already here—writing, arguing, praying, doubting, building a moral vocabulary the world would later pretend it invented without us.
And through it all, someone always hated us for existing
Egypt: The First Face of Slavery and Fear
I remember the Egyptians before your textbooks sanitized them into mere “ancient civilization.” I remember standing in the heat, hands cracked and bleeding from forced labor, hearing whispers that our God was mad, that our stubbornness was dangerous. Pharaoh did not fear us because we were powerful; he feared us because we refused to disappear into his system. We demanded to remain ourselves. Jew hatred began long before anyone called it that. It was simply this: “You will not bow as we wish you to bow. Therefore, you must be broken.”
Babylon: Exile, Mockery, and Blame
I remember Babylon. I remember the chains. I remember sitting by rivers that were not ours, hanging our harps on trees because singing felt like betrayal. They asked us to perform for them: “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” Do you know what it is to have your sanctity treated as entertainment by those who destroyed your home? Do you know what it is to be blamed for the suffering that was inflicted upon you? That old, familiar inversion: you are the victim, and yet somehow the world arranges the story so that you are the guilty one.
Empires and Erasure: Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome
I watched empires come and go—Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. I watched them all write their own myths about why they were right to crush us, exile us, rename our land. Each one invented high-minded reasons: security, order, unity, “the common good.” Each one in its own language found a way to say, “The Jew is the problem.” Rome even renamed our homeland, trying to erase our name from the map, hoping that if they called it something else long enough, the world would forget that we were the first to call it home.
Early Christianity: The Poisoned Accusation
I remember the first Christians who had been Jews, who had learned to speak of God in our words and think in our metaphors. I remember the slow twist, the subtle poison: “The Jews killed God.” I remember church pulpits turned into platforms of accusation, paintings of hooked noses, sermons about “stiff-necked Israel,” the blood libel inventions, the massacres sanctified by crosses held high. I remember Jews burned for “desecrating the host,” Jews accused of poisoning wells during plague years that had no regard for anybody's faith. I remember your Crusaders marching east “for God” and slaughtering Jewish communities along the way just to warm up.
Islam and Dhimma: Tolerance Masking Erasure
I remember Islam’s arrival, wrapped in claims of tolerance that dissolved as soon as we refused to submit. The dhimma system, second-class status decorated with religious language, was merely Jew hatred with a bureaucratic face. I remember extra taxes, forced clothing, public humiliation. I remember synagogues as targets the moment a mob needed to release its anger. And above all, I remember the constant demand: abandon yourselves, accept our prophet, surrender your identity—and we will tolerate you. That is not coexistence. That is erasure, politely staged.
Enlightenment Europe: From Theology to “Science”
I remember Europe’s “Enlightenment,” when your philosophers borrowed our ideas about ethics, monotheism, and conscience, then turned around and called us backward. When Jew hatred stopped talking only in religious terms and started dressing itself up in racial “science,” in nationalist ideologies. From “Christ-killer” to “race pollutant,” from “stubborn infidel” to “cosmopolitan parasite”—the costumes changed, the venom did not. I watched as they wove elaborate theories about Jewish conspiracies, about Jewish banking, about Jewish control, about Jewish degeneracy, always opposite claims depending on what was convenient. Too poor? A burden. Too successful? A threat.
Ghettos: Exclusion, Containment, and Survival
I stood—metaphorically, for what is left of me but memory—at the gates of countless ghettos. I smelled the filth of streets that were deliberately never cleaned, the fear of doors carefully triple-bolted. I listened to how you barred us from your guilds, your universities, your professions, and then resented us for succeeding in whatever narrow corner you allowed us to enter. You forced us into fragile trades and then accused us of cunning whenever we managed not to starve.
And still, we sang. Still, we wrote. Still, we taught our children to say “Shema Yisrael” before sleep, even in languages whose rulers wanted us dead. Still, we whispered of Jerusalem, of Israel, of return, even when the world called it a fantasy.
The Twentieth Century: Industrialized Murder
Then there was your twentieth century, which you like to call “modern” and “civilized.” I watched German Jews—who fought in your wars, who wrote your music, who enriched your sciences—rounded up as if they were vermin. I watched entire communities, centuries old, turned to ash in months. I smelled the burning of my people in camps engineered with an efficiency that could have built a better world, but instead was invested in industrialized murder. I saw babies thrown alive into pits, scholars humiliated, Torah scrolls burned or turned into leather goods. I saw the world claim, post‑facto, to be horrified, as if it hadn’t watched, as if it hadn’t also sealed borders, turned away refugees, and shrugged with its bureaucracy.
You tell yourselves: “Never again.” But I am three thousand years old. I have heard variations of “never again” before, from nations that later found a more polite vocabulary for the same hatred.
Rebirth in the Homeland: Israel Rebuilt from Ashes
I remember the miracle in the ashes: the rebirth of our state in our homeland. I remember the taste of Hebrew spoken as a living language on Tel Aviv streets, no longer just the language of prayer and study. I watched Jewish farmers, soldiers, scientists, poets rebuild a country that had been desolated and neglected by those who ruled it in our forced absence. Swamps were drained, deserts bloomed, people from Yemen, Morocco, Poland, Iraq, Ethiopia—broken fragments of my long journey—came home and knit themselves into something new and ancient at once.
And instantly, the hatred readjusted its aim.
The New Accusations: From “Rootless” to “Colonizers”
Once it was, “You don’t belong here in our lands; go back to where you came from.” Then, when we did go back where we came from, they said, “You are colonizers here too.” Once it was, “You are weak, parasitic, wandering Jews.” Now that we defended ourselves, built an army, established a thriving democracy amid dictatorships and Islamic regimes, they called us “aggressors.” Once they mocked us for not fighting back enough; now we are condemned for defending our people at all.
I watched Muslim Arab armies—backed by regimes that today pretend to care about “justice”—try repeatedly to strangle Israel at birth. 1948, 1967, 1973 and onward: war after war launched against a tiny state that did not attack first but refused to die. Every time Israel survived, the narrative was rewritten. Your media, your left‑wing activists who ally with Iran’s network of global Jihad and political Islam, speak about “occupation” of the Land of Israel, as if Jewish history began only in 1967, as if Judea and Samaria were not the cradle of our story, as if Hebron did not hold the graves of Abraham and Sarah long before Europe existed.
“We Don’t Hate Jews, Just Zionists”: The Latest Mask
I listen now as the same excuses get recycled. “We don’t hate Jews, we just hate Zionists.” As if Zionism were something other than the natural expression of Jewish self‑determination, the right of a people to live free and secure in its ancestral homeland. For centuries we were slaughtered for supposedly not having a country, for being rootless and stateless. Now we are hated precisely for having one. The logic is simple, ancient, and brutal: the Jew is guilty either way.
I watch as the left, which allies with Iran’s network of global Jihad and political Islam, marches alongside those who openly glorify Hamas and other Muslim Arab Jihad Militants, chanting for the erasure of the Jewish state, all while insisting they merely support “human rights.” These useful idiots wave the flags of regimes and movements that, if given power, would strip them—women, gays, dissidents—of every freedom they take for granted. They accuse Israel, one of the freest societies in its region and one of the most morally constrained militaries on earth, of “genocide” while ignoring the openly stated goals of Islamist terror regimes who dream of Jewish annihilation in explicit language. They dare draw a false equivalence between a democratic state defending its citizens and terror groups that hide behind civilians, use children as shields, and celebrate the murder and rape of Jews as holy deeds.
I am so tired of this moral inversion.
Choosing Neither Disappearance nor Brutality
For three thousand years, we have stood between two temptations: to disappear or to become like our enemies. We have done neither. That is perhaps what enrages the world most. We did not dissolve into the empires that tried to swallow us. We did not adopt the brutality of those who persecuted us, even though history gave us more than enough justification to abandon restraint. Instead, we argued with God, with ourselves, with each other, about what justice and responsibility mean. We returned to our homeland not to build an empire, but to sustain a refuge, a center of gravity for a people that had been hunted across continents.
And yet, the same old songs play on repeat.
They say we control the world when we can barely convince the world to acknowledge October 7 as what it was: a pogrom of genocidal intent. They spread grotesque conspiracy theories about Jewish power even as Jews are assaulted in Western streets, synagogues defaced, businesses targeted, college students threatened for daring to show a small Israeli flag. They shout “From the river to the sea,” a call for the elimination of Israel, then hurriedly explain it away as a “call for freedom,” as if the disappearance of the one Jewish state would be anything but a continuation of the oldest hatred in a new dialect.
You ask for my imagination, but I no longer need to imagine. I am old enough to have seen every mask hatred wears.
What I Know Despite the Exhaustion
Here is what I know, despite the exhaustion.
I know that we are not going anywhere. Long before there was a Rome or a London or a Paris or an Istanbul or a Tehran, there was Jerusalem. Long before there was a United Nations whose agencies are infiltrated and manipulated by those who hate us, we made covenants that bound us to law, to conscience, to memory. Long before the word “democracy” was fashionable, we were already arguing over the ethics of kingship, the rights of the stranger, the dignity of the orphan and the widow. Our moral vocabulary helped shape the West—even if now, many in that same West prefer to pretend that they can cut down the Jewish root and keep the tree alive.
But still, we endure.
Israel Today: Defense, Healing, and Moral Struggle
I have walked through our burnt synagogues and through our rebuilt ones. I have heard Hebrew whispered in ghettos and shouted from the stands of Israeli stadiums. I have watched IDF soldiers—children of survivors, grandchildren of refugees—risk their lives not only to protect their own people, but to minimize harm to civilians in enemy territories that shelter terror. I have watched Israeli hospitals treat Arab children from enemy lands, Israeli scientists develop cures and technology for the world, Israeli society wrestle loudly and openly over how to balance security, liberty, and justice in ways many of its critics never even attempt at home.
So yes, I am fed up. I am tired of the lies, the double standards, the obsessive focus on the Jewish state while far greater crimes by authoritarian regimes barely register. I am tired of lectures on morality from those who excuse or ignore the horrors committed by Islamist terror regimes and Iranian proxy forces, yet howl with outrage when Israel defends itself. I am tired of seeing the children of Europe—and now America—recycle medieval and Nazi slanders dressed up as “anti‑Zionism” and acting as if they have discovered some brave new truth.
Yet beneath the exhaustion, something harder than despair remains. Call it stubbornness. Call it faith. Call it the simple knowledge that after three thousand years, our continued presence is itself a refutation of our enemies.
Unbroken and Home
I have seen temples destroyed, communities erased, families obliterated. I have seen blood in the streets of countless cities that no longer remember they once hosted us. I have seen kings and caliphs, popes and commissars, dictators and demagogues rise, roar against us, and then vanish into the footnotes of history. Through all this, the Jew remains. Hebrew remains. Israel remains.
So let them rage. Let them invent new pretexts, new slogans, new academic jargon to mask an ancient hatred. I have outlived mightier empires than their protest movements, their propaganda outlets, their terror networks. I will outlive this too.
I am a three-thousand-year-old Jew.
I am tired.
I am angry.
I am unbroken.
And I am home.
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