Parshat Chayei Sarah

This week’s Torah portion begins with Sarah being buried in a cave and ends with Rebecca entering Sarah’s tent.

The cave is permanent, a place for the dead. The tent is temporary, a place for the living. Together, they establish two foundations of Judaism: a homeland and a people.

After the death of Sarah, Abraham purchases the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron to bury her. Despite God’s promise of the Land of Israel, Abraham’s first recorded family property is a burial place. It anchors his family permanently to a particular piece of land, where generations will return to bury and remember their ancestors.

Rebecca makes the opposite journey. She leaves her birthplace, choosing to join Isaac and enter Sarah’s tent. According to the Midrash, the Shabbat light that burned from week to week, the blessing in the bread and the divine presence that had disappeared with Sarah’s death all return with Rebecca.

The cave preserves Sarah’s memory. The tent restores her way of life.

Jewish law teaches Lo’eg LaRash, that we refrain from displaying certain mitzvot before the dead because they can no longer perform them. We honor the dead by respecting what they have lost. We honor their lives by continuing what they began.

That is the paradox of the cave and the tent. The cave will remain in place for thousands of years, but no mitzvot can be performed by those buried within it. The tent can be dismantled tomorrow, yet the faith, traditions and values practiced inside can endure for generations.

We discussed the Five Israels this week: the Land of Israel, the People of Israel, the State of Israel, its government and its policies. Chayei Sarah establishes the first two, well before Jacob/Israel was born, and there was a Jewish kingdom or modern state. Judaism is rooted in a particular land, but its survival depends on a people who carry its practices and beliefs wherever they go.

Perhaps that is why a portion beginning with Sarah’s death is called Chayei Sarah, the Life of Sarah. In her passing she firmly established the Jewish family in the holy land forever, and her daughter-in-law continued her family and traditions for generations, wherever they would travel.

There is an expression in Hebrew “od avenu chai” that the Jewish patriarchs still live. It is lifted from the story of Joseph who asked his brothers whether their father Israel was still alive. We should consider that Sarah is the one whose life set the the course for the Jewish family.

Today, we refer to the “Land of Israel” and the “Children of Israel” because that was when the family became a nation. But at its core, the Jewish people have always been a family anchored in the land and traditions set out by the matriarch Sarah.

The Binding of Isaac (Akeidat Yitzchak) stands at the heart of Judaism. Abraham and Isaac ascended Mount Moriah together, prepared to sacrifice everything in obedience to God. Their devotion became a lasting source of merit for future generations, invoked in Jewish prayers for divine mercy.

The ram sacrificed in Isaac’s place is remembered every Rosh Hashanah through the sounding of the shofar, traditionally made from a ram’s horn. Christianity interprets the binding as foreshadowing Jesus’s sacrifice, while Islamic tradition often identifies Ishmael rather than Isaac as the intended offering. Across all three Abrahamic religions, the story remains a defining encounter between Abraham, his son and God.

But what if another sacrifice has been overlooked?

Consider the familiar biblical story through the surrealist art of Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), a man whose life was shaped by the death of a brother he never knew.

Salvador Dalí: Living in Another Child’s Shadow

Salvador Dalí was born nine months after the death of his older brother, also named Salvador, a name shared by their father. His parents took him to his brother’s grave and told him he was the dead child’s reincarnation. He grew up struggling to establish an identity separate from the brother he had replaced.

The experience haunted him throughout his life, eventually appearing in his 1963 painting Portrait of My Dead Brother.

His beloved mother died when he was sixteen, devastating the young artist. His relationship with his authoritarian father deteriorated into bitter estrangement. Death, substitution and troubled family relationships became recurring themes in Dalí’s life and art.

For Dalí, the notion of one child taking the place of another was deeply personal.

The Ram (The Spectral Cow), 1928

In 1928, at just 24 years old, Dalí painted The Ram (The Spectral Cow), an early work in his exploration of Surrealism. The painting recalls the mysterious compositions of Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), placing seemingly unrelated objects in a strange, theatrical setting.

Surrealist artists drew heavily on the theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who viewed dreams as windows into unconscious fears and desires. The artists invited viewers to become dream interpreters, examining unusual objects and their relationships to discover hidden meanings.

Dalí’s painting offers an intriguing puzzle.

An enormous bird occupies the left side of the painting, balanced by a skeletal ram on the right. A strange cloud rises between them, while a mysterious heavenly orb watches over the scene. A tiny dead bird lies almost unnoticed on the ground.

What connects these objects?

Reading the Painting

Consider first the enormous bird dominating the painting. Its wing resembles a giant five-fingered hand reaching toward the heavens and away from the activity unfolding to the right and below. The bird’s head and body occupy the center of the composition, partially hidden by a strange, dark cloud. Its gaze appears fixed on the mysterious orb above.

Is the bird praying? Pleading? And what is it seeking?

The bird’s enormous head is balanced by a gaunt ram, skeletal and seemingly more dead than alive. The two creatures share hollow eye sockets and small curved features: the bird’s beak and the ram’s horn.

But they are looking in different directions.

While the bird gazes toward heaven, the ram stares at the bird’s swollen belly. Curious wisps of hair mark the space between them, drawing our attention to their point of contact. The ram seems transfixed by the bird’s body, seemingly oblivious to the enormous head towering above it.

Why would Dalí have the ram stare at the bird’s belly rather than its face?

The mysterious cloud separating them is equally curious. It conceals much of the enormous bird’s head and body, while the ram’s head barely touches its edge. One creature seems to disappear into the cloud, while the other remains almost entirely outside it.

The cloud itself appears divided in two. A darker mass rises from the ground and envelops the bird on the left, while lighter mist occupies the ram’s side. The dark cloud stretches diagonally upward, nearly touching the heavenly orb, while the lighter cloud obscures its lower edge.

The effect makes the orb itself almost drawn downward, peering through the mist at the mysterious activity below.

And what do we notice as our eyes descend?

Just outside the cloud, a tiny dead bird lies on the ground beneath the ram, seemingly staring upward. It is so small that it barely registers in the composition.

Our eyes have traveled from the enormous bird on the left, full of movement and reaching toward heaven, to the almost invisible lifeless creature on the ground. The two birds appear strikingly different in size and vitality, yet their placement invites us to consider a connection.

Could the tiny dead bird be the fate of the enormous one?

The Child Who Replaced Another

Dalí knew very well the idea of substituting one child for another. He was the replacement for a brother he never knew, born into a family still mourning the loss of its first son.

How might such an artist have viewed the biblical matriarch Sarah?

Sarah had waited decades to bear Isaac, the son through whom God promised Abraham’s covenant would continue. Yet Isaac was not Abraham’s first son. Ishmael, born to Hagar, was already part of the family.

Sarah feared for Isaac’s safety and demanded that Abraham cast out Ishmael and his mother. In protecting Isaac, she effectively made him the substitute for Ishmael, removing Abraham’s first son from the household to protect her own. She was the ultimate protective mother, willing to break apart Abraham’s family to keep her son safe.

Yet in one of the most consequential stories in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Sarah is entirely absent.

When Abraham takes Isaac to Mount Moriah, Sarah never gets to raise her hand toward heaven, plead for her son or beg Abraham to stop. The woman who so wanted a child and had fought to protect Isaac from his brother has no voice when his father prepares to sacrifice him.

Where was Sarah? What happened to the mother whose entire life had been devoted to securing Isaac’s future?

Deciphering the Dream

Now we can understand the mysterious cloud at the center of Dalí’s painting.

It is the altar, rising from the ground as smoke toward heaven.

The lighter smoke ascends above the ram, seemingly carrying its sacrifice to God. The white smoke almost looks like a nose inhaling the ram, signifying the pleasing aroma of an accepted offering. The ram has taken Isaac’s place, preserving the life of Abraham’s beloved son.

But what is hidden in the darker smoke?

Consider the enormous bird reaching toward heaven. Its swollen belly recalls Sarah, who waited until old age to bear Isaac. Its outstretched wing resembles a hand raised in desperate prayer, while the skeletal ram stares directly at the womb that brought Isaac into the world.

The bird is Sarah.

And what of the tiny dead bird beneath the ram?

It is Sarah after the Akeidah.

The Torah records that Abraham returned from Mount Moriah, while Isaac’s fate after the binding is left unstated until he reappears later in the narrative. The ram had been sacrificed, and God’s promise to Abraham reaffirmed.

But the next Torah portion, Chayei Sarah, opens with Sarah’s death.

Jewish tradition has long connected these events. Rashi (1040–1105), drawing on earlier midrash, explains that Sarah died upon hearing news of Isaac’s near-sacrifice. The shock of learning what had almost happened to her beloved son caused her death.

Here, the painting’s dark smoke conceals the death of Sarah, while its lighter smoke carries the ram toward heaven. The enormous bird reaching upward and the tiny lifeless creature below become two images of the same mother, before and after the Akeidah.

The ram was sacrificed in Isaac’s place. Sarah died because Isaac was nearly sacrificed.

The Voice of Sarah

For thousands of years, Jews have sounded the ram’s horn on Rosh Hashanah, recalling Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son and God’s mercy in sparing him. The ram became a permanent symbol of devotion, its sacrifice remembered with every blast of the shofar.

But Sarah’s sacrifice presents a more troubling question. Abraham was commanded to offer Isaac, and Isaac was spared. Sarah received no command, made no choice and was given no opportunity to intervene. The mother who had spent her life protecting her son may have been the only person to die because of the Akeidah.

Jewish tradition celebrates Abraham’s obedience and Isaac’s willingness. Yet through Dalí’s surrealist lens, the story also becomes one of a mother whose devotion was no less profound, but whose suffering remained outside the biblical narrative.

Perhaps the shofar’s haunting cry recalls more than the ram that died. Perhaps it also gives voice to Sarah, whose sacrifice was never requested, whose consent was never sought, and whose life was never spared.

Understanding Judaism as the ancestral religion of a people changes the entire debate over Zionism, indigeneity and colonialism.

Everyone wants to define antisemitism and Zionism. Jewish organizations, politicians and academics spend enormous energy debating these terms, convinced that better definitions will produce greater understanding.

Yet they overlook a more fundamental question: What is Judaism?

The conventional answer, that Judaism is one of the world’s three great monotheistic religions, is technically correct but profoundly misleading.

Christianity and Islam are universal religions, with messages directed toward humanity and traditions of bringing the world into their faiths. Their religious communities transcend ancestry and geography, helping explain why each has spread across continents and attracted more than two billion adherents.

Judaism, meanwhile, has approximately 15 million people after more than three thousand years. It has survived empires, expulsions, massacres, forced conversions and genocide, yet remains extraordinarily small.

The three religions are grouped together because of their historical and theological connections. Jesus was Jewish, forever connecting Christianity to the Jewish people. Islam incorporates Abraham, Moses and other biblical figures into its tradition. Both transformed elements of Judaism’s religious inheritance into universal faiths. The historical irony is that the world subsequently began interpreting Judaism through the framework of its successors, making the original religion appear to be the peculiar exception.

Jewish religious leaders often explain the difference by describing Judaism as a particularist rather than universalist form of monotheism. Jews have a special covenant with God, while humanity can live righteously without becoming Jewish. Judaism generally does not seek converts.

But particularism merely modifies the conventional classification. There is a more fundamental distinction: Judaism is an ancient tribal folk religion, or more precisely, an indigenous ethnoreligious tradition.

Consider the Yazidis, a small ethnoreligious community whose ancestral homeland lies in northern Mesopotamia and whose sacred sanctuary at Lalish remains central to their identity despite centuries of persecution. Or the roughly one million Māori of New Zealand, whose understanding of ancestry, tribal identity and sacred geography binds people to the land of their forebears. The world readily recognizes that these peoples’ relationships with their ancestral lands are embedded in their identities.

Judaism belongs in this same family of land-rooted traditions.

The Torah itself reveals the difference. It begins with the creation of humanity but quickly narrows to the story of one family, its descendants, its covenant, its laws and its promised land. Genesis traces a family. Exodus describes the formation of a nation. Numbers organizes that nation into tribes. Deuteronomy prepares it to reenter its ancestral homeland.

The Torah is sacred scripture, but it is also the founding history and constitution of a people. Jews call themselves Am Yisrael, the People of Israel, carrying the name given to Jacob, ancestor of the twelve tribes, thousands of years before the establishment of the modern state.

Even conversion reflects this understanding. A person converting to Judaism joins the Jewish people, assuming the obligations and identity of the community. Ruth’s famous declaration captures the union: “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” The people come first in the sentence.

Most revealing is how thoroughly Judaism is rooted in the physical land of Israel.

Jewish law governs the cultivation, harvesting and distribution of produce grown there. The sabbatical year requires the land itself to rest, shmita. The Temple in Jerusalem was the center of national worship. And the Torah commands Jewish males to appear before God at the designated sanctuary three times annually, for Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot.

Consider the extraordinary geographic assumption: Three times every year, Jewish men were commanded to journey to the national sanctuary, eventually established in Jerusalem. These commandments were written for a world of footpaths, centuries before mechanized transportation. The Torah envisioned a people living within reach of a common sacred center, cultivating the same land and celebrating its agricultural seasons.

Judaism was conceived as the religion of a people living in the land of Israel. Its commandments were embedded in the soil, seasons, cities and sacred places of that homeland. Its God was universal, but its religious civilization was profoundly local.

The destruction of Jewish sovereignty and the dispersal of much of the population forced that land-based religion to adapt. Jewish communities developed religious institutions and practices that could survive thousands of miles from Jerusalem, and without a Temple. Yet the homeland remained central to their prayers, calendar, holidays and collective memory.

Jews continued living in Israel under successive foreign rulers, while communities in Poland, Yemen, Ethiopia and Iraq preserved the same ancestral orientation. A Jew could speak another language, adopt different customs or even reject belief in God and remain part of Am Yisrael.

For Christianity and Islam, the faithful carry their religion wherever they go. For Jews, wherever they went, their religion carried them back to Israel.

The consequences of misunderstanding this relationship are visible today on the Temple Mount.

Imagine the United Nations defending a prohibition on Lakota Sioux praying in the Black Hills because American ultranationalists threatened violence if they approached Mount Rushmore. The world would be outraged. The Black Hills are sacred ancestral territory, and Mount Rushmore was carved into that landscape following the conquest and dispossession of indigenous peoples.

Yet UN bodies have defended the Temple Mount “status quo,” under which Jewish prayer is forbidden, and have labeled Jewish religious activity there as “provocative.” The First and Second Temples stood on that mountain, the center of ancient Jewish national and religious life. Jews have prayed toward Jerusalem for two thousand years. It is the holiest location to only one religion: Judaism.

But the threat of jihadi violence has become a justification for limiting the religious rights of an indigenous people rather than confronting those threatening them. Political sovereignty and religious structures have changed repeatedly, but the Jewish ancestral attachment endures.

This same failure to understand Jewish indigeneity distorts the contemporary debate over Zionism and colonialism.

Modern political Zionism emerged in the nineteenth century, but the Jewish relationship to Zion began thousands of years earlier. Zionism gave modern political expression to the aspiration of an ancient people to restore national life in its ancestral homeland.

Colonialism generally describes the expansion of power by outsiders who establish control over another territory and its inhabitants. European colonial enterprises extended the authority of distant imperial capitals into foreign lands.

But how can a people be considered foreign colonizers in the very land at the center of their religion? How can their return be understood through the framework of European imperial expansion when their prayers, festivals, laws and sacred geography have been tied to that land for thousands of years? If the Māori were expelled from New Zealand for hundreds of years, would their return be labeled imperialism or colonialism?

To call Jews foreign colonizers in the center of their own ancient folk religion is to misunderstand the very nature Judaism.

“Genocide” is usually treated as a description: a word often intended to characterize what is happening in Gaza. People unpack the actual definition and bring dozens of examples to prove why the accusation is not just false but slander, or accurate.

But it distracts from the environment the word lives in. The word functions as a tool of the accuser.

The same word serves different purposes for different groups.

• Humanitarian organizations use it as a bullhorn to protect Palestinians.
• Anti-Israel protestors use it to undermine military support for Israel.
• Political actors in the Arab and Muslim world use it to keep the Abraham Accords from expanding.
• Antisemites use it to attack Zionists and Jews.
• Palestinian Arabs use it as a form of absolution.

And in response to the tool being worked into their sides and hearts, Jews are being forced to consider what the charge means for their relationship with Israel, with one another and with the people making it.

The first function is humanitarian.

Pro-Palestinian activists and human rights organizations, use the accusation of “genocide” to create the greatest possible urgency around Palestinian Arab suffering. It makes the world jump the queue of Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Ukraine or any number of regions suffering massive death.

In common terminology, calling civilian deaths a “tragedy” demands sympathy. Calling them “disproportionate” raises questions about military conduct. Calling them “war crimes” demands investigation. But calling them “genocide” demands that they stop. Immediate intervention becomes the imperative.

The second function is policy.

For activists seeking to weaken or end Western support for Israel, the genocide accusation transforms the argument over weapons. Countries supplying Israel with arms can be accused of enabling genocide. The target expands from Israeli military conduct to the governments, companies and institutions that make that conduct possible. Arms sales become complicity. Military assistance becomes something that must be stopped rather than merely conditioned.

It similarly pressures would be allies of Israel to pause. One of the reasons Hamas launched the war when it did was that Saudi Arabia was getting very close to joining the Abraham Accords and normalizing relations with the Jewish State. The masses would rebel if the kingdom normalized such relations when a “genocide” was unfolding against Muslims nearby.

The third function is social — external.

For antisemites, “genocide” provides an extraordinarily powerful accusation to direct against Zionists and Jews.

Once Israel is placed in that category, the accusation travels outward. Zionists become supporters of genocide. Jewish organizations defending Israel become its enablers. Jews associated with Zionism are pressed to answer for it.

The argument has traveled from Gaza to Jews themselves. “Genocide” becomes a means of stigmatizing Zionists, excluding them from institutions and social spaces, and targeting Jews who refuse to disassociate themselves from Israel.

The fourth function is absolution via inversion.

Palestinian Arabs and their supporters divert attention away from the truly genocidal acts and intentions of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, dozens of jihadi terrorist groups and thousands of Palestinian Arabs. Attaching a label of genocide on Israel reorients the viewers and grants amnesty to the heinous acts of October 7, and allows room for people to rationalize the action.

The fifth function is social — internal.

Here the audience is the Jewish community itself. Jews are being asked to not only look at the war, but at one another and at the people deploying the accusation.

They must decide what they believe Israel is doing. They must decide whether other Jews who reach a different conclusion remain inside a shared communal tent. And they must decide how to regard the organizations, movements, individuals and governments using the word “genocide” – as humanitarian advocates, political adversaries, antisemites, jihadists or some combination of them.

“Genocide” is much more than a smear in this war. It acts. And to miss that point is to miss the invisible war that has permeated society.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History has a good rule for teaching history: let students read primary sources.

So when it teaches September 11, students can encounter Osama bin Laden in his own words. That should make the origins of 9/11 unusually difficult to sanitize.

Bin Laden’s 1996 document was a Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Mosques. Its principal immediate grievance was the presence of American forces in Saudi Arabia, home to Mecca and Medina. He condemned the Saudi government for permitting what he called an army of “infidels” into land containing Islam’s holiest places and called on Muslims to drive them out.

The bipartisan 9/11 Commission described the document plainly. Bin Laden objected to “an army of infidels in a land with the sites most sacred to Islam.” He saw himself as following in the footsteps of the Prophet and organizing a new kind of war against America.

This was not simply a dispute over where the Pentagon stationed troops. Their being non-Muslims was central to the offense.

He became even more clear about his objection in his 1998 fatwa, written with Ayman al-Zawahiri under the banner of the “International Islamic Front for Jihad on the Jews and Crusaders.“

Not Israelis. Not Americans. Not NATO.

Jews and Crusaders.

The declaration said Muslims should kill Americans, including civilians, wherever they could be found.

“The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, “and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.”” – 1998 Fatwa

Then came the jihadi terrorist attacks of September 11.

That is where Gilder Lehrman’s lesson becomes peculiar.

Its current historical background accurately identifies al-Qaeda as an “international terrorist group.” But its explanation of bin Laden’s motivation says he “claimed that he was defending Islam” before quickly translating the dispute into political language: “He blamed the United States for supporting Israel and oppressing Muslims around the world.” It adds his opposition to American support for governments such as the Saudi monarchy.

It never uses the word “jihad” a single time, even when Bin Laden’s own 1996 and 1998 declarations both use “jihad” in the titles. The narrative is recast as a political dispute rather than a religious holy war.

The American presence in Saudi Arabia wasn’t objectionable to bin Laden merely because he disliked an American military deployment. His declaration treated an army of infidels in Islam’s sacred land as an offense demanding jihad.

His organization didn’t subsequently call itself the International Front Against American Middle East Policy. It invoked Jews and Crusaders – both words never used in the GLI lesson plan.

The curriculum directs students toward questions about American foreign policy. Its broader narrative proceeds rapidly from the attacks to American intelligence failures, the Patriot Act, surveillance, Guantánamo Bay, civil-liberties concerns, anti-Muslim discrimination, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Those are all legitimate subjects in a history of the War on Terror, AFTER 9/11.

But before asking about American actions after September 11, students should understand why 19 men believed murdering thousands of civilians was righteous in the first place. It does not require blaming Islam or all Muslims for September 11.

The distinction is straightforward: Islam is not al-Qaeda, and Muslims are not responsible for al-Qaeda. But al-Qaeda is a jihadist movement whose leaders explicitly justify their violence in religious terms.

There is another revealing asymmetry.

Gilder Lehrman makes sure students learn that hate crimes and discrimination against Muslim Americans increased after September 11. That belongs in the history. President George W. Bush’s insistence that America’s enemy was terrorism rather than Islam belongs there too.

But if prejudice against a religious group after the attack deserves explicit attention, surely the religious ideology of the men who carried it out deserves the same scrutiny.

Imagine reading a Declaration of Jihad filled with God, Islam, infidels, sacred territory and martyrdom—and being trained to search everywhere except religion for the explanation.

Gilder Lehrman’s great educational principle is that students should encounter history through original documents rather than having someone else tell them what happened. But here, the documents are presented and then the lesson redirects students toward American foreign policy and the subsequent War on Terror. It shifts the center of the 9/11 story from genocidal jihadists murdering thousands of innocent Americans to Muslims suffering from American policies, wars, discrimination and backlash.

That is an extraordinary inversion. And an insult to thousands of Americans who were murdered.

A predator attacks a porcupine expecting an easy meal. Instead, it gets a face full of quills.

Photograph the predator afterward and it may look like the victim. Its wounds are real. Its suffering is real. But the photograph is missing the most important fact: it attacked the porcupine.

That injured predator Nakba’d itself.

Consider Argentina in 1982. It invaded the Falkland Islands expecting Britain to accept the conquest. Britain sailed across the Atlantic, fought back and retook them. Hundreds of Argentine servicemen died, including 323 when a British submarine sank the General Belgrano.

Begin the story with the sinking and Britain looks like the aggressor. Begin it with Argentina’s invasion and you understand why British forces were there.
Chronology changes the story.

Which is core of the word Nakba.

In 1947, the United Nations proposed Jewish and Arab states for two people with long ties to the area of Palestine, one for Jews who had ruled for hundreds of years in the land, and one for local Arabs who aspired to their own country. Jewish leaders accepted partition while Arab leaders rejected it. After Israel declared independence in May 1948, armies of five neighboring Arab states entered the war against the reborn Jewish state.

The Arab calculation was breathtaking.

Only three years after the Holocaust, a tiny Jewish state was filled in part with survivors and refugees. Six million Jews had just been murdered. Its enemies looked at a shattered people surrounded by a much larger Arab world and saw weakness.

They mistook vulnerability for helplessness.

They attacked the porcupine. And they lost.

Israel survived. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fled the battlefield as they waited for their Arab brothers to wipe out the Jews. And they lost the war they launched. In the end, Israel ended the fighting with more territory than the UN partition plan had allocated it.

Palestinian Arabs named their defeat “al-Nakba” — the Catastrophe. But over time, their catastrophe became a romanticized socialist-jihadi word stripped of its rejection of coexistence and fervor for extermination of Jews, even as the sentiments remained deeply embedded in Arab culture.

Still, the photojournalists showed the wounds as evidence of who must have been the victim.

So the Nakba lives on.

Hamas demonstrated that Israel was vulnerable, murdering 1,200 civilians and soldiers and abducting 250 hostages. When Israel fought back Gaza suffered terrible destruction. Once again, the world’s camera focused on the wounded predator rather than the beginning of the encounter.

The Gazans Nakba’d themselves again. They attacked, suffered, and then pointed to their injuries in a plee.

The animal kingdom does it. The quills can be devastating. But the story is clear.

Stop the hatred. Stop the attacks. Stop the complaining after losing the fight you sought and launched.