Friendship: From Innocence to Betrayal
Our friendship had always carried a childlike innocence, a rare quality I shared with few others. Lara called just before October 7, 2023, and we spoke for hours, as we had so many times over nearly thirty years. Three weeks later, a text from her appeared on my phone.
“Malka, will you please look at this video from Gabor Maté?”
“Of course,” I replied.
I had no idea what I was stepping into. In the video, Maté and his daughter discussed the “genocide” in Gaza. My heart sank. Still, I told myself we could discuss it. As I watched, Lara’s messages flooded in without pause: another Maté video, an Al Jazeera report, a meme declaring Israel had no right to exist. Then came the Jew-splaining of my own history. I barely recognized the person on the other end of the phone. This was my first direct, unfiltered encounter with Jew-hatred, and it hit like a physical blow. My mind reeled as her texts kept coming — libel after libel, with no questions, no space for dialogue.
Lara had been my dear friend for decades. She looked up to me as her moral compass. We had shared countless deep conversations. I had stood beside Lara through one breakup after another. When my immune system collapsed and I was at my lowest, she showed up with genuine care and presence. Now I watched as this same woman passionately defended a narrative that felt otherworldly to me — one that erased Jewish history, Jewish pain, and Jewish reality.
The first video wasn’t what devastated me. It was the avalanche that followed. As I read her messages, I felt like I was witnessing an inversion of everything I knew to be true. She wrote, in part:
“The extremist Zionists have used this as the perfect excuse to exterminate entire innocent families. This is a crime against humanity. The Israeli extremists continue the occupation. Palestinians have been driven from their ancestral lands for decades. They are victims of ethnic cleansing and genocide. I’ve researched all the way back to the Balfour Declaration. Britain had no right to give away land that was not theirs. Palestinians are trapped in Gaza, held captive by Israel. Please know I am not antisemitic.”
I don’t remember every word I wrote back, only the rage that fueled it. Then I blocked her; a necessary boundary to stop the toxic flow into my life. For days afterward I moved through shock and grief. How could someone who knew me so well turn on me without a single conversation? Without once saying, “Malka, can we talk about what’s happening? I want to understand your perspective.”
She wasn’t interested in listening to my perspective. I came to understand there was no room for dialogue or critical thinking. As much as I was devastated by her behavior, I wanted to clear the air by sending one final message. I wrote, in part:
“A line was crossed. I don’t want a disingenuous response. Thank you for revealing a side of yourself I never knew existed. There is no need to gaslight me by insisting you’re not antisemitic. You cannot know what you do not know. To tell a Jewish woman — your friend — who carries thousands of years of history in her bones that Israel has no right to exist is an act of profound ignorance, abuse, and Jew-hatred. This leaves us nowhere.”
There is a bitter irony to all of this. Lara is a realtor. She spends her days selling stolen land in the United States while condemning Israel’s existence as an illegitimate “occupation.” You truly cannot make this up.
Many longtime friends followed a similar path in the months after October 7, delivering the same self-righteous certainty and casual hatred. A few stayed. I understood quickly that those who had chosen certainty over dialogue could no longer be a part of my life. In its place was a clearer, heavier truth:
My heart breaks with this realization. Yet I have spent my life lifting veils, seeing through illusion toward what is real. Søren Kierkegaard said it aptly: “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”