Held captive to depravity I knelt, gagged and bound, and waited to be behead­ed. I remember the fu­sion of the fragrant pines and the stench of bile trapped under the rag around my mouth. I remember hearing the songs of the birds and the terrified whimper of my friend. I remember a bright light; a machete glinting in the sun. Beauty and the beast, sanctity and savagery were the unfathomable backdrop of those mo­ments, an eternal epoch that has not allowed, like other memories, for normative absorption with the passing of time.

I had never contemplated being brutally murdered. Who does? At only forty-six years old even death had barely crossed my mind. It was half an hour of madness so debilitat­ing that even the moments necessary for pre­paring myself for death were strangled by the dread of the manner of my imminent execu­tion. I recall looking to Heaven and begging the sun not to set, and seconds later witness­ing the unthinkable: A human being hacked to death before my very eyes.

I was no longer afraid to die, but I was terri­fied of giving up. I wanted the police to find my body so that the sons of evil would be caught. I wanted to choose my own grave, I wanted that last autonomy. Somehow, gagged, bound, barefoot, and bleeding to death, I managed to get up and walk a mile through the forest. I sus­tained 13 machete wounds in my lungs and di­aphragm, 6 compound fractures in my ribs, 30 additional fractures, a dislocated shoulder, a crushed sternum and a broken shoulder blade. I found no comfortable grave. Instead, surpris­ingly, I found help—a couple of families who saved my life.

Kristine Luken was robbed of her life and deprived of the final autonomy of choice that I was awarded. She was also pillaged of a natural demise surrounded by her loving family. Her death stole from her the dignity of dying in a pain-free manner, that basic mercy awarded to even the worst of convicted killers. The butch­er’s knife chopped away the future generations of an innocent woman. It ripped apart her fam­ily’s heart and tore my innocence to shreds. His blows smashed my bones, slashed my flesh, decimated my soul and shredded the person that I once was.

A year after the attack, as part of a small Is­raeli delegation I was invited to speak at a Euro­pean conference that sought to provide a plat­form for terror victims to tell their stories. I sat next to an Indonesian Muslim who had been “in the business” since the Bali bombings. He was just one of thousands of Muslims maimed or killed by the fanatics within their own Is­lamist-led regimes. He was a former man. His head was nothing but an unshapely mass that emerged at a peculiar angle from his neck. Tufts of coarse hair sprouted erratically behind his ears. The patches of light-toned skin graft­ed onto his dark face turned him into a maca­bre kaleidoscope of humanity. Juxtaposing my physical condition with his, I felt properly grate­ful. I have no physical disability or outward dis­figurement that would serve as a constant source of intrigue to those around me. Noth­ing about my appearance would ever make people suspect that I was a victim of terrorism.

As terror victims do, we skipped the small talk—we have lost the ability to engage in the mundane. The Indonesian gentleman intui­tively recognized that it must be a burden for me to have concealed physical scars that hide all evidence of the psychological terror that I live with day and night. He recognized that I am therefore not always awarded that extra dose of patience or understanding that I sometimes desperately need. I sensed his hidden pain too, and inquired if anyone ever related to him out­side his victimhood. I wondered if his conver­sations were ever peppered with anything but terrorism. Although our experiences were dif­ferent and it was futile to compare, we were family, inseparable siblings of random politi­cal murder. Irrespective of our racial and cultur­al backgrounds, we were both human targets of indiscriminate and senseless acts of terror. Like me, this innocent man had been tossed by waves of horror and ended up shipwrecked on a hostile shore. Like me, he had no possibil­ity of returning to his former life. Whatever we once were had disappeared along with all our former trivial concerns. In its place was a new us, an unfamiliar us, people who bore not only physical scars but the psychological lesions of those old before their time.

The objective of the weekend was to allow a “voice for the victims.” I appreciated the plat­form for our global and forgotten community to tell their stories. But despite the good inten­tions of the conference, my suffering was exac­erbated by the applause of well-meaning pity. It was damning. It left me shackled. I wanted to jump, scream, tear my hair out, fry an egg, take my clothes off…anything but be affirmed for my victimhood.

I will not and cannot deny that I am the vic­tim of a murderous terror attack. I am in chron­ic physical pain and am haunted by the images of my friend writhing and screaming as a ter­rorist impaled her to the ground. Life has not been kind or fair to me, but it would be incor­rect to assume that my sufferings are either comparable or unique. Inscribed upon the tab­lets of history are records of barbarity towards generations and cultures that have gone be­fore me. Entire people groups have been treat­ed with heinous cruelty: the Kurds, the Serbs, the Aborigines, the Native Americans, the Ar­menians, and the Jews, to name but a few. And history has also not been kind or fair to Pales­tinians.

The political frustrations of the Palestinians are as legitimate as they are harsh. True, the Is­raeli government has often put its head in the sand. But even now, not one Arab state has ever agreed to nationalize the Arab refugees who fled to Arab lands during or after the 1948 War. Even now, many live in squalor because their respective Muslim regimes deny them the privilege of buying land. Even now, the fail­ure of relief agencies is barely addressed. Even now, Hamas—now part of the Palestinian Au­thority—has consistently rejected prospects for peace, refusing to recognize even Israel’s right to exist. Without exception, the Palestin­ian leadership has sabotaged every single of­fer that a mediator has brought to the table. But even now—and most bizarrely of all—the world lays the blame inequitably on Israel.

The Palestinian Authority has adopted an identity of suffering to alert the world to their plight. Behind this ostensibly harmless narra­tive of misfortune is a subtle and underrated form of political terrorism that is fortified with a mendacious propaganda campaign that is so effective that lies are now truth, fact is now fic­tion, and the Palestinians have lost sight of who they are. By rewriting history, they attempt to invoke not just self-defeating perpetual sym­pathy, but inflame the fury of those who har­bor the world’s oldest hatred.

Into their tapestry of victimhood they have woven centuries of ignorance and hate. They have brilliantly unstitched the historical, Jew­ish, Jesus of Nazareth—crucified by Rome for insurrection—and darned him afresh onto their own ersatz chronicles as a “poor Palestin­ian,” who suffered at the hands of “the Jews.” Jesus’ poverty, hardship, and rewritten cultur­al identity is now one with theirs. Similarly, the Holocaust, that mass industrial murder of six million Jewish people and the ultimate human atrocity, has been nefariously captured by the talons of the Palestinian Authority. The spuri­ous and lethal certitude that every single Pal­estinian amounts to nothing but an emaciated, caged refugee in a Zionist imposed ghetto, sur­rounded by a 28-foot wall that conceals geno­cide, is a chilling, wicked, and audacious blood libel.

The formation of this “suffering Palestini­an” is a sinister narrative that perversely seeks to claim victimhood by exacerbating hatred toward the Jewish people and the State of Is­rael. It absconds with the sufferings of Jewish history to gain political clout, and carves vic­timhood out of a stealthy narrative that mir­rors, undermines, and purposefully inflames an unreformed Islamist East and hoodwinks a largely anti-Israel West. Behind the phenom­enal “suffering success” is the slick, well-oiled, and brilliantly executed directional narrative of the Palestinian Authority.

At the very least, to encourage the Palestin­ians to embrace an identity of unabated mis­ery and cling to the notion of victimhood robs them of their quest for a genuine identity and cements them in generic and disingenuous misery. As a person who has suffered greatly, I cannot accept the endorsement of the perpet­ual psychological victim of any individual as ei­ther true, moral, or helpful.

I want my horrendous experience to help my Palestinian friends unshackle themselves from the lies that they are being told and tell­ing themselves. I want to guide them out of the dark thicket of resentment and encour­age them into the light. I want them to choose life—that unstoppable and raging desire nev­er to give up—because it is a drug more pow­erful than any treacherous lie of misery and vic­timhood that seeks to poison their souls. I want them to make a better future for their children. I want them to lead healthier and more mean­ingful lives.

Behind this ostensibly harmless narrative of misfortune is a subtle and underrated form of political terrorism that is fortified with a men­dacious propaganda campaign that is so effec­tive that lies are now truth, fact is now fiction, and the Palestinians have lost sight of who they are.

So I share with them the story of my own death march so that they can marvel at the hidden strength and the irresistible drive that dwells within a human being to live and not to die. I share this in the hope that the challeng­es that I continue to encounter in my own life will help them somewhat through theirs. I re­mind them that agony and gratitude go hand in hand. I tell them that I am in psychological trauma with what I have seen, yet I am smit­ten with the joy of being alive. I look to the light that forms the shadow in the valley of death and tell them that once I was bound but now I am free. I am free to choose right from wrong, free to strike or embrace; my once-bare feet are free to walk painlessly towards or painless­ly away.

It is effortless for me to be bound again by a fear-based lie that every single Palestinian is a terrorist. To avoid shackling myself with these chains of prejudice I have to scrutinize any signs of contempt encroaching upon my soul. To steer clear of that thicket of hostility, I lunge towards freedom by nurturing the re­lationships with my Palestinian friends, and reject the manacles of vicarious blame that holds accountable the entire Palestinian peo­ple.

It is my jihad, my struggle, my individ­ual and persistent mental war that is won by me telling myself that not every Pales­tinian is responsible for the murder of Kris­tine. It was just two thugs who were part of a 13-man terror cell. It was just the Arab states, banks, and Muslim charities who finance terrorism through money laun­dering. It was just the Palestinian Author­ity, the recently united Fatah and Hamas, a state-sponsored coalition of terror. These are the people who are responsible for the murder of Kristine Luken.

There are thousands of Palestinians who have done nothing to deserve the situ­ation that they find themselves in. No one in their moral right mind is happy with the political status quo. It is these innocent Pal­estinians who are the hope for their future, and by taking on a moral jihad, a non-vio­lent struggle, I hope, with them, that they will defeat the insidious occupation of hate in their society and souls.

I wish them freedom: an autonomy of thought that refuses to believe that they will only be liberated by the shedding of blood.

I wish them courage: a valor that quar­antines religious leaders who proclaim through the muezzins that Jews are pigs and only Muslims are made in the image of God.

I wish them generosity: a giving spirit that would enable a Jewish state to live be­side them in peace.

I wish them tenacity: a resolve that uproots the rampant incitement in their educational in­stitutions.

I wish them justice: retribution that holds accountable, rather than rewards, cold-blood­ed murderers sitting in jails.

I wish them strength: a tireless resilience to meticulously trace the billions of dollars squan­dered by their own authority.

I wish them integrity: an honesty that con­cedes that Israeli settlements provide them with equal and respectable salaries.

I wish them identity: the establishment of culture so they will no longer be bereft of li­braries, museums, theaters, and galleries.

I wish them peace: a treaty that invites the international community to spurn their leaders who choose only war.

I wish them patience: the forbearance needed to wait for those such as the United Nations to cease their pathological demoniza­tion of Israel in order to address the real issues at hand.

And if they do achieve their dreams, then I wish for them to come to Israel, so that they can see the unimaginable: the sole democratic country in the Middle East.

If that day comes I will take them to Je­rusalem, the undivided and eternal capital of the Jewish people. After visiting a hos­pital to meet with the Muslim Arab-Israe­li surgeon who saved my life, we will travel to the Supreme Court, the pinnacle of Isra­el’s judicial democracy. I will tell them the story of the Arab judge who sent a former Jewish president deservedly to jail. I will laud our system that tries government and military personnel who seek to abuse their power. I will praise the Israeli authorities that arrests Jewish vandals who desecrate people’s property in the name of God and commend my people who are outraged by acts of vengeance directed at innocent Pal­estinians.

I shall also speak against the rabid injus­tice in our democratic society that is carved into the flesh of those who have buried their murdered. I shall ask for them to try and understand those who stand by help­lessly as they watch the government of Is­rael award clemency for the sons of evil. I hope that they can sense our outrage to­wards a prison system that resembles a country club; one that fails to administer befitting justice for those who chose to work off their frustrations and racial hatred by kidnapping and murdering teenagers, blowing up the elderly on buses, butcher­ing sleeping babies, and hacking at wom­en with meat cleavers without so much as blinking an eye.

I will take them to any Israeli university, where Arab and Jew study together to build for themselves a life of provision and mean­ing. In that same university, we shall attend the demonstrations held by some Arab stu­dents, the morally and hypocritically impaired, who protest that Israel is an apartheid state. I shall encourage my Palestinian friends to learn the tongue of the prophets, the same Hebrew that is used by the Israeli press to vehement­ly and fearlessly critique any and every govern­ment policy. We will finish the day at my home, a tiny rented flat, barren of all but a bed, pi­ano, and books. I will explain that my situation is due to the terror that plundered my psycho­logical health and has left me disabled. I would hope that they could understand the exasper­ating unfairness I feel when I am reminded that terrorists are entitled to a Palestinian Authori­ty monthly murder stipend ten times what the Israeli National Insurance awards me as a disa­bility allowance. But I have learned that life is neither fair nor kind. And I have learned that to listen to the inner voice of futile compara­tive victimhood only fans the flames of injus­tice and saps me of my life.

I refuse to be consumed by hate and define myself by evil. Instead I choose to be thankful for what I have. With all my resolve, I strain to hear the songs of the little birds over the whim­per of my friend. Through the reek of vomit I in­hale the fragrant pines. I turn my head away from the glint of his knife and choose to look to Heaven. With the exuberant and endless gratitude known only to those who have es­caped death, I daily declare the ancient He­brew prayer, a decree of gratitude that millions before me have stub­bornly whispered throughout mil­lennia of collective Jewish suffering: “I offer thanks before you, living and eternal King, for You have mercifully restored my breath within me; Your faithfulness is great.”

It’s a long, lonely, terrifying, yet exhilarating, walk out of the forest of hate.

Kay Wilson is a British-born Israeli writer and speaker, jazz musician, and cartoonist.

By KayWilson/www. thetower.org