Estee

Just trying to do my best. 31. she/her. 💙🇮🇱✡️

[Yoni Leviatan @songsofyoni]

Here’s what the media doesn’t tell you about the caricature of Israel you have in your mind.

In less than two hours, over 7 million Jewish Israelis will mark Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Some will go to synagogue. Some will go to the beach. Nobody will drive unless they have to. Many will not eat or drink for 25 hours, religious or not.

Then you have over 2 million Arab Israelis who will go on with their lives as usual. Many will not drive in mixed cities out of respect for their Jewish neighbors. Nobody will drive in Jewish neighborhoods. And the hospitals will only be filled with Arab doctors and nurses to let their Jewish colleagues observe the day at home. (The opposite happens on Ramadan.)

Not long ago I went out to run a few last-minute errands before the holiday begins. Every Arab I interacted with – at the dry cleaners, in the supermarket, in the elevator – wished me an easy fast.

Every one.

It happens every holiday. Any holiday. Their holidays and ours.

This is the real Israel. A country filled with Jews and Arabs that get along better than anywhere else on this planet, that nobody shows you because it’s simply not newsworthy.

It’s everyday life.

To all those who observe – have an easy fast.

גמר חתימה טובה

[Michael Brown @MichaelDBrown]

At a 9/11 remembrance event night a man told the audience his brother's remains were not identified until April of 2002.

Seven months. The room gasped. They heard neglect.

I was sitting in the back of that room, and I knew what those 7 months actually were. Because my job took me to a garbage dump on Staten Island that I believe is one of the most sacred pieces of ground in America.

For 10 months after the attacks, investigators in white personal protective equipment stood at conveyor belts on a hill called Fresh Kills and searched 1.5 million tons of the World Trade Center by hand, down to fragments a ¼ inch. An average of 30 human remains recovered every single day. Wedding bands. Police shields. Office ID cards. Names given back to families who had nothing else to bury.

The wait was terrible. But the wait was the search.

Almost nobody knows this story. I wrote down what I saw on that hill one day in my journal 25 years ago. Today I published that story.

↓

[שחר ורון | Shahar Varon @ShaharVaron]

לא ראיתי את הסרט ולכן אני לא מתכוון להתווכח עליו. אבל בתוך כל הסערה סביבו, חשוב לי לומר משהו בתור מי שהיה שם.

אני הייתי שם. אנחנו היינו שם.

בשבעה באוקטובר ראינו רוע שקשה לתאר במילים. עברנו בין הבתים, ראינו את התוצאות מקרוב ואיבדנו אנשים. את מה שהיה שם שום סרט לא באמת יצליח להעביר.

שלושה שבועות אחר כך נכנסנו לעזה.

שם נדרשנו להילחם באויב שלא משחק לפי שום כלל שאנחנו מכירים. אויב שלא תמיד עומד מולך במדים, שפועל מתוך מרחב אזרחי ומנצל את הערבוב בין לוחמים לאזרחים כדי להקשות עלינו להילחם בו.

ובתוך המציאות הבלתי אפשרית הזאת נשארנו בני אדם.

גם אחרי השבעה באוקטובר, גם אחרי שחברים שלנו נהרגו וגם אחרי שבועות וחודשים של לחימה.

כמ״פ, הייתי שם כשהתקבלו ההחלטות. אני יודע כמה מאמצים עשינו כדי לצמצם פגיעה בבלתי־מעורבים.

אי אפשר לספר את הסיפור של עזה בלי השבעה באוקטובר.
אי אפשר לדבר על תוצאות המלחמה בלי לדבר על האויב שמולו נלחמנו ועל האופן שבו הוא בחר להילחם.

שיח שמציג רק צד אחד של המציאות הוא לא שיח אמיץ או מורכב. הוא שיח מוטה. וכשהוא מוצג לעולם כאמת כולה, הוא פוגע במדינת ישראל ובלוחמים שנשלחו להגן עליה.

אני הייתי שם. אני מכיר את המחיר. אני מכיר את המורכבות.

ובעיקר אני מכיר את הלוחמים שלי ואני גאה בדרך שבה נלחמנו ובבני האדם שנשארנו.

[Mossad Commentary @MOSSADil]

🚨 NYC FIREFIGHTER BERATES PALESTINIAN PROTESTERS

As Palestinian protesters have the audacity to show up to the 9/11 memorial, while a firefighter rightly lays in to the protesters. He tells them to leave and go to Palestine and to take AOC and Mamdani along with them.

Watch until the end where they yell “the JEWS are committing a GENOCIDE!”

This has absolutely nothing to do with love of humanity or care for the Palestinians.

It has everything to do with destruction of the west and Jew hatred. They’re not even trying to hide it anymore.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

At Ground Zero, after the last living person was pulled out, the search dogs stopped eating.

So the police did something nobody had written down in any manual.

They climbed into the rubble, lay down, and pretended to be alive.

More than 300 dogs worked the World Trade Center site. They came from every corner of the country, on trucks and in cargo holds, with handlers who had been trained to do one thing. Find people who are still breathing under the ground.

That is what a search and rescue dog is built for. Not bodies. Life. They are trained on live human scent. When they find it, they bark, they dig, they light up, and the handler rewards them, and the whole thing means something.

The last living person recovered from Ground Zero was a woman named Genelle Guzman-McMillan. She had been buried for 27 hours. A dog found her.

She was the last.

After that, the dogs kept going out on twelve-hour shifts, across sixteen acres of smoldering steel, at temperatures that burned their paws, and they found nobody.

Nobody.

Day after day.

The handlers noticed it first. The dogs were changing. Their tails were down. They were not eating. They would come off the pile and lie flat and not look at anyone.

A veterinarian named Cindy Otto, who spent ten days there working night shifts to care for the animals, put it plainly. The dogs had been sent to find life, and every day they were finding the opposite.

It was breaking them.

An NYPD officer named Famiglietti described what happened next.

They pulled everybody off the rubble. Then they asked for volunteers.

The volunteers, police officers, went out into the debris and hid themselves. Under beams. In voids. Curled up in pockets of concrete. They were told to lie down like they were hurt. Then the handlers sent the dogs in.

Picture that.

A grown man with a badge, a man who had spent the last week pulling friends out of that same pile, lying down in it on purpose. Face down. Holding still. Waiting for a dog.

And the dog comes over the top of the wreckage, and catches the scent, and barks, and digs, and finds a person who is warm and moving and alive.

And the handler says good girl, good boy, and the whole team celebrates.

They called them mock finds.

They did it for the dogs.

They did it so the dogs would remember what they were for.

One of those dogs was a two-year-old golden retriever named Bretagne. She came from Texas with her handler, Denise Corliss. It was her first deployment. They worked ten days at Ground Zero. They found no survivors.

But firefighters would come off the pile, stone-faced, not speaking, and see the dog, and something would break open in them. They would kneel down. They would put their face in her fur.

One day a man walked up to Bretagne and started petting her. He told Corliss his best friend loved golden retrievers.

Corliss asked where his friend was.

The man pointed at the pile.

"He's in there somewhere."

He kept petting the dog.

Bretagne went on to work Hurricane Katrina and Rita. She retired at 10. She was the last known surviving search dog of 9/11.

On June 6, 2016, at age 16, she was carried into a veterinary office in Texas to be put to sleep.

Outside, a dozen firefighters from her fire department stood in a line in their dress uniforms, in the heat, and saluted as she went past.

They draped her in an American flag on the way out.

Three hundred dogs went into that pile looking for the living.

They found one.

And when they could not find any more, the men they worked beside laid down in the rubble and let themselves be found, so the dogs would not lose heart.

That is the whole story of Ground Zero, really.

Nobody could save the dead.

So they saved each other. 🇺🇸

[Aviva Klompas @AvivaKlompas]

⚠️ Israel has issued a heightened threat alert for Jews and Israelis traveling abroad ahead of the Jewish holidays and the third anniversary of October 7.

➡️ Iran and its proxies remain the primary threat, actively seeking attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets around the world.

➡️ Hamas is investing significant resources in building terrorist infrastructure in Europe and elsewhere for high-profile and revenge attacks.

➡️ ISIS and al-Qaeda continue to explicitly call for attacks on Jews, including potential attacks in Europe and the United States.

➡️ Lone-wolf terrorism is a growing concern, with synagogues, Jewish community institutions and large gatherings considered vulnerable targets.

🔴 Since the war began, 25 Israelis and Jews have been murdered in terrorist attacks abroad.

The National Security Council is advising travelers to avoid displaying Israeli or Jewish identifiers and posting their locations in real time.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

A Hero That Trusted His Intuition.

The problem wasn’t that Morgan Stanley didn’t believe him.

Rick Rescorla had already been right once. After the 1993 basement bombing of the World Trade Center, the firm’s security chief walked the towers, studied the site, and reached a conclusion most people preferred not to hear: the World Trade Center was still a target. Next time, he said, it would not be a truck. It would be an airplane.

An airplane. In a 1993 report.

Executives listened. Then they looked at the lease.

Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant in the complex—twenty-two floors of the South Tower, thousands of brokers, and a trading infrastructure that could not be packed into boxes and wheeled across the Hudson.

They literally made it a trading center.

The contract with the Port Authority ran until 2006. Walking away from premium Manhattan space of that scale would have meant penalties measured in the hundreds of millions, plus the operational chaos of relocating an entire downtown machine. So the company stayed.

Rescorla adjusted. If they could not leave the building, they would learn to escape it.

He built a protocol and treated it like doctrine. Unannounced drills. No exemptions. Brokers who billed by the minute were pulled off their desks and sent into the stairwells two by two, starting from the top floors, leaving a lane for firefighters coming the other way.

People complained. He did not care. Practice, he believed, was the only thing that would beat panic.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. From the 44th floor of the South Tower, Rescorla could see the fire. Then the Port Authority came over the speakers: the South Tower was secure. Stay at your desks.

Rescorla grabbed a bullhorn and ignored them.

He started the drill his people already knew by heart. Floor by floor, two by two, down the stairs. He sang as he moved—Cornish songs from childhood, then “God Bless America”—keeping the line moving, refusing to let the stairwell become a stampede. Seventeen minutes later, the second plane struck the South Tower.

By then, most of Morgan Stanley was already on the way out.

Of the 2,687 employees in the building that morning, all but 13 survived.

It was stunning.

Rescorla could have been outside with them. He went back up instead. Colleagues told him to leave. He said he would, as soon as he was sure no one was left behind.

He was last seen around the 10th floor, heading higher.

The South Tower fell at 9:59 a.m. They never found him.

He was one of the 13.

He was a hero in every sense of the word.

Remember Rick Rescorla, he remembered for us.

[Eve Barlow @Eve_Barlow]

RIP to one of the most important female activists ever. I’d like to personally thank Gloria Steinem for being one of the first prominent women to sign a statement condemning Hamas’s use of sexual violence on October 7. And for signing an open letter condemning the public shaming of Amber Heard in 2022. And for everything, glorious Gloria. 💔💪

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

She knew she wasn’t coming home. And she chose to be a witness anyway.
​On the morning of September 11, 2001, 35-year-old Madeline "Amy" Sweeney was working aboard American Airlines Flight 11. Minutes after takeoff, terror took the cabin. The cockpit went dark. Crew members were slashed. A passenger was stabbed. The pilots were gone.
​In a situation where human instinct screams to panic, Madeline picked up an Airfone.
​She dialed ground control. When supervisor Michael Woodward answered, he didn’t hear hysteria. He heard a calm, quiet, razor-sharp voice relaying reality through the dark.
​Methodically. Relentlessly.
​She gave the seat numbers of the hijackers. She described their faces. She detailed the injuries in the cabin. She gave investigators the precise identities of the men steering them toward catastrophe—including Mohamed Atta.
​She could not overpower the hijackers. She could not force the cockpit door open. She could not steer the Boeing 767 back toward the sky.
​So she did the only impossible thing left: she made sure they wouldn’t get away with doing it in secret.
​As the plane banked sharply and descended over the Manhattan skyline, she stayed on the line. Reporting what she saw. Giving the world the truth, second by second, until 8:46 a.m.
​Madeline left behind a husband and two babies—four-year-old Jack and seven-year-old Anna. She spent the final minutes of her life trapped in an airborne nightmare, staring down certain death, and weaponizing her courage so history would have an answer.
​True bravery isn't the absence of terror. It is looking into the abyss, refusing to break, and doing your duty until the very last breath.
​Remember her name. Madeline Amy Sweeney.

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS UP

They found Miss “Palestine” connected to a convicted terrorist leader.

[נועה מגיד | Noa magid @NoaMagid]

HEROES

[Olia @OliaOnX]

Mark Kondratiuk, a Russian (not Jewish) figure skating champion, dedicated his performance to the people of Israel.

Mark titled it “To taunt the antisemites”. It is set to Hava Nagila.

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

BREAKING: A leaked memo exposes the BBC’s direct coordination with Hamas to push Jihadist propaganda, according to a new Telegraph report.

The memo has completely destroyed what little credibility the BBC had left.

[Noa Argamani @ArgamaniNoa]

Two years. Two years passed since the last moment I saw Avinatan, the love of my life. Two years since the moment terrorists kidnapped us, put me on a motorcycle, and tore me away from Avinatan before the eyes of the entire world.

From that moment, our journey in captivity was separated. I was held captive with children, women, and the elderly, while Avinatan was held alone. I was mostly kept inside houses, while Avinatan was only in the tunnels. Hamas released videos and signs of life from me, while there was no information at all about Avinatan. I was held captive by Hamas for 246 days, while Avinatan was held for 738 days. I came back in a heroic rescue operation, and Avinatan returned in a deal.

But both of us, against all odds, came home and were reunited!

I cannot put into words the range of emotions I felt when I saw him for the first time after so long. Each of us faced death countless times, and yet, after two years apart, we are finally taking our first steps together again in the State of Israel.

At last, we can begin our healing together. The recovery will be long; we still haven’t truly processed what has happened here over these past two years. But we won. We won our personal war, and the war of all those who fought alongside us to reach this moment. And now, the time has come to begin our shared journey together.

I want to say a huge thank you, first and foremost, to the @IDF soldiers and security forces who have been fighting for so long and risk their lives for us every single day. Thank you to our family, friends, and to the people of Israel, Am
Yisrael, who raised their voices when we couldn’t speak. To the people around the world who embraced us, to all the incredible individuals who supported us through the hardest times and never lost hope throughout this long period. To the US government, which opened its doors to me and was always there to listen, especially @SEPeaceMissions Steve Witkoff, @jaredkushner, and the exceptional, President @realDonaldTrump.

To all the people who too stood beside our hostages and understood that light must overcome darkness.

We will never forget the fallen and the murdered, and we will not stop fighting until every fallen soldier and hostage is brought home for a proper burial in Israel.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

This could never have happened without you.

We are back ❤️

[Mor Edge Insight @MorEdge_Insight]

Says it all

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

Where is the outrage?

[Eylon Levy @EylonALevy]

Hamas believed recognition of a Palestinian state proves the October 7 Massacre worked. It will therefore try to perpetrate more October 7 Massacres because Starmer, Carney, and Macron are telling it barbaric atrocities pay off.

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

BREAKING: The UN itself admits that 87% of its 2,010 food trucks in Gaza between May 19–July 29 were hijacked by armed groups (Hamas). That’s from the UN’s own site (UNOPS).

This isn’t Israeli propaganda. It’s a UN confession. Where’s the media?

[Dr. Eli David @DrEliDavid]

Have you tried releasing the hostages?

[Eylon Levy @EylonALevy]

Tel Aviv graffiti
📌 Florentine Street