While schmoozing with a friend recently, I lamented that I wouldn’t be able to visit my family in Israel for a long while because I would be getting weekly chemo injections for the next few months. I had been on a maintenance drug for a few years that meant I just needed blood work every month or two, which had given me the freedom to travel. Now I was limited to very brief excursions.
My friend looked at me incredulously and asked me if I wasn’t terrified to travel to Israel as missiles and drones and bombs were being fired on a too regular basis, by Hamas and their toxic cohorts like Hezbollah. I answered, “No, I’ve been dealing with an internal Hamas that has been trying to stop me from living my life and exterminate me since 1993. I’ve faced cancer three times. I can face the “cancer/Hamas plaguing my homeland.
Cancer is biological Hamas. Malignant cancer cells do not behave as normal cells that just go about their business. These abnormal entities feel “entitled“ to invade what they insist is “theirs” and are relentless destroyers of neighboring, healthy cells.
My parents were survivors of the Shoah. They were of the tiny minority of Jews that survived the Nazi cancers that metastasized in Europe. Tragically, the Jewish people are being afflicted by a different cancer, in the form of radicalized Islamists, and from my experience, and I imagine of every cancer patient, there is no co-existing with cancer, the biological or political kind. There can be no holding back with stopping it, no halfway measures, no compromising.
Hashem was very clear about how you deal with Amalek, of which Hamas is a spiritual, if not physical descendant (which it likely is with Ishmael commingling with Amalek over the centuries).
The impossibility of co-existence with cancer was taught to me during my first cancer, thyroid cancer. The thyroid is a gland that regulates many functions in the body, including metabolism. It is butterfly shaped, with lobes on each side of the windpipe.
The surgeon and his team decided to remove both lobes, even though one lobe was cancer-free. They explained to me that over the years, they noticed in thyroid cancer patients, that the healthy lobe would eventually be invaded by cancer and would need to be removed. Thus I could avoid a second surgery down the road, with its risks, like a life-threatening infection or a bad reaction from the anesthesia.
In today’s parlance, there could never be a two state/lobe solution. Cancer does not share or recognize borders and thus there can be no half way, benign measures to appease it. The State of Israel gave up Gaza years ago, a lush paradise, in medical terms a beautiful and productive “body part” in a vain, desperate attempt to exist side by side with Hamas. But cancer by nature does not compromise. It invades.
To my point, 10 years later, in 2003, my cancer/Hamas infiltrated the empty thyroid bed where my thyroid used to be. New malignant tissue had started growing. It came back in a different form.
In 2017, 14 years later, I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma – bone marrow cancer. Hamas-cancer was destroying my immune system, for it is in the bone marrow that the white cells that fight off viruses, bacterias and infections are manufactured. (Please note that I have simplified the medical aspects of myeloma.) Basically, this cancer makes people vulnerable to infections and pneumonias, causes anemia and severe fatigue, renal issues, and weakens the bones. Often people are diagnosed because of rib and vertebrae fractures. It is insidious because it attacks the elderly, where there are many possible benign causes of back pain, or tiredness and is overlooked, and diagnosed when it has already caused damage, like brittle bones. But With Hashem’s chesed, I am very healthy and never experienced any symptoms. I was diagnosed because of an annual osteoporosis evaluation that needed a second look, not because of any issues.
This Hamas-cancer is especially harder to deal with. Like Type 1 diabetes, it is treatable, but so far not curable. Despite what you throw at it, myeloma reappears. A very effective treatment for myeloma was developed from the research of two Israeli scientists, Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work. In addition, I was fortunate to be deemed well enough to have my stems cells harvested, and later reintroduced after a very strong chemo nuked all the blood cells in my body, seemingly killing the malignant myeloma blood cells. But like in any war, there is collateral damage, with the healthy red and white blood cells destroyed as well. Hence the stem cell transplant.
But Hamas-cancer is relentless, and blood work showed after six years, that the cancer numbers were creeping up, albeit at a snail’s pace. I held off from starting treatment for eight months; I felt great and all my other blood work was so normal, and the number was rising sooo slowly. Maybe I could wait a few years. But even though my number is still way lower from my original diagnosis, 2,400, and now 380, (the normal range is 3-19) overcoming a relapse is more of a battle. My doctors told me that I should fight my cancer from a position of strength, not weakness and shouldn’t delay. And that is what Israel needs to do. Fight this insidious Hamas-cancer tormenting our land, the Jewish people’s collective body and ending this existential threat to our well being.
And as a side note, in terms of Hamas, get-refusers should be considered in the same category of cancer and Hamas. For they prevent future generations from coming into existence. A look at the seruv list in The Jewish Press shows that some women have been prevented from marrying for years. Each person is considered a world, but these get-refusers are stopping new children from being born. Cancer and our enemies are unavoidable. But these men are making a choice to stop our nation from growing. They are toxic.
