I was never a mega-fan of Charlie Kirk. I never met him.
I had some work-related contact with Turning Point USA, but, like many pro-Israel, pro-American pundits, I mostly followed his social-media feeds, where he voiced opinions others were often too afraid to share, particularly about the dangers of Islam and illegal immigration. I disagreed with him about when human life begins in the womb, his isolationist stance on the 12-day war this June between Isral and Iran, and his belief that women find ultimate happiness in marriage—unless they married righteous, doting men like him.
Most of all, I’m not Christian.
Yet his murder gutted me, and I wasn’t exactly sure why. It was as if I were reliving old traumas that had paralyzed me in the past: the Oct. 7 massacre and its root cause: the 2005 expulsion of Jews from Gaza, which I experienced as a reporter. I burst into tears the night Charlie was taken, and again whenever I saw pictures on my feed of his beautiful, all-American family. His loss must symbolize something deeper.
As I watched the eulogy of his widow, Erika, tears pouring down my face, I began to understand my inconsolable sorrow. Charlie embodied the same spirit that fought on the sands of Gush Katif, when tens of thousands of “settlers” and their supporters warned Israel against betraying its own by uprooting Jews from their homes only to hand their well-tended land to sworn enemies. Eighteen years later, their warnings were vindicated by the Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 men, women, children, even babies.
“They killed Charlie because he preached a message of patriotism, faith and of God’s merciful love,” Erika said.
When I infiltrated Gush Katif before the disengagement, I was a secular rationalist inspired by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who taught that God is the essence of existence and that loving Him means living a life of reason in pursuit of self-preservation. I didn’t have to be an Orthodox Jew to see the truth: destroying the lives of productive countrymen in surrender to murderous Islamic terror was wrong—and, by extension, self-destructive.
The “settlers,” once celebrated as Zionist pioneers when they made their homes on barren, biblical lands in the 1970s and ’80s, may not have shared Spinoza’s version of ethical monotheism. But I fought alongside these modest, faithful men and women anyway—in jeans and a crop top with a belly-button ring. Ultimately, we were fighting for the same God.
To this day, my lifestyle is not theirs. I’m a single mother who left Israel for Berlin, I study at a liberal rabbinical school, and I’m the author of novels that would make conservatives blush. To me, the “settlers” in Gaza and Judea and Samaria were like the priestly caste of the nation of Israel, preserving, through rigorous Torah observance, the moral virtues our enemies despise, those immortalized in the Ten Commandments and in the Torah’s universal teaching, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Charlie’s family and followers carried the spirit of America’s early Christian settlers, and that made him part of a priestly American caste.
In the days after his death, I watched more of his campus debates. He was clearly gifted—his breadth of knowledge, quick wit and ability to communicate with people of all kinds. His love for humanity came through in the kindness he showed even those who disagreed with him. He believed in achieving the world he envisioned through words, not violence. He urged Americans to see their country not merely as an economic zone for consumer comfort, but as a homeland where families and legacies are built upon the virtues of human freedom and Divine love that inspired America’s founders.
I envied Erika because she didn’t cower in grief. She rose in her darkest hour to continue the fight for the world he envisioned. “One of his mottos was ‘Never surrender,’” she declared. “So I want to tell you that we will never surrender. We never will. Ever.”
As Israel reels from its own losses of hundreds of civilians and soldiers, I wondered: Why don’t Israelis speak like this? In the highly publicized eulogies of bereaved family members, I rarely hear this defiant, warrior spirit. What’s worse: Some turn their grief inward, begging the Israeli government to give in to Hamas’s demands and end the current war in a stalemate.
But then I remembered.
Some Israelis do speak like Erika—understanding, as she put it: “Our battle is not simply a political one. Above all, it is spiritual.” These Israelis are just not given much airtime.
They are, of course, religious Zionists, particularly the “settlers” living in Judea and Samaria. They are the same Israeli nationalists that Charlie’s enemies would be quick to defame as “fascists.” They are the kind of Israelis who founded the Tikva Forum for families whose sons are held captive in Gaza. Even with the deep longing and worry they feel for their children, they understand that the nation will be endangered by negotiating with terrorists. They buck the popular, media-driven trends and call on the government to “never surrender.”
My grief for Charlie stirs my grief for Gush Katif and the loss of that land, made possible by the constant defamation and dehumanization of the good people living there 20 years ago before disengagement.
Charlie’s battle was also theirs—not just for their respective national security, but for the national soul. Our battle on those sands was not only for land but for values: elite power versus the common man; godless nihilism versus rational faith; radical individualism versus traditional family; conformity versus independent thought.
The rise of “populists” in Europe is akin to the settler movement in Israel. Ordinary people, turned by circumstance into extraordinary people, motivated by love for their families, their countries, their God—sounding the alarm against the influx of radical Muslims who no doubt sympathize with the terrorists and ideological extremists who drove Jews out of Gush Katif. They are the settlers.
Charlie was an American settler.
