Nine months ago, I went to a music festival in Israel. It ended up being the most traumatic event of my life.

When the rocket warning sirens woke us up, my friend told me not to worry. It was normal in that part of Israel, she said — normal to live with the constant awareness that people close by want to kill you.

Then the music stopped, and the silence was more terrifying than the sirens.

Nova Music Festival security personnel, to whom I am eternally grateful, told us to get out. We fled from the sound of gunfire and explosions, watching Hamas terrorists advance in the distance, murdering, raping, and kidnapping people I had been dancing with just hours before.

I am alive today because of trivial choices — to go to the bathroom a minute before the stalls were riddled with bullets, to flee rather than hide, to run in one direction rather than another. If not for Moshe Sati and his son rescuing us, I would have been shot in the desert or, worse, taken hostage.

When I finally got home to New York, people kept asking me if I was glad to be safe at home. I should have felt better an ocean away from Hamas, but I didn’t.

How could I?

As I was bearing witness to Hamas’s atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023, crowds of people were downplaying or denying them.

Like survivors of violent antisemitism before me, I thought the world would unite in condemnation of Hamas and its attack. Instead, Israelis and Jews were blamed for their own deaths and condemned for fighting back.

Massive parades, both in New York and around the world, actually praised the massacre as some form of “resistance.” Strangers disputed my experiences to my face, citing reports from terrorist-aligned sources such as Al Jazeera. The heartless and the hateful ripped down posters of the hostages, posters that could easily have had my face on them.

I wish I could say the situation here has improved as further evidence of Hamas’s atrocities comes out, but it’s only gotten worse.

Just last month, a crowd of “protesters” blockaded the Nova Music Festival memorial in downtown Manhattan, carrying terrorist flags and calling for more antisemitic violence. And a couple of weeks ago at Glastonbury, a music festival in England, attendees and performers showed support for Palestinians but ignored their peer festivalgoers who were taken as hostages from the Nova festival. To them, I’m sure, my survival, not the murder, rape, or torture of innocent civilians, was the tragedy worth commemorating.

It’s no wonder I now feel safer in Israel, where people have the basic human decency those “protesters” clearly lack.

At the end of June, the organizers of the Nova Music Festival held their first official event since Oct. 7, bringing together more than 40,000 attendees in Tel Aviv for a healing concert to commemorate the victims and show solidarity.

I also got to participate in a bittersweet short film led by social media influencer Montana Tucker in partnership with the Combat Antisemitism Movement. In it, I and other survivors danced alongside Israel’s Lilach Friedman’s Dance Ensemble on the very site where 364 of my fellow festivalgoers were murdered.

Going back to the festival grounds was difficult enough, let alone dancing there again. But as I danced, surrounded by people who shared my pain at the most personal level, I felt both grateful and hopeful. I am grateful to Montana Tucker, her followers, and everyone else who’s interested in understanding Oct. 7 and spreading the word — even if it just means sharing the video on social media.

I can’t adequately express my appreciation for the allies who have helped me and other survivors tell our stories. Unlike the protesters, they recognize Hamas’s brutal terrorism for the evil it is and have added their voices to the struggle for justice and truth.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

I am hopeful that, in the long run, truth and goodness will win, that the protestors will reject terrorism rather than embrace it, and that community and human connection, the very things the Nova Music Festival represented, are more powerful than hate.

I know we have to fight for that outcome, and I know it won’t be easy. But if I’m hopeful after what I’ve been through, then you can be too.

Natalie Sanandaji is a public affairs officer for the Combat Antisemitism Movement.