Charlie Kirk, American Settler

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.