It was May, 1967. The mood in Israel was tense. Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt was riling up the masses, talking about driving Israel into the sea. There was a fear that the surrounding Arab countries were about to attack Israel from all sides with the intent of destroying it, and there was a sense of imminent tragedy. High school students were put to work digging trenches around Israeli towns to impede foreign attack. City parks were consecrated as burial grounds. The common black humor of the time was, “Will the last person to leave Ben Gurion Airport please turn out the lights?”
A Story
There was a Jewish man, the owner of a small café frequented by American State Department officials posted to Israel. Often, those men would chat with the owner. During that month, they approached him and challenged him, asking, “How is Israel going to survive this? You are so greatly outnumbered! The whole country is going to be slaughtered!”
But the Jewish owner responded to them, “You are forgetting one thing. We’ve got G-d.”
The diplomats responded to this derisively and left the café.
Soon after that, from June 5 to 10, Israel won its lighting victory in the Six-Day War, and when the war was over, the officials returned to the café and apologized to the owner.
And I ask myself: Would I have had the faith and fortitude to respond the way that owner did?
The Present Conflict – Where Do We Stand?
We in Israel are currently in the advanced stages of “Swords of Iron” (Charvot Barzel), our conflict with Hamas in Gaza, and we are dealing in increasing seriousness with the challenge from Hezbollah in Lebanon. Most of Gaza’s terror tunnels have been destroyed. The Egyptian-Gazan border, named the “Philadelphi Corridor,” is now hermetically sealed and is apparently going to remain so for the foreseeable future, even if eventual elections bring in Bennett and Liberman and Sa’ar to replace Netanyahu. For many years, this corridor was the chief route by which large-scale arms moved from Egypt to Gaza, facilitated by baksheesh, bribe money.
The residents of all the Gaza border towns are returning home. Agriculture is being restored. Much reconstruction will be required, but that is proceeding. Even if no Jews are allowed to resettle in any part of Gaza proper, Gaza will never be the same, as Netanyahu promised before the ground campaign began.
In the meantime, we are witnessing what can only be described as miracles on par with those of the Six-Day War. Iran, on April 13, 2024, simultaneously launched 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles at Israel, aimed at Tel Aviv, important air force bases, and intelligence bases in the far north. If one of those ballistic missiles had struck Tel Aviv, thousands of people could have died. Yet all of them were downed or neutralized before arrival by Israel, in cooperation with Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and, of course, the United Arab Emirates. The results were miraculous.
Then, on August 24, Israel sent an armada of 100 warplanes to neutralize a major threat, a Lebanese attack on Israel set to begin a few hours later. Israel’s strike, so reminiscent of Israel’s preemptive strike on Nasser’s air force in 1967, was likewise miraculous in its success, and pointed to enormously sophisticated intelligence information.
Finally, and most strikingly, we have the brilliant pager and walkie-talkie attacks of this past week, killing, blinding, or otherwise neutralizing much of the Hezbollah officer corps in two days. Suddenly, Nasrallah’s speeches are marked by less bravado. Recent events have not treated him well. Here, too, we have signs of brilliant planning and coordination, and unparalleled intelligence information. Qatar Airways has announced a ban on passengers flying from Beirut from bringing pagers or walkie-talkies onto its flights. The entire Arab world really does not know what hit them.
The next step is to conquer Southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, in order to enable 60,000 residents of the North to return home. In May of 2000, during Ehud Barak’s notorious term as premier, Israel withdrew from that area, and there were UN guarantees that Hezbollah would remain above the Litani River. But, of course, those promises were worthless, so now we will be going back, and the army seems ready. There seem to be plans for this to occur imminently, and we are certainly in better shape to do this now with a maimed Hezbollah office corps than we were a week ago.
The Debacle of the “Conceptzia”
All that said, we have to ask ourselves: If Israel has such a brilliant Mossad, such brilliant intelligence capabilities, and such wonderful skills for advanced planning, what happened on October 7th?
As Jews, we have to answer that question in two ways: on the earthly plane and on the celestial plane. On the earthly plane, Israelis seemed to have been suffering from two misconceptions – called in Hebrew “the conceptzia.” First, there was the blind belief that nothing bad would happen, that the threat across the border was not real, or that Israel could deal with it. During the past week we have heard the testimonies of two female tatzpetaniyot, “spotters,” Amit Yerushalmi and Margaret Weinstein, who happened to have completed their service a month before October 7th. These were girls who spent 18 months sitting along the Gazan border watching what was happening on the other side. Most of the girls unfortunate enough to be serving as spotters on October 7th were either murdered or abducted. Here is a sample of what Amit had to say:
I saw [Hamas] practice drills. At first, they were once a month, then they were twice a month. That turned into three times a month, and slowly it became several times a day. I also saw the drills being carried out closer and closer to Israel…. Sometimes the drills were not carried out in their practice compound – itself suspicious. I saw more and more Arabs disturbing the peace along the Israeli border… Additionally [towards the end], there were also convoys of 30 pickup trucks, which at last count were moving along the Israeli border. Each truck carried armed terrorists carrying cameras and waving Hamas flags, 300 meters from the Israeli border. We reported everything.
And Margalit added, “Certainly, we felt that something was happening. It was in the air. There was no mistaking it.”
So, it was obvious that Hamas was preparing for a major attack. Everything was being reported. It’s just that the army decided to ignore the warnings.
For years, under Israel’s nose, major construction, including terror tunnels, proceeded with Western funding. For years, mass sums of money were transferred to Hamas’ leaders by way of Qatar. For years, mass amounts of weaponry was moved from Egypt to Gaza.
Why did Israel seem to ignore all of this? Because they were afraid of making waves? Because they did not take Hamas seriously? In human terms, these questions are being examined right now. Heads have already begun to roll, and conclusions will be drawn, hopefully leaving Israel more mature and thoughtful than before.
The Challenge and the Hope
Yet there is also a second kind of answer, the more ethereal answer. King David said,
Unless the Lord builds the house,
Its builders labor in vain on it;
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
The watchman keeps vigil in vain. (Psalm 127:1)
And this week’s parsha, Ki Tavo, includes the Tochacha, God’s rebuke to the Jewish people when they sin:
You will bring much seed out to the field, but the locusts will devour the crop and you will bring little back. You will plant vineyards and work hard, but the worms will eat the grapes, so you will not drink wine or have a harvest. You will have olive trees in all your territories, but the olives will drop off and you will not enjoy their oil. (Deuteronomy 28:38-40)
In a word, it is not always enough to be doing the right thing. You can have the guards in place. You can be building the city. You can properly plant the field or the vineyard or the olive trees. But Hashem has to want you to succeed. And here, for His own reasons, Hashem wanted Israel to undergo this trauma. If Israel moves another step as a nation towards taking G-d into account, then the entire episode will have been proven to be worth it.
That is our challenge: to become more like the café owner in the story.
