Because I have lived in Kiryat Arba, Israel, for 32 years, bored Shabbos guests often ask me, “Well then! Living near Hebron you must have seen a lot of violence in your day, isn’t that so?” After recovering from their use of the expression, “in your day,” I realize that they are right in a sense. I have seen violence. Here is the story of when that happened.

In 1988, at age 33, married with one child, I did 95 days in the Israeli military, away from home, learning to be an artillery soldier. Startled to discover that I could actually learn something that didn’t involve conjugating verbs or declining nouns, I chalked it up as a positive experience and moved on. A year later I was called up for a 17-day reserve duty, including all of Succot, to guard in a prison for Arab stone-throwers at Anatot, Jeremiah’s birthplace. Then, half-a-year later, I was called up for my first five days of artillery war games, in the Negev desert base of Shivta, somewhere south of Beersheva.

Kiryat Arba, Israel

These are hard times. The Arabs of the Land of Israel, some of them with Israeli citizenship and some without, are presently going all around Israel stabbing Jews. In fact, they’re not just stabbing them. They’re throwing rocks at them, running them over with cars, and even shooting at them. It has reached the point where, a few days ago, when our chazan skipped Tachanun at our sunrise service in the Tomb of the Patriarchs – which he often does – and people wondered who was holding a circumcision, one of our local wags commented, “What circumcision? We’re celebrating five hours without a stabbing.…”

When I was a yeshiva student, the attitude at one yeshiva I attended was, “Don’t read newspapers; they’re a waste of time.” At another yeshiva I attended, the attitude was, “Read newspapers; you’ll be informed.” Forty years later, I do read newspapers, but I sometimes feel like I’ve wasted my time.

Israel has just completed another democratic election, and the Right and religious parties won, 67 seats to 53 (the latter including 13 Arab mandates), even if the Left-leaning Israeli media did not want them to. Their victory is not really news, in the man-bites-dog sense. For 38 years, since Menachem Begin’s victory in 1977, the Right wing, supported by the religious, have dominated Israeli politics. Even in the Oslo “victory” of 1992, the Right and religious won in terms of the popular vote. Politically, as far as our relationship with our Arab neighbors goes, the fact is that fewer and fewer Israelis are seeking for us to commit suicide or dig our own graves, and religiously, the majority of Israelis are supportive, or at least not “anti.”

These are hard times for us all, and nobody can say what the future holds. Last week we all experienced, together, the horror of an attack on a shul in Har Nof, in which four pious rabbis were killed, and almost 20 others were wounded, mostly people in the middle of prayers. Pictures of that attack evoked memories of scenes we have not experienced in 70 years.

In this most recent tragedy, just one of many, fate decreed that I had a connection to two out of the four Har Nof families in mourning, and many of you in Baltimore have at least one connection as well. Wednesday evening I paid condolence calls to Agassi Street in Har Nof, where the murders occurred, and where those two families live. Rabbi Arye Kupinsky, hy”d, of Har Nof was raised in Kiryat Arba, my town, and my family has several connections to his family, which still lives there. I also paid a call to the Twersky family, down the street, who were mourning Rabbi Mosheh Twersky, hy”d. There, as I had thought I might, I found Rabbi Twersky’s sister Tzippora, and her husband, Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblatt, a close childhood friend from Baltimore. The couple had just flown in from the Bronx, where Jonathan is a rabbi.

In my last article, from early July, “Giving the Arabs Something to Lose,” I made an attempt to predict what was going to happen if a war began with Hamas. Afterwards, I received compliments that I had done a decent job with my predictions.

Frankly, I don’t know how good a job I did. There were a lot of surprises. Everything in real life proved to be more exaggerated than I had foreseen.

First of all, I could not have predicted the passions this war would raise in me. As a card-carrying fifth-generation American Litvak (all of whose ancestors came from Kovne), I am a fairly calm, passionless person. Yet in this war we discovered a ghoulish enemy that builds terror tunnels with which to engage in mass attacks on Israel, an enemy that revels in the death of its own citizenry. That enemy combines the more horrifying aspects of H.G. Well’s science fiction work The Time Machine with the first frightening movie I ever saw, a 1950’s B-movie called “Invasions from Mars,” and makes them look, by comparison, like “Bambi’s Greatest Adventure.”

Hamas, the ruling government of Gaza, and, de facto, the most popular movement in Judea and Samaria, is in trouble. The financial support they thought they would gain by linking up with the Palestinian Authority has not materialized. Their hoped-for hostage deal with Israel fell through when the kidnappers killed the hostages. Their smuggling tunnels have been blocked off. The Egyptians oppose them, and are poised to execute over 500 protesters who, if not Hamas members, are similar.

Once more Hamas is desperate for some way to change its bad luck. They don’t like Jews, and, considering that they don’t terribly value their own lives, they have little to lose at this point by attacking Israel. Thus, after a few years of keeping their bombing of the Israeli South to an “acceptable” level, they have just now begun once more to provoke Israel by bombing the Israeli South massively. Worse, for the first time, their bombing is being accompanied by large-scale unrest in Arab areas of Israel, itself. In a word, Israeli Arab citizens are openly aligning themselves with the Arabs of Judea and Samaria. Israel seems headed for war.