Israel 2024 – Miracles and Challenges
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.