Es Wird Wieder Anders Werden (Things Are Going to Change)

I didn’t sleep much last night. I didn’t expect I would. The day before, Britain’s Labour Government, imposed sanctions on Israel for planning to build 3,401 new housing units in an area near Jerusalem referred to as E1.

The sanctions are only supposed to be on Israeli produce from Judea and Samaria but no one is buying that story. This is the latest coordinated attack on the entirety of the Israeli state.

The UK is joined by Canada and France and nine others. All claim that they are pursuing this course to encourage the fabled “Two State Solution.” In case the events of October 7made that particular delusional fairytale slips your mind, let me remind you about it.

That is the story of the Palestinian Arabs living in a land called “Palestine” in perfect peace and happiness alongside a place called “Israel.”

The happy and smiling people of Palestine march off to work every day to make keffiyehs in all sorts of jolly colors or to their olive groves to pick the fruit while singing in perfect harmony and waving at their Jewish neighbors with love and affection.

To return from fantasy to reality, Great Britain, Canada, et al., are once more rewarding Hamas – as they did in recognizing “Palestine” – for their pogrom and slaughter of Jews.

They pretend not to know that the Palestinians already had a state before October 7, 2023 in Gaza. They used it to launch that pogrom. They affect amnesia about it being turned into an enormous terror training camp and missile base.

Of course, as is so often the case when a truly antisemitic line is being crossed, it is a Jew who makes the announcement. On this occasion that Jew is called Ed Miliband who recently became Britain’s Foreign Secretary.

He began his announcement by recalling that sixty of his family members were killed by the Nazis, he is a “staunch” supporter of Israel, and that Britain and the other Jew-loving states like Ireland and Spain are doing all of this to create that La La Land of peace and harmony described above.

Listening to him, I thought I would vomit.

Of course, the real motive behind this UK initiative and in so many of the other countries that joined is completely different.

Leftist governments across the continent have long been bound to an alliance with Muslim voters, the so called Red-Green alliance. The calculus is straight forward and profoundly cynical.

The Left tells Muslims that they will support them and in return the Muslims will vote for the Left. The Left is then insulated and protected from the views and the votes of the actual population as the Muslim vote increases.

If you want to see what an effective political weapon that alliance is, then look no further than the UK.

In my last Jewish Press column, I wrote about the scandalous cover up about the industrial scale rape of indigenous young white girls by Pakistani Muslim gangs. The figure over the last twenty-five years is estimated to be a quarter of a million victims!

If the words “Muslim Vote” enters the UK’s political metric, as far as Labour is concerned, “What they want… is what they’ll get.”

A cover up of the Muslim rape gangs: Check!

A cynical prioritizing of attacking Israel: Check!

A policy to protect the Muslim religion from criticism: Check!

Suppression of the names of the individuals who were invited to “advise” the UK government on their “no criticism of Islam policy”: Check!

UK Cabinet ministers shredding (in violation of their own rules) papers that could identify who these advisors were (hint as to why – they were Islamists): Check!

A complete refusal to join other European nations banning the Muslim Brotherhood: Check!

A total refusal to tackle boatloads of chiefly young male Muslims daily breaching UK borders: Check!

Two-tier policing that discriminates against white British citizens: Check!

The list goes on and on and the more it does, both the UK’s domestic agenda and now foreign agenda is dictated by Labour in thrall to its most important voter base.

When Prime Minister Netanyahu blasts the UK for Jew-hatred and being “Islamic,” he is expressing a position informed by the facts.

In a Wall Street Journal editorial entitled “Europe Joins the Boycott Israel Crowd,” the hypocrisy and lies of the states in this anti-Israel Axis is laid bare.

“Israel offered the Palestinians a state in the West Bank and Gaza in 2000-2001. They turned it down and launched a terrorist intifada, then rejected it again in 2008. What Palestinians keep saying, but the likes of Mr. Miliband refuse to hear, is that they won’t live in peace alongside a Jewish state even in Tel Aviv, which they consider as much a settlement as any hilltop outpost.”

As for the supposed provocation for the whole economic assault on the Jewish state…

“The sanctions’ impetus is supposedly Israel’s plan to build in E1, an area in the Jerusalem suburbs. This is an excuse – E1 stayed Israeli in the 2000 peace proposal negotiated by Bill Clinton. The real aim is to appease the Muslim and hard-left voters threatening to flee Labour for the Greens.”

Oh! and in case you have not been paying attention to your own city and state in the U.S. like New York; precisely the same playbook is in operation by the Left across the country.

That’s why the Biden administration had almost no border controls at all. If you want clarification on whether I am right, just check out the statements of Ilhan Omar or Rashid Tlaib on the question of borders and immigration. You might also want to remind yourself of the fanatical opposition of the Democratic Party to Voter I.D.

So, to return to my troubled last night’s sleep.

It is heartbreaking to watch someone you love become sick and die. I recall that well during the five years my late wife suffered from and sadly succumbed to breast cancer.

The country I grew up in and lived most of my life in is smitten with an equally virulent form of that disease and watching it change, wither and die is heartbreaking. Much of my family and many dear friends still live there. Too few have realized how very sick the place they live in has become, nor do they seem to understand the danger that it brings them. The Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis called the situation, “A dark day that will bolster extremism.”

So, at 4:30 a.m. I made myself a cup of tea (well what else?) and sat in a chair to continue a book I had started to read a week ago.

It is the story of a remarkable Jew, Max Mordechai Sinasohn. His life included serving in the Kaiser’s army during World War I and fighting to enable his wife and young children to survive the Holocaust. I never met “Max” but I knew his son, the author of the book. Several of his sons were chaverim of mine in yeshiva. I had reached the part of the book that told the story of Germany as it entered the 1930s. The title of the chapter was written in German with an English subtitle. It read, “Es Wird Wieder Anders Werden.” (Things are going to change.)

When January 30, 1933 arrived, something happened that guaranteed that they would; Hitler came to power.

If I had thought to pick up the book (it’s called Saba Marches On) to take my mind off the horrible times we are going through, I was very much mistaken. September 8, 2026, just three days before Rosh Hashanah is another date which heralds that once again things are going to change. The world has combined and conspired to abandon the Jews, just as it did before. Countries that seem secure can become unrecognizable, and societies that seem to have learned the lessons of the past can forget them.

Perhaps that is why those words stayed with me as the night wore on: Es wird wieder anders werden. Things are going to change. The question is not whether they will, but what we will do while they are changing – and whether, this time, we will recognize where the road is leading before it is too late.