Our beloved Israel is engaged in an existential fight for survival. From the moment of its birth in 1948, Israel has been under constant siege. This latest war, however, feels different. It comes upon Israel after decades of non-stop terrorist attacks, large-scale military battles, and endless international boycotts and condemnation.
Israel has been relentlessly demonized and successfully isolated by lethal propaganda. World-class illiterates and leading academics have loudly agreed that Israel is a “Nazi, apartheid” state that deserves disdain and death or have shamefully looked the other way as Jewish blood flowed and the noose tightened, perhaps secretly hoping that a second Holocaust – this one for the Jews of Israel – might somehow spare the West from experiencing its own much larger Holocaust at Islamist hands.
I first wrote in these pages in 2004 and again in 2006 that the beginnings of a second Holocaust were already discernable. A handful of others also envisioned this. Only recently have some Jewish-American leaders begun to entertain this idea and to repeat our lines but without acknowledging their source. Until now I was mocked as a “Jewish Cassandra” by certain Jewish leaders and slandered, banished, or simply ignored by the mainstream (liberal, left, and feminist) media.
Tragically, many of our leading Jewish intellectuals and our mainly liberal Jewish masses shared the view that whatever was happening was not really happening – and if it was, that Israel either had only itself to blame or actually had the power to reverse the course of events. Even today, many Israeli leftists and feminists actually believe that Israel can find peace by negotiating with Hamas and Hizbullah. They send me their ideas. They boggle the mind.
Over the years, Israelis have learned to live large and tough and sweet despite the unending attacks against them. Now, for the first time, Israelis, Jews, and their many supporters are beginning to contemplate the unbearable – namely, that the siege against Israel might never end, that our Islamist enemies (and their supporters in the Western media and academy) will never stop until they wear us down completely, drive us into the sea, or annihilate us with nuclear weaponry.
Of course, Israelis are not leaving (though many of Israel’s wealthiest and most well connected citizens have second and third homes on other continents and work and travel outside of Israel a great deal). True, thousands of Jews have made aliyah in the past few years, despite the ongoing violence, and world Jewry, our Christian Zionist supporters, and the American government have continued to visit, fund, and arm Israel.
Still, there is a somber and infinitely sad quality to the conversations I’ve had with many Israelis. Those who have lived long enough are exhausted and afraid. The never-ending battle for the land is consuming their young. They and their children after them have all fought and been wounded in Israel’s unending wars; now they are sending their grandchildren to the front. Worse: the entire country has become the front.
In the space of five weeks, trees that took one hundred years to grow were burned to the ground by Hizbullah rockets. The Israeli north became one vast ghost town, Kiryat Shmonah was devastated, more than a million Israeli refugees were forced to flee – though they have been welcomed by other Israelis who live in temporarily safer, southern communities. (May this hospitality begin to unite our people.) But little of this has been shown by the world media, which has focused obsessively on the Lebanese civilian dead.
How ironic. Israeli civilians are essentially soldiers while Iranian terrorist army members who dress in street clothes are counted by the media as “civilian” dead. Despite being stopped in some instances by vigilant bloggers, the world media continue to run Hizbullah’s doctored footage and craftily arranged photo opportunities.
Israelis are asking some hard but necessary questions. A Haifa resident admitted that “finally, for the first time in 40 years,” she is “depressed” and wondering “whether Israel has a future.” Israel’s enemies, she said, “live only to fight, kill, and die. They ‘win’ if they can reduce our way of life to one of brute existence.”
A resident of Jerusalem tells me “the loss is great, the fear is deep, confidence is low, support for the soldiers is high, but we feel isolated and misrepresented, misunderstood. Where will this end?”