Another Jerusalem resident says, “The war in the field is barely connected to the war being constructed by the media who mold the broadcasts to fit their ideologies. The ironies are too much to bear.”
A refugee from Nahariya: “The Israeli government is not showing us the pictures of the northern towns. But are they getting out to the world? Do you see the Israeli wounded, are you getting the picture of what it’s like to live in a bomb shelter actually or in your head for five or six weeks? How long are we supposed to do this?”
The director of a northern kibbutz for handicapped and special-needs children writes that his vulnerable charges are “terrified by all the rocket-dodging” and by life in “small, crowded, underground spaces.”
Even some proverbially nonchalant Tel Avivians have confirmed that they have been staying home “every single night” to be close to their young children and aging parents “in case they are bombed.”
Today, for the first time, Israelis and Jews are beginning to think the unthinkable. How long must Israel continue to do the heavy lifting in America’s civilizational war against Iran and Syria and indeed against Islamist jihad? At what point will Israel need to consider exercising its nuclear option against Iran?
Can Israel, or Israel and America, succeed militarily? Even if they can, will the fallout for Israel be greater politically – or radioactively? Must the Jews once again enact another Masada-like scenario? Or is Israel, unrestrained, still capable of an Entebbe-like commando action that will stop Ahmadinejad/Armageddon?
Conversely, will the Jews have to consider leaving Israel again, at least temporarily? If they do, where will they go? To the moon? Under the sea? Perchance to Arizona or New Mexico for a century until things quiet down in the Middle East? But will Jews ever be safe in a Jew-hating world without a strong Israel?
Just this month a London hairdresser refused to cut “the hair of a Jew” (a woman who had frequented the salon for a decade) and 20 Jewish shops were vandalized in Rome. Anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist, and anti-American marches (not to mention terrorist attacks against trains and buses and plots against airlines) continue unabated in every major European capital. Placards read: “Europe is the Cancer. Islam is the Answer”; “Europe You Will Pay, Your 9/11 Is on Its Way”; and “Be Prepared for the Real Holocaust.”
And it’s not just Europe: Dislike, if not open hatred, for Israel, coupled with the belief in an evil Zionist lobby, is rampant on American campuses, within certain quarters of the American State Department, and among the progressive and mainstream media. This month in Washington, D.C., ten-year-old Arab-American girls chanted pro-Hizbullah slogans.
Religious Zionists will never give up on Israel; I doubt secular Israelis will either. I certainly won’t. And Israeli soldiers are absolutely willing and able to fight. But the exhaustion and the danger are real and must be factored in. We must weigh every option, make all kinds of contingency plans, be prepared to act on all fronts – simultaneously, if need be.
There are at least a million totalitarian Islamists willing to die in order to kill Jews and other infidels; more than a billion of their fellow Muslims have, thus far, refused to challenge and subdue them. These civilian-terrorists, who hide in rat-holes and caves, rooming houses and dormitories, are adept at using our technology and our legal system against us. Israel was in the forefront of fighting Arafat’s kind of terrorism but we are now in the al Qaeda/Hizbullah era. New military, undercover, and propaganda strategies must be adopted.
Many people, including some Jews, accuse Jews of elevating our suffering above that of other groups. They see this as selfish, even racist. In my view, what happens to Israel is a prophecy and a warning to the world about what will happen to all humanity. Perhaps this is one way the Jews are special or “chosen.” We constitute God’s holy classroom.
If the world does not stop the jihadists in Israel, if it chooses to sacrifice the Jews once again, it will, soon enough, find itself bombed back to the seventh century and living under Islamic religious law. Several Iranian dissident friends have begged me to explain to them why America has not already stopped Iran. As one distraught dissident put it, the mullahs have already murdered vast numbers of their own countrymen and will stop at nothing to return to a Caliphate. “And the Jews?” he asks. “How can they, of all people, hesitate?”