When Hamas/Gaza began the current chapter of the war against Israel on October 7th, 2023, with rape, torture, kidnapping and murder, other parts of the Arab and Muslim world gleefully joined in with missiles, rockets, propaganda and political support. Here in Israel we felt horror, sadness and our vulnerability.
We had thought that Israel had moved towards normalization of relations with some Arab countries including Morocco, Dubai and Saudi Arabia in the framework of the Abraham Accords. The cold peace with Egypt and Jordan had held for most of three decades, and Arab workers from Gaza and Judea and Samaria entered Israel daily for work. We believed earnestly what we hoped for passionately, that Israel could eventually be a little nation like other little nations in the world, living in relative peace and connecting with other nations and people on the basis of mutual interests, trade, science and cultural exchanges. The brutal attack of October 7 and its aftermath, especially the raw show of Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred in the Muslim world and in Europe that followed that attack dampened our hopes that this could ever be so. We realized yet again that Israel is still being treated as something unique.
In the first few weeks after the war began, Hamas still had missile and rocket capabilities and fired at will on Israel. Besides fighting, we had more to do. There were the dead to bury, the injured to care for, the displaced to shelter. I don’t know anyone who did not attend some funerals in the few weeks and months after the October 7 attack, some for the victims of that attack and some for soldiers killed in the next few months. The Anglo community of Jerusalem was particularly active about attending the funerals of Lone Soldiers (soldiers who had little or no family in Israel and came to serve in the IDF, often as part of their aliyah). There were too many funerals of beautiful, bright, dedicated, good-hearted young people to attend. And along with that was concern for the young people we know, both the young draftees, many of whom came right out of high school, and of more mature reservists, often men and women with families, Jewish patriots all, who serve their country in times like this and do not shirk their obligations.
The political controversy over proposed changes to the legal system that had roiled the country for months prior to October 7 disappeared overnight and was replaced with a unity of purpose to recover the hostages and to crush Hamas.
We were pleased to see the Army and Air Force go to Gaza and we understood that this war was different from any war that any nation had ever been forced to fight before at any time in history. After all, Hamas was and is the government of Gaza, but unlike most governments it has no concern for its people and Hamas’s leaders have been clear in saying that they want and expect civilian casualties which they can use for propaganda. In addition, although Hamas is not so skillful a fighting force, it had been preparing for a war like this since it took power in 2006 and had developed not only a sophisticated network of tunnels, but also skill at killing with booby traps, improvised explosive devices and snipers. After the first few months of war, Hamas operatives only came out of their tunnels and their barracks and command centers in mosques, hospitals, schools and UNRWA offices to lay traps, snipe, and lie.
On October 8 Hezbollah attacked in the north with a continual stream of rockets, missiles and drones that continues and has recently escalated. The murderous Houthis of Yemen began pirating and shooting at ships in the Red Sea as their Iranian masters demanded. It seemed the world quickly began to cry out against Israel. The Jew-hating campaign quickly escalated online and elsewhere. A segment of the world accused us of genocide called us war criminals and “Zionazis” demanding that we vacate the Middle East and “Go back to Poland, where you came from.” (This last claim seems funny to Ethiopian, Indian, Moroccan, Egyptian, Algerian, Iraqi, Persian Jews and others Jews whose ancestors never lived in Europe.)
It was an important lesson: we thought that one of the reasons that the Muslim world and many of the post-colonial sewers like South Africa were so hateful to Israel and to Jews was that the Enlightenment ideas of free speech, freedom of religion, fair and free elections and tolerance of others had not penetrated broadly or deeply into the Muslim world and post-colonial countries. As it turned out, a combination of hatred of Jews, hatred of Israel and foolish ideas like those perpetrated on college students by their professors in the works of Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky added to the outpouring of malice towards Jews and Israel.
Despite the attacks on Israel on multiple fronts, and recognizing that about 80,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes by Hezbollah rocket and missile fire in the north and the original Hamas destruction in the south on October 7, life in Jerusalem for those who do not have to fight and who do not have close family members fighting is relatively normal. The store shelves are well-stocked, there are no noticeable shortages. Traffic is perhaps a little lighter than before due to the absence of many tourists who don’t want to tour what they think is a war zone. More Israelis have been volunteering to help make up for labor shortages and to show their patriotic spirit. Some construction projects have slowed down because fewer Arab workers are entering Israel from Judea and Samaria and almost none from Gaza. There are more Thai, Nepalese and other Asian construction workers in Jerusalem now. It would be an unusual day that we do not hear warplanes above the city on their way to some target, although they fly so high and so fast we rarely see them.
In other parts of the country the situation is much different with Hezbollah rockets raining down on the Golan and Galil and often starting fires in fields and on hills. For me, the worst part of this war is that when I go to the computer to read the news in the morning there are, all too often, pictures of the brave young men, and the occasional young woman, who fell in defense of Israel and the Jewish people. There are their names, photos and a brief biography in the morning news. Although they are mostly Jews, they are also Druze and Bedouin Israelis. Sometimes when I read their stories I want to cry. They all seem so young and I wish I could bring them all back.
We have also realized who we can trust and who our friends really are: despite its waffle-words, its incredibly poorly thought-out hostage-cease-fire plan and a temporary hold on some weapons, the Biden administration has done a relatively good job of supporting Israel. A number of personalities also stand out as friends and champions of Israel including many senators and congressmen and they deserve our thanks. I mention only two champions of Israel here. Douglas Murray, the British journalist, author and social critic, has been an unwavering defender of Israel taking on all the haters with a calm and knowledgeable style. And Hillel Neuer, the executive director of U.N. Watch has repeatedly exposed the misconduct of UNRWA, and of a gaggle of other U.N. functionaries as well as the U.N.’s stunning pattern of dishonesty, active support for Israel’s enemies, Israel-hatred and the hypocrisy that permeates that institution.
I have a young friend here in Jerusalem, one of the first people I met in the neighborhood when we moved here. He is a religious man, a high school teacher who is also studying for his Ph.D. in Jewish history at Hebrew University as well as having studied for some years at the Rav Kook yeshiva. He is also a master sergeant in the reserves of the IDF. He was called up in October and he spent the next 100 or so days fighting in Gaza. When he came back in January we went to lunch and I asked him about his experience. He wanted me to know that the soldiers felt hampered by the constant demands that they be restrained. If there was a sniper shooting at Israeli soldiers they could not call in an air strike when there was also some possibility that non-combatants occupied the same building. He also said that the entire population of Gaza seemed to be with Hamas in their project of killing Israelis, including Gazan women and teenagers who acted as runners, lookouts and planted explosive devices for Hamas.
He observed that in every house he and his unit had to fight their way through, they invariably found two things: a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf translated into Arabic and a picture of the Golden Dome Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. I asked him the meaning of the picture of the mosque. He said that in the Arab world and perhaps in the Muslim world more generally, they are taught that their war against Israel will not be over until Moslems have recaptured Jerusalem and expelled the Jews. They are raised from birth with the grotesque fiction that Jews want to destroy the mosque and that therefore war against the Jews is a religious crusade to recapture a holy place. The picture is therefore a symbol of both their allegiance to Islam and their desire to expel the Jews. They can claim a religious motive as well as concern for the people of “Palestine” to justify their hate-soaked behavior.
The deep realization that has resulted from this war, a realization I think many people in Israel now share, is that any hope of being a normal country is in vain – without a paradigm shift that causes the region’s 440 million Arabs, the world’s two billion Muslims and the world’s numerous other Jew-haters and Israel-haters to accept the little Jewish state in the ancient homeland of the Jews.
We have friends. We are not alone. There is hope. But the sad realization is that much of the world still hates the Jews and sees the little Jewish state as the concrete representation of Jews and Judaism. Until something changes dramatically, Israel will not be treated like any other little country.
