Tag Archives: Israel

Jan 17 2025
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Bring Them Home

Since October 7th, my heart has grown a protective membrane, shielding me from the unrelenting pain and woe. From the daily tally of IDF soldiers lost fighting a vicious foe to the families of Israeli hostages weeping in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, begging politicians to save their loved ones. From the towns of Gaza that now mirror Europe’s wrecked cities during WWII, to Gazan parents cradling their children’s remains wrapped in cotton muslin, names scrawled in black across makeshift shrouds.

This protective membrane serves its purpose. A voluntary news blackout cannot block everything, but it shields me from the worst stories. It filters out the brutes, the bullies, and the opportunists who see only dollar signs where ethics should reside.

Yet this membrane extracts its price. Cynicism creeps in. Sarcasm becomes a reflex. Everything grows suspect, and nothing good penetrates. Darkness lurks, and life tastes bitter.

I began writing this on Thursday night. On Friday morning, I’m struggling to keep the ceasefire story from breaching my heart’s defenses. I cannot bear to watch it collapse. I imagine the hostage families clustered around their televisions and radios, hanging on every word of Israel’s famous around-the-clock news programs and heated debate shows. Who indeed can argue like a Jewish man convinced of his righteousness and others’ folly?

This ceasefire agreement is undeniably bitter medicine for Israel. Many in the government and their supporters resist swallowing it. They refuse to grant Hamas any concession to acknowledge their existence. Yet according to a recent Israel Democracy Institute survey, more than two-thirds of the public supports a deal to release all or some hostages. The remainder—about a quarter—advocate maintaining military pressure on Hamas, believing it will yield better terms for Israel.

Let’s be clear: no ceasefire, no armistice, arrives without complications. Questions about what remained unaccomplished will persist. The melody of “would’ve, could’ve” plays eternally in the background. This is an imperfect process, as all such processes must be.

As I prepare for Shabbat, I hold fast to one hope: bring them home. I pray: bring them home. Despite the unfinished business and political machinations, I pray this marks the beginning of a long, winding path toward some form of peace.

As Daniel Gordis writes, “A deal can be a huge success and a crushing failure at the very same time. A deal can raise the spirits of a country and leave it shattered at the very same moment—and that, assuming the deal goes through, is almost certainly what will happen. If this deal goes through, what happens to the spirit of the Jewish State? If this deal does not go through, what happens to the spirit of the Jewish state? We do not know.”

What I know from here in the Diaspora is this: As odious as Hamas is and will always be, they remain an unavoidable reality. There’s no one else to negotiate with. The release of these Israelis is beyond overdue. The cost of this hostage exchange is one we must collectively bear. Bring them home.

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Oct 18 2024
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Gone At Last

In the end, it was serendipity. A group of 18&19-year-old Israeli soldiers, barely out of high school, were being trained in the complex and dangerous art of urban warfare in Gaza. As they navigated the ruins of what was once a large and populated neighborhood in Rafah, they stumbled upon three Hamas terrorists who were as surprised by the encounter as the Israelis. In the chaos that ensued, a firefight broke out.

As the dust settled, their unit commander sent in a drone to the ruins of an apartment building to see whether the terrorists were dead. As the young soldiers watched the drone feed, one of them uttered words that would soon reverberate around the world: “This guy looks familiar. He looks just like Sinwar!” At first, the idea seemed absurd, too coincidental to be true. How could it be that these inexperienced soldiers had encountered the most wanted man in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas and the mastermind of the October 7th massacre?

For months, the Israeli military had been hunting Sinwar with a determination bordering on obsession. Since October 8th of last year, every intelligence asset, every piece of technology, and every human resource had been devoted to finding this man who had brought such devastation to Israel and Gaza. The frustration among Israeli forces was constant as Sinwar seemed to vanish into the labyrinthine tunnel systems beneath Gaza.

The assumption had always been that Sinwar would surround himself with hostages, using innocents as human shields to deter any attack. His constant movement made pinpointing his location nearly impossible, turning the search into a deadly game of cat and mouse. But on this day, Sinwar and two bodyguards were found above ground, exposed and vulnerable, without any hostages nearby. In a moment that will be etched in the annals of this conflict, Sinwar’s life was ended by a shell from an Israeli tank operated by soldiers who may not have fully grasped the magnitude of their actions until much later.

Upon hearing the news of Sinwar’s death, I felt a tremendous rush of relief, a sense that a dark chapter might be closing. This cold-blooded, ruthless killer, whose particular brand of hatred and violence had caused immeasurable suffering, was no more.

In that moment I said a prayer of thanksgiving to God that this scourge was gone. I thought of those young IDF recruits, barely adults, who will carry this story with them for the rest of their lives. They will recount it a million times to a million grateful Israelis, their unexpected role in history a reminder of the unpredictable nature of the conflict.

My thoughts also turned to the Palestinian people, particularly those in Gaza, who have suffered immensely under the rule of Hamas. I couldn’t help but imagine that many were quietly relieved at the news. Sinwar’s leadership had been characterized by a nihilistic indifference to the suffering of his own people, using their pain as a political tool rather than working towards their well-being and prosperity. His absence might create space for voices of moderation and reconciliation to emerge.

As our Vice President said yesterday, “Justice was done.” Amen to that. But justice, especially in the context of this long and bitter conflict, is a complex and often elusive concept. It’s a reminder that this moment is just a step on a long and tough path toward true peace and reconciliation.

Now, we all wonder: What next? Is this the first positive step toward a hostage release coupled with a ceasefire? Could this be the act that cracks open Hamas’ extremism, allowing more moderate voices to gain influence? Are there any moderate voices in Gaza? Or in Israel’s war cabinet? Will we actually see the dominoes begin to fall, making room for some sort of future amelioration of this seemingly intractable struggle?

As I’ve said many times, particularly during the High Holy Days, when we reflect on our past and look towards our future, hope is the fuel that makes imagining a better world something more than a pipe dream. In all of this blood and destruction, in the face of so much pain and loss on both sides, we must cling to the hope that there will come a day, soon and in our time, of something close to peace.

Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu v’al kol Yisrael, v’imru. Amen.

May the One who makes peace in the high heavens make peace for us, for all Israel, and for all who dwell on earth. And all say: Amen.

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Jan 28 2012
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The Winds of War

The winds of war are blowing. We can see the storm clouds, once distant and vague, darkening as they begin to color the sky. For years we’ve listened to voices from Iran – hateful, contemptuous, murderous – enunciate a determined policy to destroy the Jewish State and as many Jews as they can get their hands on. According to the ADL, President Ahmadinejad termed Zionists “the most detested people in all humanity” and called the extermination of six million Jews during World War II “a myth,” claiming that Jews have played up Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust in a bid to extort sympathy for Israel from European governments.
Of course we’ve survived all kinds of antisemitic rhetoric for the past 2000 years. Iranian antisemitism is neither more nor less virulent than any other form we’ve encountered. What can anyone say that hasn’t already been said by Haman?
The difference, the frightening new dimension to this ridiculous talk is that Iran is developing the capacity to create a nuclear weapon. This fact is as they call it, a game changer. And when we ask the all-important Jewish litmus test question, “Is it good for the Jews?,” the answer is unambiguously no.
What are we to do? What is the best course of action? These and other questions are no longer on a back burner. In capitals from Jerusalem to Washington to Teheran to Cairo to Moscow to Beijing to Paris and beyond, these questions are researched and evaluated. The answers aren’t going to be simply interesting – they will determine the future and possibly the survival of Israel.
In the upcoming New York Times Magazine, Ronen Bergman muses over 3 questions in a bluntly named article, “Will Israel Attack Iran?”:
1. Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran’s nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counterattack?
2. Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack?
3. Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran’s nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?
These three questions are stark and unavoidable. As Iran gets closer to nuclear weapon capability, and as their rhetoric further encourages the rattling of Iranian sabers, the choices will grow more and more difficult. It’ also worth noting that there is no consensus, here or in Israel, about what to do. Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak both seem certain that an Israeli attack is inevitable. Yet a senior official from the Israeli Defense Department itself recently said, “I informed the cabinet we have no ability to hit the Iranian nuclear program in a meaningful way. If I get the order I will do it, but we don’t have the ability to hit in a meaningful way.”
Ronen concludes that, “Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012. Perhaps in the small and ever-diminishing window that is left, the United States will choose to intervene after all, but here, from the Israeli perspective, there is not much hope for that. Instead there is that peculiar Israeli mixture of fear – rooted in the sense that Israel is dependent on the tacit support of other nations to survive – and tenacity, the fierce conviction, right or wrong, that only the Israelis can ultimately defend themselves.”
Matthew Kroenig, in Foreign Affairs, writes “Iran’s rapid nuclear development will ultimately force the United States to choose between a conventional conflict and a possible nuclear war. Faced with that decision, the United States should conduct a surgical strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, absorb an inevitable round of retaliation, and then seek to quickly de-escalate the crisis.”
Barry Rubin (pjmedia.com) writes, “But here’s what’s most likely going to happen: Iran will get nuclear weapons. Iran is not going to stop its nuclear drive (though it could stop short of actually building bombs or warheads ready to go). Western policies are not so bold or adventurous as to go to war; Israel’s interests and capabilities do not make attacking sensible. An attack would not solve but increase problems.
And no matter how crazy you think Iran’s regime is, the inescapable predicable threat is not high enough to force policymakers to risk getting hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people killed, when the chance of avoiding such an outcome is very high. I am not talking here about Hezbollah firing a few rockets (Hamas might well do nothing) but a long term war that would guarantee the use of Iranian nuclear weapons.”
We all must do what we can to learn more about this issue that so closely affects Israel and the rest of the world too. There are those gung ho to bomb Teheran and others urging restraint and caution. All these voices must be heard.

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