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The Jerusalem Post’s David Horovitz has written a commentary noting that Israel faces security challenges requiring confident leadership and cohesion of national purpose:
Home Truths About Gaza, by David Horovitz (Jerusalem Post)
Excerpts:
Are we losing the capacity to distinguish between what we know from our own experiences to be true or credible and what others would have the world believe about us?
…Esther Wachsman, whose son Nachshon was kidnapped by Hamas in 1994 and killed in a Palestinian village not far from Jerusalem as the IDF tried to come to his rescue, describes poignantly how the family came to choose his name.
The family’s third son, he was born at Pessah time in 1975, and they decided to name him in honor of Nachshon the son of Aminadav, the man who had the guts to trust God and test the waters, the man who leapt into the Red Sea confident that his people would be able to cross, the man who showed the children of Israel the path to their destiny.
Israel cries out for such a figure today… or such a mindset: the confidence to set a path of national destiny, to unify behind it, and to pursue it for our own benefit and that of like-minded nations, leaving our enemies helpless in our wake.
Israel has faced, and faced down, more daunting hostile challenges in its brief modern history than those posed today by the toxic mix of demonization and violence championed by Iran and offshoots such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Surviving the first moments of statehood in 1948, when a few hundred thousand pioneering Israelis prevailed against armies drawn from surrounding populations in the tens of millions, was only the first of many improbable victories.
It was a series maintained through the decades, notably including the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, all the way through to the second intifada, when the Palestinians dispatched suicide bombers in a calculated, strategic onslaught that was designed to terrorize our nation and encourage us to take the only sensible course of action – to flee.
Protecting Israel cannot now be achieved by walls and fences and defensive measures; the rockets have to be stopped at the source – and the source of the rockets, as ruthlessly determined by the Palestinians who manufacture and launch them, lies in the heart of the civilian populace. By cynical design, those who would kill our citizens thus ensure that their people are killed when we try to thwart the attacks – so that we are forced to fight not only to protect ourselves, but to protect our good name and our legitimacy as we do so.
We live in a region where hostility and hatred are not easily redirected… We are battling in a largely unsympathetic international climate and must defend ourselves, physically and intellectually, against those who seek our demise. Critically, we cannot afford to become the prisoners of others’ distorted sense of our reality, our behavior and our challenges.
These are national imperatives and they require a cohesion of purpose that Israel has yet to achieve. Internally driven and all-too intolerant, we remain as far as ever from a consensus over what our goals should be and the means we should employ to realize them.
We have left Egypt and reached the promised land, but not yet fulfilled our destiny. We await our Nachshon.
Commentary:
Horovitz stops at the point of walls, fences and Israel’s security. And he stops at the mention of a hostile international climate. But where he stops short is at the immense damage and deprecation of Israel’s security which ensues after the IDF expells and arrests Jews and dismantles beginnings of Jewish towns, such as was done to Shvut Ami on Thursday, not to mention Beit HaShalom, or Federman’s farm or when the regime the expelled and evicted 8,000 Jews from Gush Katif and 4 Shomron towns nearly 4 years ago — and has continued its conspiracy to persecute them preventing them at every turn from putting their lives back together.
Horovitz stops short of what Israeli’s enemies and the world must think of the preoccupation of successive Israeli regimes’ with freezing Jewish building and settlement while Arabs continue to live in illegal buildings in Jerusalem and elsewhere.
He stops short on Israel’s willingness to free and trade hundreds, thousands of terrorists for a single soldier or for body-bags. These terrorists, free to again kill and maim Jews.
One could on and on about what Horovitz stopped short of.
But this author returns to his analogy with Nachshon Wachsman being named for Nachshon the son of Aminadav and thinks back to a conversation from over Pesach sparked by my discussion of possible modern-day parallels to the Korban Pesach.
The closing sentence of Horovitz’s commentary:
We have left Egypt and reached the promised land, but not yet fulfilled our destiny. We await our Nachshon.
provokes this thought; If one speaks of the superpower America’s modern-day deity, “peace” in this spelling, when we know that their political spelling of the word in the context of Israel Kissinger “salami-slicer” is piece, then how does Barack Hussein Obama, or US envoy George Mitchell, or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, or for that matter, Mahmud Abbas react when an Israeli Prime Minister tells them that ‘Palestinians must accept Jewish state’ before Israel will hand over Jewish land?
One question is what are the implications of pronouncing a ‘Jewish state.’ Would not the above-named personages be very much in order to ask questions like;
- Doesn’t being a Jew denote a closeness to their G’d?
- And doesn’t such a closeness to G’d require the Jew to keep the Sabbath, to keep Kosher, to keep to a code of morality and modesty?
- Why is it that while you invoke the term Jewish, I see not one of you before me in a yarmulka, in a kippah or in an appropriate skirt rather than in a pair of pants?
- How would Believing Jews who believe in Hashem, who believe — “Breish’t Bora Keilokim…” — that Hashem gave Israel to the Jews, ever hand over, or justify handing over parts of Jewish Land, parts of Jerusalem to anyone?
To these questions, Israel’s governmental leaders from Bibi to Olmert, to Barak, Livni, Ramon, etc., and I’ll dare say that at least 118 of 120 Knesset members, secular and chareidi alike, have no intelligible answer.
The point that David Horovitz stops short of or misses altogether, is that in the eyes of the world, and for sure the eyes our enemies and of the superpower of the era, before we can invoke our Jewishness and embrace and possess Jewish Land, we MUST ourselves embrace our Jewishness, Hashem and collectively express a faith-based national leadership. (MB)