Thursday
Finishing supper at friends' with a mug of super-coffee, I wasn't ready for bed until eleven o'clock last evening. Slept through, only waking once to thunder, lightning, thunder, as the residual of what, down in the southern Gulf of Mexico earlier in the week, threatened to organize into a tropical cyclone, swept through; then back to sleep until six-oh-five, which is late for me.
Breakfast like we used to have riding the trail from Texas to Montana, ribs and beans. Cookie always kept us well fed. It was so long ago: I remember the food, but I don't remember why we were driving the cattle to Montana in the first place.
Don't remember how we got back to Texas either, maybe rail, by train? Seriously, one of my relatives on my mother's side rode that trail driving cattle from Texas, stayed in Montana, married. Gina, our gutsy and adventurous one, found and united us with descendants, relatives who live in Montana. We have met and loved them.
Sometimes food makes me a bit giddy. Which is welcome these days, because my mind is being eaten up by the news that keeps coming from Israel of the horrendous atrocities, the barbarism and cruelty. A military force that targets not simply an army, but massacres and butchers a race of human beings: Jews, men, women, old women, children, toddlers, infants? We've been here before in my own Time within Germany to Germans by Germans, and by Germans claiming lebensraum as Germans expanded their Reich throughout Europe: it seems that the Holocaust is not history but still with us, evil remaining to be wiped out, and in towering fury, the word that comes to mind is coventrieren. Dresden, Hamburg, Coventrate. Is this what Israel is doing? IDK.
In anger, things can be said that express one's outrage but that hopefully would not actually be done to other human beings because of the innocents.
Even if we can explain and understand why we are here, how we got here with Israel - Palestine, we are where we are now, today is today, this is not 1948 this is 2023, and last weekend's attack into Israel was of the nature not simply of terrorism, but of a "nation of people," through their government, committing themselves to "Total War." Only "Total War" such as Germany committed to towards the end of WW2 extends the battlefield to include not just military, but an entire population. I have watched Goebbels incite a huge audience of civilians to standing, saluting, riotous ovation when he asked if they wanted Total War, and, they said they did, and indeed, they got what they asked for. Does the Palestinian populace of Gaza want Total War? I think and hope not, but Hamas is the government of the people of Gaza as fully as the NSDAP was the government of the German people. Like it or not, choose it now, regret it later, you get what your government brings down on you. Whether it's the way it should be is another issue, but it is the way life works.
Hamas has revealed itself to be one with ISIS, the Islamic State. And it is a fact that jeering mobs who taunt and torment terrified hostages paraded through the streets make themselves morally legitimate targets in Total War. Not that it matters in any scheme of things, but in this barbarism the Palestinians have lost me as a moral apologist.
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Israel has said there will be no humanitarian break to its siege of the Gaza Strip until all its hostages are freed, amid growing concern over dwindling water, food and fuel supplies after a fifth night of bombardment.
The energy minister, Israel Katz, wrote on social media that no “electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter” until the “abductees” were free.
Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte says Israel should ‘crush Hamas’, turn Gaza into ‘world’s biggest cemetery’
He also said if he were Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, he would ‘pulverise Gaza and make it the biggest cemetery in the world’
Duterte, who retired from politics in 2022 after completing his six-year term in office, has made controversial remarks and insulted world leaders in the past.
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Outrageous things are said and done in the heat of the moment, even our God can be driven to murderous rage, as witness one of our Bible readings for the upcoming Sunday:
Exodus 32:1-14 (RSV). When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron, and said to him, “Up, make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” 2 And Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold which are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off the rings of gold which were in their ears, and brought them to Aaron. 4 And he received the gold at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, and made a molten calf; and they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” 5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.” 6 And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.
7 And the Lord said to Moses, “Go down; for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves; 8 they have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them; they have made for themselves a molten calf, and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’” 9 And the Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people; 10 now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; but of you I will make a great nation.”
11 But Moses besought the Lord his God, and said, “O Lord, why does thy wrath burn hot against thy people, whom thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them forth, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. 13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou didst swear by thine own self, and didst say to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it for ever.’” 14 And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do to his people.
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The Time may come when we repent of the evil that we want done, but this is the heat of the moment, and even God himself understands human anger.
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AND THIS,
Everything I thought I knew about Israel and Gaza was wrong
Demonstrators gather to show their solidarity with Israel in Munich, Germany. Photo by Getty Images
Editor in ChiefJodi RudorenOctober 9, 2023
Everything I thought I knew about Israel and Gaza turns out not to be true. And everything I feared about Hamas has come to fruition.
That’s what I’m reckoning with as I continue to absorb this unimaginable fact: More Jews were murdered on Saturday than on any single day since the Holocaust — inside the Jewish homeland, in the nation-state that is supposed to be our safe haven, on the watch of the strongest military in the Middle East, by terrorists whose tactics can only be described as barbaric.
It is almost too much to bear. But looking away is not an option. Not for anyone who cares about the future of Israel and the Jewish people — nor for all who care about peace, democracy, civility, humanity.
I am supposed to be an expert on Israel and Gaza. During my four years as Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times, I made perhaps a dozen reporting trips into the Gaza Strip, covering not one but two conflagrations between Israel and Hamas.
I was on the ground for the entire eight-day Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and led coverage of the 51-day Operation Protective Edge in 2014. I have visited Sderot and Kibbutz Nahal Oz and Ofakim and many of the other southern Israeli communities that were turned into battlefields this weekend. I have stood inside a tunnel that Hamas dug underneath the border to infiltrate Israel — after it had been seized and blocked by the Israeli military.
I have attended funerals of Gaza civilians killed by Israeli airstrikes and of Jewish teenagers murdered by Hamas terrorists. I have walked through the rubble, I have sat in the bomb shelters, I have wiped the tears.
If you had asked me on Friday if it was possible to imagine Gaza militants driving a bulldozer through the Erez crossing and over the border fence, I would have said: No way. This is a checkpoint I used every time I entered Gaza, and you cannot take a step across its parking lot without Israeli guards recording it. That fence is equipped with the highest-tech sensors; anyone touching it risks being shot dead.
Or so I thought.
If you’d asked last week about terrorists on motorbikes infiltrating the border communities and kidnapping grandparents and toddlers, I would have shaken my head. There are Israeli military posts throughout the Gaza Envelope, and these communities have vigilant armed civilian patrols and sophisticated alert systems.
I was wrong. Dead wrong. At least 900 Israelis dead wrong, by the latest count.
The failure of Israeli — and U.S. — intelligence to detect plans for this unprecedented, coordinated assault, and Israel’s inadequate response in the first 36 hours afterward, will rightly be the subject of investigatory commissions and commentary for months to come. The most plausible explanation I have heard so far is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government took its eye off the ball, moving thousands of troops from the Gaza Command to protect Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, and focusing far too much energy on suppressing pro-democracy protests rather than thwarting actual threats.
I was also wrong about the unity and cohesiveness that any attack generates among Israelis from all political, geographic, religious and ethnic backgrounds. The open way in which journalists, military analysts and individual families are calling out the government’s gaping missteps even while the battles are raging is something new, something I did not see in 2014 and 2012, something that perhaps reflects the deep wounds this government and its judicial overhaul have inflicted on the body politic.
None of which changes the fact that Israel, for all its flaws, was just subjected to one of the worst terror attacks in history. Competitive tragedies are never a good idea, but stop for a second to ponder this: Given Israel’s tiny 9 million population, the death toll is akin to the U.S. losing 11 times the number it did on 9/11.
Virtually everyone in the tiny country knows someone who was at the all-night dance party in the desert that became a death trap. If you had asked Israelis on Friday if it was safe to go, they all would have said what I would have said: Sure. The army is right there, the fence is secure. It’s a holiday. Have fun.
We were all wrong. Dead wrong. About everything except the brutality of Hamas.
The horrific acts of terror these militants filmed themselves carrying out are every bit as bad as their fiercest critics ever described. Our empathy for individual Palestinians in Gaza, our support for Palestinian national sovereignty, must never obscure the cold truth of Hamas militants: They are hateful, antisemitic terrorists who want to wipe Israel from the map.
They are also not going away.
At a panel discussion I moderated Sunday night in Manhattan, Lihi Ben Shitrit, director of the Israel studies program at NYU, reminded us of a scary truth: You don’t pick your enemies.
Israel and her allies have to find a way to crush Hamas — and to make peace with the Palestinians. Otherwise, our era will become the third in history in which Jewish control of Jerusalem did not last more than 80 years. The Palestinian conflict is our problem to solve, because Israel is our Jewish homeland to protect.
I was wrong about Israel’s vulnerability to this kind of devastating attack and wrong about the Israeli military’s asymmetrical advantages. But this weekend’s events make very clear I was not wrong about one important thing: The status quo is clearly not sustainable.
The coming days and weeks will be awful. Israel has no good options. Netanyahu must remain focused on bringing the hostages home. Opposition politicians should insist on that as a condition of entering the government, along with a promise of new elections once the war is over. The judicial overhaul plan must clearly be dropped, immediately.
And we, American Jews, human beings who abhor terror, must stand with Israel today. Stand with the citizens racing home from holidays abroad to do their reserve duty, with the partners and parents and siblings of the desert revelers kidnapped and killed, with the families evacuated indefinitely from the southern border communities.
Stand with everyone who, like me, is realizing that everything they thought they knew about Israel and Gaza was wrong.