1.
The good month
Ramadan is upon us and everyone is in suspense. Why? We cannot afford to change our plans due to constant threats ahead of the Muslim holy month. We simply need to prepare for the threats and make it clear that any disturbance of public order will be responded to with severity. Last week we read about Moses who stayed at Mount Sinai for forty days during which he neither ate nor drank. As far as the Qur'an is concerned, Moses stayed on the Mount for thirty days during which he "met with His Lord," and God extended his stay for another ten days. And that is how the fast of the month of Ramadan came into being. What was supposed to be a month of righteousness and repentance and rectification of the soul has become a month of jihad and pogroms against the Jews.
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The time has come to change the equation. Ramadan is a good time to take care of Rafah. If the people of Gaza have not learned from the people of Nineveh, and have not "turned from their evil way, and from the violence [Hamas in biblical Hebrew] that is in their hands" (Jonah 3:8), then they should be helped. Especially in the month of Adar in which "the enemies of the Jews hoped to have rule over them; whereas it was turned to the contrary, that the Jews had rule over them that hated them" (Esther 9:1).
2.
Shut down the lie now
The United Nations has two refugee organizations: one for refugees from all over the world (UNHCR), and the other (UNRWA) only for Palestinian refugees (the nearly one million Jewish refugees from Arab countries do not have an organization; Israel absorbed them). The first organization recognizes only the refugeehood of the deportee or exile and does not allow the transfer of refugee status to his descendants. Once the refugee has settled in another country and received citizenship, his rights expire. Tens of millions of refugees have settled in countries outside their homeland in this way over the past century. On the other hand, Palestinians can pass on the right of refugeehood from generation to generation, even if they have received citizenship in another country. Thus, the figure of half a million Palestinians in 1948 has been inflated to more than five million today. Incidentally, while all other refugees in the world who lived in their home countries from time immemorial, until they were expelled or exiled, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) a Palestinian refugee is someone who resided in Palestine only two years or more before the establishment of Israel. In other words, an Arab who arrived from Sudan, for example, in 1945 still receives refugee status and rights, which he can transfer to his descendants. The lie of the Nakba is there for all to see.
Why do they have more rights than the 11 million Syrian refugees over the last decade, what is different about them? It's the Jews. The world doesn't care about Muslims being killed by Muslims. It's the racism of low expectations. But when the Jews choose not to fulfill the role designated to them in history – that of the victim – and choose to fight back, the world is angry. When refugeehood results from war with the Jews, then that must be used against them. That is how UNRWA turned from an aid agency to an agency that perpetuates the conflict and channels hated against us. Worse yet, Hamas uses the agency to launder terrorism funds and there are hundreds of Hamas terrorists who work inside the agency as UNRWA personnel, who benefit from the funds donated by the useful idiots around the world. Now that incriminating evidence has been published against the "aid organization," we must take advantage of this to have it closed down – the sooner the better.
3.
Gaza on steroids
While we are focused on the Gaza Strip, thousands of terrorists disguised as Palestinian Authority police are preparing for another October 7. The most recent terrorist attack in Eli was carried out by a PA policeman. Judea and Samaria are dotted with well-known terrorist bases. Naturally, the army and security agencies act when there is information about a terrorist attack that is about to be carried out. In Judea and Samaria, we don't deal with the enemy's intentions because we still hold the old perceptions, the "conception" – namely that our neighbors are a normal people who want to live alongside us if only we solve the territorial dispute with them. Because we see things that way, we ease restrictions on them, remove checkpoints, and make further gestures on the assumption that they will then calm things down. We continue to look at the enemy through our worldview as if what interests the Palestinians is the economic welfare of their citizens. We are committing the racist sin of low expectations.
Over and over again, we have seen that this approach doesn't clear the territory from terrorists and doesn't distance the threat. We need to remember that Gaza is at sea level and look what we got from there. The PA on the other hand sits 900 meters above sea level. Have we been fooled into agreeing to the establishment of a Gaza on steroids on the mountain ridge – a huge terror base with a controlling view over the heart of the country?
We are failing to address the root of the problem: the antisemitic education in the PA, the textbooks, the mosques, the payment of salaries to murderers of Jews, the incitement on social media, trains the next generation of terrorists. This can be dealt with; why wait for the next October 7?
4.
Blasphemy in the North
The situation in northern Israel, where Hezbollah has displaced tens of thousands of our civilians and is firing at our towns in a kind of damned routine – as if the nature of the world is that Lebanese territory is a "legitimate" source of death, destruction, and terror – is blasphemy. The prophet Ezekiel, who sat with the exiles of Judah in Babylon, taught as early as the sixth century BCE that humiliating the people of Israel is blasphemy, and vice versa. Therefore, the exile that follows the destruction of the Land of Israel is a blasphemy of God's name: "I scattered them among the nations, and they were dispersed through the countries… But when they came to those nations, they caused My holy name to be profaned, in that it was said of them, 'These are God's people, yet they had to leave their land'." This applies all the more so when Israel resides in its land and terrorists from Lebanon cause Jews to be exiles in their own country and destroy our homes, agriculture, and industry. We cannot accept this disgrace. This blasphemy harms our lives in the present and hinders our future deterrence.
5.
What Isaac taught Jacob
This week we marked the anniversary of the death of the poet Jacob (Yaakov) Orland. At the age of six, Orland witnessed a pogrom in his hometown of Tetiev, in Ukraine, in which he witnessed the murder of eight members of his family. The pogrom was part of the wider Petliura pogroms.
In his book "Nathan Would Say," Orland relates how Yitzhak Sadeh, the commander of the Palmach, invited him to tour the battlefields in Lod and Ramle a few days after they were captured in the War of Independence.
A heavy day awaited me. The wounds of the battle were still open on every corner / Destruction and eeriness in the streets. Frightened looks. People rummaging through the ruins / The jeep drove past dead people who had yet to be buried, frozen eyes. Here and there/ Children's bloated bellies. Eternal peace offerings that were sacrificed for nothing/ Mighty God... The blood of man's freedom and his blindness is flowing in your streets / And you, where are you, where are you? Enfolded in the Tanach, in the Quraan, in the New Testament?//
All that time my eyes were clouded by the confusion of reality and the horrors of memory / The sights I remembered from my Tetiev. The pogroms. The carcasses of my grandfather and grandmother, my uncle and their daughters.../ How terrible it is to watch a foreign binding and to know that you are always the ram / and you are the thicket / Yitzhak (Issac) looked at me: 'If you can't – then let's go back. I thought that writers/ need to see. To know. In order to remember.
I re-read these lines and then I saw the incredible connection that Orland creates with the biblical story of the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac. Immediately after he realized that "you are always the ram and you are the thicket," he wrote, "Yitzhak (Isaac) looked at me." But this time in history Yitzhak (Sadeh) didn't look helplessly at Abraham and wonder "Here are the firestone and the wood; but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?" This time Yitzhak inspired heroism in Jacob (Orland) to be a witness to the resounding defeat of Ishmael and to write it down for posterity to the final generation.
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