1.
A time of war and our enemies believe they can see signs of weakness; they are wrong. Look in the direction of Rafah and Jabaliya: Most of the population has been evacuated from there without harm, and now our forces are grinding down the enemy and destroying the enormous terror fortress that it built above and below ground. A time of war, and our haters are feverish; the old antisemitism has emerged from the gutter. The result will be that the Jews will leave the Diaspora, they will make Aliya, even if many of them still delude themselves, that they will be left alone and that life will return to some imaginary normalcy. Countries in Europe have recognized an imaginary Palestinian state. History teaches us that the thought that if the Jews are sacrificed as a scapegoat, the ones who sacrifice them won't be hit by Islamist terrorism is a trap: After the Jews, the turn of the Christians will come. The war in Gaza is the war of the whole free world.
A time of war, the enormous momentum of our soldiers gives us all the courage to do what history has determined: to defend our lives and expel evil from the world. A time of war, the spirit of 1948 has re-emerged from the depths of history and gives us life; it tells us that it was not in vain that we constructed a new building and that from these stones that our warriors have placed at our threshold the new temple of a good life for our people in its homeland will be built. "Time of war... they will pull… the soul of a generation, also in a sown field / To remember, not only for badness, awful days" (N. Alterman).
2.
This Shabbat, we finished the reading of the third of the five books. The Torah portion discusses curses and blessings. In synagogues, the cantor lowers his voice when we read the harsh words. Amid a string of curses is one that our sages saw as a blessing. "I will make the land desolate, so that your enemies who settle in it shall be appalled by it" (Leviticus 26:32). In the midrash, our sages write that this is a "good measure" as even if we are exiled, our enemies who settle the land will find it "forsaken." These words were written in the early centuries after the destruction, but there were still Jews here. Our sages foresaw what was to come. For century after century, the Land of Israel was empty of its Jews and became desolate. Those that settled in our place failed to make it blossom.
In 1267, Nachmanides, the Ramban, made Aliyah to the Land of Israel and bore witness to the terrible neglect and desolation that he saw. He, too, looked out beyond his time and saw in this desolation a promise: "'and your enemies who settle in it shall be appalled by it' constitutes a good tiding, proclaiming that during all our exiles, our Land will not accept our enemies. This also is a great proof and assurance to us, for in the whole inhabited part of the world one cannot find such a 'good and large Land' which was always lived in and yet is as ruined as it is [today], for since the time that we left it, it has not accepted any nation or people, and they all try to settle it, but to no avail."
3.
The Land waited for us and did not respond to foreigners; it was like a chained woman waiting for the return of her lover. Rabbeinu Bahya Ben Asher (1255-1340) who lived in Girona, quoted Nachmanides and added: "And all nations are trying to build it and yet they do not have the ability. This is a great sign for the Jewish People, for ever since they were exiled from their Land, no other nation settled there. Rather, it is destroyed and desolate until its young ones return to it." He knew she would not accept strangers. This is the tradition our people have passed down from generation to generation: when the young ones return to the nest from which they were sent, the land will flourish again (the mother – the Shechinah (divine presence) – will also return to the nest).
In 1867, six hundred years after Nachmanides, the American writer Mark Twain visited the Land of Israel and reported on the curse that still hung over the Land. "The hills are barren, they are dull of color, they are unpicturesque in shape," he wrote. "The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent… It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land… Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies." Little did he know that this despondent and hopeless land was beginning to rise from the dust during his visit – just eleven years later, Petach Tikva (in Hebrew: Gate of Hope"!), the "Mother of the Colonies" was founded.
4.
The curse that turned out to be a blessing expressed itself not just in the land being barren of inhabitants and vegetation: ever since the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, no government and no state emerged here until Israel's independence in 1948. In all our long years of exile, our Land was always a far-off province belonging to one empire or another. Our haters around the world and those who are merely ignorant should take note: The modern State of Israel was not founded on "Palestinian" land.
In fact, the name Palestine was given to the Land of Israel by Emperor Hadrian, who was furious over the Bar Kokhba revolt. He effected what was known as a "Damnatio memoriae" the erasure of a person – in this instance, a country – from historical memory. He renamed the province of Judea as Syria Palaestina, believing that after a generation or two, the Jews would forget the Land of Israel and would no longer demand an independent state there.
5.
These ideas are echoed in Article 20 of the Palestinian National Charter, which states, "Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history." (Incidentally, if the Jews have no roots in the Holy Land, then neither do Christians"). It continues: "Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong."
Freud called this a projection of your deformities on another person: In this case, an invented people with an invented history erases the world of a people that has influenced human history more than any other national collective. Some Europeans believe them. The erasure of the Jews fits well with the antisemitic residues that nurture Western culture. Those who wish to establish a Palestinian state – and thus reward those who murdered, raped, decapitated, and burned alive – are continuing the emperor's mission. We survived Hadrian, we will survive these modern-day antisemites.
6.
When he was six years old, the poet Ya'akov Orland (1914-2005) survived a cruel pogrom in Ukraine. Eight members of his family were murdered before his eyes. And so he wrote to the soldiers of the IDF and the youth of Israel in his 'Song of the Ingathering of the Peoples' appearing in his amazing 1976's ballad "The Day of Tel Faher":"
"You her master of this land and she your subject. To you, she, befitting to you./ Favor of your youth she. Love of your marriage. Do not let her go./ Remember to her her going after you in the wanderings, in a land, not yours./ With a strong hand you were exiled from her and with great mercies you were gathered in her again ./ Womb of your mother she and seed of your father and you have no other bosom besides her.../
"...Have the courage to fight, my son, and know what you will answer yourself if you ask in your soul/ And memorize this well so you do not forget what you are fighting for:/ For four-thousand-years-in-this-land. For it being your blood and your strength/ .../ For the First Temple that they destroyed you over it and for the Second Temple and for the disgrace of your wandering as pover-at-the-gate./ For the shame of your expulsion from nation to nation/ And the humiliation of your persecution neck-upon-neck/ And for the degradation of your hand weakening before your defamers./ Behold, against these you fight, my son. For these you fight."
And it is befitting that we engrave these matters in our memory until the last generation.
