Swords of Iron: The Simchat Torah War of 7th October 2023: First thoughts

I have not blogged in a very long time and I’m out of practice. One big reason was that I was burned out, and in general fed up with posting the same old stuff every time: antisemitism, Jew-hatred, anti-Zionism, Israel-hatred, terrorism, the bigotry and hypocrisy of the UN and all its associated organizations, the blatant anti-Israel bias of the BBC (who still won’t call Hamas terrorists), and the list goes on.

And then came the morning of Simchat Torah, the happiest day in the Jewish calendar, which turned into the most traumatic day in the lives of every Israeli and almost every Jew in the world.

My first reactions, our first reactions, were shock, horror, disbelief, grief, anger, trauma… I felt I was reeling with the emotions and the shock, I simply couldn’t process any of it. A few days later, a friend of mine living in Canada reached out to ask how I was doing. I’m not sure he was expecting the long screed that I wrote. I’m going to reproduce it here with some light editing just to give you an idea of how I was feeling and coping in those first few days.

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We will win with G-d’s help (Play on words: We will win in Gaza)

Thank you so much for reaching out to me.  Yes our family is OK for the moment, Thank God. I have two sons-in-law in the army, one is up north, and the other one is in the Rabbanut (Rabbinate/chaplaincy), I didn’t ask too many questions. Two of my brothers 4 sons-in-law are also in the army, one up north and one down south, another one is in the local search and rescue team so he’s on call here. My sister’s son is also up north, my younger brother is part of his own local search and rescue team. My own two sons have not been called up, one has had a medical exemption ever since he was actually in the army, but he’s on his local settlement security detail. My younger son, his reserves unit was disbanded a few years ago, so he is at home, I wouldn’t necessarily say safe, because none of us are safe at the moment with the Rockets coming in in the thousands.

This story repeats itself in every family in the country, that’s what happens when you call up 300,000 reserves in 24 hours out of a country of 9 million. There was total chaos at the beginning, and I’m not talking about the initial attack but when the soldiers reached their meeting points, there was no food, they were no uniforms, there weren’t even enough weapons, not to mention bulletproof vests, helmets, and all the rest of it.

That’s where the public stepped in. I don’t know if you’ve been following what’s going on in this country since the last elections. I’m not a huge fan of Bibi, but the left went completely berserk when he was elected and pretty much rejected the election result. They’ve been holding massive weekly demonstrations, including road blocking and minor acts of vandalism and violence for eight months straight. At the beginning, it was very nerve-racking, but lately people have gotten used to it, I’ve lately ignored those demos, just not interested. But they’ve been ramping up the rhetoric, and it took a very ugly anti-religious turn, which turned into something that in any other country would be called antisemitic, when they broke up public Yom Kippur prayers in Tel Aviv under the excuse that they won’t allow gender separation in public spaces.

The thing is that this is something that’s been on for years at the request of the secular residents who don’t necessarily want to go into a synagogue, but do want to hear some prayers. Also  Muslim prayers have been allowed to take place with gender separation with no objection. In any case things reached a head on Yom Kippur, which was about three weeks ago. [Edited to add: I wrote this about 2 weeks ago. Yom Kippur was towards the end of September]. It feels like a lifetime ago now. Things carried on ramping up with the decision by Tel Aviv municipality to ban Simchat Torah celebrations in public which was petty and vengeful.

I am a firm believer in God intervening in history. He rose up and gave us a massive slap around the face like you would do to a person having an attack of hysteria, and woke us up. No, there were not going to be any Simchat Torah celebrations at all. Instead He visited upon us the most devastating attack since the Holocaust and that’s no exaggeration. 1400 people murdered, slaughtered savagely, the most ghastly atrocities committed on livestream go-pro cameras by the terrorists themselves and broadcast by those sadistic bastards – it almost outdid anything the Nazis did.

I don’t need to tell you about the atrocities they committed, it’s all over the media. Israel has completely changed tactic, and they have woken a sleeping tiger. It sounds like a cliché, but the newly convened emergency unity government is hopefully going to change the face of the region. Firstly, in a totally different tack, the government have been broadcasting worldwide the horrific pictures, something the Palestinians always did to gain public sympathy, and Israel was too humane to do for our own cause. Unbelievably, even with all the reports of the atrocities there are people who refuse to believe it, just like holocaust deniers.  The army has given unprecedented access to foreign reporters to the scenes of the devastation, and seeing respected reporters collapse in tears as they describe what they saw cannot be denied.

And now the army has instructed the whole northern part of the Gaza Strip to be evacuated forthwith, either as a prelude to a massive bombing, or for the incursion of ground troops. Of course, the UN, being the UN, has protested saying it’ll create a humanitarian crisis. Do we give a rat’s ass? No we do not. Please excuse the language. Well, they should complain to Hamas, and not to Israel. What was will be no more. Both the previous situation and hopefully not Gaza itself. I used to have a smidgen of sympathy for the Gaza residents, but now I feel nothing. I just hope our leaders don’t lose their nerve and stop before the job is finished.

There is incredible public spirit here, after the first 24 to 36 hours when we were numb with the trauma, shock and grief, the country has come together in a 180° turnaround from what was going on literally up to a week ago. Literally last Friday (Simchat Torah eve) they were still discussing the prayers in Tel Aviv!

People who literally could not speak to each other, who wouldn’t even share the same public space till that Friday, crowded into Dizengoff Square, the scene of the vilified prayers, bringing in donations and contributions for the evacuees for the soldiers, for people stuck in shelters and under fire, it was an incredible sight. Even more incredible, Israeli Arabs did the same thing in their own communities, raising funds and contributions for the army! Have you ever seen or heard anything like it? As I am writing this I have tears in my eyes. Every single community in Israel, whether the cities or the settlements, or the kibbutzim have been doing the same thing. It’s now reached a situation where the soldiers are begging people to stop sending food, and they also say that they’ve all received their equipment now, it was a temporary glitch, because so many soldiers turned up within 24 hours. The logistics couldn’t cope.

There is another important aspect of this war. During these leftist, I would say, anarchist demonstrations, you might’ve heard that there have been calls for the last few months from the leaders to reservists not to report for reserve duty. The pilots threatened not to report for training, it was anarchy, it was in effect an attempted coup.

So what do you know? There was something like 130% reporting for duty on Sunday! Literally everyone who was called up reported, and people who were not called up, got offended and turned up at their units anyway demanding to be enlisted.

Not only that, but the ultra-Orthodox have been queuing up to enlist as well. Honestly, I would not be surprised if the Messiah arrived today riding on his white pickup truck. I’m guessing that is the modern day equivalent of a donkey!

Back to the grim reality, the son of my friend Hannah Katzman who used to blog at A Mother in Israel, her son Hayim Hy’d was murdered in kibbutz Holit on Shabbat. At first, she publicized that she had been kidnapped, but a day later they found his body. He died as a hero, protecting his neighbour and 2 small children. They could only hold the funeral a few days later . And so far over 300 soldiers have been killed, the numbers are horrific, but they pale in comparison to the 1400 civilians, not to mention the dozens or hundreds of soldiers and civilians who have been kidnapped. The worst is we do not even know how many there are.  We all feel sick at the prospect. I am pretty sure that a lot of them are no longer alive and the army is bombing as if there are no hostages, the grim reality is, they cannot be careful not to harm them because that is exactly what Hamas wants, they want us to refrain from attacking . If we don’t go all out, this will only happen again, and again. There have been no calls from the public, even from the families of the hostages, for the army to refrain from attacking in Gaza. They understand the situation full well. The modern world doesn’t really know how to deal with these barbarians, even Israel with all is its bitter experience .

We get notices all the time of funerals taking place, sometimes people with no family because everyone else was kidnapped or murdered.  It’s indescribable.They are still working to identify the bodies from the south, some of them have been burnt beyond recognition. There are also very many unconscious victims in hospitals, and no one has come to claim them. The hospitals do not know the identity of these people, they could very well be people who have been reported missing or dead. Hospitals are publicizing pictures of tattoos and scars and other identifying marks, and asking families to come to the hospitals with some kind of DNA source because some of them have been so badly burnt. In my absolute, worst nightmares, I could never have dreamed of a situation like this. Those sadistic bastards came not just to kill, and certainly not to conquer territory, they came to slaughter, to destroy, to humiliate and demoralize. They didn’t only attack the humans, they burnt the fields and the houses. I don’t know how many kibbutzim no longer exist, burnt to the ground, the fields and livestock destroyed, it’s almost biblical.

There is a paragraph that we read from the Torah every year on the Shabbat before Purim,

“wipe out the memory of Amalek from under the heavens, you shall not forget“.

תמחה את זכר עמלק מתחת השמיים, לא תשכח

The connection to Purim is because Haman the villain was descended from Amalek. We all thought that this is a nice story, and it doesn’t apply in our day any more. And then of course it applied to the Nazis and we thought that was it. But here we go again, it applies not only to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, but all their supporters, they are obviously connected to ISIS, there can be no doubt, and, of course, the hand of Iran is not even bothering to hide itself.

What I have been pleasantly surprised, even amazed, is the worldwide support for Israel, and the practical support. America has already sent two aircraft carriers to our region and are apparently sending a third. I have a feeling they are being sent as a threat to Iran not to open a regional war, because they will have to contend not only with Israel, which they feel confident they can do, but also with western armies, hopefully that will be a deterrent. But the Iranians don’t act with logic, they act with religious zeal.

After the war, there is going to have to be a massive accounting from the political and military echelons, how this catastrophic failure occurred. Was there a cyber attack which paralyzed our intelligence? Or was it the Yom Kippur war redux with overconfidence and misjudgment? Whatever the result, I think this is an inglorious end to Bibi’s illustrious career. This will forever taint him, and it has drowned out any of the good that he has done. And certainly the public have lost all confidence in the politicians, and despite the massive response to the military call ups, I wonder how much confidence the soldiers have in their leaders.

I spent the first week of the war at my daughter in the Shomron, she was very stressed out at coping with two children on her own after her husband went in to the army on Sunday. It was also a help for me to get me away from the sporadic air raid sirens and rocket attacks which freak me out.  But we returned home to Petach Tikva, rockets and all, the following Sunday. I needed to get back to my normal life, this situation can go on for months. Our older son lives literally a five minute drive from his sister, he has a big house and balcony and garden, and he and his wife have very kindly invited our daughter for as long as she wants. Now that school has resumed in the Shomron since it is relatively quiet, their lives are halfway normal again.

My niece lives in Netanya and she has moved into her parents here in PT so that a family from the south can take refuge in her flat. This is only one small act of kindness and has been repeated throughout the country. Pretty much the entire south of Israel was evacuated as soon as possible, and as Hezbollah started shooting anti-tank missiles and other rockets into northern cities, the north of Israel was evacuated too. The evacuees are being put up in hotels and boarding schools all around the country, thousands of them will not be able to return because they have nothing to return to.

There have been many reports of the incredible heroism of the first response teams in the southern towns and kibbutzim, literally fighting off the terrorists in hand to hand fighting. One of those heroes is our daughter-in-law’s cousin who is in Sufa. He saved the kibbutz with “only” 2 casualties. Sadly it did not help in many kibbutzim.

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I apologize for this very rambling and slightly incoherent report. I could post dozens of links and films and articles but I will simply recommend that you check out any Israeli news site such as Times of Israel, Jerusalem Post, Ynet, Arutz Sheva.(Do NOT read Ha’aretz).

There are many excellent blogs out there too. Israellycool is one of them, Elder of Ziyon is invaluable, Abu Yehuda and C.R.A.P. are great, and there are so many others.

Use the resources listed on the right-hand side panel of this blog, they are invaluable for getting the truth as opposed to propaganda. And for everyone’s sake, avoid the BBC, the New York Times, Sky News and the Guardian unless you like reading antisemitic bile and drivel.

If you go onto “X” (Twitter) or Facebook and search for the hashtag “theGazaYouDontSee” which was thought up by an Israeli woman called Imshin, you will get a very good taste of the lies spread about the “open air prison” of Gaza, posts that will leave you gobsmacked at the luxury and good life that exists (or existed pre-war) in Gaza.  But you can also just go to Israel’s government sources as well, the foreign ministry, the IDF, the list goes on. You know, as well as me where to look.

If you would like to help Israel, donations are always welcome to Magen David Adom, Zaka (whose workers are suffering terribly under the horrendous strain of identifying bodies and body parts in the most horrific situations you could hope never to imagine), Friends of the IDF, and many other organizations.

I will continue this series in the next few days with reblogs from other blogs, a guest post (or 2?) and other reports as my time and my nerves hold out. Since I started writing and editing this post I have been up and down to my bomb shelter because of a rocket attack – always followed by checkins with family and friends, and I lose my train of thought.

PS: yesterday the nation received the first excellent piece of news as one of the hostages, Cpl. Ori Magidish was rescued by the IDF in a daring operation in Gaza. She returned home unharmed to an ecstatic welcome! The feeling in Israel was one of pure euphoria, it is something literally indescribable. There were Hassidim dancing in the street celebrating the return of a female soldier!

Celebration in the streets of Kiryat Gat, following the rescue of captured Israeli Soldier Ori Megidish.

Jews of all backgrounds can be seen dancing outside the Megidish family home. pic.twitter.com/Zt8TY1ooEe

— Chabad.org (@Chabad) October 30, 2023

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This morning (31st October) we returned to grim determined reality as the ground incursion gets fully under way. Listen to the address by the commander of the southern Command as he addresses the troops before they go into battle. Truly inspiring, almost Churchillian in his words.

“It doesn’t matter how long it takes. There is no other outcome except victory.”

We are facing the enemy and we will defeat them. Bless the IDF. pic.twitter.com/xiaiG5sPde

— The Mossad: Satirical, Yet Awesome (@TheMossadIL) October 31, 2023

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Here is the translation by Josh Feldman on Twitter:

English: “Southern Command forces, this is the Commander. We are striking Hamas and the terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip. We have one goal – victory. No matter how long or how hard the fighting will be, there is no other outcome than victory. We will fight with professionalism and strength, based first and foremost on the IDF values which were instilled in us – dedication to mission, and the pursuit of victory. We will fight in alleys, we will fight in tunnels, we will fight wherever necessary. We will eliminate the abominable enemy before whom we stand. My brothers in arms, the residents of Be’eri, Sderot, Nir Oz, Kfar Aza, and the West Negev communities, and alongside them are all the people of Israel – they are all looking at us now. Like me, they trust you and believe in you, you are the generation of victory. This is the Commander, complete your mission, strike the enemy, over and out.”

Keep well and keep safe everyone.

May Hashem protect our soldiers and bring them home safely. May their mission be successful.

May Hashem protect the hundreds of hostages held by the barbaric Hamas and their allies in Gaza, may they all return home safely.

May Hashem protect all the evacuees from the north and the south, may He protect all of Israel, and all the Jews in the Diaspora who are suffering under an unprecedented onslaught of antisemitic hate crimes.

May Hashem give strength to His people, May Hashem bless His people with peace.

ה’ עוז לעמו יתן, ה’ יברך את עמו בשלום