17-Jul-18: Prayers for the dead, prayers for the living

There's going to be a public discussion this evening in London about the events we mention below. What we write in this blog post will, we hope, reach the people gathered at JW3 and be understood as a constructive contribution to a fraught but important dialogue:

Devastation at Sbarro pizzeria, Jerusalem, August 9, 2001

We’re living in morally confused times.

The handful of young British Jews, a few dozen according to reports, who assembled in Parliament Square in mid-May and solemnly said Kaddish for 62 dead Palestinian Arab Gazans, surely didn’t see themselves as compromising any principles or betraying any values.

They likely felt they were on moral high ground by being in solidarity with unfortunate, peaceful, unarmed, aggrieved protesters who clashed with Israeli army bullets on Gaza’s side of the Hamas/Israel border.

Our fifteen year old daughter Malki was murdered in Jerusalem by a woman foot soldier in the Hamas fighting forces. This happened in the Battle of Sbarro Pizzeria. That female terrorist saw herself as unarmed too - as a protestor, as aggrieved.

This she expressed by planting a bomb – a walking, breathing human bomb – in the pizza place.

After the massacre was done, she said she chose that site because at two in the afternoon it attracted children. She needed dead children. Lots of dead Jewish children.

We now know that just a few hours before the London Kaddish, a Hamas insider owned up to how at least 50 of the 62 deceased “protestors” were in reality Hamas fighters. Another Gazan terror group immediately piped up and claimed several more of the dead as their fighters. Most, maybe all, of the Gazans who passed on in that ‘demo’ were there to fight. And - at almost any price - to bring extreme harm to Israelis.

Hamas’s Salah Bardawil acknowledges 50 Hamas fatalities among the
62 killed on Israel-Gaza border, May 16, 2018 (Screenshot) [Source: MEMRI]

It’s unfair to blame the Kaddish-sayers for not knowing the truth about them - those rioting, murder-minded Gazan jihadists. The news professionals at the BBC, The Independent, The Guardian evidently didn’t know either. Some still don’t know it even now.

But we can ask those youngsters, some of whom had had some instruction in the basics of Judaism, if they know what Kaddish means. 

Beyond the fact that it’s said for the dead, do they recognize these words?

May there be abundant peace from heaven. And life for us and for all Israel. And say, Amen. May the Maker of peace in His celestial heights make peace for us and for all Israel and say, Amen.

Kaddish doesn’t mention the dead at all – not even once. It’s a central Jewish prayer for goodness. An expression of gratitude for Heaven’s power to bring peace and beneficence into our lives and into the world.

At the heart of the Kaddish is something that has been at the top of my mind constantly since Malki’s life was stolen from us. It’s not peace. Heaven knows, we haven’t had much of that.

No. It’s the importance of us, of our side: Hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu – May He make peace for us. 

Losing a child to triumphant, barbarous murder is an experience – I can tell you from first-hand knowledge – that fiercely concentrates a person’s mind. It forces you to look very closely at what the enemy wants. And then to decide what our side wants. 

I don’t believe we Jews are better than other people. I don’t suggest for a moment that peace is something only we, our side, ought to have. On the contrary.

Malki Z"L, on her way to

a Passover hike when she was 14

Some of us knew before the Hamas thug admitted it that the Gaza mob was there at the fence to do as much harm to us as humanly possible. Those who didn’t know it then must surely know it now, even as the BBC and its ilk conceal this reality. 

The Gazan side want to win, to triumph. And to destroy us. Peace isn’t on their minds at all.

The moral confusion I mentioned just now is what causes some young Jews to lose their sense of us. Feeling part of us doesn’t, mustn’t, mean wishing bad to the other side. But it does mean understanding that if we want good – for us and also for them – we have to protect our own side first: our own homes, our own children, our own lives.

And be vigilant because we face a real, shooting, incinerating, bombing foe who means to wreak the greatest possible harm on us.

If the shocking display of Jews saying Kaddish was meant in the same way we say it for our deceased grandparents and family members, then it signifies a failure by all of us in preparing young Jews for a life that sadly includes unwanted confrontation with an unfathomable evil that targets us – all of us.

But if it was intended as a cry for more peace, then I wish those young people knew, and maybe they do, that on the Israeli side, the passion for peace is real and easy to find.

If we want a passion for peace to take root among the Gazans, we owe it to ourselves to first acknowledge that calls for peace – as opposed to calls for victory, self-sacrifice and triumph – have completely gone from Gaza and not only from Gaza. And for now at least, they don't seem to be coming back soon.

That’s something worth praying for.


Postscript: The families of Malki Roth הי"ד and Michal Raziel  הי"ד invite friends of the two girls, murdered together in the Sbarro massacre on the 20th day of Av, seventeen years ago, to pray with us at their gravesides in Jerusalem's Har Tamir cemetery (part of the Har Menuchot complex) on Wednesday August 1, 2018 starting at 5:30 pm. We will be glad to provide more specific details [click].

6-Aug-06: Disproportionality argument starts to fade

To the evident satisfaction of the Vatican and leaders of most European countries, the disproportionality of losses between Lebanese and Israelis has undergone a significant re-alignment in the past 48 hours.

The tragic deaths of a mother and her two daughters in their own home in the Israeli village of Arab Daramshe on Saturday, almost entirely un-noticed and un-reported by news media outside Israel, pushed the death toll up, as did developments this morning. 

A fifteen minute-long barrage of Katyusha missile attacks on Sunday struck Kfar Giladi, Ma'alot, Safed, Acre, the Golan Heights and numerous open areas in the north. Initial reports say ten Israelis were killed in this morning's attacks, and many others injured. Additional missiles are landing as we write these lines.

Hezbollah's missile firings are always essentially pot-shots. 

This is by no means a strategic problem for the Lebanese Shi'ites since they have never pretended to be engaged in a strategic battle. Every loss of human life - and certainly including Israeli Arab lives, which happen to be over-represented among the Israeli casualties - on the Israeli side of the border is a victory for Nasrallah's barbarians. Any act of violence qualifies as "resistance", and there is a ready supply of media dupes ready to buy and repackage their spun stories.

Part of the freedom that comes from being designated a terror organization under United States, UK, Canadian and Australian law, but not under the laws of most European countries or of the EU, is that Hezbullah can shoot anywhere it likes. Anything that dies or is destroyed can then be treated as an achievement.

So long as Hizbollah can spin the news as effectively as it has done so far, even the deaths of Lebanese advance their cause. While this will sound odd to many ordinary people unversed in the finer points of press coverage, the editors of such sober and object publications as The Independent (UK) understand this well.

5-Jul-06: Preventive Measures... Work

There are many aspects of the news coverage of this war that infuriate us. One of them is the dishonest and cowardly way some reporters and photographers distort the way the Israeli authorities carry out preventive security. Among the favorite cliches of agenda-driven reporters and photographers (see image at right, courtesy of one of many Israel-bashing sources) is the Israeli security check. Nothing captures quite so well their perception of an asymmetrical war. You can count on words like "forced to stand in the heat", "treated rudely by Israeli troops", "seething anger", "humiliation" and "demeaning" sprouting from each sentence. But never the unbearable truth that this is the strategy of last resort and it saves lives on both sides.

A classic of the genre is Robert Fiske's memorable article with the unmemorable title "How Pointless Checkpoints Humiliate the Lions of Palestine, Sending Them on the Road to Vengeance". If you click the link to read it, please keep in mind it was written several weeks before the murder by Hamas terrorists of our fifteen year-old daughter. Ponder also on the fact that Malki's killer hid his explosives inside a guitar case on his back. Under current Israeli security procedures (but not at that time), he would have been stopped and our daughter would be twenty and alive. (The death toll that day was 15, plus 130 injured, plus a young mother left unconscious and still unconscious today.) The appalling Fiske, and perhaps also his editors at Britain's Independent newspaper, would find it hard to see what that has to do with him and his writing. But for us the connection is clear.

For those of us not infected by the Fiskean approach to this war, the role of active, preventive security is probably better appreciated. Events today emphasize their usefulness.

A news blackout was lifted an hour ago, as a result of which we can write that the security forces succeeded this morning in finding and stopping the intended-perpetrators of yet another large-scale terror attack, this one set to be carried out in an Israeli city somewhere in Israel's centre. One of the terrorists was arrested in the Barkan industrial zone following some successful intelligence work. He was wearing an explosive belt, the kind often called a suicide belt. (A pity to use the word suicide, which places all the emphasis on the would-be murderer. We wish the word were avoided in settings like this.) Haaretz says the taxi driver who transported the man to the area was also detained.

Prior to the arrests, forces were deployed throughout the Sharon region (the cities and towns north of Tel-Aviv) as well as in a number of Judea and Samaria communities this morning. Unannounced roadblocks were set up at strategic locations on highways and suspicious vehicles were stopped for inspection. Though most Israelis pay scant attention to general security alert announcements and the local media rarely report them, a high alert had been declared for the Sharon region and then canceled at about 10 this morning - for the best possible reason (i.e. the terrorists were found and stopped).

Other details are still currently banned from being published. But we can report with a reasonable degree of confidence that no one died of humiliation, and the injury toll from being forced to sit in a car being searched by security forces was zero.