October 7 – Again

As I write this, tomorrow is October 7. In Jewish tradition, we remember things according to the Hebrew date but that would be Simchat Torah, so that’s no good. For reasons I don’t understand, the government decided that the formal day would be October 5^th this year, though some events are happening on October 7.

The truth is we always remember. Even though it’s been a year since the last missile out of Gaza, the IDF is still finding and blowing up tunnels: today’s was 1.5 km long. We still have soldiers in Lebanon and Gaza, not to mention watching the borders, looking for missile launches, patrolling the skies, and a lot I don’t know about.

We still have painful memories and more questions than answers about how the IDF missed the signs and was caught so unprepared.

And last week there was the unbelievable flydubai incident. Which has uncovered another huge gap in our security. Regulations existed banning people like that copilot terrorist from flying a plane into Israel. No one implemented them. Not just that one day, apparently they were simply not being implemented for years.

I don’t really care who specifically was at fault. Years of doing ISO certification has taught me that you have to create processes that achieve your purposes AND then you have to monitor them to make sure they are being implemented.

When I do a second year re-certification, the first thing I do is find the policies and try to find evidence that we do what they say. The second thing is to check whether the policies we have written match the current situation. They never do. Things always change.

So the army has watchers whose job it is to monitor potential enemy activity. Who gets those reports? What is the process for reviewing and acting on them, for passing them up the command chain, maybe even to the government level? Those are the gaps that need to be filled in to save our lives and our country.

So that’s on us to fix.

In parallel, I watch with disbelief what is going on in the world. I saw a statistic today (Sept-26-JPPI-Voice-of-the-Jewish-People-Index.pdf) that 68% of “strong liberal” and 49% of “lean liberal” connected American Jews attribute rising antisemitism to Israeli policy  “to a great extent.” Oh, so it’s okay to blame the victim. I am speechless! So it must be our fault that people hate us? Must be our fault that lies about genocide, starvation, targeting innocent civilians and journalists, etc., etc. are pervasive in media that those same Jewish liberals believe?

It’s of course not only the Jewish liberals who are falling for classic antisemitism. I don’t see people targeting Chinese Americans because of what the Chinese government does. Pick any other nationality and show me that Americans of that nationality are being blamed for what their previous country’s government did. Liberals generally would condemn the fact that the US put Japanese Americans into camps during World War II!

Look at the new law in the Netherlands (Dutch Customs Page) that has them rifling through the luggage of people arriving from Israel for “contraband” from a “settlement.” Or the Green Party in the UK (Greenparty.org.uk announcement) having passed their own version of Zionism is Racism—no one cares that the UN repealed that resolution.

So it’s yet another distortion that attacks Jews and Israelis for existing.

Which makes me triply sad. I am sad because so many died on October 7 and since. I am sad because the war and its impact on Israel continues, albeit less intensely. I am sad because the world is a hypocritical place that is potentially dangerous to me and mine and those dangers grow with each new group that adopts the lies.

Even among ourselves, the Jews of America and the world or the people of Israel, we have division and hatred, denial of facts and acceptance of lies as fact.

Wake up quickly. Time is not on our side.