Still Waiting for Something?

If we are to believe what our government here has told us about the back and forth with Hezbollah on Sunday night/Monday morning, we should feel good that we escaped major damage from the 300+ rockets and drones lobbed at us from the north.  Further, that we dealt a serious blow to the rocket launching capabilities of Hezbollah in Lebanon by knocking out 1,000 launch capsules.  As President Biden has now advised us twice, once in April and again yesterday, we should take the “win.”  My reaction?  What win?

Laying in bed on Monday morning between 4-5 AM we heard aircraft passing over us, and then returning in 10 minutes, every 10 minutes for an hour.  As this was clearly a different pattern than the noise we hear when fighter aircraft are on their way to Gaza, I told my wife that what we are hearing is the Israel Air Force protecting us from something, later to find out what that “something” was.

So yes, it is good that we survived another attack, although the north did sustain damage, that we eliminated some of the enemy’s capability to pound us with aerial bombardments, but has anything changed?  Not really….

Witness…..

• Hezbollah says they hit an Israel air base (not true) and exacted revenge for the killing a few weeks ago of one of their top leaders;
• We say we reduced Hezbollah’s aerial attack capability;
• The hostage/cease fire talks in Cairo are going nowhere with the Hamas delegation having left the country seemingly as fast as they arrived;
• Our government is telling us that while Hezbollah may be done for the moment, we should expect another attack, perhaps from a different country (Yemen? Iran? Syria? Iraq?) possibly in the next 24-48 hours;
• The cross border tit-for-tat with Hezbollah in Lebanon continues today;
• The war in Gaza continues apace as well;
• 109 hostages remain under Hamas control in Gaza, and we have no idea how many of them are dead or alive or how we will get them out;
• Iran continues to say that they will wait patiently but, at some point, will also retaliate for the killing of Ismail Haniya in Tehran a few weeks ago.

So, nothing really has changed.  There is still activity on every border, the hostages are still in captivity, we here continue to live under the real possibility of another aerial attack by one of our many enemies, the economy continues to be negatively affected, ELAL is effectively the only route to the west (and is capitalizing on that monopoly “big time” by the way) while, counter intuitively, home prices here rose 6% last quarter (I need not remind my readers that home prices here are already among the five highest worldwide).

When I speak about all of this with people here and suggest that perhaps it is time for new leadership to take over who can figure out how best to get us back to some semblance of what we used to call normalcy, they often respond “don’t blame it all on you know who!!!!”  But who else is there to blame?

Finding ourselves in the position we are in with the only stated objective of the government being to “win the war ad rout out Hamas” does not seem to be working very well. If Israel were a company the CEO would have been sacked right after last October 7^th just for that failure, never mind the compounded failures we have been subject to ever since.

If the government has a plan to get us out of this morass, at the very least we should be told that plans are being worked on and who is responsible for developing each element of the plan.  We don’t need to know the details of the plans nor do our enemies.  But as “shareholders” in this enterprise called Israel, at the very least we should feel secure in the knowledge that (a) there is a plan and (b) know who is responsible for developing each aspect of the plan.  Not sharing that with us at all makes everything the leadership does suspect.

The noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith said: “All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.”  Would that we were blessed with leaders who understood this above all else.