The Day After
It has been a year since the atrocities of 10/7/23 when hordes of Hamas militants crept into Israel at dawn and attacked musical festival attendees and sleeping small villages.
Twelve hundred people were brutalized, burned, shot, mutilated and raped and 6,900 were injured. Two hundred and fifty-one were captured and taken into Gaza. Dozens of hostages have been killed since then, some as recently as last week.
Every day we see the faces of the soldiers killed in battle. There are of Ashkenazi, Druze, Ethiopian, Mizrahi and Sephardic descent. Most are young. Civilians riding in cars and on trains, children in playgrounds have been killed as well.
A year later, Israel is fighting Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, terrorists in Judea and Samaria and Iran.
The only solace (besides the post 10/7 intelligence successes) is that many now realize, whether publicly or to themselves, that the unrelenting personal attacks on Netanyahu were seen by the Haniyehs, Nasrallahs, Sinwars and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a green light to attack Israel.
Many are no longer tolerant of regime change analysts, politicians and protestors who toss around words like “colonization, genocide” without any historical support or their glamorization and recasting of pathological murderers as freedom fighters.
No, the October 8th Jew is not the October 6th Jew.
Millions have flowed into Israel from global Jewry to supply the soldiers of the Israel Defense Force and the displaced communities. Missions and volunteers flooded the small nation to emotionally and financially support it.
This time, there will no false peace.
This time we will adhere to the commandment:
“You shall remember what Amalek did to you on the way, when you went out of Egypt, how he happened upon you on the way out and cut off all the stragglers at your rear, when you were faint and weary, and he did not fear God. (Therefore) it will be when the Lord your God grants you respite from all your enemies around (you) in the Land which the Lord your God , gives to you as an inheritance, to possess, that you shall obliterate the memory of Amalek from beneath the Heavens. You shall not forget!” (Deuteronomy 24: 17-19)