Rabbi, Consultant, Author
The Edge
Protective Edge is a more apt name for the Gaza operation in Israel than even the leaders who coined the term might have realized.
The idea of protection extends far beyond the protection of Israel and her citizens. This operation is protecting all Jews everywhere in the world from a re-emergence of a form and scale of anti-semitism that we have not seen for seventy years. The anti-semitism is not new. It’s as old as we are and as continuous. While we sat seven decades of Shiva for 6,000,000 family members, anti-semitism was politely submerged in Europe and elsewhere. The Shiva is barely over and both latent and patent anti-semitism are back.
Jewish survival needs Israel’s survival; but Israel’s survival cannot be taken for granted in a world increasingly accommodating to the bullying of extreme Islam and ever weaker in its moral resolve to fight even for its own beliefs. The thought of us retrogressing to being a nation without our Land is too horrible to contemplate. The ceaseless chain of Divinely miraculous protection and the mesirut neffesh of our soldiers and their families, give us our hope . Yet we must remember, we are fighting a battle for our very survival as a nation as well as a country. However, although we are fighting alone, the battle is not ours alone. This is the meaning of the word Edge in the operation’s name.
Israel is positioned at the edge of the Judeo-Christian West – at the ideological, political and geographic interface between the West and the seat of the hate and terror-spewing radical elements of Islam. Israel’s battle with the terror groups of the Middle East is the front-line. However, inevitably if not stopped at the edge, a slow but terrifying global struggle for the hearts, minds, values and leadership of the Western World will ensue. Like Britain under Chamberlain and the US before Pearl Harbor, the West believes it can isolate itself from the Edge. But it cannot. It can delay engagement; it can surrender; but it cannot ignore. Although we are fighting alone, the battle is not ours alone.
This battle, unlike almost any previous one in history, is not about territory. It is about ideology and faith. Victory for Islamic terror would not be the surrender of the territory one nation to another. Victory in this struggle would be the conversion of the West to Islam.This battle is not about a strip of territory in the Middle East. This battle is about the future of civilization. This battle is not ours alone.
We need to identify our supporters wherever they are and of whatever faith they are. We must appreciate them and build alliances with them. We can use our passion, intellects, influence and networks to change one mind-set at a time. Each one of us can help to counter the insidious undermining by the media of the thoughts and beliefs of naive people. Those being seduced by the media include many Jews to whom emotional liberalism seems more attractive than truth and their traditional political affiliations with the left, dearer to them than Jewish survival. This is not a time for domestic American political affiliations to determine our standpoint. This is a time to stand for truth and to stand by our People.
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