Waiting for the inevitable

Waiting….

We are waiting for the other shoe to drop. We know it is coming, we didn’t call up 400,000 reservists to hold a grand picnic.

I live in the north. Driving yesterday I saw convoys of heavy armor heading south. Tanks, artillery, armored troop carriers. The horrible tools of war.

No picnic is planned.

Those calling for a ceasefire don’t get it. That is not going to happen, nor should it. We Israelis have not been this united in purpose since the Yom Kippur War. Hamas brought upon us a war of no choice. That was a massive miscalculation by Hamas. That is understatement.

Those taking Hamas’s side, and here I’m speaking of the radical progressive Left (Democratic Socialists of America, the misnamed Jewish Voice for Peace, Socialist Workers of UK, and the rest of that lot) we see you. You have forfeited whatever claims you may have had on social justice. You are charlatans, poseurs, fools. As in the socialism of fools.

Antisemitism is not social justice.

The mass murder of Jews is not social justice.

Carrying Hamas’s water is not social justice.

But, I digress.

So, we wait. Today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, it will come. We will enter Gaza. Well, “we” is not accurate. Our young men and women in the IDF will go into harm’s way. Some won’t come home. Many will come home wounded in body, mind and spirit. All of us, scarred already, will be scarred all the more.

I find no solace in the suffering of innocent Palestinians. Nobody should. We cannot make claims to our humanity without seeing their humanity. The main address for that suffering, and this should be obvious, is Hamas.

I feel no joy of what must come. Just a profound sadness that here we are.

I end not with a quote from Torah, as appropriate that would be, but from JRR Tolkien, in Lord of the Rings, written during World War II as a metaphor for that war:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”