In spite of a lack of regular news coverage, Lebanon and Israel have
been exchanging fire for the past
eleven months. Over 8,000 rockets, missiles, and drones have crossed over from Lebanon (stats according to the BBC), these assaults usually staying within a few miles from their shared border, which is about 150 miles north of where we are in Jerusalem. And Israel has been responding with air strikes, tank fire, and mind-boggling hits on Hezbollah senior officials in a tit-for-tat that has become so monotonous that few people seem to be mindful of it, until there are casualties. A couple months ago I asked Danny to turn off his phone's rocket notifications for the region and I have since been able to duck in and out of that state of blissful ignorance where most of the rest of the non-Israeli world chooses to live. Vast swathes of country in the north, once lush with green rolling hills and carved by beautiful farmlands and orchards, have been charred, over 21,000 acres. Sixty thousand Israeli citizens (Israeli Jews, Arabs, Druze, Christians) have been evacuated from border towns and villages, and have been living as internal refugees in hotels while their precious homes and livelihoods are destroyed. Eleven months later... they're still displaced, with no end in sight unless Israel takes matters into its own hands on Lebanese soil. But this most recent episode with the pagers...
It
reminds me of the incredible feat of Hezekiah’s in withstanding the
siege
of Sennacherib. Seven hundred years before Christ, Sennacherib was the
powerful Assyrian military general-king who left his throne in Nineveh
(in modern day Iraq), swept through the lands his father had conquered
(Jordan, and Lebanon, and Israel) and decided he wanted to add Judah to
his world-domination portfolio. In response to this impending threat,
Hezekiah tried to convince Sennacherib to leave him alone by sawing off the
golden doors from the Holy Temple and having them shipped to Assyria. When this bribery-diplomacy failed, Hezekiah supposedly started building the Tunnel that bears his name. It was dug by two teams, each started on opposite ends and worked toward each other in order to meet in the middle, as recorded by an ancient inscription at the Pool of Siloam as well as in the Bible, in 2 Chronicles 32:2–4. While Sennacherib's army was busy destroying Judah's walled cities one by one, the Hebrew people were digging desperately, furtively, through solid rock, to give their city access to the waters of the Gihon Spring as they prepared to withstand the coming siege. They would never survive in the desert without access to water.
As he wrapped up his campaign in the nearby town of Lachish, Sennacherib sent envoys ahead to the capital city of Jerusalem to demand the surrender of the city and of King Hezekiah himself. The envoys
stood before the walls of Jerusalem and, in an account documented in 2
Kings 18 and 2 Chronicles 32, called out to the Israeli people, in
Hebrew, saying that Judah’s God was as powerless as the gods of the
nations that Assyria had already conquered. "Now do not let Hezekiah
deceive you and mislead you like this!" the envoys yelled. "Do not
believe him, for no god of any nation or kingdom has been able to
deliver his people from our hand... How much less will your god deliver
you?!” Hezekiah hurried to the Temple to pray for deliverance, asking
God to bring glory to his name through their deliverance. The prophet
Isaiah showed up and, in a poetic prophecy (2 Kings 19:21–34),
assured Hezekiah that Jerusalem would be saved. As you descend into the tunnel today, you can see
the chisel marks on the walls and imagine the laborers with their
Bronze Age tools and dogged determination to survive- not knowing if
this plan would work but desperately hoping… what? That their engineering
skills could pull off this endeavor of tunneling through 500 meters (a third of a
mile) from two directions and be able to meet in the
middle without advanced mathematics, engineering or navigational
equipment? Were they praying that the Assyrians wouldn’t find the entrance to the tunnel that could give them access to the city? Were they hoping that God would recognize the gargantuan effort and bless it as a
testimony of their faith? The Bible says that this is how the story
ended. When Sennacherib decided to attack, 185,000
Assyrian soldiers were slaughtered by an angel of the Lord.
Similarly, the exploding pagers stunt was extraordinary-- tactically
brilliant, bewilderingly audacious... genius but somehow unsettling? Morally...disorienting? And Hezbollah's response has been an escalation
less rhetorical than in the past, following up their usually bombastic, empty threats with an increased intensity of rocket fire that Israel has been matching, as one could judge from the near constant-roars of jets overhead that can be heard even from Jerusalem. The news is back to being absorbing. And as I am back to imagining end
of the world scenarios, Danny has told me to stay off the news. Indeed
we have friends on the front lines and when we hear of additional
casualties on the border we scan their names and faces to make sure it’s
not one we recognize.
Two days ago, Wednesday, The UN voted on a resolution put forward by the Palestinians that calls for Israel to remove its presence from Palestinian areas (that is, Gaza, and the West Bank) within 12 months. Some 124 countries voted in favor of the resolution, while 14 opposed the measure which demands something that is, of course,
impossible. And stupid. Israel directly occupied Gaza up until 2005, when the Prime Minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, withdrew all Israeli security forces from the territory, as well as 21 Israeli settlements. “The end of Israeli control over and responsibility for the Gaza Strip allows the Palestinians, if they so wish, to develop their economy and build a peace-seeking society, which is developed, free, law-abiding, and transparent and which adheres to democratic principles,” declared Sharon at the UN General Assembly that year. And how did that work out for the Palestinians? A militant terrorist terrorist group (Hamas) won local elections in 2006 then took sole control of the territory in 2007, following a brief civil war against their rivals. With their new-found autonomy and self governance the Palestinians chose to submit themselves to an oppressive regime so hell-bent on the reclaiming of Israel's land for a Palestinian state that they blew through many billions of dollars in humanitarian aid over the years in educating their children to hate Israel, in collecting a massive arsenal with which to attack Israel, and building expansive tunnel systems and paragliders from which to attack Israel. Imagine what good that aid could have done to improve the quality of life of those in the Gaza Strip! (The US alone gives $400 million dollars *per year* to UNWRA.) But no. Instead those funds were used to enable the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. How is further independence a
tenable option? Especially considering those lands are Israeli ancestral
lands? Especially considering that Israel gained control of those lands
following the Six-Day War in 1967 defending their existence against Egypt and Jordan? Perhaps the UN should change its name
to the United Nations Against Israel since its no longer keeping the facade of "maintaining peace and international security," casting judgements with neither impartiality nor integrity, without wisdom, and without good judgement. In chapter 12 of the book of Zechariah, there is a prophecy that says that as the end of days draw near, there will come a point when all the nations of the earth are gathered against the nation of Israel. It repeats two chapters later, "For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle." The implication is that Israel won’t have a
friend among the nations. As in all things that our current administration does, they say what itching ears want to hear. And in the bizarro-world where relieving itching ears has become more important than truth or goodness,
the sway of relativism will ultimately come against Israel because Satan
is behind it. Satan, the great deceiver. Satan the one who wishes to
take out God’s chosen people because God has said salvation will come to the world through this chosen tribe among the nations... or the "Palestine occupiers" as Hezbollah calls them.
… So I
am back to not-reading the news. Instead I take my kids to Krav Maga and
violin and I crochet my temperature blanket while Danny reads crossword
clues aloud. And I try to ignore the sound of jets flying overhead and I wash all the dirty
implements generated from this liver detox diet with its twice-a-day,
green, gag-me smoothies. And I wonder at the brilliance of exploding
pagers and simultaneously wonder that Jewish Americans can overwhelmingly support the administration that gave Iran access to $16 billion in assets that had been frozen for misbehavior (which they obviously continue)... the same administration that destroyed American
credibility in the region with the monumental disaster that was the Afghanistan withdrawal. The modern Jewish American is so out of touch with their Israeli family that 72% of them support this administration that "donated" $10 billion
worth of the world's best military equipment to a regime so oppressive that it will stone its own women should they dare to use their voice in public. Was it Harris' feeble-handed response to antisemitic
protests domestically and abroad that won the hearts of the Jewish people? That can't be... Instead Jewish Americans turn their back on those who
crafted the Abraham Accords, affording the greatest peace and stability
in the Middle East in recent history, and on the administration that was
first to boldly legitimize Israel’s claim to its capital. It is truly a
stiff-necked ungrateful people, unable to distinguish its true friends
from opportunists. Israelis, meanwhile, seem prefer Trump.
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