Assaults, sirens, shutdown and remodeling…

Maybe this morning, Tuesday, October 13, 2015, was truly worse than all the others; maybe it was only that it seemed so. All morning, across the city, we could hear beating helicopters, screaming ambulances and convoys of police vehicles racing behind their sirens. A sampling of events…

• Two stabbing attacks in Ra’anana
• Three killed, several wounded in terror attacks in Jerusalem
• A stabbing at the IKEA at Kiryat Ata
• A shooting on the 78-bus killed a 60 year old man and wounded 15 others.
• The Old City has been shut down.

Meanwhile in America, even-minded Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the preacher President Obama never listened to while regularly attending his church, has weighed in from his hateful perch.

Israel is an apartheid state, Wright finds the time to say (adding that Jesus was a “Palestinian”).

Mahmoud Abbas, the millionaire Palestinian President, Israel’s “peace partner,” the US insists, (accused of embezzling only a fraction of the hundreds of millions salted away by his predecessor, the late, Yasser Arafat), has announced that terrorists martyred while assaulting Jews shed “pure” blood, adds that Jews have “no right to desecrate the mosque with their dirty feet.” (The mosque built not far from where King Solomon, a Jew, built his Temple some 1,500 years before Islam was invented.)

Seventy-two hours, 11 terrorist attacks, 0 United Nations Condemnation. The UN has called upon Israel to levy a “proportional response” to the terrorism but, so far, no Jews have stepped forward and volunteered to stab innocent Palestinian families while walking in the Old City or riding buses. Neither do any seem willing to launch thousands of rockets into defenseless Arab neighborhoods.

His majesty, Tom Friedman

Given all this hatred, what’s a Jew to think? There are at least two answers, apparently. American Jews have no need to think at all. Israel, for too many of them, is not their problem, at least not until the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman chimes in to explain that everything would be okay in Israel if only Benjamin Netanyahu were nicer to militant Arabs.

It will come about in that day that I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples; all who lift it will be severely injured. And all the nations of the earth will be gathered against it. Zec 12:3

Israeli Jews, while not all of a mind, are at least uniformly not so certain that Obama’s so-called tough love, Iran’s self-policed nuclear program, Tom Friedman’s towering wisdom, Abbas’s incitement to terrorism and the UN’s continued condemnation of everything we do are necessarily in our best interests.

Many solid Arab Israeli citizens feel the same way.

Israel is a resilient country. It has to be, where else are we to go? Most here have learned that attempting to reason with our enemies, including those enemies who claim to be our friends, in hopes to persuade them that we are good is a fruitless exercise.

The truth is plain to see to all who will only look.

In our neighborhood, today, while sirens blared and choppers chopped (it continues as this is written) we were treated to another sound; hammer drills demolishing existing walls in a nearby apartment undergoing remodeling.

As always in Jerusalem, life goes on.