Sunday, November 10, 2024
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: A new Israeli nation is arising from the smoke of battle
Melanie Phillips: A new Israeli nation is arising from the smoke of battle
The shiva was an unbearably tragic, moving and yet inspirational experience.10 Lies about Israel (pdf)
Inspirational because here in microcosm was something of unexpected and priceless value that has emerged in Israel during this terrible year. It is no reflection on the grit and valour of those who fought in Israel’s previous wars to say that what’s now taking place is seen by many as a spiritual rebirth of the Jewish nation.
At the funeral and shiva, Avi’s widow Rachel showed the inner strength of this couple when she spoke up for three principles dear to her husband and demanded by his ultimate sacrifice.
The first was the need for unity, demonstrated by the family’s request that any politician who paid a shiva visit should be accompanied by someone with a different perspective.
The second was that Charedim should enlist in the IDF, a demand she made in public to a prominent rabbinic opponent of the Charedi draft when he visited the mourners.
The third, which encompassed the first two, was that the cause for which her husband had given his life was a war of good against evil.
This understanding lies at the core of the astounding spirit shown by countless IDF soldiers, secular as well as believers, over the past year.
These soldiers — many of them achingly young — have shown they aren’t fighting merely to defeat an enemy bent on their nation’s destruction and to recover the remaining Israeli hostages.
They understand they are up against an existential evil, the same barbaric depravity that has claimed millions of Jewish lives over the centuries.
This conscript army accordingly feels accompanied on the battlefield by the ghosts of those who were slaughtered in previous generations. These soldiers know they’re fighting for the moral and spiritual principles that have kept the Jewish people alive throughout unparalleled persecution.
It’s why they believe they will win this war, whatever the cost.
It’s why so many of them, secular as well as religious, have gone to war wearing tzitzit, the fringed garment intended to remind them of the Jews’ religious calling. They wear this Jewish identity like armour next to their hearts.
Avi Goldberg was a warrior rabbi fighting for the nation, the first for centuries to have taken this dual role so familiar to us from the Hebrew bible. He had the aura of a biblical figure fighting in what many have come to view as a biblical war. For it feels like a momentous new chapter is being written in Jewish history.
No-one is under any illusion that, after the war ends, Israel’s profound political dysfunctionality and social divisions will magically melt away. But a great new generation is arising from the smoke of the battlefield who will never again put up with the doublethink and confusion of a society that lost its ancient clarity of vision and paid a terrible price.
A spark has been rekindled by this war to forge the nation anew. The people of Israel are being bound together in fire, a nation fighting for civilisation against barbarism, for light against darkness, for life against death.
May the memory of all who have fallen in this seismic war be a blessing.
Telling the truth about Israel is an urgent necessity after the October 7th massacre and the unexpected wave of antisemitism that we witnessed afterward. For many years Israel’s image has been polluted to the point of asphyxiation by a well-prepared set of lies that, over the decades, have become widespread – mindsets that fuel not only incitement to terrorism in the Arab world but also antisemitic hatred in the Western world.
The resulting ignorance is an abyss of shame. The young people who take to the streets against Israel know nothing but myths and lies, while ignoring even the most basic facts of Israel’s history and current events. In this little book, we offer our contribution to the truth facing the ten basic lies about Israel.
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