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picture of the day
21 soldiers killed in deadliest incident for Israel since start of Gaza ground offensive
1000 Israeli musicians sing with one voice, BRING THEM HOME! - Homeland concert at the Roman theater of Caesarea.
Click the picture below to watch and listen on the Internet. Despite heavy losses suffered by kibbutz Be’eri, with many of its people murdered or kidnapped, and despite the community’s living in hotels outside the kibbutz which was burned and ruined, their fields are plowed, and wheat is being sown.
Just in case you still don't get it:
From the river to the sea Palestine will be free - by any means necessary (note the map on the left) Columbia University, New York, USA First group of 13 Israeli, 12 Thai and one Filipino hostages released.
IDF recovers bodies of Cpl. Noa Marciano and Yehudit Weiss found near Al-Shifa hospital
Above, left to right:
Yesterday evening (Nov.14) three civilians were injured in Central Tel Aviv from rocket shrapnel. IDF Spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari inspected in person the Rantisi Hospital in Gaza and the Hamas infrastructure embedded in it. IDF soldiers unloaded medical supplies, incubators and fuel outside the Shifa Hospital in Gaza. 7th Armored Brigade and Golani Infantry Brigade fighters captured Gaza military police headquarters, Hamas Parliament and other governmental sites. Prof. Chaim Hames, BGU Rector, addresses colleagues abroad from kibbutz Be’eri.
Click the picture below to watch on youtube. Whether you’re an academic or not, leafing through November’s special issue of BGU’s journal will give allow you a glimpse at the challenges faced by an academic institution in times of war, and the special tasks BGU has been taking upon itself.
Click the picture below to read on the Internet. Israel's President exhibiting a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf translated in Arabic, found in one of the Hamas strongholds in Gaza, full of underlined passages and annotations in the margins.
Below: Kibbutz Nir Oz mailboxes, this week. Red - Murdered Black - Kidnapped Blue - Liberated Eylon Levy's interview with Ireland's @rtenews, Nov.7
Click the picture to watch on X. Czech Parliament members with pictures of the hostages.
The Czech people have been with us since the War of Independence in 1948. We acknowledge their friendship and support. People's liberation movement? Freedom fighters? Protectors of the Palestinian people?
Do me a favor! 20-year old Sergeant Roy Saragosti from the Nahal haRoah farmstead near our community, a graduate of our environmental high school and a pupil of my wife’s.
Killed in action Oct.31, 2023. Excerpts from the interrogations of captured Hamas murderers.
Click the picture to watch on youtube. This is an intercepted call from one of the terrorists to his parents in Gaza. If you know Arabic you won’t need the translation, but if you are not fluent in Arabic, please read carefully.
Click the picture to watch on youtube. Here’s a slip of paper found on one of the Hamas terrorists. It was presented by the IDF spokesperson at a press conference yesterday. If you can’t read either the original Arabic or the translation in Hebrew, here’s what an excerpt of it says in English:
You must sharpen the blades of your swords and be pure in your intentions before Allah. Know that the enemy is a disease that has no cure, other than cutting their heads off and tearing out their hearts and livers. Storm them!
war lexicon
Credit: What the world – our friends abroad – are willing to give Israel in terms of the time they are ready to grind their teeth, roll their eyes, look the other way, and allow us to defend ourselves. Regularly that time interval is limited to a couple of days - no matter what. This time our credit extended to maybe a week or two – that’s the credit we got for over 1400 massacred, over 220 abducted hostages, for crimes that no war law can explain, let alone excuse. See also Empathy and Memory.
Empathy: What the world may – though not always does - feel when Jews are slaughtered. See also Memory. Guilt: What those that survived the onslaught feel, those left alive whereas their partners, friends, comrades in arms were murdered or killed in action, those that couldn’t make it in time to save others. Is it OK to have dinner with friends? A glass of wine? Watch a movie? Not think for a second about the Black Saturday of October 7? About the war? About the hostages? About all those whose lives have been put on hold, the refugees, the families that grieve? Is it OK to think about the civilians that die on the other side? Luck: A rocket hit yesterday an electricity transformer and pylon alongside a highway minutes after our son and daughter drove by. Memory: The ability or will to remember over time the reason for an Israeli retaliation. Once the memory of events that caused Empathy fades or is erased, ongoing events become meaningless violence. Proportionality/Reciprocity/Symmetry: The perverse notion that assumes that the reaction to an unprovoked attack should be exactly of the same nature and magnitude. Does one have to kill exactly the same number of innocent civilians as the Hamas murderers butchered? How does one reciprocate proportionately and symmetrically for decapitated babies, raped young women, kidnapped civilians, whole families burned in locked rooms? Routine: One of the very few ways to stay sane at times of insanity. Shower, breakfast, work, dinner. Do not change it, do not stop going to your workplace, unsafe as this may be. Keep on doing what you usually do otherwise they win, and you lose the war. “Never surrender” is a T-shirt slogan from the days of the anti-government demonstrations – could have never been more appropriate. Underground: The Hamas subterranean installations, passages, tunnels, storage, military infrastructure, spreading under houses, schools, hospitals. Who will bear responsibility for the collateral damage when this city-beneath-a-city is attacked? Useful idiot: A person perceived as propagandizing for a cause—particularly a bad cause originating from a devious, ruthless source—without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically being used by the cause's leaders. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot) Vacuum: The void that exists in the place of the moral compass and the judgement of certain people, e.g., Antonio Guterres, UN General Secretary. This is a war blog.
The decision to start it stemmed from the need to update friends on the situation in Israel without imposing on them the social media pestering on a daily basis. Thus, an email with the blog URL is sent herewith for those interested. It will not attempt to be balanced or PC. This how I, my family and friends are experiencing this war. Parts of it may not be easy to stomach either. The blog will be bilingual – English and Greek. The Hebrew speakers have enough feeds daily and certainly do not need me. New updates are below - starting with the earlier ones, continuing with the newer ones.
Οct.15, 2023
My wife and I were in Chania, Crete, where we had gone for a conference and some work with my colleagues but, not least, in order to meet friends and have a short vacation. Our daughter and her boyfriend joined us for four days – that were to become nearly a fortnight. The feeds that started coming in on Saturday Oct.7 on all social media and the Israeli news sites were horrific. They talked about a significant Hamas invasion from Gaza in the south of Israel on the holiday day of Sukkoth, the Tabernacles. There were heavy casualties, there was talk about kidnapped, massacred, vanished people of all ages, kibbutzim and other settlements having been taken by terrorists. Clips and images were flying all over, and it was practically impossible to avoid them. I wrote to friends and colleagues outside Israel that this is going to be like earthquakes or floods. At first numbers are small, but they keep rising. Unfortunately, so they did indeed, and by Saturday Oct.14, as I’m writing these lines, the number of murdered or killed in action has already surpassed 1300, the number of kidnapped over 150, the wounded over 3000. Our younger son was called up by his unit the very first day. His pregnant wife moved in with her parents. Our older son, his wife and seven-month-old boy moved in with her parents who have a “safe space” – a term coined for the shelters built in each new house, apartment, office building, school or public building. Missiles and rockets were shot from Gaza causing havoc, sending people into bomb shelters, causing damage, casualties, bringing up to surface PTSD from previous rounds. All flights to Israel were cancelled immediately. So was the one our daughter was supposed to fly back on, and so was ours. We tried to look for alternatives contacting our travel agent in Israel and Greek friends in the tourist business. Israeli companies, first ELAL and then Arkia, started flying back and forth, flying out of Israel foreigners and Israelis too anxious to stay there, flying into Israel on emergency flights reservists whose units had called them up for active duty and Israelis like us who couldn’t wait to reunite with their families in Israel. The first flights were all overbooked. 5,000 reservists flooded into Athens from all over, others opted for Larnaca, the two cities, their two airports, becoming the spring points back to the land in war. It took us a couple of days to manage to book an Arkia emergency flight on Saturday evening, then an Aegean flight form Chania to Athens, with a short connection – so short that everything could go wrong. Sitting at home was not an option, we needed to keep busy. We were lucky to be able to extend our car and Airbnb rental. Naturally, we lived in a schizophrenic situation, meeting with friends for lunch or dinner, going to the beach or a café, one eye always on the incoming messages and news, those of the immediate family as well as those from friends and colleagues and neighbors. The news were so terrible, the violence so unprecedented, that it was very hard to stomach. Some 250 young women and men had been massacred while at a rave party in the Negev desert. Women, children, elders were grabbed, kidnapped into Gaza. Young girls were raped, then slaughtered, their bodies dragged naked in the streets of Gaza to be spat on. Babies were slaughtered, decapitated. Children shot in front of their parents. Parents died trying to protect their children. Kibbutzniks in the agricultural settlements around Gaza were killed in huge numbers, some of the Kibbutzim eventually losing up to 25% of their population. Men and women were killed fighting the terrorists that stormed their communities. All this needed to be brought out – to friends and colleagues and the wider world, to those whose knee-jerk reaction is to blame Israel for all misfortunes that befall the Palestinians, while ignoring the facts on the ground. The democratic world’s reaction was first disbelief, then shock, then condemnation of this horrific inhuman crime against Israel, Israelis, Jews. I started sending out messages to friends, trying to explain to them what was hard for us to understand. Eventually I joined a volunteers’ group trying to bring to the world not the official news, but rather the personal stories and messages and clips – of parents looking for their kids, of youngsters telling their stories from the rave party, of evacuees describing the horrors they faced. Volunteer translators took upon themselves to cover as many languages, reach as many people as possible – all European languages, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Philippine, Arabic, Farsi – you name it, we have it. I took upon myself the Greek translation. Alongside this, I started posting texts on the FB page of the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE), a communist platform which started posting the usual pro-Palestinian slogans. First reactions to my post were reasonable, some of them saying we are not with Fascist Hamas, we are with the Palestinian people. Then it got more aggressive and ugly. But it wasn’t something I hadn’t expected – friends warned me right up front this is the reaction I should expect. Not surprising, yet very disappointing, especially when student unions, women’s organizations and others started joining the anti-Israel bandwagon without bothering to understand why Israel was bombing Gaza – again. I was asked by local friends to give an interview to the local newspaper and TV station, which I agreed to do, not without the usual reservations – will my words be filtered, censored, manipulated? I was surprised by a sincere interest and rather accurate representation of what I said. Others, friends among them, were doing the same with other mass media platforms. Up to the last moment we were trying to explain to friends there why this is not like other wars. The inhuman ugly homicidal attack on Israeli citizens, non-combatants of all ages, was such that no excuses would help in the retaliation by Israel. And, no, there cannot be any symmetry or reciprocity in war – this is just an academic sterile argument, in the case of Israel more often than not stemming from a basic misunderstanding of the situation on the ground in Gaza, where terrorists are using civilians as human shields. By that time my university, a rather small one with some 20,000 students, had already issued over 30 death and funeral announcements of faculty, staff, students and family members murdered or killed in action. War in Israel is a very private matter. If one doesn’t know personally the person that died, they know their parents, or siblings, or neighbors. Each casualty is personal loss for all of us. Saturday Oct.14 we boarded a flight from Chania to Athens, left with a 30’ delay, all could go wrong, yet we were very lucky to make it to our flight to Tel Aviv. As the plane was taxing for takeoff, the pilot gave the usual introduction to the flight ending with the words “my crew and I have left our homes and families to make sure our air connections are kept open”. A country at war trying to keep connected to the rest of the world. I had already experienced that when I flew to blockaded Yugoslavia in the winter of 1999. A small plane with two seats on either side of the corridor, full of Israelis of all ages returning home after being stranded abroad for days, felt like home already. As we approached the Israeli coast flight became a bit bumpy – clouds, pressure differences – yet the sudden drop of the plane to one side and its sharp upwards surge were a bit weird. The pilot explained that the weather is a bit rough, but there is nothing to worry about since planes can fly in any weather. Yet our daughter said she saw something weird flying near us. Others sitting on the same side of the plane looked a bit shocked. When we finally landed, we realized there had just been another missile attack from Gaza, missiles passing near our plane, the sudden flashes witnessed possibly being Iron Dome hits. Welcome home, then! Oct.16, 2023
We live with the sounds of fighter planes dashing over our heads to respond to each and every missile attack from Gaza – and these are fewer than during the first days, yet enough to make life difficult for people all over the country. Our community, as practically all other small communities, has set up security patrols and guarding manned mainly by the residents. Soldiers and police are needed elsewhere. We arrived home after Saturday midnight and I was of duty Sunday morning, as I was this morning from 06:30. Our daughter and her boyfriend came yesterday to stay with us. Neighbors’ kids with spouses and children have packed their parents’ houses. The whole community is packed with refugees from the cities and agricultural communities around Gaza. This morning at about 05:00 I heard the muezzin from one of the unrecognized Bedouin settlements nearby calling people through loudspeakers to morning prayer. Allahu Akbar – god is great. Unfortunately for god and people alike, this has been also the battle cry of the Hamas murderers, suicide bombers, ISIS, Al Qaeda, the mujahedeen. Our university’s casualties have risen to 46 by this morning. Stories of bravery are told about young men and women – as well as retired past chiefs of staff and officers - putting on their fatigues and rushing to the sites of last week’s massacres with their private handguns. Many of them died while fighting the terrorists. They were the people who voluntarily took upon themselves the task of defending civilians, fighting off a murderous enemy. Many of them, as many of those reservists called up by their units on day 1 of the battles, have been called names over the past 40 weeks of anti-government demonstrations. They were told they are traitors, anarchists, Israel haters for refusing to back the worst government we have ever had. When we are done settling our accounts with murderers of Hamas, their leaders and religious and financial supporters, the time will come to settle accounts with our government and all those responsible for this disaster. I guess “high treason” is not a term sufficiently strong for what they have perpetrated. A short ceasefire has been brokered by Egypt and the US to allow for humanitarian aid to be brought into Gaza, and Gazans with foreign passports to leave through Egypt. Oct.16, 2023, 18:00
I have just returned from the funeral of two of Oct.7’s massacre – the daughter of a colleague, a BGU and Brandeis University emeritus. His daughter and her husband, both of them musicians, kibbutz Holit (Dune) members, were murdered. Their parents and their three children left behind in shock, students and colleagues left with no words. Two bodies, two graves, some flowers. This (below) is what our TV looks like these days. The orange ribbons on the upper right corner have the names of cities, villages, communities under missile attack at any given moment. Earlier today Beer Sheva, the communities around the Gaza border, then Tel Aviv and its surrounding cities, Jerusalem came under attack time and again. The specific shot is from last night’s Channel 11 news as a father and son describe how they saved their daughter/sister together with another 30 girls and boys from the rave party where over 250 young people were massacred.
Oct.17, 2023
In Memoriam As the days pass, we start burying our dead. Below is a temporary list of the toll the BGU family has paid so far: Major Oriel Bibi, z”l, Student in the Department of Emergency Medicine Killed in battle in the line of duty Saturday, October 7, 2023 Ori Tchernichovsky, z”l, Student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Killed in the terrorist attack Saturday, October 7, 2023 Itay Bewjo, z”l, Student and teaching assistant in the Department of Materials Engineering. Killed in the terrorist attack Saturday, October 7, 2023 Major Dr. Eitan Neeman, z”l, Member of the Faculty of Health Sciences. Killed in battle in the line of duty Saturday, October 7, 2023 Dr. Sergei Gredskull, z”l, Emeritus member of the Department of Physics. Killed in the terrorist attack together with his wife Dr. Victoria Gredskull, z”l, Emeritus member of the Department of Mathematics, Saturday, October 7, 2023 Chief Sergeant Deborah Abraham, z”l, Student in the Conflict Management and Resolution Program. Killed in battle in the line of duty Saturday, October 7, 2023 Dina Kapshetar, z”l, Staff member in the Human Resources Division. Killed in the terrorist attack together with her husband Evgeny (Genia) Kapshetar Saturday, October 7, 2023. Their two children are still missing. Dr. Victoria Gredskull, z”l, Emeritus member of the Department of Mathematics. Killed in the terrorist attack together with her husband, Dr. Sergei Gredskull, z”l, Emeritus member of the Department of Physics, Saturday, October 7, 2023 Evgeni Postel, z”l, Student in the Department of Computer Science. Killed in the terrorist attack Saturday, October 7, 2023 Yasmin Zohar (Livne), z”l, Graduate student and member of the Department of Education. Killed in the terrorist attack together with her husband Yaniv Zohar, z”l, her father Haim Livne, z”l, and her daughters Keshet and Techelet Zohar, z”l, Saturday, October 7, 2023 Lior Tkach, z”l, Student in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering. Killed in the terrorist attack Saturday, October 7, 2023 Ronit Tal Sultan, z”l, Graduate student and member of the Department of the Arts Killed in the terrorist attack together with her husband, Roland Sultan, z”l, Saturday, October 7, 2023 Shahak Yosef Madar, z”l, Student in the Department of Hotel and Tourism Management. Killed in the terrorist attack Saturday, October 7, 2023 Shani Kupervaser, z”l, MA student and teaching assistant in the Department of Economics. Killed in the terrorist attack Saturday, October 7, 2023 Dr. Lilia Gurevich, z”l, BGU alumnus, PhD in chemistry. Killed in the terrorist attack Saturday, October 7, 2023 Superintendent Amin Akhundov, z”l, BGU alumnus and husband of Luba Akhundov. Member of the Department of Computer Science. Killed in battle Saturday, October 7, 2023 Mark Shindel, z”l, Student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering And brother of Guy Shindel, a student in the Department of Computer Science. Killed in the terrorist attack Saturday, October 7, 2023 Here are the updated (Oct.16, 2023) numbers of this carnage: Murdered/killed in action: >1,400 Wounded: 4,229 Hostages kidnapped into Gaza: 199 6,930 missiles/rockets were shot by Hamas and Islamic Jihad (Oct.16)
Oct.18, 2023
Yesterday Israel took out Ayman Nofal, ‘Abu Ahmad,’ a member of the general military council and commander of the central command in Al-Qassam Brigades, responsible for the planning of the Oct.7 massacre of innocent Israelis. The visit (yesterday) in Israel of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and planned visit (today) of US President Biden made the missile barrage against Israel all the more intense. Wave after wave of missiles came out of Gaza. The family of one of our sons reported they were rushing to the shelter every 15’. So did our other son’s wife – pregnant, running to the shelter, falling, getting up, running again. The orange tags at the upper right corner of the TV screen kept running like mad. All of the south and lowlands and coastal plane and center of the country and even parts of the north were under attack. And then the bad news came. A direct hit on Al-Ahali hospital in the Al Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinians had taken refuge. The number of casualties released by the Palestinians increased – 200, 300, 500. I zapped from the three main Israeli TV channels to CNN, Sky, France24, Al Jazeera – they all declared that was an Israeli strike, thus Israel is responsible for the killing of hundreds of innocent civilians. Israel Air Force (IAF) always investigates and analyzes its operations, all the more so when accidents may have occurred. So it did this time, and soon enough, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson announced that an analysis of all IAF missiles documentation, an analysis of all camera obtained data including infrareds, show clearly that was not an Israeli hit, but rather an Islamic Jihad missile misfire that hit the hospital. Do not believe me, do not believe the IDF Spokesperson – just watch carefully the Al Jazeera footage. ISRAEL DOES NOT TARGET CIVILIANS – PLEASE GET ALL THE DATA BEFORE CONDEMNING US. Why am I not surprised, though, that those that condemned us vehemently as of yesterday do not retract their condemnations? Al Jazeera itself, that accidentally documented the event, has not changed yesterday’s condemnation of Israel on its site. And a careful footnote by a layman – the blast that followed the hospital’s hit by the Jihad missile misfire was way too massive to be the result of the missile alone. If I am right, this will not be the first time ammunition and explosives are hidden underneath Gazan hospitals, UNRWA schools, mosques. Just for the record. Oct.18, 18:00
Earlier today the death of Oded Barzilai was announced through the Ramat haNegev regional authority’s contacts. Oded was born in 1930 in kibbutz Kfar Giladi, in the Upper Galilee. He studied at an agricultural high school, joined the Palmach, the elite fighting force of the Haganah, the underground army of the Yishuv during the period of the British Mandate for Palestine. He fought during the war of Independence (1948) and was injured. After the war he joined kibbutz Revivim in the Negev, which was founded in 1943. He served as the regional authority’s head, and chief engineer for many years. I have known Oded for nearly 40 years, so my wife and I attended his funeral in the graveyard of kibbutz Revivim several kilometers from our home. Oded passed away peacefully in his sleep at the age of 93 having been fully lucid to the end. Family and friends spoke with love and much respect for the man, his contribution to the independence of the state and the development of the Negev. As we were burying Oded, on the other side of the graveyard’s fence, 104 temporary graves were being dug by workers for 104 of the Oct.7 massacres. Temporary because their communities have been fully destroyed and those of their residents that survived have been spread all over, away from the war’s front line. Once the communities are rebuilt the bodies shall be transferred there.
Moshe Dayan, Defense Minister during the Yom Kippur war, addressed the people, and spoke of “a war of heavy days, heavy blood”. 50 years later once again we are in such a war – of heavy days, heavy blood. Oct.19, 2023
It is eerily quiet this morning. Somehow, we got used to the alarms and fighter jets rushing over our heads. It may well be that this is the quiet before the storm. But that wasn’t really going to last for long. Several questions keep rising. For example, do people abroad really care that the Gaza hospital hit that Israel was originally blamed for, was indeed a Jihad blunder? Looking at this morning’s posts, newspaper headlines and other mass media, they probably don’t. Or, does anyone care about the fact Israel did not target or hit the Al-Ahali hospital, but Hamas and Jihad have been targeting the Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon, which received four direct hits. Another question that keeps bothering me relates to the displacement of civilians. Israel’s pushing southwards Palestinians in the northern Gaza strip has been dubbed by many a war crime, despite the fact it’s done to protect them from the eminent attack, at least partly. Yet I don’t think anyone abroad really knows or cares about the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have become refugees in their own country - internally displaced people, or IDPs - because their communities have been burned to the ground or are under continuous missile attacks. Kibbutzim (plural for kibbutz) around the Gaza border have been vacated leaving behind only voluntary security teams of some of the residents. Towns near Gaza, such as Sderot, have been vacated to avoid unnecessary casualties in the daily missile attacks. Ashkelon and Ashdod and even cities around Tel Aviv look like ghost towns, with tens of thousands of residents having been moved – or having escaped – to hotels at the Dead Sea and Eilat, let alone those that have opted to fly abroad and wait there for the war to come to an end. This war, like all previous ones, isn’t about the facts. It is about narratives. The Palestinians have been playing this card for so many years and have been so successful. This, then, is my narrative which, though, I try to keep as accurate on the facts as I can.
So here’s a fact: in the picture above is my daughter’s bicycle which she had tied outside the building she lived in until moving to a different part of the city. This is central Tel Aviv, the part of the city which on normal days is bustling with locals and tourists, bars and pubs and restaurants, music and traffic. The bicycle has been completely twisted by the blast of the rocket that fell on the building. Russian roulette, anyone? Oct.20, 2023
Two weeks from that cursed day of this horrible massacre. During all this time, when we are all immersed in what happened and happens in the south, Hezbollah has been trying to heat up the northern border, trying to infiltrate into Israel, shooting daily rocket propelled grenades – RPGs – against military and civilian targets, injuring soldiers and civilians. This morning an armed terrorist shot a soldier guarding the entrance to Moshav Margaliot, an agricultural settlement in the Upper Galilee. Alongside this, the Ministry of Defense and the IDF have ordered the complete evacuation of Kiryat Shmona, a town of nearly 23,000 people. A couple of days ago I heard on the radio Prosper Azran, ex-mayor of Kiryat Shmona, who protested the decision to evacuate the settlements close to the Lebanese border which is under complete Hezbollah control. He said “I’m 70 years old, but I’ve been in the army and I can handle a gun. Give the residents arms and let us defend our towns and villages, and let the army take this war back into enemy territory!” This has been the Israeli doctrine all along the state’s history. Israel has no strategic depth, being a small and rather thin country. Prosper Azran knows that all too well. His town was under daily heavy Katyusha rocket bombardments until the first Lebanon war in 1982. I met him around that time when I was working on the town’s development plan. He was the town’s indigenous leader, cared about his town and its residents, tried his best to slow and even stop the town’s abandonment by its residents who couldn’t take the daily barrage from Lebanon. He is an intelligent and serious person. And means what he says. Yesterday the Houthis in Yemen shot nineteen (19) missiles towards Israel, which were intercepted by one of the US aircraft carriers. Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas – all three of them Iran proxies. Alongside all this – and the missile and rocket attacks from Gaza, which are continuing as I write these lines at 21:00 – we traveled to the center of the country to accompany our daughter to a rather serious dental operation, which was successful, and visited our grandson in a town in between Tel Aviv and our campus. When we put on WAZE our son’s address the image below appeared on the mobile’s screen: Drive carefully – you are traveling to a dangerous area. Take all necessary precautions during your trip”. I wrote yesterday about internally displaced people so here we have today IDF vacating Kiryat Shmona and other border communities in the north, whereas during the recent heavy barrage on Sderot in the south the mayor asked the remaining 25% of the residents still in the town to leave to one of the safe areas where accommodation has been organized for them by the government.
All the land - front line. Αll the people - army. Oct.21, 2023
Two weeks ago happened something that has changed all of us, the Middle East, maybe also the World. As the days pass the numbers of those murdered, those kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza, those missing keep growing. In a nominally humanitarian step, Hamas released yesterday a mother and daughter with American citizenship. “Nominally” because this was the price they agreed to pay for humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza strip. “Nominally” because that was a deal brokered by the US and Qatar. “Nominally” because they are still holding over 200 hostages, some of them with dual citizenship (over 30 countries), but many, maybe most of them, with only Israeli citizenship and no foreign countries to speak on their behalf. Yesterday evening a huge dinner table was set up next to the Tel Aviv Museum. It was the Shabbat dinner table for the hostages whose families held there a Shabbat prayer. The weekend newspapers are full with the pictures and names of those murdered, the hostages, the soldiers and policemen who stopped the invasion and carnage with their bodies – and many of them paid their heroism with their lives.
Each one of those murdered or killed in action is a whole world lost. We read their names and ages and see their pictures – and will try to remember all of them. I will mention only two – a father and his daughter, Arik Peretz and 16-year-old Ruth, a girl with special needs. She loved music so her father took her to this music festival. Their last picture appears in one of the clips showing the people running for their lives. Arik is seen running with his daughter in his arms. Their bodies were found a few days ago in a creek where they were murdered. Next to the graveyard of kibbutz Revivim, the 104 temporary graves dug last week are receiving the bodies of those murdered in nearby communities. A whole family, parents and children, were buried there on Thursday. Another whole family will be buried on Sunday.
I try to keep calm as I read on Facebook and other social media the reactions and statements of the self-appointed armchair revolutionaries and advocates of freedom movements (is Hamas one of them? ISIS, too?) who condemn us for our actions. Their ugly messages and words only expose the deep anti-Israeli sentiment, not to talk about the deeply rooted anti-Semitism. English has a most appropriate expression to describe such – they come out of the woodwork. A friend posted the Greek version of this page on Facebook. It was erased for violating the rules of the site. How about caricatures of blood thirsty Israeli soldiers with blood drenched hands and Swastika armbands, then? Don’t such violate the rules of Facebook? And since I have promised to try to keep my data as accurate as I can, I must retract what I wrote about the massive explosion in the hospital in Gaza. What caused it wasn’t explosives hidden there by Hamas, but rather the amount of fuel in the rocket which crashed there seconds after its launching. BTW, the death toll – for which Jihad is responsible – is neither 500, nor 200, not even 100, but these are details for the Palestinian propaganda, as well as for journalists who rushed to report drivel once again. Oct.22, 2023
The war goes on – on a lower level, but the alarms keep sounding every so often, the rockets and missiles fall, the planes take off to bomb, Hezbollah is working hard on making a statement in the north without risking reaching the point that Israel will have to respond – and everybody knows that if Israel is provoked into an all-out war there, Lebanon will never be again what it is today. I need to update the figures. Bodies of those massacred on Oct.7 are still being found in creeks, under bushes, in the desert, in burned out houses. Many are still unidentified – those burned, those violated by the inhuman Hamas murderers. Here are today’s (Oct.22) figures: Hostages kidnapped into Gaza: 212 Missing: 100-200 Israelis Internally Displaced (IDP): ~150,000 I have just returned from kibbutz Revivim. Hundreds of cars fill a huge area in the desert. The desert soil has already been ground so thin by the cars of those attending the continuous funerals, that it has become fine powder rising with every car driving on it, with every step. I returned from the funeral of the Even family. They were kibbutzniks from Be’eri. Rinat, the mother, was an advanced studies student at the BGU faculty of medical sciences. Her husband, Chen, was described as a farmer with rough hands and a soft heart. Their two boys, Alon and Ido, were murdered with them. Two younger kids were saved.
The family asked that the press not be present during the burial. Eulogies were covered by the sobs of the two younger boys, the classmates of the older ones, the families and friends and colleagues. As the Even family’s funeral started the muezzin from the nearby Bedouin community of Bir Hadaj was calling Muslims to noon prayers. The Bir Hadaj Bedouin took active part in the extermination of the Hamas assassins on Oct.7. They hunted them because the terrorists killed some of their women who were working in the fields that morning, and because they knew that for the terrorists no difference exists between Jew, Bedouin or other Israeli. Maybe this is why the Israeli army today is not an army of Jews, but one of Israelis where Jew, Druze, Bedouin, Christian, Muslim and Circassian Israelis feel proud to post their pictures in full combat gear on their way to protect their families and homes from a rabid homicidal enemy. The temporary graves dug next to the kibbutz Revivim cemetery are being filled. Next to the four new graves of the Even family there are some more from last week’s funerals. Another two graves were filled as the Even family burial was over, and the next one started. The Revivim farmers have taken upon themselves that task of burying the dead comrades from the kibbutzim that were destroyed. Jews bury the dead in shrouds, but the burials we attend are in coffins – burials not of simply dead but of killed, massacred, assassinated, burned. Oct.23, 2023
I was already awake when I heard the muezzin of one of the nearby Bedouin communities calling the faithful Muslims to sunrise prayers. I wonder whether the loudspeakers are louder than before, or that I wake up earlier than I used to or, maybe, the nerves are more exposed. I thought it might be a day more peaceful than the previous ones, yet on the morning news they spoke of one soldier killed by an anti-tank rocket shot from Gaza at his squad as he and the other soldiers were looking for traces of our people taken hostage. One young world cut short; three other young soldiers wounded. Guard duty at the entrance to the campus. One of the guys joked that it must be part of the security orders to have a professor or at least a doctor on each shift. Our department chair tries to keep a façade of business-as-usual by holding weekly departmental meetings on ZOOM. The moment the meeting started the alarm sounded in several of the communities many of the faculty and staff were, including the main BGU campus in Beer Sheva. We returned to business-as-usual 10 minutes later. I have a rhetorical question: how many university rectors and presidents are there that attend daily burials of their university’s casualties? Because I know two – the rector and the president of BGU who I see every time I attend one of the burials. They are there, lay a wreath, bow humbly, and leave. No speeches. And I bow humbly to them. Oct.24, 2023
Another day in this war. Seemingly a relatively quiet one. Morning jogging in the fog in the desert. Jogging armed – I’m too old for that shit. An interview with a local Greek TV station in Kozani. Polite young people who try to tell a story they can’t possibly understand. Two old women hostages are released. One of them and her husband – still in the hands of Hamas – for years have been volunteering to transport to Israeli hospitals Gazans in need of medical care. She describes her captivity as hell, but then says she had daily medical attention. Of course she would – her husband is still there, in one of the Gaza tunnels, in the hands of Hamas murderers. A flying intrusion attempt in the north. A sea intrusion attempt in the south. Both identified in time, both taken care of in time. The Israel Association of Architects’ WhatsApp sent out an announcement for the burial tomorrow of the son of a colleague murdered on the massacre of Oct.7. Alarms all over the country. One missile hits directly a house. A mobile phone is found. The last call is grounded. A Hamas murderer calls his parents in Gaza and says this is the phone of the Jewess he has just killed. Not only her – ten Jews! He says his hands are dripping with their blood. The father wishes him that Allah protect him and bring him home. His mother enters the conversation. She also wishes him that Allah preserve him. Proud parents of a successful son. Are you a parent? Is this how you brought your child up? Jews do not sanctify the shahada – the martyrs, or martyrdom. Jews sanctify life. When we raise our glasses we drink to life – lehayim! We don’t want our kids to become “martyrs”. We want them to study and succeed and become doctors and engineers and farmers and builders and inventors. To build a family and have children and live in peace on this god forsaken piece of land, that doesn’t even have enough water to drink. Over 70% of our water is desalinated Mediterranean Sea water. Go figure – Israel, the Start Up Nation. How can there be a dialogue between two such diverse cultures? Oct.25, 2023
Israel is a small country – in area as well as in population. And expansive as the south of the land is – 65% of the country’s area within the 1948 borders (usually called mistakenly 1967 borders) it is sparsely populated and the social and professional circles intersect and overlap. Today we buried Nir in the graveyard of Omer, a community close to Beer Sheva. Nir was 25 days to be 30. He and his girlfriend, spouse, wife-to-be, had just found a new apartment in Tel Aviv and were about to move there. On Oct.7 they attended their first rave party that was to be their last one. He and his spouse were butchered by the Hamas murderers. She was buried in the north, where her parents live. He was buried in the south, where his parents live. I didn’t know Nir, but I have known his father for over 35 years since I founded the Negev Design and Construction Workshop in 1988. For years Nir’s father was the deputy planner and then chief planner of the regional planning committee, Ministry of Interior, Southern District. Our paths intersected and I got to know him as a very quiet and polite professional. Nir’s mother was a BGU professor. One of his sisters is at BGU as well. Thus, funeral attendees came from all of these backgrounds – architects and planners, university faculty and personnel, people from ministries and institutions and NGOs. And, naturally, there were Nir’s family and friends, all broken. And there was Ilan. He just got up from his daughter’s Shivah – the seven days Jews mourn their dead sitting on the floor – and came to this funeral. And there was the university’s president. We keep meeting at these burials - colleagues, friends, acquaintances - and the more we meet the less we have to say to each other. Only the sorrow becomes deeper, the anger bigger, the eyes drier. On one of the murderers a slip of paper was found encouraging him and his partners to fight this holy war by cutting heads, tearing out the hearts and livers of their victims. And I wonder how one of my students, an Arab kid from the north of the country, could possibly post the propaganda of such heinous murderers. His being taken to police custody was made public yesterday and hit our department like a slap in the face. I searched the pictures we took during final project presentations at the end of the academic year, and there he is, smiling, with his arm on my shoulder. Where do we go from here, then? Oct.27, 2023.
Yesterday we traveled to the center of the country. Our son who’s in the army got a day off to be with his pregnant wife who had a medical exam. Alongside that we visited our other son and grandson, and picked our daughter from the garage where she left her car for service. We had coffee and cremeschnitte, as the alarms app kept buzzing, and the Iron Dome hits exploded nearby in the sky and were clearly audible. Our kids kept saying half-jokingly - yet half-seriously – “maybe you should get on the road before the seven- or the nine-barrage”. For the past three weeks, when people meet do not ask simply “so, how are you?” There’s always an undertone meaning do you and yours are well and safe? Did you know anyone from “there”- where the massacre took place? And the next question is “where are the kids?” We all have kids who’ve been called up and are either in the south or the north, in special operations or waiting for the ground operation to start. Kids, brothers and sisters, husbands, wives, neighbors, friends. Before sunrise I had guard shift with the Bedouin guard of the community and a young girl soldier in full combat gear who graduated form the Thelma Yellin fine arts high school. That’s a random section of this country. “Apartheid state” - a Jewish and a Muslim IDF soldier side by side at morning prayer. They say the Druze villages on the Carmel Mountain and the Galilee are empty of young men, almost all of them in the army, called up by their units.
Oct.28, 2023
Last night started the ground operation. All day long planes flew above, alarms sounded all over the country, and in the evening, missiles shot by Hamas fell in a large area of Bedouin communities. I have been trying to contact one of my Bedouin students, but with no success. PM Netanyahu, minister of defense Gallant and Gantz, one of the opposition leaders who joined the war cabinet, ex-chief of staff and ex-minister of defense, appeared at a press conference including Q&A for the first time. Nothing significant was said other than slogans. At noon we popped into our neighbors for a coffee. Nothing other than the war was discussed. And the constant Q – “…the kids?...” Oct.29, 2023
23 days since the beginning of this war, second or third day since the IDF incursion in Gaza – depending on who’s counting. The world is screaming “bloody murder” as the Palestinian health authorities publish growing numbers of casualties, especially those of children. We shouldn't have been surprised, it was by no means unexpected. Yet the vehemence of anti-Israel demonstrations abroad, as well as that of the anti-Jewish, purely anti-Semitic incidents, have indeed surpassed even the super flexible limits of “anti-Zionist, anti-colonialist” rhetoric and passion. Jewish students at Cooper Union College in downtown Manhattan, were locked in their school’s library for 20 minutes on Oct.25 as pro-Palestinian demonstrators ponded on the doors and shouted slogans. On Oct.12 the BBC reported that “Antisemitic incidents ‘quadruple in UK’ since Hamas attack in Israel”. In Germany many houses of Jews were marked with a Star of David painted on their façade or entrance door. It is always very disappointing finding out how fragile the friendship of Israelis is with non-Israelis, how little time and obvious triggers it takes for our friends abroad to flip over from empathy for our misfortune (e.g., the Oct.7 massacre) to mad hatred for our response, calling Israel a Nazi state that kills innocent non-combatants. It is always so very sad and discouraging realizing – once again - how frail Jewish safety abroad is, how rabid anti-Semitism is still so widely spread, strong, accepted. The unholy coalitions of Islamists or just Muslims, with people from the traditional and far left and people form the far right, seem to have only one single goal in common – the eradication of Israel, and that of the Jews along the way. We learned nothing and forgot everything! P.S. One Israeli officer severely wounded, one Israeli soldier wounded. Oct.31, 2023
Day 25 on this war’s counter. I had decided I was going to stop writing this “non-blog”. It’s not doing anyone any good, certainly not me. I need to get back to my regular routine and immerse myself in things I somehow understand, certainly a bit more than what has happened and what is happening and what will happen around the massacre of Oct.7. But then, yesterday afternoon, as I was coming out of my office, I met a younger colleague. I walked over to him to have chitchat – maybe also reprimand him for his dog that had been barking outside the office for the past hour. So, how’ve you been, I asked, all of yours safe and healthy? I have this friend who’s in Gaza, he said. Called up by his unit you mean? I asked. No, he replied, my friend and his two kids are hostages in Gaza. His wife was assassinated. His voice broke, his eyes filled with tears, he turned his head and regained his composure quickly. There was nothing I could say. I simply hugged him and wished him “good news” – which is something we have all come to do and say several times a day – hug people and wish that they hear something positive. I started walking out of the campus when I met another colleague, ex-student of mine. We talked about the situation and eventually I asked her how’s her husband. He’s not very well, she replied. A good friend of his and one of the friend’s kids have been abducted from their kibbutz and are held hostage. The distance between the two meetings was 150 meters, no more. The distance between the two worlds – the one I left behind me at the office and the one I encountered outside – was light years – or were these darkness years? War in Israel is a personal matter. This afternoon two hundred and forty empty chairs were arranged around the graves of David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of Israel, and his wife Paula. Each of the chairs carried the picture of one of the hostages, their name, age. There were people from our community and the nearby kibbutz, and some of the families of the hostages, and some of the evacuees that have found refuge in our small community in the middle of the desert. There were no speeches, only the broken voice of an abducted soldier’s mother who asked that we do not forget her son and the other hostages, and a representative of the hostages’ families that asked that this war not be considered over until the last of the hostages be returned.
How come the number of hostages is still going up, you may ask? Because among them are foreign workers – caregivers from the Philippines or India or Nepal, farmers form Thailand and elsewhere – whose identities take time to verify with their hosts, families and consulates. Out of this deep darkness a light shone last night when it was announced on the news that one of the hostages, a 19-year-old girl, Private Ori Megidish, was freed by the IDF and the Israeli intelligence units, who managed to bring her back after a face-to-face battle with her captors deep inside the Gaza Strip. One light, over 240 to go.
Nov.1, 2023
I was on the main campus in Beer Sheva today. This is what our corridors and foyers look like – pictures of the murdered, lists of the funerals and burials. The war continues on all fronts. In the north, the Hezbollah is shooting from Southern Lebanon missiles and antitank rockets at residential areas and tries to get terrorist groups through the border. In the south, the Houthis from Yemen keep trying to hit Israel with ballistic missiles and drones, all of them intercepted so far before entering Israel.
And in Gaza? In Gaza the IDF has nearly completed surrounding Gaza City and its satellite refugee camps – if we are to trust foreign and Hamas sources, since Israel is maintaining complete silence on the IDF ground operation details. Arabic speaking volunteers, many of them ex-intelligence and secret services, have been telephoning each and every family in Gaza telling them to move south of Wadi Gaza. This will save their lives and allow IDF ground forces to focus on the objective: finding the hostages kept there, the Hamas leadership and terrorists, and their underground installations and weapons caches. If there are civilians in and around Gaza after continuous Israeli attempts to persuade them to leave, they are either used by the Hamas as human shields or are Hamas supporters who see themselves as part of the terrorist organization and its goals. Yet, careful and professional and determined as our soldiers may be, there are casualties – 15 Israeli soldiers killed in action since the beginning of the ground operation last Saturday. One of them is 20-year old Sergeant Roy Saragosti from the Nahal haRoah farmstead near our community, a graduate of our environmental high school and a pupil of my wife’s. And thus I cannot but keep writing – war in Israel is a personal matter. Do remember this the next time you throw at us the claims that our reaction is disproportionate, or that women and children are killed on the other side, or that we must observe warfare laws and regulations. We tried for over 120 years of the Zionist movement and 75 years of our Independence to operate in the Middle East according to Western manners and decorum. Unfortunately, that seems to have been a big mistake. In the Middle East one can survive only by the rules of the Middle East. Golda Meir once said “If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.” Or, as my late father, who survived WWII as a partisan with gun in hand, told me - better to be afraid of you than to pity you. Just so that we do not forget the numbers of today (Nov.1): Hostages: 243 including a number of foreign citizens Killed in action: 330 whose names have been released by the IDF, 15 of whom since the beginning of the ground operation. Rockets: over 8,000 rockets, mortars, drones, and other projectiles have been fired from Gaza during this war. Nov.3, 2023
Yesterday was the day of the Balfour Declaration, in which, in 1917, Foreign Minister Lord Arthur James Balfour declared that: "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." As in all other cases, including the 1947 UN Partition Plan, but also all the previous less favorable plans and blueprints, the Zionist Movement accepted, the Arabs rejected. Yesterday was the day we accompanied Roy Saragosti to his grave on kibbutz Sde Boker. Roy was a small, shy boy who disliked mathematics but loved animals. His siblings and friends talked about a lively boy with a sense of humor and urge for pranks. The path from the kibbutz olive grove to the cemetery was lined on both sides by neighbors and friends holding flags. Tough farmers with rough hands and sun-burned faces, some of his friends in combat uniform, others in civilian clothes, neighbors, teachers, hundreds of people attended the funeral. Sergeant Roy Sargosti was brought to burial with full military honors including the three-volley salute. Roy was 20 years old, loved nature, the desert, motorcycles and surfing. Nov.5, 2023
Yesterday, Saturday, a massive barrage fell on the south and the east, including the Arava - the deep valley of the Afro-Asian Rift between Israel and Jordan - and the Negev. It must have been around 17:30 or so when a massive explosion was heard over the Ramat Negev region, albeit with no casualties. Another massive barrage all over the country occurred a bit after 20:00. In between I was on guard duty with a soldier from the adjacent base, a 19-20 year old girl with one hearing aid who did her 5-credit matriculation (the highest level) on cello, playing among other pieces, variations by Mendelssohn. I am listening to them now. Today, one month from the Black Saturday massacre, we traveled to a point near the Gaza border to meet our son for a few minutes. There is a gas station and eateries complex there which serves as a refreshment point for soldiers coming out of Gaza for a short break. The Aroma café was serving soldiers for free coffee, cakes, sandwiches, pastries – and there were hundreds of them, boys and girls, young and not so young, simple soldiers and high-ranking officers. Those coming out were covered in dust and sand, those going in still clean and orderly. We met our son for a few minutes, a quick coffee, a strong hug. There’s a strange feeling when father and son embrace with a flak jacket between them, and the flak jacket is worn by the son. A massive barrage came from Gaza at about 20:00 again, targeting most of the country, this time coming from the southern part of the Gaza Strip, where civilians from the north have been advised by the IDF to escape to. Gaza City is surrounded by IDF units, Hamas tunnels are being attacked, Hamas is trying hard to attack back, the world is pressing for a ceasefire – humanitarian, they call it – which will allow Hamas to regroup and reorganize, and Hamas is using the southern part of the Strip as its new shooting ground, using Gazan civilians as human shields, trying to drag Israel to retaliate there, thus killing civilians and causing an international outcry which will only serve Hamas. Machiavelli could learn much from the Hamas. The Useful Idiots are writing and posting and publishing – they just want peace, they want one Palestine free from the river to the sea (have they ever looked at the map?), they are worried about the high number of civilian casualties on the Palestinian side, they post pictures of destroyed Gaza City asking if this is what a defensive war looks like. All I can answer is – we want ALL 241 hostages back NOW, ALL Hamas leaders, operatives, supporters dead NOW. This may facilitate a ceasefire. Numbers today: Military and security personnel casualties: 347 dead from the beginning of this war. Nov.6, 2023
A few days ago I wrote that we were too naïve to believe that we could survive in this region behaving according to Western manners and decorum, and that it may be time that we realized that in the Middle East one needs to adapt to the local customs. This morning the news reported that the family of one of the Israeli Bedouin murdered on Oct.7 has offered the prize of 1 million dollars to whoever helps them in reaching the murderers. An uncle interviewed said “blood revenge is an imperative in our culture”. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, till everyone left here is blind and toothless. In the meantime, in Europe, the US, Canada, S. America and elsewhere, Jews are being terrorized and attacked. Only the day before yesterday a Jewish woman in Lyon was stubbed and a Swastika curved in her door. The Jewish Agency is reporting a rise in applications for Aliyah – immigration – from Europe and the US. These happen as people, mostly young, have been photographed tearing down the pictures of the hostages posted in public spaces and university campuses abroad. This means what? That there are no hostages? That it is a hoax? Maybe that people shouldn’t or don’t care? Or maybe that they should die? Which ties to an interview given by Iman Khatib-Yassin, an Israeli Arab social worker and member of the United Arab List (Ra’am) party sitting in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, who said she is not sure a massacre happened, or that babies were beheaded, or women raped, or that whole communities have been destroyed. Even her party leader, Mansour Abbas, called for her resignation. All this goes on as Hezbollah attacks against Northern Israel continue, killing yesterday an Israeli whose truck was hit by an RPG. Communities evacuated from their settlements, be those around the Gaza Strip or along the northern borders, are settling down in Eilat, the Dead Sea and other locations they have been relocated to. “Temporarily” might be an optimistic way to describe their current situation, but in reality, they are planned to stay there for long, until the situation along our hot borders settles. Thus, local schools are absorbing the evacuees’ children in either newly formed mixed classes or newly formed evacuee classes. Our small community has absorbed the kibbutz Urim members, among others. Refugees in their own country. Nov.7, 2023
A month has passed from the Oct.7 massacre. The university held a minute’s silence for all its victims and all other victims. It was also the last day of the Shivah, the seven-day mourning period, for Roy Saragοsti. This is where he grew up – in the desert, with the animals he loved. The entrance to the family farmstead carries the insignia of his army unit.
What words of comfort can one say to his parents? To his siblings? Nov.8, 2023
A few words on the economic price of this war, civil society and volunteering. Since this war started, since the communities around the Gaza Strip were evacuated, since the communities around the Lebanese border were evacuated, since 350,000 reservists were called up, since foreign workers left the country, businesses have been going downwards. All the more so agriculture. Greenhouses and fields have been left with produce rotting on the trees, bushes and the ground; cows, sheep and goats need to be fed and milked; chicken and turkeys need to be fed and eggs be collected. One of the most vocal and active anti-government movements that demonstrated continuously for over 40 weeks against this government and its policies is named Brothers in Arms. Since this war started, they have collected donations, bought abroad and flew to Israel tactical equipment dearly needed by the vast number of reservists. Alongside that, Brothers in Arms spawned a vast organization of volunteers named Brothers in Farms. Thousands of people too young or too old to fight are working voluntarily daily in farms all over the communities that need working hands to save their produce, keep their cowsheds and chicken coops going, and make sure the market gets the dearly needed agricultural products. Brothers in Farms are not alone. Negev Bedouin communities have joined in. So have many other bodies, including the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, whose faculty put in a day’s work in cherry tomato greenhouses on the border. No, this is not enough and won’t solve the problem. But this is another way the people of this country are pulling their efforts and capabilities together to cope with a contingency we did not want or anticipate yet prevail we shall. P.S. – Just in case you were wondering, yes, there are also Sisters in Arms and Sisters in Farms. Nov.9, 2023
I have been meaning to write this for some time now, yet didn’t find the peace of mind to do so. Nevertheless, as this war continues, as our casualties rise, as the numbers of Palestinian civilians killed rise (and I do not suggest we buy the Hamas numbers wholesale), as the anti-Israeli protests around the world become all the more toxic, as anti-Semitism – expressed both verbally and physically – bring to mind very dark days from the 1930s, I decided it is time to put some thoughts into writing. I will try to present briefly the picture as I see it. This dispute has never been about land, concessions, compromise. Naïve leftists like me wanted to believe an accommodation would be possible. However, Haj Amin el Husseini, leader of the Palestinians under British Mandate, incited violence against the Jews time and again. During WWII he sided up with Hitler and organized volunteer corps for the Waffen SS from within the Muslim communities of the Balkans (e.g., 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar - 1st Croatian), hoping the Nazis will win the war in N. Africa and take British Mandate Palestine, thus giving him the chance to get rid of the Jews. During the War of Independence in 1948 he called for the Jews to be driven to the sea and ordered Arabs (e.g., in Haifa) to leave till the war is over, when they would return and take all that the Jews left behind. Unfortunately for the Arabs, the war ended differently. The Jews, the Zionist movement, accepted each and every partition plan that was put on the table – from the vague and unclear Balfour declaration (1917) stating that “His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object,…” – which means nothing, but the Zionist movement rejoiced. So they did with each and every plan put forth, unfavorable and illogical as it might have been, all the way to the 1947 partition plan, endorsed by a majority vote at the UN, including the USSR. The Arabs refused. Each and every time an agreement was reached – Oslo Accords (1993), Wye Agreement (1995), Camp David Summit (2000), and all other meetings and plans that were later proposed by Ehud Barak and then Ehud Olmert which were far reaching, including East Jerusalem as capital of the Palestinian state, and Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories up to ~95% of all West Bank and Gaza Strip land including swapping of lands along the border to compensate for areas with large Jewish populations within the West Bank. None of these were accepted. Why? Because this has never been about land. It has always been about a refusal to accept Jewish presence here. If you look at the emblems of the Fatah/PLO you will realize it has been “from the river to the sea” all along – no Israel. If you look at the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) you will realize it is even more ambitious – no Israel or Jordan. The UN accepted the PLO position when it allowed Arafat to address the General Assembly with his gun hanging on his belt. It endorsed this position with the unfortunate and ill intending comment by Guterres “the Hamas attack did not happen in a vacuum”. The UN is fully complicit in what has been created in Gaza, by allowing UNRWA schools to produce anti-Semitic material and indoctrinate children with hatred and racism. It is fully complicit and responsible for what is happening now in Gaza for not stopping the use of schools, clinics and hospitals as rockets and ammunition caches and missile launching grounds. This has been documented time and again by independent reporters in Gaza, including such that have said way up front that they were used as human shields when Hamas and the Jihad launched rockets against Israel from the grounds of hotels known to host international journalists.
The UN and the aid donating countries have been fully complicit for allowing their money to be used not for electricity, sewage, water and roads infrastructures, not for housing, not for health, not for welfare, but for the underground installations of Hamas and Jihad, and their massive armaments project. Have you wondered how come Gaza is running out of water, food, medicines, but has launched over 8,000 rockets and can still launch more every day and every night? Can you follow the money? Strangely enough, I have been completely unsuccessful in finding a single registry of foreign aid given to the Palestinian people from 1948 to date. On the other hand, Suha Arafat, widow of Yasser Arafat, seems to be living on a very high standard in Paris and elsewhere, despite the fact she was said to have given up some of her “private” money to the Palestinian Authority. Likewise, the Hamas leaders are living very comfortable lives in Qatar, Turkey, Iran and elsewhere, using money donated by the world to the Palestinian people – who live in the sewers. Israel has no use for and does not want the Gaza Strip (the Egyptians do not want it either…). The Gaza Strip was unilaterally left by Israel in 2005. Ariel Sharon sent the Israeli Army to pull out thousands of Israeli settlers, who left behind houses and greenhouses and infrastructures and packing plants and what-not. Everything was torn down by the Gazans and looted, instead of trying to operate it to their benefit. We did not get a peaceful neighbor; we rather got a hornet nest full of homicidal criminals whose one and only aim is to kill Jews. The Oct.7, 2023, events highlighted this as clearly as possible. Two words about the ability to discuss and compromise. Islam has never undergone a Reformation, Renaissance, French Revolution. It has never produced a Magna Carta or Social Contract. In its extreme form it exalts and glorifies martyrdom and death, oppresses women and minorities, and has produced an inglorious history of homicidal campaigns. There is no Arab brotherhood – this is a fiction. It was only used as a tool to drive the Jews to the sea. If it indeed existed, a solution would have been found to accommodate the 700,000 Palestinian refugees of 1948. However, those still live in refugee camps in Gaza (under Egyptian occupation between 1948-1967), the West Bank (under Jordanian occupation between 1948-1967), in Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere. During the time Palestinians were becoming refugees in Arab countries, Israel absorbed Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim countries, about 1,500,000 of them – more than twice as many as the Palestinian refugees. They were housed and fed and taught Hebrew and despite all the mistakes Israel made in their absorption and integration in Israeli society, today are an integral part of this country, its academic, legal, and health institutions, its political life, its culture and society. Incidentally, Palestinians never integrated in the Muslim countries they were grudgingly accepted by. The Black September of 1970 was actually a full-scale war between the PLO and the Jordanian army on Jordanian soil. It ended with the PLO being ousted to Lebanon. That’s when Israel's trouble with Lebanon started. What happened on Oct.7, 2023, has indeed changed everything, and nothing and nobody will ever be the same. My one-cent advice to whoever cares about the Palestinians of Gaza: return all hostages now, and disarm and hand over all Hamas leaders and operatives to be tried for the blackest event in the 21st century. Humanitarian aid – over 100 trucks a day – are entering Gaza from Egypt daily. This is the very same part of the Gaza Strip that Israel advised Gazans to go to so they will be safer, yet in the last two days rockets have been fired from there, too. As for what happens outside this country now, it is a disgrace to the human race and Western culture. The countries that experienced the massacre of their Jewish communities in WWII are now justifying anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred. The West is not even aware of the Jihadist ideology that their Muslim communities have been indoctrinated with. Some of my colleagues and acquaintances want the “academic papers”, but the social media are playing the tune, and they are rabidly anti-West and anti-Semitic. What makes a young American or European, even if they are Muslim or of Arab descent, tear the posted pictures of the kidnapped Israelis? My generation’s biggest mistake was to allow the poor education of the next generation. This has brought to the rise of lack of literacy, knowledge of history and geography, the ability to question and analyze critically mass media, as well as a blind following of social media whose sources are questionable, while their environment and atmosphere are toxic, poisonous. Once again I turn to Douglas Murray (below - click the picture to watch on youtube) for a clear presentation of the facts and issues at hand. What else is there to be said 85 years after Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass?
Nothing learned, everything forgotten. Nov.12, 2023
Already in the sixth week of this war, day 37. No news on the hostages yet, no official announcement on any negotiations. Where is the Red Cross? Isn’t it only reasonable to expect them to act at least in finding out how the hostages are? Are they alive? Are they in reasonable condition? Are they being mistreated? How come it is Qatar, the country that funded Hamas for years, that is running the “negotiations”? The IDF is advancing carefully – to avoid losses, to avoid hitting Palestinian civilians or hospitals, despite hospitals being fully dug underneath, used by Hamas and Jihad for their purposes. The IDF has created a secure passage to the southern part of the Gaza Strip and more than 200,000 Gazans have moved south in the last three days. How many of those are Hamas terrorists and leaders? Rumors have it that the high echelon has escaped south leaving the lower ranks to fight and die. The secure corridor is being protected by IDF tanks to prevent Hamas from retaliating against Gazan civilians, retaliations aimed at preventing civilians – the humans shields – from fleeing. Seeing the pictures of civilians of all ages walking with raised arms and flying white flags brings to mind the 1948 Nakba pictures. So they will be remembered. Let there be no mistake – sad as these are from the human point of view, it is the Hamas that has brought this disaster on the Palestinians, and it is the Palestinians that have brough Hamas to power and support it all along. First filmed reports come from within Gaza. Weapons and explosives storages next to classrooms, rocket launchers in schools, mosques, hospitals. Schoolbooks exalting the killing of Jews and martyrdom. And yes, all these have been funded by and administered by UNRWA, thanks to the international aid and the Useful Idiots. Israel is dealing with a rising pressure on all fronts. Only the other day – was it Friday? days do seem to get mixed up – a drone fell on a primary school in Eilat, albeit with no casualties. Two rockets were shot from Syria which fell in open areas on the Golan heights. In Gaza we are having casualties. Five more young men in their 30s and 40s – reservists - were killed by a booby-trapped device when they discovered yet another shaft to one of the terrorist underground tunnels, outside a mosque. This brings our army casualties to 361 from the beginning of this war. This number does not include the police, security or other personnel, e.g., firefighters. Social media have become as noxious, and toxic as can be. Facebook keeps blocking postings of this blog because it “violates community standards”, but I receive almost on a daily base posts such at the one below, posted on the site of the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE - ΔΣΕ), a site affiliated with the Greek communist party. Posts of mobs attacking students with Israeli flags on campuses seem to be in line with Facebook and Twitter standards, as probably are the clips of people tearing down pictures of the hostages while passersby seem at ease with this. Time is running short. Israel will not be given the time it needs to find the hostages and clean the hornets’ nests in Gaza. This includes rising international pressure, including organizations such as the UN, which considers it reasonable to have Iran, Syrian, N. Korea, Yemen, Libya on human rights and the security council.
Nov.12, 2023, 14:00
War routine, they call it – six workers of the electric corporation were severely wounded by a Hezbollah rocket propelled grenade (RPG) shot at them near the Lebanese border while they were repairing damage done to the electricity infrastructure in a previous attack. In the meantime, Israel's President revealed a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf translated in Arabic, found in one of the Hamas strongholds in Gaza, full of underlined passages and annotations in the margins. This, too, is what Hamas murderers are indoctrinated with. The spirit of the Great Mufti Haj Amin el Husseini is alive and well. Incidentally, I wonder how that works with the above picture I attached earlier today, which a Greek member of the DSE group keeps posting time after time. Nov.13, 2023, Day 38 of this war
A rather strange and loaded evening. One ZOOM with over 90 participants from the academia, but not only, discussing the growing numbers of citizens applying for gun licenses following the massacre of the Black Saturday of Oct.7, alongside another live Facebook meeting of volunteers in Explain Israel, a civil society group that started from nothing the day the war started. All this is happening as a huge rocket barrage from Gaza is released all over the country, and as the pictures and names of our casualties in Gaza and the Lebanese border are flying on the TV screen. Nov.15, 2023
News on the hostages: 12-year-old Liat Hetzroni from Be’eri, originally thought to be among the hostages, was defined yesterday as killed. Corporal Noa Marchano, 19 years old, seen in a Hamas propaganda clip filmed four days after she was taken hostage, is now recognized by the military as a “fallen soldier held captive by a terror group”. Vivian Silver, a 74-year-old peace advocate from kibbutz Be’eri, co-founder of peace and coexistence promoting organizations, originally thought to have been taken hostage into Gaza, is now confirmed killed. Remains of bodies are still identified by forensics teams backed up by archaeologists of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Since the Black Saturday of Oct.7 massacre included butchering, burning, mutilating, identifying remains has become a complicated mission. I wonder where all those super vocal feminist groups are that have raised hell and brought down men of fame and power because of sexual harassment or rape. Where are they now that women have been murdered and raped and taken hostage? How come their voice hasn’t been heard so far? And where are all those children’s rights groups? How come they are not heard now that adolescents and children and toddlers and babies are kept in captivity for 40 days and nobody knows anything about them? Where is the Red Cross? The WHO? The UN? UNICEF?
Human rights can be very tricky and selective now, can’t they? In the last two days, Nov.13-14, four more IDF soldiers in their 20s fell in action. The IDF has reached the notorious Shifa hospital in the center of Gaza under which the Hamas headquarters are located. Hospital administration and personnel have been advised by the IDF to evacuate the building, yet – as a Palestinian doctor says on a Facebook clip widely shared in recent days – Hamas has been preventing them to leave. Despite being engaged by Hamas terrorists around the hospital, soldiers left yesterday at a designated point fuel, baby food and incubators for the hospital personnel to collect, yet to this morning nothing has been taken them in. Last night a ballistic missile from Yemen, aimed at Eilat, was intercepted over the Red Sea, before entering Israeli territory. In the north the few people still in the agricultural communities cannot attend to their fields, chicken coops, orchards, greenhouses, as such areas are on the Lebanese border thus prone to Hezbollah attacks, and the IDF is preventing civilian movement there. Yesterday we had a brief break with our son who got a short leave. It was enough for a hug, coffee, and passing on to his car the lasagna and cheesecake my wife prepared for him and his unit the night before. Speaking of my wife, the day before yesterday she volunteered in tomato greenhouses in a small community on the Egyptian border. Respect! I have been telling my son to make sure they dig drainage channels around their tents and get their equipment on high ground. I had been hoping this whole mess be cleared out before the rains started, but I must have been overoptimistic. So far, we have had summer temperatures and no rain. Now the winter seems to be kicking in and the rain starts and fighting in the mud is a completely different story. Among the heroic stories that keep surfacing, that of Aner Shapira is one that must be told and remembered. A Nahal Brigade 22-year-old soldier on leave, Aner joined the unfortunate music festival on Oct.7. When the rocket barrage started, he found himself in a shelter with many other young men and women from the festival. But soon the Hamas terrorists were surrounding the shelter and shooting in it. They eventually decided not to take chances and threw a grenade in the shelter that was packed with people who sought refuge in it. Aner grabbed the grenade and threw it back out where it exploded. He did the same when a second grenade was thrown in, and a third and a fourth… He managed to grab seven grenades and throw them back out thus saving many lives of those with him in the shelter. Unfortunately, the eighth grenade killed him. The accidental operation of a phone camera caught him in action, as he is standing on guard at the entrance to the shelter and throws the grenades back out.
I try not to sound pompous, but how else can I say that this unfortunate, cursed war has brought forth so many heroes? And how deeply sad should we be that all those heroes won’t live to become spouses and parents, that they won’t live the full lives they so much deserved? Nov.16, 2023
The above story of Aner Shapira brings to mind another story of unexpected heroism from the first day of combat, Oct.7. The armored personnel carrier (APC) of Corporal Matan Abergil and his comrades from Golani’s 13th battalion was surrounded by Hamas terrorists who shot and prevented them from exiting. Then a grenade was thrown in the APC. Matan jumped on the grenade and saved six of his comrades defending Kibbutz Nir Am. His last words: “I tried to protect the nation of Israel.” Matan was 19 years old. The IDF released this morning the names of two officers that fell in battle in Gaza yesterday.
Nov.19, 2023
A poll run in recent days by Birzeit University (near Ramallah, W. Bank) reveals a wide support among Palestinians for terror groups. Over 80% support the various terrorist factions. What is much more worrying is the fact that a majority of surveyed Palestinians in the West Bank support the October 7 massacre carried out by Hamas. The survey showed that 68 percent in the West Bank strongly supported the massacres and kidnapping, while another 16 percent supported to some extent. 668 Palestinians were surveyed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, during the fourth week of the ongoing Gaza War. The team conducted the survey through tablet-assisted, face-to-face interviews, according to its press release. "The poll’s sample includes all socioeconomic groups, ensuring equal representation of adult men and women, and is proportionately distributed across the West Bank and Gaza." Those are the people we have been hoping to make peace with. When you say or write that you are sorry about innocent people dying on both sides, do remember that those are the people who elected Hamas and have been supporting it, that many of them ran after the Hamas terrorists on Oct.7 and were the plundering mob that came to kill, rape, steal, kidnap, that those are the people that have taught their children - or allowed others to teach them – in kindergarten and school and summer camp that killing Jews is a sacred task. When you say or write that you are sorry about innocent people dying on both sides, do remember that most of those massacred, raped, kidnapped, butchered on Oct.7 were peace seeking people, many of whom did their best to help Gazans – giving them jobs, driving them to hospitals in Israel, demonstrating for peaceful coexistence. When you say or write that you are sorry about innocent people dying on both sides, do remember that there is no symmetry – never has been. Three Israeli soldiers fell in action in the last day. Ben-Gurion University announced today the funeral details of Captain (reserves) Roey Biber, Mechanical Engineering Department student, killed in battle on Nov.18.
Nov.23, 2023
There has been talk about a deal with Hamas for the return of the hostages, of some of the hostages, only children and mothers, maybe only some of them. This has been a roller coaster for all, but especially for the families of the hostages. Yesterday we were finally informed on the news that the deal has been struck with the help of Qatar – the Al Jazeera owners on whose screens Jerusalem appears as “Occupied East Jerusalem”, the very same Qatar that has been paying Hamas millions of dollars per month, in cash. Vague details of the deal were released. There will be a ceasefire for four, five, maybe more days, during which Hamas will be releasing 20, maybe only 10 hostages a day, but no more than 50 overall, and Israel will be releasing security prisoners, underage and women. There was also talk about Israel agreeing to stop reconnaissance flights over Gaza for the duration of the ceasefire, which was supposed to start early this morning, with the release starting at 10:00. Who would be released was also not disclosed for the obvious reason it is Hamas that will decide at the last moment who to let go and who not, let alone the fact hostages are also held by the Islamic Jihad and other smaller gangs, as well as those held by one “hamula” or other, hamula meaning clan, and in this case meaning Palestinian mafia families. Yet this morning we woke up to no ceasefire, no deal, no hostages released. On that side we have mad genocidal criminals that cannot be counted on for any deal of any kind – which should be remembered when the day come that we will look for someone to sign an agreement with. On this side we have a government of incompetent irresponsible TikTok addicted idiots, that are so egocentric that cannot see the stupidity behind initiating a discussion on death penalty for terrorists – while the latter are still holding nearly 240 hostages – or announcing that the PM has advised the security services to take out all Hamas leadership wherever that may be – while the Hamas leadership is still holding nearly 240 hostages. Nov.25, 2023
Fifty days since the Black Saturday, Oct.7. Yesterday evening, after long delays, the first group of hostages was freed. It included 13 Israelis, mostly older women, only four children, as well as 10 Thai nationals and a Filipino. The process was long and tedious and included the Red Cross receiving the hostages from the Hamas in Gaza and passing them across the Rafah crossing to Egypt, from where the non-Israeli ones were met by their consular staff, whereas the Israelis were met by Israeli security, passed on to Israel where they had a preliminary medical checkup, met with psychologists and social workers, and then were transferred by military helicopters to hospitals in the center of Israel for further medical examinations and psychological follow up. They also met their families that had been informed in advance about the specific persons to be included in the first exchange wave. In return, Israel released 39 security prisoners, 24 women and 14 minors, a ratio of 1:3 Israeli to Palestinian, held in Israeli prisons for terrorist activities, including shooting, stabbing, an attempted major suicide bombing with a car full of cooking gas containers etc. Looking forward to tonight’s second group, hopefully to contain more children and teenagers. This is not the end – it is only a temporary break to allow for the release of some of the hostages. Nov.26, 2023
Yesterday we were already stuck on the radio and the TV from 16:00 waiting for the second group of hostages to be transferred from Hamas to Israel. Time went by, a late announcement was made that they were being transferred to the Red Cross, and then another announcement was made by Hamas that they, Hamas, hadn’t authorized the transfer, and that they had new conditions that needed to be met by Israel before the hostage transfer took place. Hamas, like Hamas, pulled the rope to maximum tension by demanding that in addition to what had already been agreed upon, Israel would have to agree to allowing entry of supplies to the northern part of the strip. Additional terrorist groups started raising issues regarding the original agreement mediated by Qatar, and Palestinian officials had new demands, e.g., freeing Palestinian security prisoners by “seniority” – first in jail, first out of jail. It is believed that both Qatar and Egypt played significant roles in solving last night’s near-collapse of the agreement and subsequently potentially of the ceasefire. Eventually, after a long and nerve wrecking delay, 13 Israelis (among them 8 children) and 4 foreign citizens were freed, again at the ration of 1 Israeli for 3 Palestinians. Israeli health authorities have announced that hostages released so far seem to be relatively reasonable health, though they are undernourished. In the meantime, the world still doesn’t get it. The first day’s exchange was delayed by Belgian and Spanish PMs having to make long speeches mainly chastising Israel. This one-sided position is obvious and international. Very few governments have taken the Israeli side despite popular positions in their countries. Yet most have chosen the easy way of siding with the “underdog” which, they refuse to understand, is not the Palestinian people but Hamas, whose genocidal actions are only being backed and boosted by such dogmatic and blind actions. Hamas has always been a criminal organization and will continue to try to squeeze more out of the ceasefire by playing with the lives of hostages, and this ceasefire may well cost Israel more casualties at the end of it. Dec.1, 2023 Several days of ceasefire went by, during which some 70 Israeli hostage mothers and children and grandmothers were released at a ratio of one Israeli for 3 Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in Israel. Alongside these, some of the foreign citizens kidnapped – Thai and Filipino – were also released. In the last two days, three Israeli hostages also holding Russian citizenship were released as a special gesture of Hamas goodwill towards Putin, though the day after, Hamas tried to renegotiate their release as part of the Israeli quota. Speaking of Putin, did anyone notice nobody talks in the past two months about the ongoing war in the Ukraine and the bloody attacks in recent days? Israel has been accepting daily extensions of the ceasefire hoping to free more hostages, considering the condition in which most of them returned – malnourished, the older ones in bad health condition due to lack of medical treatment for chronic conditions (where is the Red Cross?). Yet the Hamas broke the last ceasefire extension by not providing a list of the hostages to be freed today, and starting to shoot rockets long before the 07:00 deadline, when the IDF started retaliating. As of this morning we’re back at war, with heavy rocket barrages all over the country during the whole day and until late at night as these lines are being written. In a terrorist attack in Jerusalem yesterday morning two East Jerusalem Palestinians shot at people at a hitch hike point at the exit from the city and killed three. An armed citizen killed them both but was then shot mistakenly by soldiers that rushed to the site. The numbers so far: 136 hostages, including 17 women and children, still in captivity in Gaza. 6 hostages confirmed murdered in Gaza. 1 body of a murdered hostage retrieved by security forces from the vicinity of the Shifa hospital. IDF spokesperson denied Israeli involvement in the attack on munitions stores in Yemen. Though I have tried to return back to regular work, in recent days and weeks I have been attending ZOOM after ZOOM on the proliferation of guns among citizens; rape as a war tool and the silence of international women’s organizations refusing to condemn the rape of Israeli women and girls during the Black Saturday, and probably subsequent abuse of female hostages; and, not least, workshops dealing with the challenges we shall be facing when universities will eventually open the new semester and classes will include survivors of the Oct.7 massacre, reservists who have been drafted and are actively involved in the fighting, and Arab students, many of whom have been voicing concerns and fears, many of the new ones being exposed to the Jewish part of Israel for the first time, having lived so far mostly in their villages and within their culture. All these pose significant challenges in running regular classes. To focus that I will say that some 30% of my department’s students are in active reserve duty, and some 50% of my classes are Arab students. My department faculty held a one-day workshop on this coordinated by a Jewish educator and a Muslim clinical psychologist, both from the bi-national community of Newe Shalon (Peace Oasis). One of the ZOOM seminars focused on Game Theory. One of the conclusions was that it is irrational to act rationally when dealing with an irrational person, whereas there’s rationality in being irrational when dealing with an irrational person. Though the seminar was not focused on this war, the above conclusion seems to be definitely relevant. And, yes, we’ve been doing more volunteering work in agriculture. Dec.9, 2023
64 days from the Black Saturday of Oct.7. Third Hanukkah evening. This Hanukkah, celebration of light, Israelis and Jews light candles commemorating the commemorating the 2nd century BCE Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire which brought to the recovery of Jerusalem and subsequent rededication of the Second Temple. Yet this year we light candles thinking of our hostages still in captivity in Gaza. More than half of our hostages – 138 - are still there, in Gaza, and concerns are rising as to their health and wellbeing. Freed hostages have described undergoing violent interrogations and hunger, being given drugs to keep them sedated and quiet, total lack of medical attention. Information given by them and by captured Hamas terrorists confirms the death and/or assassination of several hostages. The war goes on, with new casualties among our soldiers – over 420 since Oct.7 - including the youngest son of ex-Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, serving in the special commando brigade. We’re losing many of our best and bravest. Eizenkot, currently a member of the war cabinet, was quoted as having said that he makes decisions on this war as if his granddaughter was a hostage in Gaza, and as if his son was not fighting in Gaza. Yesterday’s casualties were just announced. Among them was Eizenkot’s nephew. Young Israelis are being drafted, and among the new draftees are Haredi men, religious women who had been exempted from military service yet have decided to defer and join the army, and many women who have asked to join combat units. The US Congress held a hearing at which the presidents of MIT, Harvard and Penn State University were asked why they did nothing to curb on their campuses rising anti-Semitism and calls for the annihilation of Israel, and embarrassingly replied that genocide depends on the context, that it is the act itself that has to be condemned, not just voicing the intent. When murder and rape and kidnapping are justified as “not having happened in a vacuum”, genocide of course “depends on the context”. It may be time that the Jews started using and applying BDS, direct their donations to academic institutions that maintain a basic decency and intellectual integrity, as opposed to those colleges and universities that sanctify relativism and post-modern theories, and condone anti-Semitism and calls for the annihilation of Israel. Dec.15, 2023
70 days since the Black Saturday of Oct.7, 70 days of war. We are paying a heavy price, only this week having lost nearly 15 soldiers and officers, including a Colonel and a Lieutenant Colonel, the greatest number of casualties sustained in the Sajaia combats on Dec.12. Alongside this, Kibbutz Sede Boqer and the Ramat Negev Regional Council are holding a long weekend music festival of Sounds in the Desert, an event that has been organized and held for 26 years now, bringing together some of the most diametrically opposed musicians, groups, music styles. A festival during a bloody war, you may ask, and the answer will be – changing our lives will be their victory. One of last night’s concerts hosted Ivri Lider, a young Israeli musician and singer whose Wiki page defines as a pop singer, though I’d say he’s more of a rocker. On the stage were himself, his pianist and his guitarist, and a large portrait of smiling Aviv Bar’am. Aviv was the production tech of Ivri Lider, a kibbutz Kfar Aza member, and member of its rapid response security team that tried to stop the Hamas invasion on Oct.7. Aviv was killed fighting, one of at least 7 rapid response security team members, while kibbutz Kfar Aza suffered some 70 slayings and another 20 kidnappings. Ivri Lider described Aviv as exceptionally professional – and terribly shy. Just before the beginning of the concert Aviv’s father, ex-member of kibbutz Sede Boqer talked briefly about Aviv. And then Ivri Lider started his performance, apologizing and saying this is the worst concert he has ever had under the circumstances, yet the first “normal” concert he’s had since Oct.7, all other performances done for soldiers on the front. And he sang, like I have never heard him sing before, and he cried, and the last song he sang was the very same he sang at Aviv’s wedding, and at Aviv’s funeral, and as he sang it he walked through the audience and climbed over the seats, and reached Aviv’s parents whom he hugged and sat with them as he was singing. And I don’t think there was anyone in that hall whose eyes were dry. Aviv left behind wife and two children, parents and siblings, friends and many people who got to know him for what he was now that he is not anymore. The war is going on, more lives will be lost, and the chances of freeing living hostages are being questioned, yet on we must go to the end, and regain our lives, though none of us and nothing will be the same again. Jan.04, 2024
For the past three weeks – nearly – I refrained from updating this blog. It starting becoming too heavy psychologically counting our casualties daily, stating again the number of hostages still in captivity. Just so that we keep up with those, here are the more recent numbers: Hostages: 133 Soldiers killed in action: 509 Our academic year was finally launched on Sunday Dec.31 with a lot of uncertainty and vagueness as to what to expect, how many of our students still in reserve duty would be released, what potential tensions we might encounter in class, in short – teaching in times of war. I saw a post on Jan.1 that said something like “they keep telling me it’s the 1st of January, but for me it’s the 86th of October” and indeed many of us are counting our new lives from Oct.7. Concerts and plays and movies and restaurants and cafés are shyly trying to kickstart again as our boys and girls are spilling their blood in Gaza or stay in full alert along the Lebanese and Syrian borders where the war is kept on low-to-medium fire. We have to get this country back on its feet otherwise “they” win, but how can we go back to “normal” when tens and hundreds of thousands are still in combat or displaced from their homes and communities? The other day a TV reporter talked to 17–18-year-old youngsters from one of the communities that were so hardly hit and are now IDPs in hotels and apartment blocks around the country. What about matriculation exams and graduation, he asked them. A girl looked him sadly and replied, “we already graduated on Oct.7.” May 2024 be not as dark as the last part of 2023. And this isn’t much to ask for. P.S. – On Jan.2 Salah al-Aruri, deputy chairman of the political bureau of Hamas, was taken out in the Dahia neighborhood of Beirut. The targeted killing was done through a precision drone attack, said to have been conducted by Israeli. Five other operatives of Hamas and probably Jihad were also killed in the attack, which occurred one day before Hezbollah commemorated the anniversary of another targeted killing, that of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani. The account is still open and will stay so as long as those responsible for the Oct.7 massacre are still alive. Jan.18, 2023
Last Sunday, Jan.14, was the 100th day of this war, 100 days after the Black Saturday massacre, 100 days of captivity of 136 of the hostages still in the hands of Hamas, still in the tunnels of Gaza. The day was marked with a general 100-minutes shutdown of much of the governmental and public sectors, including universities, as well as much of the private sector. As a reminder of the graveness of the situation, a mother and son were killed in the northern Israel community of Kfar Yuval by a Hezbollah shot RPG. They were killed in their home as they were having lunch. They were buried at night, in complete darkness, hastily and under the protection of IDF units to ensure no more casualties would be inflicted by the Hezbollah a few hundred meters across the border. My classes have gone hybrid with many of my students still in uniform, in combat, occasionally joining classes on the web so they feel part of the semester. It is an unusual situation, to say the least. One of my students emailed me asking for the link to the upcoming class, apologizing that she won’t be able to attend, but her little boy is unwell, and her husband is in the army. A colleague emailed me saying she couldn’t reply earlier to a message I sent because her life is upside down with her son fighting in Gaza and her husband having been called up in the reserves. The BGU campus is across the road from the Soroka Medical Center. In the past, when we heard a helicopter approaching, we assumed people injured in a traffic accident were flown to the hospital helipad. However, over the past 104 days, any helicopter passing over us on the way to the helipad implies more war casualties. It is so obvious that it shows on the faces of my students in class. Jan.21, 2023
If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it a thousand times – Israel with its mighty army is brutally fighting Palestinians guerillas with practically no weapons. So, here’s what one of their weapons looks like. It’s part of a rocket I photographed last Friday in the garden on one of my sons. It may not look like much, but it can carry a head with up to 100 kg of explosives or more. Yes, it is a pipe transformed into part of rocket. It is part of the sewage and drainage infrastructure Gaza was supposed to install to ensure streets and houses are not flooded with sewage and mud every time there’s rain. Factories producing such and more sophisticated rockets and missiles were found by the IDF on ground and underground, with hundreds of rockets at different production stages. 107 days into this war Hamas is still shooting rockets at Israeli cities and communities. And believe me, you don’t need more than this to kill and wound and maim and ruin and cause destruction and pain and angst. That’s one of the reasons for which Israel is still fighting in Gaza. And our 136 hostages held in captivity since Oct.7. And the need to make sure this won’t go on and the communities destroyed on Oct.7 can be rebuilt and the people can go back to their homes.
Isaac A. Meir (Sakis)
I was born in Thessaloniki, Greece (1957), made Aliya (immigrated to Israel, 1975), studied at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and the Ben-Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev, where I have been researching and teaching since 1986. For the past 40-odd years I have been living with my family in a small research station in the Negev Desert. |