In these crazy times, when the news does a complete 180 degree turn every day, when there is much more that we do not know than what we do know, I would like to take a look back and a look forward.
For many years,
Israel faced a nuclear threat from Iran, and that fact had great political
meaning. Two American rabbis I am close to each expressed these fears to me,
separately, 30 years ago, during the Oslo period, in almost the same words.
Both viewed holding on to all of Judea and Samaria (my view) as endangering
Israel. Both rebuked me, more or less gently. One said, “If we provoke Iran by
holding on to Judea and Samaria, and they drop an atomic bomb on us, maybe
Kiryat Arba where you live will survive, but I have my doubts about the
millions of Jews in the Tel Aviv area.”
The two men who
thus addressed me were not hedonistic, bar-hopping atheists. They were both
learned men, committed to teaching as much Torah as possible to as many young
people as possible, and that was what they spent their lives doing, one in
America and one in Israel. They were both very good at what they did, and both
still are. I almost never respond quickly to oral arguments, and I just
listened when they spoke, especially as I revere both.
If we look back
today, based on their comments back then, we might question the judgment of
these two men. Yet judging the past based on what we see in the present is not
always fair. A great deal has changed here during the past 30 years. Israel is
stronger and smarter than it was. And its people are wiser.
Years after the
appeasement approach of both Oslo and the Gush Katif withdrawal, the older of
the two rabbis, a resident of Jerusalem 15 years my senior, approached me and
said, somewhat wistfully, “When I was a boy in Brooklyn, when you saw bullies
coming down the street, the first thing you did was to cross the street, and
that was my approach for a long time. Recently, I have learned that that does
not always work.”
G-d has been
teaching us for many years that, when it comes to holding on to our land, “crossing
the street” is often not best. If I must choose the man who has done most to
help G-d in spreading that message, my choice is Benjamin Netanyahu. He has
been subtly educating Israelis – and the Western world – for 30 years. But he
is cautious. It took gargantuan events to push him and all of Israel into
action.
Iran Schemes
When the Abraham
Accords were signed in 2020, those agreements showed the world that “peace in
exchange for peace” is just as good an equation as “territories for peace”; in
fact, it is better. By establishing this new paradigm, the Abraham Accords
imperiled the “two-state solution.” And this led the ayatollahs of Iran, in
their despair, to make one last effort to destroy Israel.
But the Iranians
today are not worth much as soldiers, unlike their might against the
Babylonians 2,500 years ago. What they have is money, oil wealth. For many
years, they had funded proxies to harm Israel: Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in
Lebanon, the Assad regime in Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen. But now, they
harnessed those proxies to make one final effort to attack and destroy the
State of Israel. The Iranians viewed themselves and their proxies as more
powerful than Israel, and this could very well be true in human terms. They
likewise reasoned that Israel was suffering from internal strife, from daily
demonstrations, that would render Israel weak and easier to conquer.
Miracles
Stage I of their
plan was supposed to involve Hezbollah in Lebanon, with its professional army,
attacking Israel from the north, while Hamas was supposed to attack Israel
simultaneously from the south. Had that occurred, not 1,200 Jews would have
been murdered, as happened on October 7, but 12,000 or more.
The first
miracle of the past 21 months
– and
there have been many – was thus that
Hamas and Hezbollah did not attack together. Hamas was too excited and
undisciplined to wait for the date chosen by Iran for this two-front attack to
occur, so Israel faced only a one-front attack, and within a number of days,
despite the horrific results of the attack, Israel had cleared all the
terrorists out of southern Israel and had begun a conventional campaign inside
Gaza to destroy the enemy. Had the surprise attack involved a much larger
Hezbollah army simultaneously attacking, it might have taken months, not days,
to remove foreign forces from our country.
So, thank G-d,
Iran’s initial attempt to destroy Israel was confounded. But the Iranians did
not give up. They then drafted all their proxies together, hoping for a
four-front war between Israel and the Arabs, a war of attrition that would lead
to Israel’s collapse. Lebanon’s Hezbollah began heavy bombing of Israel’s
north, ultimately resulting in 90,000 northern residents being forced out of
their homes.
More miracles:
Israel conquered Lebanon, caused the fall of Syria, and the Houthis’ bombs did
not cause damage. The Iranians could not predict that Israel, through brilliant
planning, intelligence information, and help from Above, would kill or
incapacitate the entire Hezbollah officer corps by way of booby-trapped pagers
and walkie talkies in September 2024. Neither could they predict the fall of
the Syrian Assad regime, which enabled Israel to conquer the entire Syrian
Golan Heights, and left them in virtual control of the entire country by December
2024. Thus Israel was left with a free hand to operate in both Lebanon and
Syria. So Israel proved capable of handling a four-front war.
Why Now?
Why, after 30 years of talk, did Netanyahu choose to attack Iran’s nuclear
program on June 13?
Two factors came
together to make it necessary for Israel to act when it did. 1) Intelligence
information proved that the Iranians were days away from making their own
atomic bomb. June 13 was chosen as the day for the attack. 2) But we also know
that the Israeli government was in the midst of a coalition crisis, with the
Left pushing for a no-confidence vote that would have turned Netanyahu’s
government into a caretaker government without genuine power until elections
could be held. Not only would this end this right-wing government’s chances of
enacting judicial reform but would also prevent it from annexing portions of
Judea and Samaria, something possible with the present American president.
June 12, one day before Israel’s attack on
Tehran, the opposition chose to hold a vote of no confidence. The Left wanted
to force the government out, to get rid of Netanyahu. And this time around,
unlike other times, the chareidi
parties had likewise been threatening to vote against the government. This is
because the Israeli government, under coercion from the Supreme Court, seemed
to be going ahead with a Knesset bill that would force chareidim to go into the army or face legal and financial
consequences. No opposition party would push for a vote of no confidence unless
it thought it had a good chance of gaining 61 seats in favor. Otherwise, if
they lose the vote, they are forbidden to raise another vote of no confidence
for six months.
So Netanyahu
secretly told the chareidi parties,
which are part of the coalition, that he was planning a war the next day, a war
he had been planning for 30 years, and he asked them to vote with the coalition
against the no-confidence. But of course, Netanyahu did not share this secret
with the Labor party, which was sponsoring the vote. So, the final tally was 61
to 52, a win for the government, and a guarantee that the Opposition would not
be able to threaten bringing down the government during a war against Iran. The
government was thus guaranteed six months of quiet.
Like a Lion!
By no coincidence,
Netanyahu had chosen to invite the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, for a
state visit. Milei is an interesting man. He wants to become an Orthodox Jew,
but he presently cannot. It is against the law in Argentina to have a president
who is not Catholic. In his first visit to Israel as president, he read some of
the Torah out loud in Hebrew. The night before the war began, Milei’s last
night in the country, Netanyahu invited Milei to pray with him at the Kotel,
and of course, Milei was happy to. All this can be seen on the internet. You
can see Netanyahu writing a note and slipping it into a crack in the Western
Wall. Written on that note, in Hebrew, are the words: “This is a nation that
rises like the king of beasts and lifts itself like a lion – Binyamin
Netanyahu.” And of course, that verse is the name that Netanyahu chose for the
new war against Iran. Only no one on the outside knew that at the time. May
Israel rise up like a lion and defeat its enemies!
Well, the attack
took place, and it was an enormous success. Iran’s nuclear program was pushed
back at least a few years. The country’s defense systems have been destroyed,
so Israel can watch and police and destroy further installations if they are
rebuilt. And there is also the possibility that Iran’s population will find the
initiative to hold a revolution and push out the ayatollahs in favor of some
other acceptable candidate. There is much we don’t know, but Hashem has
consistently been with us throughout the past 21 months, and we pray that we
will continue to enjoy His blessing.
