So where shall I begin? The daily revelations and insidious GoPro videos that catch us unaware with their bestial lack of human decency? The daily sickening propaganda posts by Goebbels of Hamas? The additional IDF soldier/heroes who have lost their lives defending ours? The daily ultimatums from our “friends” in Washington demanding we bring in oil/water/etc. etc. to help our enemies or risk losing American support? And worst of all, the fears for our loved ones going down into those booby trapped tunnels?

Let me start with my most hateful things (as opposed to the famous Sound of Music song). This is my top most hateful thing: right after October 7, when Jews all over the world were mourning and in shock for their butchered and kidnapped children and family members, I saw a Palestinian rally, I think it was in NYC. The group, with their Hamas flags and keffiyehs, faced a pro-Israel group on the other side of a barrier. And this is what I saw: a bearded, keffiyeh-wearing young man with a big smile, rubbing his fists into his eyes in mockery of our tears for what had been done to us.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget that image. It’s hard to imagine such a thing happening after 9/11 or Bataclan, or the Ariana Grande concert bombing in Manchester in 2017. Imagine someone doing that facing New Yorkers, or the French, or British. But to do it to Jews is somehow acceptable, because we, by virtue of the fact that God gave us the land of Israel, have it coming.

It reminds me of the stories my mother-in-law told of her neighbors in Czechoslovakia when the Jews were rounded up and sent to the gas chambers. She was a teenager, and she remembered so clearly how they stood in the streets pointing and laughing, some throwing stones because gassing the Jews wasn’t punishment enough for them.

Today I saw something equally sickening. The Ha’aretz newspaper published an article quoting sources in Israeli intelligence that said that Hamas hadn’t known about the Nova Concert before they attacked. I don’t have a problem with that. I guess they thought when they saw all those beautiful young people: Wow, what luck, we can just mow them down! Which they proceeded to do mercilessly for no reason other than bottomless hatred, the same reason that Nazis took schools full of Jewish children straight to the gas chambers and killing fields.

But what is Hamas doing with this information? According to the website Abu Ali which shares information from the Arabic press, Hamas is using this widely to show that they weren’t targeting civilians!! They say: “See, you had the story all wrong! These young people, they actually killed themselves! We had nothing to do with it.”

The fact that this makes absolutely no sense, that it is a clear and blatant lie, and is too ridiculous to even bother denying doesn’t seem to bother Hamas, who understands perfectly well the level of intelligence of the average Hamas supporter, who will have no problem buying into a narrative of happy young concert goers suddenly committing mass suicide. Maybe it’s all those consanguineous marriages.

Equal in horror for me today, was a video explaining what my grandson’s unit does underground in those dark tunnels. Listen, I know it has to be done. We need to destroy Hamas completely, not because we need to prove our strength, or want revenge, but because we can’t ever have them running across the border to commit such acts again on our soil. They have to die. So we are stuck until it’s done.

Please, God help us!

And I’d like to end with this: To those people who took offense at my post yesterday about the conversation in Israel about Sabbath observance and the Hamas attack, I’d like to make it crystal clear that in no way, shape, or form was I – God forbid – suggesting that somehow people’s religious beliefs or observance or lack of them made them more or less worthy of being saved. In my own view, no one in Israel, indeed, in the world, deserved what Hamas terrorists did on October 7, for any reason whatsoever. And not a single victim could have done anything to prevent what happened to them at the hands of Hamas beasts who indiscriminately killed Israelis, secular and religious, foreigners, men, women, children, babies.

People want to believe in miracles. They want to believe that if they keep the Torah they will be divinely protected. They cling to such stories like life rafts. Yet so many fine, religious people have already lost their lives in this horror, as did whole yeshivot and all their rabbis in the Shoa. That doesn’t stop people from wanting to feel they have control, and are closer to God and His mercies if they keep His Torah.

I think it’s enough to say that all army units consist of secular and religious soldiers, all are holy, willing to give their lives for each other and for our nation. May God bless our holy soldiers and our holy people, whatever they believe and practice.

We are an amazing, and wonderful nation which exists in only one place in the world, the Land of Israel.

We are truly worthy of being God’s chosen.

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