Ever since the decision to retreat from Gaza, I have felt that events were rushing by at such a furious pace it was impossible to comprehend them. The horror of forcible evacuations of Jews by Jews, the bulldozing of hundreds of homes, the wholesale destruction of businesses and schools and community centers. The busloads of homeless arriving in Jerusalem with only the clothes on their backs, forced into hotel rooms with no refrigerators to hold bottles and baby food. The frightening and strange parallels of human suffering and homelessness across the seas by an act of God.

The idea that synagogues would be blown up, the decision to leave them followed by the horror of Hamas-led destruction and wholesale burning of holy places. The falling of two Kassam rockets within Israel (Sderot and Yad Mordechai) with no Israeli response, despite our Defense Minister’s toothless threat of “zero tolerance” for any more Kassams. The knowledge that more Kassams will fall, and our government will do nothing until it is too late, until small Jewish children lie dead in the streets of Israel, as we experienced during the Intifada.

The Philadelphi corridor, that strip of land between Gaza and Egypt where so many of our young soldiers died keeping terrorists from smuggling in more weapons and bombs, suddenly turned over to Egyptians – (even though the weapons-smuggling tunnels clearly exited into Egyptian army camps.) The complete failure of the Egyptians to exert control of the border, allowing Palestinian hordes from Gaza to overrun them….

The symbolism of 9/11 being the day that Israel let the terror groups take over Gaza. How can I understand how America- who spoke so bravely of fighting terror, of finding in anyone who supported terror an enemy of the United States– is now responsible for Israel’s complete capitulation to terror?

In my mind’s eye, I see what should have happened: The American support to destroy Hamas. The destruction of terrorist camps all over Gaza. The denunciation of the Palestinian Authority for being terror-supporters. The support for the settlers in Gaza and the West Bank. Instead, this incomprehensible policy of appeasement and capitulation. The British desire to cancel Holocaust Memorial day to appease the Muslims.

History will show that the day Israel was forced by the United States and Europe and her own misguided stupidity and blindness to give aid and succor to terrorism, to leave her people vulnerable to terrorism, was the day the peace of the world was destroyed.

I don’t know how this is going to happen, but just as the feeding of Ethiopia and Poland and Czechoslovakia to Hitler, bite by bite, only whet his appetite and increased his hubris, so the burning of Jewish synagogues by the Hamas in Gaza, the unprovoked rocket attacks that went unanswered by a brave and competent army, incomprehensibly emasculated by weak and confused politicians, will prove a turning point that all mankind will have reason to mourn.

I mourn now.