(Galilee, Israel) — Shalom from Israel! This Sunday night will begin Yom HaShoah, and the remembrance will run through Monday afternoon. Translated literally as “Day of the Catastrophe”, this is Israel’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the 1930s and 1940s, more than six million Jews lost their lives under the Nazi regime. Of those victims, greater than 1.5 million were children.
At 10:00 on Monday morning, sirens will sound throughout the nation of Israel. At that moment, all people will stop what they are doing and stand in silence for two minutes to honor and remember those who were slaughtered during that horrific time. Places of business will halt their activities. Cars will pull over and their passengers will get out. School classes will pause their instruction. As a nation and as a people, we are determined that we will never forget what took place during those dark times.
Why is it so important to intentionally remember tragedy? To answer that, all you need to do is look at what is currently happening in national and international government buildings and on university campuses around the world. On October 7, a slaughter took place that was so vile, so vicious, so demonic that it seemed the world had to pause to catch its breath. Torture, systematic rape, kidnapping, murder, and mutilation were perpetrated by gleeful terrorists against an unsuspecting and wholly innocent civilian population. Israel was forever changed, and a huge majority of nations around the world commiserated with us. But that was then, and this is now.
Before we get to what is different today, let’s talk about what led to this change of attitude. It’s really very simple – Israel fought back, and it did so with a vengeance. That’s not what is supposed to happen. The world likes it much better when its Jews are victims. During the Holocaust, apart from some amazing acts of bravery, like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, most all of the Jews went quietly to their deaths. During the pogroms in Russia, the Jews fled from the violence. Over the centuries, when Jews were forced to leave their homes and their countries, they went. What else could they do? They were part of a diaspora. They were strangers in a strange land.
But now the Jews have a home, and that home has allowed us to become strong. No longer are we forced to take the shots. When the chanters cry out, “From the River to the Sea”, we respond, “Yeah, just try to take our land.” And when the terrorists invade, Israel will make sure that they can never, ever do it again. How do we do that? We kill all of Hamas’s leadership, and, if there are any of their rank-and-file members that survive the onslaught, we will bring them to justice. It’s harsh, it’s violent, and it’s bloody. But it is what it will take for Israel to once again be safe within its own borders.
The International Pushback
The United Nations hates anything it can’t control. For decades it’s been unsuccessfully trying to control Israel. Resolution after resolution condemning Israel and demanding the government change its ways have all fallen on deaf ears. This is especially frustrating for them, because Israel is filled with those same Jews that for so many centuries were under the thumb of many of the United Nations’ nations.
After October 7, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the Hamas attack, although the body itself never did so. But what goodwill might have been contained within the UN soon started to fade once Israel began to fight back against Hamas in Gaza. In January, Guterres condemned Israel for the killing of Gazan civilians, despite the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) taking unprecedented care to avoid innocent deaths. Then, in March, the UN Security Council demanded a ceasefire in Gaza for Ramadan. Since those tactics didn’t work, they’ve now concocted a new scheme to use the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and other top government officials. The United States’ president and congress have threatened retaliation if the ICC goes through with this hair-brained scheme, but it goes to show how desperate the international community is to get those renegade Jews back under control.
As wonderful as it is to have this support from the United States, Israel recognizes that America is getting frustrated at the fact that they, too, are losing control of their closest Middle Eastern ally. From its inception, Israel has been the beneficiary of U.S. goodwill, sometimes military, sometimes financial. The extent of this goodwill has varied from time to time, often based on who is in the White House. In return for that support, the United States could typically count on Israel to acquiesce when Washington felt strongly enough to insist on a matter. Currently, that is not the case.
The Biden administration needs peace in Gaza. The election is coming, and he desperately needs an international win. Unfortunately, Netanyahu is saying, “Yeah, I get it. But we’ve got to see this thing through, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.” This puts the Washington administration in a tough situation. The majority of American public opinion is still with Israel, so if the U.S. pulls an Afghanistan and totally abandons their Jewish allies, Biden will get walloped in the polls. But if he does nothing and the war in Israel expands up into Lebanon, as planned, he’ll also get walloped in the polls.
So, the administration is resorting to arm-twisting using the normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia as leverage. While in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, just prior to visiting Israel, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “In order to move forward with normalization, two things will be required – calm in Gaza and a credible pathway to a Palestinian state.” Bringing to a close Israel’s battle for safety and passing some sort of two-state solution would go a long way to showing Biden as an international leader. But there is no way that Netanyahu is going to allow either of those to take place.
That is why the White House is working to oust the prime minister using the hostage situation. Factions are arising in Israel surrounding the hostages. It’s understandable, because people want their family members home. Rumblings are coming out of the White House talking about a ceasefire in return for a limited release of hostages. If Netanyahu were to cave to the pressure to take such a deal, his government would fall apart almost instantly. Some members of the left in Washington are hoping that the emotions surrounding the hostages will overwhelm the big picture wisdom surrounding the war to such an extent that Netanyahu’s coalition will break and a more pliable option like Yair Lapid or Yoav Gallant will be given the prime minister position.
For now, Netanyahu is doing what most of Israel is wanting him to do. We have not forgotten October 7. The IDF is using aerial attacks to soften up Rafah, in preparation for a ground invasion to put the final nails in the coffin of Hamas. They are also continuing the battle in the West Bank against Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Up in the north, key Hezbollah infrastructure is being destroyed and terrorist leaders are being killed in Lebanon and Syria. Hezbollah and the proxy militias are fighting back. Regular barrages of rockets are flying over the Syrian and Lebanese border into Israel, and terrorist attacks in the streets and at military checkpoints are becoming all too familiar. Israel’s fight against the terrorist groups will continue, and we will not at all be surprised if the day will soon come when we will be prosecuting the war standing by ourselves.
Radical Pushback
It is certainly more sensational to focus on the crazy antics that are taking place on college campuses in the U.S. However, I don’t think that is the important story. This is not a “what” question, but a “why”. And to understand the “why”, we must identify the “who”.
It’s impossible to turn on the network media or to go onto your favorite online news sources without seeing a bunch of black-and-white keffiyeh wearing college students chanting ridiculous slogans, setting up “Palestinian Liberation Zones” on campus, breaking into and taking over university buildings, and wrestling with the police. According to AP News, more than 1,000 protesters have been arrested on university campuses over the past two weeks. But despite the location of the arrests, many of those taken into custody were not students.
The protests taking place are neither spontaneous nor organic. They have been carefully planned and were simply awaiting a catalyst to launch. Those behind the college riots are outside professionals funded by radical leftists like George Soros and organizations like the American Muslims for Palestine, which is a Hamas-financing arm in the U.S. These skilled agitators know the right words to say to whip up emotion. They are social media savvy and know how to glamorize the idea of “sticking it to the man.” They are also masters at escalation, and when protests turn violent it is typically their hands behind the intensification.
The greatest tools these agitators have are the liberal nature of secondary and university education, the susceptibility and geopolitical ignorance of the majority of American young adults, and the desperate craving of this generation for deeper meaning in their lives. So, when a passionate activist comes along and reaffirms the lies of their leftist teachers and professors, they are ready to believe it. Because they are susceptible and ignorant, logic and truth are easily discounted in favor of emotion and feelings. Thus, when they take over a university building and throw a water bottle at a policeman, they feel they are doing something righteous in the name of justice for the oppressed. Little do they know that their entire belief system is a house of cards built on a foundation of lies.
This is why you can find college students who two years ago were nervously posing for prom pictures now employing Nazi SA brown shirt tactics blocking Jewish students from entering college buildings and beating them up because of their race. It is the lies of these agitators that turn the high school valedictorian who went to Columbia for a law degree into a keffiyeh wrapped banshee screaming and spitting at the cops. Meanwhile, at many universities, the administration and faculty that parents are trusting to educate and lead their children are allowing this insanity to take place without recrimination.
This is why we must constantly be reminded of October 7. This is why you regularly find brutal reminders on my Telegram channel of what took place that tragic day. Already, the rapes and torture are being branded as lies or exaggerations. Or, worse yet, they’re being given a pass as an understandable acting out of an oppressed people. That is disgusting, it is appalling, and it is heartbreaking to think of what that kind of moral equivalency is doing to the hearts of those who are being taught that brand of evil.
But the ever-worsening antisemitic rhetoric being spouted on streets and on campuses is not just limited to October 7. It is directed at Israel in general and at the Jewish people in particular. That is why it is unfathomable to me that so many pastors and political figures remain mute on the subject. It is a silence that I believe they will have to answer for. God is looking for church pulpits and political rostrums from which His chosen people are prayed for and antisemitism is harshly condemned.
Yom HaShoah ensures that we will never forget the Holocaust and the millions who were brutally murdered. But even though we Jews didn’t forget that there were people who once wanted to wipe us all out, we did get complacent. October 7 was a different kind of “Day of Catastrophe”. It was a wake-up call. Rather than stand in remembrance of the slaughtered innocents for two minutes, we grabbed our guns to take revenge on the guilty. We will not be caught off-guard again. We will never forget.
