“Some days”, as a wise man once said, “you’re the fly, and some days you’re the windscreen.” The secret of a contented life, I suspect, is to acknowledge and accept the truth of that observation. Of course, that probably works better if the ratio of days when you are the fly to days when you are the windscreen stays closer to 0.5 than 0.
Of course, most of the time, a day is a very crude measure for this ratio. Any given day will offer plenty of situations in which you could be the fly or the windscreen, and, in my experience, most of the time they are more or less evenly balanced. You’re held up in traffic and you miss the screening of the film you planned to catch. However, this gives you the opportunity to take a delightful late spring hour-long walk through the park. You waste half an hour looking for the glasses that are on your forehead, but then a friend you haven’t spoken to for ages gives you a call and you have a lovely chat. You get the idea.
And then there are days like today (Monday), when the light tone of those first two paragraphs is so completely inappropriate. I have just been listening to a random 60 minutes of the mainstream TV station’s evening news programme. The broadcaster’s radio news channel carries the audio of that programme every evening, usually from 7:00 to 8:30, but this evening it stayed with the feed until 9:30. Today was one of those days.
At 6:00 this morning, Hamas operatives in the outskirts of Gaza City approached an IDF shelter. They made their way, undetected, up to a tank that was parked outside the shelter, with a full crew inside the tank. Apparently, the crew were not sleeping, but were checking their surroundings and reporting to their HQ. The terrorists managed to lob a bomb into the tank, which exploded, killing the crew of four: Staff Sergeant Uri Lamed, aged 20, from Tel Mond; Sergeant Gadi Cotal, aged 20, from Kibbutz Afikim; Sergeant Amit Aryeh Regev, aged 19, from Modi’in-Maccabim-Re’ut; and a fourth soldier whose name has not been released.
The question begs to be asked: how is it possible that they didn’t spot the terrorists? Is it just the case that, on Day 703, our soldiers can no longer maintain the level of alertness that the situation demands? Whether or not, these are another four lives, ended before they had done little more than begin; four unique life adventures that will now never be followed. I see no reference online to any of the four being married. Is this a blessing? They leave no widows or orphans. Or is it a curse? They are the end of their line. Nothing of them is left here for their parents and siblings, other than an entire world of memories to be cherished and shared.
These four boys/men are the 901st, 902nd, 903rd and 904th members of the forces to have fallen since October 7th began 23 months ago. Are all those lives paving the way to a better future? Today is not a day when I feel strong enough to contemplate that question too deeply.
And then, just a few hours later, three terrorists armed with automatic weapons infiltrated from West Bank villages, crossing the barrier at one of the well-known crossing points used by Palestinians seeking to cross the barrier illegally and work in Israel. They made their way to one of Jerusalem’s major junctions, to a busy bus-stop that serves multiple bus lines and where, at that hour of the morning, many people crowd the pavement waiting for their buses. There they boarded a bus and opened fire, killing six civilians and wounding at least 21 more.
The six who died were: Dr Mordechai Steintzag, aged 79, who made aliya from the US in his mid-40s, and, discovering there was no ‘healthy’ bread available in Israel, started a home bakery that now supplies supermarkets throughout Israel; Sarah Mendelsohn, aged 60, who was a worker in Bnei Akiva’s head office, and was eulogized today as “sort of the movement’s mother figure”; Levi Yitzchak Pash, a 57-year-old who learnt and worked at Yeshivat Kol Torah, and was eulogized as someone who always gave to others (he apparently had accepted a lift this morning at the bus-stop from a passing motorist, but, when someone else mentioned that he needed to get to Shaarei Tzedek hospital, Pash gave up his seat and thus met his death); Yaakov Pinto, a 25-year-old who came on aliya alone from Spain as a teenager, learnt and taught at yeshiva, and married just three months ago; Rav Yosef David, aged 43, a Torah student who leaves a wife and four children; Yisrael Metzner, aged 28, a Torah student of particular intensity, seriousness and modesty.
This list reflects the fact that the bus stop is at Ramot junction, and Ramot is a religious (largely Haredi) neighbourhood of North Jerusalem. In every other respect, this list is a random list. These very special, very ordinary people were not singled out by their murderers; they were just as ordinary, and just as special, as any six Israelis, any six human beings, are.
And then, as if the day were not black enough, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu arrived at the scene of the attack, and, of all the things that they might have chosen to say, and ignoring all the ways in which this tragic event might have given Bibi an opportunity to unite this fractured nation, this is how he, and Ben-Gvir, saw fit to mark this occasion. A little background is needed.
On Sunday this week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Israel Prison Service is failing to carry out its legal obligation to provide adequate and nourishing food to security prisoners (most, though not all, of whom are, of course, Palestinians). The minister responsible for this issue is Ben-Gvir, who, at the scene of the terror attack, accused judges of encouraging terror to “raise its head”. Bibi then added to his prepared remarks by endorsing Ben-Gvir’s remarks. “With regard to the court,” he said, “you are also in this war, and we don’t make things easier for our enemies; we hit them as hard as we can, and that’s what you ought to be doing as well.” So outrageous and divisive is this that my online search shows that the mainstream media decided it would be better not to report these words.
It is worth pointing out that the law that the court found that the Prison Service and Ben-Gvir are ignoring is, of course, a law that Netanyahu’s government introduced.
Those of us with memories that go back earlier than last week will recall that, in opposition, Ben-Gvir, and Bibi, were always very quick to lay the blame for Palestinian terror attacks in Jerusalem on ineffective government. This, apparently, is no longer the case.
No, it’s been a very dark day here in Israel. The only things to raise the spirits were two statesmanlike pronouncements. The first was from Abu Mazen who was quick to condemn any attack on Israeli or Palestinian civilians. Does this include, I find myself wondering, the murderers of Israeli civilians that he pays terrorists lifetime stipends for perpetrating?
The second was from President Macron, a man of whom it might be said: ‘To lose one Prime Minister may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose three looks like carelessness.’ He looks at Palestinians murdering Israelis and sees this as an indication that now is the perfect time for a two-state solution. “What,” he has presumably asked himself, “could possibly go wrong?” There speaks a man whose country’s civil struggles were with populations conveniently separated from France by a body of water considerably wider than the Jordan river, or possibly a man who has studied no history.
Tomorrow, by the law of averages, I should be the windscreen. And so to bed.