We are worried, we are frustrated, we are nervous, we are scared. There is no point in denying it, we are “under the gun” – literally – from virtually every direction. In the blink of an eye – heref ayin, as it’s called – we have seen and felt the walls closing in on us.
First and foremost, of course, is the shock of the daily injuries and fatalities to our courageous troops, along with the heartbreaking news that yet another hostage has been murdered at the hands of the Hamas monsters. Rockets still fall indiscriminately throughout the country, and forests are set afire by shelling in the North. As we look beyond our borders, we witness a pathetic parade of former allies pressuring us to drop our opposition to a Palestinian state, an entity that has every possibility of being no less of a terrorist threat than the one in Gaza.
Faith in our government is at an all-time low. Truth be told, the campaign against Hamas has been mismanaged from the get-go. The first rule in warfare is never tell your enemy what your plans are, yet we irresponsibly telegrammed our objectives time and again rather than simply declaring, “We will do what we have to do.
” We have painted ourselves into a corner and, in effect, are now held hostage by the overly ambitious promises we boasted of accomplishing. A simple reading of Jewish history would have provided a clear truth about our intractable enemies in Gaza: Joshua could not expel them, even when he was vanquishing the land’s .
