Since ‘The Jewish War’ against the Roman Empire, some thoughts of The Jewish War of today.

By David E. Kaplan

Today my brother Sidney and I visited the grave of our father in Kfar Saba. It was his Yahrzeit (Anniversary of a death in Judaism), and standing over the stone of Solly Kaplan, and reflecting on what he would think of Israel’s present war embattled on multiple fronts, Sidney recalled our worldly-wise father remarking immediately after 9/11:

“Now, the world will understand Israel’s situation.”

While right about most things, how naively wrong our father was on this!

The world not only does not understand Israel, it chooses not to understand. The depth of global hatred towards Jews – once thought to be on the wane in the wake of the Holocaust – burst and exploded in sync and with the speed of the murderous hoards that broke through the fences from Gaza into Israel on October 7.

Solly, like most Jews never would have believed that so soon after the Holocaust, a world would again be so receptive to the mass murder of Jews – that countries world reflexively side with the killers and not the victims, and somehow cerebrally contort to justify the horror they support with “They deserve it; they had it coming”. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, very few countries condemned Hamas; resisted calling it a massacre and found reasons to justify their conduct. My native South Africa was in the forefront of this this posture as reflective in this all-revealing photo below.   

Writing in The Jerusalem Post (Sept 23), Moshe Targin asks:

 “Why do they oppose us with such intensity? Why does the hyper-liberal world react so viscerally to Israel? What stirs their agitation, driving them to fabricate wild claims and hurl accusations with unbridled fury?”

As we approach Rosh HaShana (New Year) and the anniversary of October 7, we ask these questions but in truth these are questions Jews have long asked without answers as persecution persists unabated.

Has anything changed over the last two millennia? Continuing,  Targin writes:

“In this current struggle, our enemies are willing to concoct far-fetched notions and propagate blatant falsehoods, desperately clinging to their old convictions.”

All this was evident  as I watched on TV in the hours before I went to the cemetery, as speaker after speaker of world leaders at the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) lambasted Israel for protecting its people, like any other member state of the UN would do if it had been attacked by marauding mass murders and who threatened to repeat such massacres in the future. They were quick to “concoct far-fetched notions and propagate blatant falsehoods” as South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa did by so-falsely accusing Israel of Apartheid.

There was hardly a note of  criticism from most the speakers of the terrorist organisations initiating and orchestrating the killing –  Hamas and Hezbollah. A welcome exception was the Argentinian president, Javier Milei who criticized the UN for its hypocrisies in criticizing Israel. For most the rest, the message of the UN was clear: Israel as an “Apartheid”, “colonialist”, “occupier” or whatever other false convenient label –  and consequently has no right to defend itself.  The indifference to the plight of Israel and Jews was  reflected in a speech by the British Prime Minister at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, England, being held at the same time as the UNGA, where Keir Starmer called for “return of the sausages” instead of hostages. Yes, it was a gaffe but it was also a verbal slip that exposed deep rooted attitudes, unleashed by the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah.

“I call again for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza,” said Prime Minister Starmer, “the return of the sausages – the hostages – and a recommitment to the two-state solution: recognized Palestinian state alongside a safe and secure Israel.”

How do you support “a safe and secure Israel,” when you deny licenses for arms to Israel during an existential war?

Irrelevant to these delegates of world leaders at the UNGA was how a music festival turned into a nightmare scenario and young attendees faced unimaginable horrors. How the Supernova music festival, attended by about 3,500 young people, turned into a site of mass murder and sexual assault, including gang rapes and the desecration of corpses. How Road 232 connecting the Gaza border kibbutzim, which could have provided an escape route but instead became a road of death – a trap ensnaring fleeing young people who were met with death, sexual violence,  including rape and mutilation.

Two thousand years after the first-century Roman-Jewish historian Josephus wrote The Jewish War, there is today a feeling of déjà vu. If Jews were then in their homeland of Judea defending themselves against the might of the Roman Empire, today again in a cataclysmic clash, not only against Islamic extremism but against a world  bursting with antisemitism and favoring our killers at every international forum.

There is however one big difference:

If 9/11 had no impact in changing global antipathy towards the Jewish state, October 7 impacted on Israelis and Jews all over the world to accept this and to no longer be under and false illusions.  If people indicate they intent to kill us Jews, we have to take it that they mean in and we need to do whatever is necessary to prevent them from succeeding, including sometimes  “paging” them!

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).