JERUSALEM POST
by Daniel Gordis
August 28, 2014
I have now lost count of the number of emails I’ve received this summer from committed, involved Jews, that began, “Hope you’re having a good summer,” or “Hope all’s well with you.” But I will confess that these notes, more of which I got this week, continue to stun me.
Summer? Most people here won’t go to the beach – what if the siren went off and you were outside, with nowhere to hide? Many fewer people will go camping, for the same reason. Many people who had planned to travel have canceled – what if you’re in Scotland and your kid gets called into battle? What then? When, for that matter, did summer even begin? Ever since Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-Ad Shaer and Eyal Yifrah were kidnapped on June 12, we have been a news-consumed nation – first praying for their return, then devastated by their murders, then horrified by the revenge killing of Muhammad Abu Khdeir, then stunned by the beginning of Hamas fire onto almost all parts of Israel, and then the war, the tunnels, the horrific number of IDF soldiers killed, the searingly painful funerals, the multiple cease-fires, US Secretary of State John Kerry’s utter ineptitude, the US Federal Aviation Administration’s reminder that we are surrounded and besieged, American “delays” in resupplying armaments, Britain’s threat of an arms embargo and the emergence of a Europe to which many Israelis are now too frightened to travel.
Summer? What summer? Of the entire above-mentioned list, it was the discovery of the tunnels (which the army and government had known about, but most Israelis had not) that changed everything. We were used to rockets, even if not in these quantities, and we feel largely protected by a virtually miraculous Iron Dome system. But the images of tunnels so well-constructed that Hamas terrorists could ride motorcycles in them – that was something different……
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