Israel is strengthened by the hardship it faces
This month I have a personal reason to celebrate. Nine months since October 7th, that’s not as easy as it sounds. But here I am. In Israel. I’m celebrating my 45th Aliyah anniversary.
Four and a half decades have passed since I left England for Israel forever. If you ask Israelis what the most important event of 1979 was, they will probably say that the country won the Eurovision Song Contest for the second year in a row.
In fact, “Hallelujah” by Gali Atari and Milk and Honey could have been my theme song while I packed and unpacked my things.
Back then, both the country and I were more naive. But Israel had suffered severe damage from the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and when I joined the Israel Defense Forces shortly after my arrival, I knew that it would not just be about singing the hora and dancing around a communal campfire.
For me, Aliyah 1979 was a very special day. Winning the Eurovision Song Contest was a national highlight. But something much more significant was happening on a global level. It was the year of the Iranian Revolution, the Islamic Revolution.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini also returned to Tehran in glory from exile in Paris, bringing his ideology with him. The overthrow of the Shah 45 years ago was a blow to the free world as we knew it.
Khomeini sent Iran back to the dark ages under a strict Sharia regime. He also declared two enemies: the Great Satan and the Little Satan – the US and Israel. In recent years, the Iranian regime’s hostility towards the Jewish state and America has not changed. But its capabilities have improved.
Its sphere of influence now includes neighboring countries from Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to Yemen. Iran is about 1,500 km from Israel, but its terrorist activities make it a dangerous neighbor with an extensive common front. Its proxies include Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and the Houthis, who continue to attack not only the Jewish state but also the international community.
If we don’t lose sleep enough already, the thought of a near-nuclear-armed Iran, potentially days away from producing nuclear weapons, should. Indeed, Israel and its Sunni neighbors spent a sleepless night in April when the Islamic Republic of Iran fired hundreds of missiles and killer drones in an unprecedented attack that cannot be downplayed without danger.
Iran is waging a dirty war, both physically and psychologically, and has shown that it will use any weapon at its disposal, from cyberattacks to suicide drones.
Its global jihad is a global threat. Like classical chess players, Iran’s rulers think ahead and wait patiently to strike and knock a strategic piece off the board. The international response similarly requires a strategic approach, not tactics.
Aliyah to Israel
MY DESIRE to settle in Israel arose several years before my aliyah. Seven, to be exact. It was triggered by another event in which Israeli and world history collided.
The trigger for my move was the 1972 Olympic Games in Germany. The Munich massacre changed my life. It changed the world, but the world continues to deny it.
The fact that Iranian athletes refuse to compete against Israelis is more than just a sign of bad sportsmanship.
As a teenager, I was an avid competitive swimmer and in love with Mark Spitz, the American-Jewish multiple gold medalist. I followed the 1972 Games closely. When Arab terrorists broke into the Olympic Village, I – like the rest of the world – watched the hostage drama live on television.
The Olympic Games were hijacked by the PLO-affiliated terrorist movement “Black September”. The hostage-taking ended with the murder of eleven Israelis and a German policeman. We must remember. Never forget.
The big winner of the 1972 Olympics was PLO leader and arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat. Through a campaign of terror, he put the Palestinians on the map – and tried to wipe out Israel in the process. That Palestinian identity was born out of terrorist atrocities should be a lesson to the world suffering from violent protests on universities and elsewhere.
The murder of the eleven Israeli athletes by Black September in 1972 can be linked to September 11, 2001. One can see this in the black flag of ISIS, the dark events of the Palestinian invasion and the mega atrocity of October 7. Nowhere is safe.
Ask the organizers of the Olympic Games in Paris later this month about the security nightmare posed by Islamist terrorism and Palestinian extremism and its supporters. The two causes are no longer separable. Israel is on the front lines of a religious war, but it is a war that the entire West is facing.
Iran and its Axis powers – Russia, China and North Korea – smell the fear, it whets their appetite. We are in a time of great upheaval. Elections are coming up. The democratic election should be a stabilizing tool, but in today’s world it is more divisive and creates strange political loyalties.
There is an extraordinarily radical alliance of the far left, the far right and Islamists united by their hatred of Jews and the Jewish state. Those who saw the murder of Israelis at the Munich Olympics as a “heroic act of resistance” have grown older, but not necessarily wiser.
In 1972, the Olympic Games continued after a one-day break. The world kept turning. And the Palestinians and their accomplices continued their sensational campaign of terror.
When French President Emmanuel Macron called for new elections following the shift to the right in the European Parliament, he obviously hoped to strengthen the position of his Renaissance party.
Instead, given the results of this week’s first round of voting, it seems as if he has scored an own goal, giving Marine Le Pen’s right-wing Rassemblement National (RN) and the radical left coalition more power than ever before.
As I write this, the results of the British general election called by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak this week are not yet known, but most political experts are predicting a severe blow to Sunak’s Conservative Party.
Iran is holding another election campaign today, July 5, in search of a successor to President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May. Neither candidate was able to win enough votes to win in the first round of voting last week.
The low turnout in the first round suggests that Iranians know that neither candidate is a good option. Masoud Pezeshkian is portrayed as a “reformer” running against Saeed Jalili. However, Pezeshkian would obviously not have been allowed to run if Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had not considered him loyal.
Meanwhile, after the debate between US President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, some believe that the best analyses of American politics come from satirists rather than political scientists.
All is not well with the world. And Israel is going through the most difficult time I have experienced in 45 years here, and perhaps even since its founding and the War of Independence in 1948. I have lived through the First and Second Lebanon Wars, the First and Second Intifadas and countless other waves of war and terror. Nevertheless, like the country, I am battered, but proud and still standing. And I still look to the future for better days.
In a popular old Israeli song, Chava Alberstein sings: “In London there are more films; in London there is good music; in London the television is great; in London the people are more polite. Therefore despair is more pleasant.”
These views no longer hold – growing Muslim fundamentalism, economic hardship and political unrest are taking their toll on Britain.
At the same time, despite the war, the missile attacks, the political chaos and the economic challenges, life goes on here. And it’s good. Even the movies, music and TV have gotten better. And the food and the weather are definitely better than in the UK.
Since October 7 and the global wave of violent anti-Semitism that accompanied it, hundreds of Jews have decided to move to Israel. After the elections, more will undoubtedly follow – with the exception of Iranian Jews held hostage by the Ayatollah regime.
I still consider my aliyah a personal victory in the fight against terrorism.
Every war, every terrorist attack and every anti-Semitic act strengthens Jewish identity and brings more Jews back to the Jewish homeland. The irony is unsurpassed.
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