Boy sitting on rocks near sea shore waiting. Haifa beach. Israel
David Young – In Israel ” Sitting and Waiting”
The world has not moved on. It has not changed. If anything, it has got worse.
In 1941, George Orwell in an essay called, England Your England wrote, ‘As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.’
As I sit here at this moment, at the beginning of October 2023 in my flat in Jerusalem, Israel, dozens of Palestinian Hamas terrorists in Gaza are launching (and have been doing so for the past few hours) thousands of rockets with one simple aim in sight. To kill and wound, preferably kill, as many Israeli citizens as possible. I am waiting to see if one will land on my building which will obliterate me and the other forty families here. It doesn’t matter to Hamas if the victims of these attacks are civilian or military, just as long as they are Israeli and will be killed. The Palestinian rockets are mainly simple and crude: long lengths of metal tubing with a pointed cone welded at one end and small fin stabilizers at the other. They look like small kids’ drawings of rockets. However, despite their simplicity, they are lethal and can and do successfully blow up buildings while killing and maiming the people inside. The more people the Hamas kill in this indiscriminate attack, the greater they will claim this aggressive act as their ‘victory.’
In addition, the Hamas ground forces have blasted their way over the border into Israel and have murdered, quite literally, hundreds and hundreds of Israeli citizens: men, women, and children, in their homes which border the Gaza Strip. In addition to this murderous spree, the Hamas carried out another one in which they killed about 250 young people having an open-air party also near the Gaza Strip. This organized butchery was accompanied by scenes of rape as well as grabbing unfortunate victims and bundling them off to be displayed as spoils of war, just like the ancient Romans did, in the streets of Gaza. As more than one commentator has said, Hamas is not an ordinary army; it is an army of animals, a copy of ISIS (Daash).
However, the Palestinians in Gaza will not have a victory to celebrate. They cannot win. This is not a question of propaganda or hopeful speculation. It is the truth. It is true that this enemy has caught the Israeli army napping, but now that it has woken up, the price that the people of Gaza will pay will be terrible. The Israeli air force will bomb and reduce hundreds of buildings to rubble and dust, buildings where the Hamas had been secretly building their rockets and hiding them for this day of war. I say day because I doubt if it will last very long. Israel cannot afford to let it go on for long. There is also a limit to how long the Hamas leadership can hold out. In addition, the Israeli navy will shell the Gaza Strip from the coast in order to complete the air-force’s mass-destruction of the Hamas infrastructure. Tens if not hundreds of Gazans will be killed or wounded and their whole shaky economy will be knocked out once again.
Such destruction will not cause the Israelis to feel happy because they want revenge. No, they will be busy asking why this Hamas attack happened in the first place. What happened to our army and its famous intelligence services? How was it that we didn’t see this coming? How were we so blind? If one or two, or even a few small bands of terrorists sneaked into this country in the past to murder nearby members of the border kibbutzim, this meant that they had literally and metaphorically slipped in ‘under the radar.’ But for hundreds, if not a few thousand of them to have done so, in vehicles and bearing Kalashnikov rifles, knives, grenades, and other means to kill the Zionist enemy, then this means that to steal a phrase from Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, someone has blundered. But not a single someone. Someone in the plural – both military and political. These so-called leaders will have to answer to the angry and grieving Israeli public when all this is over. At the moment, the pain is too great to bear to point fingers. But this day will come as it certainly came fifty years ago after the Israeli débâcle that preceded this country’s ultimate victory in the Yom Kippur War.
Bio: David L. Young moved to Israel in 1968 and since then he served in the army and also taught and lectured mainly in Jerusalem high schools and the Hebrew U. He retired in 2013 and now spends his time writing historical novels and repairing wheelchairs at Yad Sarah. He is married, and has three kids and four grandchildren, the oldest one now serving in the south near Gaza.
