Hey, beloved tribe!
I have incredibly exciting news. Our inaugural book club meeting, which has been scheduled for this coming Thursday at 5:30 pm Pacific time, 8:30 pm Eastern time, will include the author herself.
To recap: the book is Morning After The Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History, and author Nellie Bowles will be joining us via Zoom.
To keep from inundating the non-book-club members here with info irrelevant to their lives, I’ve started a Facebook group called Never Alone Book Club. It’s private, which means anyone can find us but no one can read our conversations without being granted entry. This way, we will be able to talk amongst ourselves about club activities.
Click here to join the group and please don’t be shy about inviting your friends. Any Israel-loving Jew and any ally to Jews is more than welcome.
I don’t know whether there’s a cap on how many members I’m allowed to invite to join per day because Facebook halted my invites to the group and restricted my activity for an hour. I’ll try to resume the invitations when I can get back on, but in the meantime, I’m not prevented from approving requests, so please feel free to fling invitations far and wide as long as you trust the recipients.
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In other news, things continue to be dire both at home here in the U.S. and abroad.
In Israel, hostilities are escalating at an alarming rate from the North. Hezbollah has fired dozens of drones and rockets on several Israeli military bases, igniting fires and wounding at least two citizens. This was in retaliation for Israel’s fatal attack on top Hezbollah commander Taleb Abdullah (also known as Abu Taleb) in an airstrike on Jouaiyya. Three other Hezbollah operatives were also eliminated in the same strike.
Tension has been high in Israel as firefighters battle blazes in the Golan Heights and Upper Galilee, and missiles have fallen on Tsfat and Tiberias.
Meanwhile, Hamas is refusing to negotiate a tenable ceasefire / hostage deal. Sinwar explicitly reiterated this past week that the terror group’s cause is greatly strengthened by dead Palestinian civilians and he makes no pretense of doing anything other than openly trying his best to maximize them. Of course, no one in the U.S. or anywhere else seems to blame Hamas for any of this, to demand anything of them or condemn them. It is the literal truth that Israel cares about Palestinians vastly more than their own leadership does, and yet of course to the media and public at large, the Jewish nation is the sole and perpetual villain in this picture.
To this end, protests have been raging outside the Nova Music Festival Exhibition on Wall Street, organized by Within Our Lifetime, an openly violent hate group against Israel. Participants waved the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah and chanted eliminationist slogans, as seen in this clip.
Let’s really focus for a moment on how outrageous it is that Americans would protest outside a memorial for the civilian victims of a massacre. This exhibit has nothing to do with retaliatory measures or military strikes or the number of Gazans killed in this war. It simply has to do with Jewish men, women and children ripped from their homes, sexually assaulted, tortured, raped, murdered, and/or set on fire while still alive. Many of them ardent left-wingers who had devoted their lives’ work to serving Palestinians and working toward peace.
The disrespect and sociopathy involved in chanting for more Jewish death outside of such an exhibit is breathtaking — beyond anything I have the ability to describe.
We must not delude ourselves about who these people are or what they want. They are neither peaceful nor peace-seeking. Students for Justice in Palestine and Within Our Lifetime are scorchingly anti-Semitic hate groups functioning as the propaganda arm of Hamas and Hezbollah. They are behind the campus protests and they’re after our kids. We need to fight them with everything we have.
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On the legislative front, Prime Minister Netanyahu is planning to address the U.S. Congress next month as he did during Obama’s presidency. It’s especially vexing that he’s willing to go to such lengths to address the American public while steadfastly refusing to speak to his own people. One of the most enduring complaints about Bibi is that he is totally MIA when it comes to explaining this war to Israelis, conferring with and reassuring the families of the hostages, and doing any of the domestic diplomacy he was once renowned for.
He is widely distrusted and despised throughout the Jewish Nation. Israelis believe that he prioritizes saving his own political career over the well-being of Israel. They believe he is dragging out this war for as long as possible to avoid the elections that will be called as soon as it ends. They believe, in fact, that he does not want the war to end at all, ever. Per Times of Israel senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur, he is the least trusted politician in Israel, which is a disaster anytime but especially during a war for which Israeli citizens are sacrificing mightily.
In striking contrast is the high trust placed in Defense Minister Yoav Gallant by the Israeli populace. Gallant seems to be, in fact, Israel’s most trusted politician. This sets the opposite feeling toward Netanyahu in an especially striking light, given that Gallant shares so much incriminating territory with Bibi. Gallant shares the responsibility for the catastrophe that was October 7th. As a member of the tiny War Cabinet, he shares the responsibility for the way the war has been prosecuted so far. He even shares membership in the Likud party with Bibi. Yet he is as revered as the prime minister is hated.
One possible reason for this is that, in contrast to Bibi, Yoav Gallant took responsibility for October 7th. He had the integrity to acknowledge his own failure to protect the country and he swore to stop at nothing to restore the public’s trust. Whereas Netanyahu has shown that he is capable of no such moral reckoning, honesty or humility.
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I know I usually try to send you into Shabbat on a high note. I guess this is somewhat less uplifting than my usual Friday fare. But I promise to bring you good things next week. Including, again, our inaugural book club meeting.
In the meantime, I hope your Sabbath is lovely. I’ll be back with all of you on Monday.
Sending heartfelt love and candlelight. Chazak chazak.
Am Yisrael Chai.
Shabbat Shalom, Elissa. You continue to inspire and bring hope, even when all the notes can’t be high.
Shabbat Shalom dear one