The Little Country That Could

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

What a weekend.

Sometimes there's a moment in life so breathtaking and filled with possiblity that I wish there were some cosmic pause button I could hit, some way to stop time in order to hold it close, breathe it in, bask in the promise of it.

The fall of the Assad regime and its aftermath is such a moment.

It’s incredible to think of where we were just a year ago — where we were then, and how far we’ve come.

In the months after October 7th 2023, no matter where I went or what I was doing, Israel’s uncertain future was hanging overhead like a chemical cloud. There were days I felt I could barely move. I walked around slowly, as if trying not to jar my heart. I met friends at places like my local shuls or the JCC and we stood holding each other for long moments before sitting down and having some version of the same conversation over and over.

Will Israel survive this moment? Can she survive? Is this the end? How can such a tiny and embattled nation possibly prevail yet again?

When those questions were put to me, I had two answers, much like every other Jew in the world. Two answers to every question is the perennial Jewish way.

Yes. Yes, Israel will survive, even if I don’t know how. She always has and I have come to believe, kayn ahora, that she always will. My faith in the Jewish nation is unshakeable.

And then there was my other answer, voiced less often but no less true. It called to mind a song by Taylor Swift called Death By A Thousand Cuts — a song that felt ominously apropos to the current moment. One stanza kept running through my head:

I dress to kill my time

I take the long way home

I ask the traffic lights

If it’ll be all right

They say: I don’t know.

And that was my other, unspoken answer to the question of whether our homeland would eventually, ultimately, somehow be all right.

I don’t know.

Israel, so deeply hurt by the massacre, was facing a war on 6 or 7 fronts: Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and the terrifying head of the octopus, of which all the aforementioned entities were mere tentacles: Iran.

All year, I’ve been saying and writing that it’s myopic to see this conflict as between Israel and Gaza, Israel and Palestine, or even Israel and Hamas.

To assess what’s happening with any understanding, it’s essential to recognize that this is first and foremost a war between Israel and Iran.

There is absolutely no way to overstate the fear that I and so many of my friends felt as we forced ourselves to consider the overall picture.

Israel was struggling mightily to contain Hamas and we were told over and over that not only was it impossible to defeat Hamas, but the latter was the slightest and weakest of all the threats facing the Jewish nation. Hezbollah, we were told, was many times the size, better capitalized, better armed, better organized and in every way infinitely more formidable.

And then there were the Houthis, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and all the other hostile proxies and terror sponsors in the mix besides. Not to mention the tidal wave of public opinion, which emboldened our enemies, kept international dollars flowing into their coffers, and led to the U.S. demanding delay and restraint in situations where Israel needed to be unfettered and decisive.

Taylor Swift isn’t my only soundtrack. Lyrics accompany so many of my thoughts about so many current events. Sometimes when I consider how far we’ve come, I hear that line from the musical Hamilton in my head: Look at where we are… look at where we started…

Hamas is leaderless and depleted. Hezbollah is decimated, demoralized, a shell of its former self. Yahya Sinwar is dead; Mohammad Deif is dead, Hassan Nasrallah is dead; Ismail Haniyeh is dead; a dizzying list of other terror leaders are dead, and new Hezbollah leaders are being killed faster than they can be replaced.

And now the Syrian government has fallen. Bashar al-Assad has fled and may or may not have even left this life by way of our trusty old friend Eli Copter.

An unspeakably brutal regime more than half a century old was taken down at warp speed, in just 12 days.

And it may sound grandiose but I have absolute conviction that this never would have been possible without Israel’s crippling blows to Tehran’s vaunted “axis of resistance” that has sustained al-Assad for so long.

If Israel hadn’t fatally weakened Iran and Hezbollah, the Syrian insurgency could not possibly have done what it just did.

There is something inexpressibly poignant and beautiful about this fact: during those days of high anxiety, uncertainty, gnawing fear, I looked around at my American cohort and felt deep affinity with just one other group besides my fellow Jews: our Ukrainian friends. Whenever I found myself in a gathering that included my kids’ friend Vitaliy, he and I would ask each other how we were holding up — in the face of the existential threats to the respective lands we loved as much as life itself — and I would feel a profound sense of connection. We didn’t say much, but the shared emotion was palpable. All around us were fellow American citizens who were all but oblivious to our reality, but I would look into his eyes and see my own reflection there.

So how karmically beautiful is this moment, when Damascus has fallen in such considerable part because Hezbollah and Iran have been too eviscerated by Israel and Russia has been too depleted by the Ukrainian resistance to prop up the Middle East’s Butcher-In-Chief any further?

I could scream from the rooftops in exultation.

So I want to pause this moment. I want to soak it in. I want to hold it close. I want to preserve its sense of breathtaking possiblity.

Because let’s be real. It’s wonderful to hear that HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebels now in power in Syria) say they want no strife with Israel or the Kurds (our best friends and most natural allies in the entire region, who are struggling for their own independence and sovereignty). But that could very well be a strategic statement for the time being. HTS is an Islamist group too, which emerged from al-Qaeda. I fervently hope they prove their break with the terror group was legit and their decision to rebrand themselves as comparatively moderate is real and lasting as opposed to nominal and temporary. But only time will tell.

Right now, though. Right now I stand in eternal awe of what our tiny yet oh-so-fierce and ingenious country has accomplished.

Hear, O Israel: I could not be prouder to call you mine; I could not possibly love you more than I do; in my wildest dreams, I could not imagine a more miraculous nation.

Fam, after the year and change we’ve had, let’s rejoice over what our homeland has done. Against all the hatred, all the odds. Just for a moment, let’s take this feeling in.

Am Yisrael Chai.