The Year After Next Year In Jerusalem

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Berlin, London, New York, Montreal and Toronto?

L'Shana Haba'ah B'Yerushalayim.

For G-d knows how many centuries, in a prayer sung at the conclusion of the Passover seder and in the concluding service of Yom Kippur, “Next Year in Jerusalem” sustained our Jewish comrades through all the massacres, the pogroms, the expulsions and the death camps.

That wish was more or less realized in 1948, and was more fully and necessarily fulfilled in Israel’s victory over the armed forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967. The Jews will never be forgiven for this.

Israelis know this to be true. In the Simchat Torah pogrom of October 7 it was like a revelation, the answer to the question William Butler Yeats’ posed in his poem, The Second Coming: And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

What is happening at the moment is not only about the Jews, or about Israel. I don’t mean to say ‘what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews,’ which always seemed to me to imply that the ancient and evil superstitions of antisemitism could be somehow mitigated if only the conjurors weren’t destined to eventually come after the rest of us. Judeocide is a sufficiently unspeakable wickedness all on its own.

But, as it happens, they are coming after all of us.

After being allowed to re-enslave the people of Afghanistan by a “war weary” Joe Biden, the jihadists are coming after the Hazaras again. After slaughtering roughly 300,000 tribespeople in Darfur before they were brought to heel 15 years ago, the Arab janjaweed, reorganized as Sudan’s “Rapid Support Forces,” slaughtered more than 1,000 Masalit people in Darfur in just two days last week.

Across Canada, the main mobilizations the mass media has ineptly called “pro-Palestine” rallies have featured innumerable celebrations of the massacres of October 7 as legitimate acts of resistance against “settler colonialism,” Israel’s imaginary original sin.

Tens of thousands of Canadians have marched under the banners of rally organizers Samidoun, the Palestinian Youth Movement and Toronto4Palestine, and occasionally, under the flag of Hamas itself.

Just peaceful protesters expressing their Canadian values by exercising their free speech rights to go for a nice walkabout in Toronto under the banner of the terror-listed Khomeinist proxy Hamas, the ISIS-style slaughterers most keenly devoted to Judeocide.

Banned in Germany but headquartered in Vancouver with a federal safe-haven corporate registration, Samidoun, is the overseas recruitment and propaganda arm of the terrorist-listed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Samidoun has long admitted that it considers the PFLP, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad to be legitimate Palestinian “resistance organizations” that should be struck from Canada’s terrorist list.

The Palestinian Youth Movement, on the very day of the October 7 pogrom, was happy to judge the Hamas atrocities in Southern Israel as “legitimate resistance against the occupiers.” Before the blood of 270 innocents had dried on the ground at the site of the Re’im music festival, the PYM was already well pleased: “The resistance’s offensive attack has shaped a new precedent for our national liberation struggle and we remain steadfast in our right to resist by any means necessary.”

Then there’s Toronto4Palestine, which has convened several of the Toronto rallies. This group’s leaders were already organizing an event to commemorate the October 7 pogrom before Hamas had even finished its butchering, which went on to litter the villages and towns of Southern Israel with roughly 1,400 corpses. “A few people wish to hand out sweets to celebrate the resistance and its next level accomplishments.”

These are not cherry-picked utterances from fringe rally attendees. These are the official statements issued by the organizers of the main street events that have drawn tens of thousands of Canadians into lalaland “ceasefire” demonstrations since October 7.

Obscenities like these are perhaps more commonplace in Britain, where the legacy of the disgraced Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is very much a breathing, undead thing. But, as in Britain, the Canadian vulgarities are by no means confined to pimply-faced college revolutionists. Across social media and in “left-wing” webzines, in much of the respectable press, throughout academia, in high-society arts and culture circles and public institutions, it’s much the same.

Not all public demonstrations have been ugly affairs. Jewish advocacy organizations have begun to organize events, mostly drawing attention to the 240 hostages Hamas kidnapped on October 7. The Canadian Jewish News has a good roundup here.

On Sunday, Toronto’s century-old United Jewish Appeal brought together perhaps a few thousand people for a solidarity rally for the hostages, at Christie Pits Park, the site of the 1933 Christie Pits riots, which were touched off by a gang of Nazi supporters who brought a swastika banner to a baseball game with a Jewish team in the field.

The Sunday event was too much of an opportunity for sarcasm to be missed by Sheridan College sociology professor, public speaker and self-described media pundit, expert on diversity, equity and inclusion and “leadership coach” Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui. She quipped: “Sorry not that many showed up, we know how much you tried to recruit people for the genocide rally.”

In Montreal last week, a molotov cocktail was thrown into the Beth Tikvah synagogue in Dollard-des-Ormeaux, and the offices of the Jewish advocacy group Fédération CJA was also firebombed. On two separate occasions, the Yeshiva Gedola was hit by gunfire, and bullets were fired overnight at the United Talmud Torah school in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges district.

On Sunday, Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante put it this way: "At this moment, the Jewish community is under attack in Montreal."

These were just the most violent incidents in a series of antisemitic outrages in Montreal going back a month. Through it all, Bochra Manaï, Montreal's Commissioner for the Fight Against Racism, said nothing. Last Friday, she finally issued a statement to the effect that "Islamophobic and anti-Semitic acts" are bad.

As the Documenting Antisemitism project has noticed, Bochra Manaï has had enough spare time to dick around on Facebook and Instagram comparing the IDF’s war on Hamas to the Rwandan genocide.

I could go on and on like this.

Nearly a decade ago, the celebrated American neuroscientist, philosopher and author Sam Harris put it this way, quite prophetically: “We all live in Israel now. It’s just that most of us haven’t realized it yet.”

Metaphorically speaking, of course, yes. You could also say we are all now living in the lines of Yeats’ Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

I’ll be coming to my column in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen from this past week, below. It’s about the political upheavals in Israel this past year, and what they imply for next year, and the year after, and the year after that. Israel is changed, and changed utterly.

Everything has changed. It’s not just about Israel. It's about civilization and its enemies. And its enemies are among us.

As for Israel, only a few weeks ago, people were rising up in the hundreds of thousands against Benjamin Netanyahu, and against what they saw as a betrayal of the democratic and secular Zionist cause. It was a gallant struggle, like the great Hong Kong uprising of 2019-2020. It already seems like a generation ago.

The Israeli protest movement was a mass movement without precedent in the Jewish state’s 75-year history. The movement is very much alive still, but it is now at war. That’s the focus of my column, which I’ll come to, but first, some personal matters. . .

Remembrance Day. A digression.

I am really, honestly, genuinely disinclined to despair, to cynicism, to surrender. I really do wish this edition of the Real Story wasn’t so dreary-seeming, but there are reasons. Not all of these reasons directly relate to the non-stop outbursts of theocratic-fascist sloganeering and raw antisemitism since October 7, the hundreds of thousands mobilized in celebration of the bloody Hamas “resistance” in the streets of European and North American cities, the attacks on Jewish businesses in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and on and on and on.

Here’s the thing. I’m exhausted.

I’d been at it full bore since October 7 when I was struck down this past week by some monstrous weirdness. I assure you I’m not being altogether a big baby about this. I don’t know if it was an extremely fierce manifestation of one of those extremely rare eruptions of those adverse side effects of the Covid booster and flu vaccinations we’ve all been sensibly lining up for, or some strange virus, but Sweet Mother of God. Felt like I was fixin’ to die.

So there was that.

Also, I’ve been trying to give form and shape to a National Post assignment that I could write in my sleep, except I don’t want to just touch all the bases that foreign-policy analysts are supposed to touch in dealing with the question at hand. On top of that I’m being sued by the Canadian wing of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which I will win if it gets before a judge but it’s a headache, let me tell you.

My office is a shambles from a renovation that’s stretching into its second week owing to weird unforeseen wiring issues I don’t quite understand. I filed my last column horribly past deadline after hitting ‘send’ just as a circular saw was opening up a huge hole in the wall next to my desk. I expect that this coming week my work hours will again be confined from dusk to dawn.

Owing to all this, there will be no regular column from me in the Post or the Citizen this week. There’s no paywall today. You can read right to the end.

I did manage to get away from the office for the afternoon on Wednesday. I mean, I had to, there was no power or wifi and my contractor, a fine lad by the name of Brendan Buchanan, was chiseling and bashing away at things and I was just in the way. In that short space of time I am proud to say I caught six rainbow trout, released all of them live but the last, which I kept and cooked for dinner when the power was back up.

Here’s another thing that hit me this week. I miss my ma. It was because of Remembrance Day.

The Globe and Mail’s Marsha Lederman wrote a lovely tribute here: ‘Bletchley Girl’ Eileen Glavin scanned airwaves for German messages during wartime.

My ma, the Nazi hunter, from back in the day. Matriarch of our tribe, she was the last of her generation. Suaimhneas síoraí dá hanam. כרונה לברכה.

I didn’t really grieve her passing when she died this past January because she had lived so well and died so well, and at 101 years of age she was ready to go. We mourned her loudly and properly after her funeral Mass. At the time I could only be struck by my great fortune to have been born one of her four sons, later joined by her “Jewish children,” Rebbe Feuerstein’s kids, in the blessings of her care and guidance and good cheer.

Everyone was so kind to me when she passed but I felt I had no special privilege of grief because she was loved by so many and she loved so many in return, and such an enormous tribe she came to preside over. People would tell me, you may not be grieving now, but you will. Just wait.

I didn’t believe it until Remembrance Day. I was a bit of a wreck over the weekend, although I must say I’m glad she didn’t live to see what has become of us, now that we’re supposed to take it as a good day if a cenotaph is not defaced, or a synagogue is not firebombed, or a Remembrance Day observance is not too rudely disrupted.

All these things can be taken as excuses for allowing more than a week to pass without a newsletter, and as an excuse for the dreary tone of this week’s Real Story. But there are other reasons.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed.

While nothing like the scale of Arab suffering elsewhere in recent years - the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights counts more than 600,000 dead in Syria since 2011, and the United Nations Development Program counts 377,000 deaths including 10,000 children in Yemen over the past eight years, just for starters - the agony in Gaza is heartstopping.

Everybody knows the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health is not what you would call the most reliable source of information but their death count from two days ago was 11,078, of whom 4,506 were said to be children. Another 2,700 people are said to be missing, perhaps trapped or dead under the rubble.

And no, this is not a matter of the Israeli Defences Forces committing genocide, a stupid claim that it is so enormously fashionable that it has become “normalized.” There will be furious and contentious post-mortem accountings among Israelis after Hamas is smashed in Gaza, as there should be, and it is near to impossible to imagine how Benjamin Netanyahu will survive all this, not least the worst military and security failure since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. I can’t imagine why he should be allowed to survive anywhere in the Israeli political class.

But it cannot be said that Israelis are coldly indifferent to the civilian death count associated with the military operation, and it’s not true that the IDF has been cutting power to the Shifa Hospital. The opposite is true. Here’s the evidence: The IDF delivered 300 liters of diesel fuel to the hospital early Sunday morning, and it appears that Hamas made off with it.

Brothers and Sisters for Israel

My column this past week: Israel's endgame in Gaza hasn't yet been stated clearly: A traumatized nation has been forced to unite behind a deeply unpopular prime minister, thanks to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.

It’s about the protest coalition that staged a series of unprecedented street protests, highway blockades and a general strike against Benjamin Netanyahu’s democracy-gutting judicial reforms - which he has now been forced to abandon- and what they’re all up to now.

After five failed governing coalitions and five elections in as many years, Israel was convulsing in protests until only a few weeks ago, led mostly by former military officers, notably the brave Eyal Naveh, a former officer with the prestigious special-forces unit Sayeret Matkal. That’s the same unit Netanyahu served a half century earlier.

Naveh’s Brothers in Arms group ended up at the vanguard of the protests - on just one day there were about 600,000 Israelis in the streets, roughly six per cent of the country’s population. It was a mass movement. It still is, but now its leadership has evolved into Brothers and Sisters for Israel, and they’re directing 15,000 volunteers from a command centre in Tel Aviv with the full co-operation of the Israeli military.

Within days of the Hamas invasion, volunteers from the group’s impromptu civil emergency headquarters were providing 30,000 soldiers with hot meals every day and offering a range of services to the 200,000 Israelis displaced by the war.

I spoke with one of the key leaders of the initiative in Tel Aviv, Gigi Levy-Weiss. An amazing human being. Gigi’s is one of the key architects of Israel’s recent transformation into the Silicon Valley of the Middle East. A former pilot in the Israeli Air Force, Levy-Weiss reckons that a new Israel will emerge from all this.

And, Insha’allah, a new Gaza, and maybe even a new Palestine down the road somewhere, where the mutant offspring of the Nazis and the Muslim Brotherhood who rule over Gaza are moaning and crying from inside history’s dustbin.

And Netanyahu will be gone, so enough freaking out about him saying ‘Israel will rule Gaza indefinitely.’ And enough with the pants-wetting about crazy things Bibi’s allies say. They’re finished too.

Do read my column about what Levy-Weiss has to say about the year after next year in Jerusalem. He is very wise, and a brave Israeli patriot.

As for my own view, as if it counts for anything, I set it out on October 18: The 'Palestinian problem' is not Israel's to solve alone. The international community needs to shoulder responsibility for the nightmare Israelis and Palestinians have been expected to endure.

I’m pleased to see I’m on the same page as my editors, who weighed in with this, last week: The National Post view: Canada and its allies should send troops into Gaza: An army of international troops would offer the best chance of a long-term peace.

Good idea. Not likely to be taken up by Melanie Joly, our stratospherically out of touch Global Affairs Minister, in whose rich fantasy life there well be a “détente” between Israel and Hamas, and “even more negotiations at a negotiating table where there are Israelis, Hamas and Qatar, which is present. . . as moderator.”

There is no future with Hamas in it. I’d have thought that would have been the very first thing that Joly’s expert advisers might have impressed upon her by now.

I do despair.

Some readings.

Of hospitals and human shields (same thing). Hamas has spent most of the past 16 years building a vast command complex under Shifa Hospital while building similar bases underneath other medical facilities in Gaza. All here, in the New York Times.

There’s been quite a rumpus about the “stringers” that CNN, the New York Timess, Associated Press and others have been relying on to report “on the ground” in Gaza. Some of the outrage is ill-informed. Some of it is righteous and justified fury.

Here’s some useful backstory to all this, written by my pal Matti Friedman, whose book on Leonard Cohen and the Yom Kippur War I have in my possession but I haven’t even had time to read. Matti used to work for the Associated Press in Israel. It’s amazing: An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth. It’s an in-depth look at how the Israel-Palestine “story” tends to end up being “a narrative construct that is largely fiction.”

More on the year after next year in Jerusalem, in the United States and the wider world: Thirteen brainiacs. Most interesting, from my perspective:

Bari Weiss: End DEI. It’s not about diversity, equity, or inclusion. It is about arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself. Jeremy Stern: End the Iran Deal Delusions. Yes please. Liel Leibovitz: Get a gun. Exactly what it says on the tin.

And always, the magnificent Claire Berlinski. As in Dispatches from Israel: Three reasons for pessimism, and one for optimism. And splendidly: ‘Is Democracy Doomed?’ revisited. Sudan, Gaza, and further reflections on the incompetence of the citizens.

So much more to draw to the attention of Real Story subscribers but I am tired, and it’s going to be a very, very long day.