October 7th - Black Sabbath

On this solemn anniversary of October 7th 2023 - a truly Black Sabbath - our hearts go out to the bereaved families and friends of victims of the Hamas pogrom and those who may yet have survived the cruel imprisonment of 365 days in the squalor of Gaza’s terror tunnels.

At the same time, we are full of pride and admiration for the men and women of the IDF and the ingenuity of the intelligence echelon in the stunning results they have achieved against the enemy in Gaza and now Lebanon. The entire Jewish nation and its future generations will be forever indebted to the heroes who fell in battle and perhaps worse-still those who have been permanently disabled by battle injuries.

After an exile of almost 2,000 years, our generation was blessed to see the rebirth of the Jewish state in its biblical homeland and the recapture of our eternal capital, Jerusalem. Ongoing miracles and divine providence have become an almost daily occurrence to those with open eyes. Just consider how an Iranian president’s helicopter falls out of the sky. How two sets of unprecedented ballistic missile barrages, never seen before in any theatre of war, failed to cause one single Jewish death. The precision of the IAF’s surgical strikes on terror leaders. The sheer gall of blowing up Haniyeh in the centre of Tehran. And, to cap it all, the exploding pagers … truly a work of pure genius, even if Israel still doesn’t take the credit.

And perhaps the most remarkable sight of all is Bibi Netanyahu. At 74 years of age, how is this man still standing with the weight of Israel’s destiny on his shoulders and all the stress he has been under? Pilloried by jealous rivals like Ehud Barak, or people he has upset or passed over like Liberman, Yaalon and Pinkas, constantly under threat of losing his wafer-thin Knesset majority and – on the nights he might actually get some sleep free of terror worries, he gets woken up by the demonstrators shouting “Democracy” outside his bedroom window when all they really want is to overturn his own democratic election.

Just as Churchill stood in WW2 as a lone bull in a flock of appeasing sheep, Netanyahu is undoubtedly our people’s Churchill at this momentous and pivotal moment in world history.

We pray that G-d gives him strength to resist the appeasers of today, those calling for a ceasefire to save Hamas & Hezbollah from total annihilation and those restraining him from destroying Iran’s nuclear program.

And on that subject, let us not forget that – after all the world’s condemnation of Israel’s bombing of Saddam’s nuclear facilities in 1981 – Vice President Dick Cheney later thanked Israel’s air force commander for the "outstanding job he did on the Iraqi nuclear program" thereby saving the US from facing a nuclear-armed Saddam in operation Desert Storm 10 years later.

If, as is hoped, Israel now destroys Iran’s nuclear facilities, the same chorus of disapproval will in time give way to ultimate appreciation by the free world (if ever the TikTok morons of Gen-Z finally grow up) that this was yet another of the innumerable gifts of the Jews to civilisation.

Am Yisrael Chai. Together we shall be victorious.