Wish You Were Here
The Soundtrack of Israel in the Wake of October 7
Songs of Loss and Longing
Our sister called us from Israel yesterday morning. She was on the road on her weekly run to deliver baked goods to Israeli soldiers. Those who have been reading this platform for a while may recall that she is part of a country wide effort called HaMachal Hamatok (Sweet volunteer organization). Their mission is to bake challah and pastries every week and deliver them to those who are serving on the battle front. You can read more about Machal Hamatok here: Hugs from the heart: The bakers sending challah and cake to IDF soldiers during wartime.
She wanted me to know what she was hearing on the radio as she drove home from her delivering her goods. She was listening to the Israeli station, KAN FM 88. “The songs are all about loss and absence,” she told me. “I found myself weeping as I drove down the road. The whole country is traumatized over those we have lost and those who are in captivity.”
Image: October 7 by my sister, Israeli artist, Devorah Roytenberg Charash — Picture by the Artist
Later she wrote me that the songs are interspersed with messages from the family members of the hostages who are still held in Gaza after nine months. The station broadcasts them in hopes that the hostages may hear them. The whole nation is listening and praying for their safe return from the hands of the enemy.
It’s hard for those of us who aren’t in the country to understand what Israelis are experiencing, even when we are closely following the news. Most of the Canadian news on the war concerns conditions in Gaza. The angry demonstrators who have regularly appeared in Canadian streets and occupied Canadian campuses for the past nine months, are also constantly in our sights, and their slogans and demands are utterly indifferent to what is happening to Israelis.
The Israeli news we read is about the political struggles and about the achievements and the casualties of the war. We don’t hear so much about what these events are doing to the psyche of those who are living through it.
My sister mentioned that there are many new songs that have been written in the wake of the war, but even older music that she hears on the radio follows the same haunting theme of loss and captivity. “They just played, ‘Wish You Were Here’ she said. I don’t like Roger Waters but the message of the song resonates.”
Of course, the radio also plays songs of resilience and survival and Israelis are grimly determined to persevere in the face of the violence of the enemy and the hatred of its supporters.
News from Gaza
The week began with the news that Mohammed Deif was present in a compound in Khan Younis where Israel dropped eight enormous bombs. We are still awaiting official confirmation of his death, but initial denials by Hamas have not been followed by any evidence that he is still among the living.
Deif’s significance in the past thirty years of history in Israel would be hard to overstate. Born in Khan Younis in 1965, his true name is Mohammed al-Masri. Deif is a nickname, meaning ‘the guest” in Arabic. According to the Wikipedia article linked above, he joined Hamas immediately after it was created in 1987. He graduated in 1988 with a degree in Science from the Islamic University of Gaza. He was arrested by Israel for his Hamas activities in 1989 and released in a prisoner exchange over a year later.
By 1996, Deif was responsible for organizing a series of horrific terrorist attacks in Israel. The Deif Wikipedia article quotes Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, who said these attacks were an important factor in determining the outcome of the Israeli election in 1996. Bergman wrote:
At the beginning of February (1996), Peres was up twenty points in the polls over his opposition, the conservative hawk Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu. By the middle of March, Netanyahu had closed the gap significantly, and Peres led by only five percentage points. On May 29, Netanyahu won by 1 percent of the vote. This was all due to the terror attacks, which Peres simply couldn't stop. Yahya Ayyash's disciples had ensured the right wing's victory and "derailed the peace process," in the words of the deputy head of the Shin Bet, Yisrael Hasson.[
The Wikipedia article notes that after Netanyahu’s election, the attacks by Hamas ceased. While some attribute this to a crackdown on Hamas by Yasser Arafat, then President of the Palestinian Authority, Bergman maintains that Hamas stopped the attacks because they had achieved their short term goal of derailing the Oslo peace process. They had done that by ensuring the electoral defeat of Peres, the surviving Israeli architect of the peace agreement with the PLO, and the election of Netanyahu, who was a fierce opponent of the Oslo accords.
Deif was arrested by the Palestinian Authority in 2000, but escaped after a few months with the help of some of his guards. In 2002, he became head of the Hamas military wing, the Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades. In that capacity he is credited with turning the brigades from a disorganized collection of terrorist cells into a real military organization.
He was instrumental in the capture of Gilad Shalit in 2006, and in the development of deadly tactics which led to the death of 65 Israelis soldiers in the 2014 Gaza incursion triggered by the murder of three Israeli teens. He supervised the development of the Hamas rocket forces as well as the maze of tunnels which have been critical to Hamas ability to control Gaza, as well as incursions into Israel.
Israel considers him the chief architect of the barbaric October 7 invasion which led to the current war. He is also credited with lulling Israel into a false sense of security in the five years leading up to the last fall’s attack. This mistaken impression led to a reduction of Israeli forces on the Gaza border, and contributed to the disastrous failure by Israel’s leadership to recognize and respond appropriately, when soldiers charged with monitoring the border reported signs that Hamas was about to attack.
Mohammed Deif is the second most powerful member of Hamas in Gaza, and was said to have had the final say in matters connected with attacks on Israel and when to agree to a truce. If he is truly dead, it will be a crippling blow to what is left of Hamas in Gaza.
Coming to Terms with a New Normal
Here in Canada, it is a struggle to carry on living as before, while the message that we see and hear in the mainstream media is that everything happening in Gaza is Israel’s fault. When we go out to do our daily business it feels like we step into a hostile world. This takes some getting used to. But the understanding that the wider world sees Jews as up to no good, and not to be trusted is nothing new. We are experiencing a taste of the sort of lives our ancestors lived here in Canada before antisemitism was driven for a generation or two from polite public discourse.
We know now, if we didn’t before, that antipathy to Jews never actually went away in Canada. It reappeared on social media decades ago, as soon as those platforms became widely available. The difference now is that pointing out that it is happening no longer seems to result in any effort to curtail it. Instead, we encounter outrage that Jews are trying to silence the voices of oppressed Palestinians.
On July 11, Seth Mandel wrote an article in Commentary headlined The Plight of Canadian Jews. It contains highlights of how anti-Israel extremism has affected Jews in Canada who are trying to go about their business or get on with their lives.
Mandel describes the weekly demonstrations in Toronto’s Jewish neighbourhoods and the publication of a list of Montreal restaurants which should be boycotted for their Zionist ties. He mentions several incidents from the past few months, in which Jewish synagogues, restaurants and schools have been attacked with gunfire. Canada, with its famously restrictive laws on legal gun ownership, is still unable to protect Jewish institutions from being fired upon. Mandel also writes:
These incidents are not outliers. Through March, 56% of the hate crimes reported in Toronto were anti-Semitic in nature. Through the same time frame, the cost of policing the pro-Hamas protests exceeded $10 million for the city. Police were forced to add a command post in one neighborhood targeted by the protests.
Seth Mandel is senior editor of Commentary.
In spite of the these distressing events, the Canadian Jewish community continues to raise its voice, to tell the truth about what we see happening around us. We gather in increasing numbers in our synagogues, schools and community centres. We write, we lobby, we make ourselves heard. We are not intimidated.
Image: Walk for Israel, Toronto, June 2024 — Source: National Post
Today is the last day of our weeklong celebration of a full year of Canadian Zionist Forum. We finish the year with 711 subscribers and 143 articles published. We look forward to reaching even more people in the year to come.
Today, we would like to offer particular thanks to our growing cadre of paid subscribers. While everything we publish here is available to be read by all, these folks contribute financially to the site, which helped us pay for our field work in Israel in February. We hope that those of you who are able to contribute $100 per year or $10 per month will celebrate the first anniversary with us by joining this stalwart group of supporters. You can help ensure that our second year is even better than our first.
With that we wish all those who are celebrating, a peaceful and meaningful Shabbat. We will be back to launch our second year on Sunday, July 21.