Substacks

From Joy to Terror: A Postcard from Jerusalem Daniel Gordis

Published

10 months ago

October 7, 2023

Israeli police officers evacuate a family from a site hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in Ashkelon, in southern Israel. (Tsafrir Abayov via AP)

We gathered outside the local community center at 7:00 this morning to celebrate the last day of the High Holiday season. It’s a little known holiday called Shemini Atzeret, when we pray for rain, thank God for our bounty, and dance with Torah scrolls.

The air had a touch of Jerusalem’s fall chill, so we were, perhaps, singing with a bit more gusto than you might expect. That was when we heard the faint booms in the distance. One and then two.

People begin to look at each other, wondering, “What is that?”

We told ourselves it was nothing. Maybe Iron Dome shot down a rocket or two—that happens here not infrequently.

But then a series of explosions, still very far away. “Must be construction,” someone whispered to me.

But it was Shabbat, and there’s no construction in Israel on Shabbat. And he knew that.

Then: the air raid alarm.

People began to sprint to the bomb shelter. Fathers and mothers gathered up their toddlers and young children. Two people grabbed the Torah scrolls.

It was tight for the hundred of us crammed into the shelter—they’re all used as storerooms, even if they’re not supposed to be. But we squished in. The yawning sound of the siren continued, then stopped, then awakened again.

When it was clear that we weren’t getting out of there anytime soon, someone found a folding table. The Torah was laid on it, and the person who’d been reading continued, the sounds of the ancient Hebrew and the air raid siren blending together.

Ours is a mixed neighborhood of religious and secular people, so even if you’re personally off the grid on Shabbat, you hear what’s going on. It sounded bad.

A couple of terrorists had apparently gotten through the border fence and penetrated a kibbutz. That sounded horrible—terrorist penetrations of security fences are every Israeli’s nightmare. But then there was another rumor that they’d taken a hostage.

That was hard to imagine. There’s an army there. It’s the border. There’s security everywhere.

When Shabbat ended, at sundown, and we finally got to watch the news, the idea that just two terrorists crossed into Israel seemed like wishful thinking. All of our usual layers of security were nowhere to be seen.

We heard stories of people calling TV stations to tell them that they were hiding in their safe-room, but the terrorists just outside were shooting into the door. “Please send soldiers!” cried one woman. She was in an area that’s supposed to be heavily guarded.

Another kibbutz put out a call for the parents of a baby found by itself. It’s a kibbutz, so everyone knows everyone, so the question wasn’t whose baby it is. The question was: Where were the parents? The parents were nowhere to be found. Somehow, though, everyone knew where they were.

Where the army was, was much less clear.

This was a massive failure of the Israel Defense Force, especially its intelligence operations. It reminded everyone of the failures that led up to the Yom Kippur war—which started fifty years and one day ago, and, for a few weeks, seemed like it might be the end of the Jewish state.

This war may be worse—at least, from an intelligence standpoint.

But today was also a massive failure of Israel’s much-vaunted ground-fighting force. At this moment, some fourteen hours after several hundred terrorists tore through the chain link fence that is the border with Gaza, the IDF is still battling in a dozen locations to recapture land inside Israel that the terrorists now control.

News sources reported that, for hours, 50 members of the Kibbutz Be’eri were held hostage in the dining room of the kibbutz, with the army unable to rescue them. We’re told that IDF soldiers have since arrived at the kibbutz, but the hostages are still being held captive.

Israeli soldiers head south on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. (Ohad Zwigenberg via AP)

Elsewhere, Hamas militants—who look like civilians, in their jeans and t-shirts, brandishing automatic rifles—dragged Israeli soldiers out of a tank. That shocked the country, and it will continue to shock everyone for a long time. It’s hard to overstate the shock. And the fury. Israelis want, in this order, to reclaim their territory, save their people, and then punish Hamas like they’ve never been punished before.

Doing all of that will require a massive force, so earlier today the government announced that it was initiating a call-up of reserves that could number in the “hundreds of thousands.”

“I am initiating an extensive mobilization of the reserves to fight back on a scale and intensity that the enemy has, so far, not experienced,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. “The enemy will pay an unprecedented price.”

It is tragic that it took a disaster of this magnitude to bring the nation of Israel together today. But Hamas has managed to do that. The staggering reports, at the moment, of 250 dead and 1,450 wounded, the images of family members looking through body bags at the entrance to the town of Netivot—that will bind Israelis together in a shared grief and rage they haven’t known in at least two generations.

They will be bound, too, by the knowledge that death may not be the worst thing that happened today. The army also posted on social media pleas with Israeli citizens not to repost videos that Hamas is uploading to Telegram, showing Israeli civilians being taken into captivity in Gaza. The army does not want families to learn that their loved ones have been captured from Hamas TV.

“We saw her on the Hamas video, so we know she’s been kidnapped, but the army isn’t telling us,” one mother told a reporter, explaining why social media was more reliable than the army. There will be rage at Hamas, but at the army, and the government. That, too, will bind Israelis together as they haven’t been in many years.

For eight years, our son was a commando in the army. When he got out, and ceased being called up for reserve duty, we heaved a sigh of relief. Since then, he’s gotten married. He’s in his thirties now, and in good shape, but nothing like he was back then. And he has two kids. His youngest, his daughter, was born less than two months ago.

An hour ago, he called us to say he’d been called up. Like thousands of other Israeli parents, we’re now watching what’s unfolding with even greater horror, more worry.

No one can know how many soldiers will pay the ultimate price to keep this country alive, or how many more mothers and grandmothers and ordinary people not in uniform will be murdered. In fact, it feels like no one here knows anything that matters. We are feeling something Israelis have not felt in a long time. This is a feeling that has been obscured, perhaps, by many years of building and success and relative security. It is that feeling that has always been part of this haunting, sad, beautiful, holy place—the terror of not knowing what tomorrow will bring.

Daniel Gordis is the Shalem Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College in Jerusalem. You can allow his writing on his Substack: Israel from the Inside.

And if you missed Gordis on Honestly, listen here to “Israel at 75: Miracles and Madness”:

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

10 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

17 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

21 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641