This month, I have a personal cause for celebration. Nine months since October 7, that is not as easy as it sounds. Nonetheless, here I am. In Israel. Celebrating my 45th aliyah anniversary.
Four and a half decades have passed since I left England for good and arrived in Israel. Ask Israelis what the most important event of 1979 was, and the likely replies will include that the country won the Eurovision Song Contest for the second year running.
Indeed, “Hallelujah” sung by Gali Atari and Milk and Honey could have been my theme song as I packed and unpacked my belongings.
Both the country and I were more naive in those days. But Israel had been badly burned by the 1973 Yom Kippur War and, joining the IDF shortly after my arrival, I knew it wasn’t going to be all singing and dancing the hora around the collective campfire.
Aliyah was my personal highlight for 1979; the Eurovision win was a national climax. But something far more significant was happening in the global arena. That was the year of the Iranian Revolution, the Islamic Revolution.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made his own glorious homecoming – from exile in Paris to Tehran, bringing his ideology with him. The fall of the Shah 45 years ago marked a blow for the free world as we knew it.
Khomeini sent Iran hurtling back to the Dark Ages, under a strict Sharia regime. He also declared two enemies: Big Satan and Little Satan – the US and Israel. In the intervening years, the Iranian regime’s animosity toward the Jewish state and America has not changed. But its capabilities have improved.
Its sphere of influence now includes neighboring countries from Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, to Yemen. Iran is located some 1,500 km. from Israel, but through its terrorist activities, it now acts as a dangerous neighbor with an extensive joint front. Its proxies include Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, who continue to attack not only the Jewish state but the international community.
If we didn’t have enough to keep us awake at night, the thought of nearly nuclear Iran – possibly just days away from being able to create nuclear weapons – should do it. As it was, Israel and its Sunni neighbors spent a sleepless night in April when the Islamic Republic of Iran launched hundreds of rockets and killer drones in an unprecedented attack that cannot be belittled without peril.
Iran is carrying out a dirty war both physically and psychologically, and it has shown it will use every weapon available, from cyber attacks to suicide drones.
Its global jihad is a global threat. Like classic chess players, Iran’s rulers think ahead and wait patiently to pounce and knock a strategic piece off the board. The international response, similarly, requires a strategic approach rather than tactics.
Making aliyah to Israel
MY DESIRE to make my home in Israel started several years before my aliyah. Seven, to be precise. It was sparked by another event in which Israeli and world history collided.
The trigger for my move can be found in the 1972 Olympic Games in Germany. The Munich massacre changed my life. It changed the world, but the world remains in denial.
Incidentally, the fact that Iranian athletes refuse to compete against Israelis is a sign of more than being bad sports.
A keen, pre-teen, competitive swimmer, I was in love with Mark Spitz, the American Jewish multi-gold medalist, and I was following the 1972 Games closely. When Arab terrorists broke into the Olympic Village, I – like the rest of the world – watched the hostage drama live on television.
The Olympics had been hijacked by the PLO-affiliated Black September terrorist movement. The hostage-taking ended with the murder of 11 Israelis and a German policeman. We need to remember. Never forget.
The big winner of the 1972 Olympics was PLO head and arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat. Through a campaign of terror attacks, he placed the Palestinians on the map – attempting to erase Israel in the process. That the Palestinian identity was born out of terrorist atrocities should be a lesson to the world suffering from violent protests on campuses and elsewhere.
The murder of the 11 Israeli sportsmen by Black September in 1972 can be connected to September 11, 2001. It can be seen in the black flag of ISIS and the dark events of the Palestinian invasion and the mega-atrocity of October 7. Nowhere is safe.
Ask the organizers of the upcoming Olympics in Paris later this month about the security nightmare presented by Islamist terrorism and Palestinian extremism and its supporters. The two causes can no longer be separated. Israel is on the front lines of a religious war, but it is a war faced by the entire West.
Iran and the members of its Axis – Russia, China, and North Korea – can smell the fear; it whets their appetite. This is a time of huge upheaval. Elections abound. The democratic ballot should be a stabilizing device, but in today’s world it is instead divisive and creates strange political bedfellows.
There is an extraordinary radical alliance of far Left, far Right, and Islamists united by their hatred for Jews and the Jewish state. Those who saw the murder of Israelis at the Munich Olympics as a “heroic act of resistance” have grown older but not necessarily wiser.
In 1972, after a one-day break, the Olympic Games went on. The world carried on. And the Palestinians and their partners in crime carried on with their attention-grabbing campaign of terror.
WHEN FRENCH President Emmanuel Macron called for snap elections following the shift to the Right in the European Parliament, he clearly hoped to bolster his Renaissance party’s position.
Instead, given the results of the first round of voting this week, it looks like he scored an own goal, giving Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally (RN) and the far-left coalition greater power than they have had before.
As I write these lines, the results of this week’s UK elections called by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are not yet known, but most political pundits are predicting a major blow to Sunak’s Conservative party.
In the search to replace president Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter accident in May, Iran is heading back to the polls today, July 5. Neither of the two candidates won enough votes to pass the first round of elections last week.
Low voter turnout in the first round suggests that Iranians know that neither candidate is a good option – Masoud Pezeshkian is presented as a “reformist” facing off against Saeed Jalili, but clearly Pezeshkian wouldn’t have been allowed to run if Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei did not consider him loyal.
Meanwhile, following the debate between US President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump, some feel the best analyses of American politics are coming from satirists rather than political scientists.
ALL IS not right with the world. And Israel is also suffering the most difficult time that I can recall in 45 years here, and possibly since its establishment and the War of Independence in 1948. I have lived through the First and Second Lebanon Wars, the First and Second Intifadas, and countless other rounds of war and terrorism. Nevertheless, like the country, I’m battered but proud and still standing. And still looking ahead to better days.
In a popular, old Israeli song, Chava Alberstein sings: “In London, they have more movies; in London, they have good music; in London, the television is great; in London, the people are politer. Thus, the despair is more comfortable.”
Those sentiments no longer hold – growing Muslim fundamentalism, economic distress, and political turmoil are taking their toll in the UK.
At the same time, despite the war, the rocket attacks, the political havoc, and the economic challenges – life here goes on. And it’s good. Even the movies, music, and television have improved. And the food and weather are definitely better than Britain’s.
Since October 7, and the global wave of violent antisemitism that accompanied it, hundreds of Jews have decided to move to Israel. In the wake of elections, no doubt more will follow – except for Iranian Jews, held hostage by the ayatollahs’ regime.
I still consider my aliyah a personal victory in the war against terrorism.
Every war, terror attack, and antisemitic act strengthens Jewish identity and brings more Jews back to the Jewish homeland. You can’t beat the irony.