We must heartily thank Hashem for the wonderful way He
has saved us over the past weeks. The dizzying speed
with which events follow one upon the other, makes it
hard to fully appreciate what He has been doing for us
recently, but it is worthwhile to at least make an
attempt. With all the pain and sorrow there is for those
innocent souls who have been murdered by terrorists, we
must be very grateful for the horrible events that have
been averted.
To recall just some of the recent events: A week ago a
bus driver found a bomb inside of a watermelon. It was
dealt with safely by police sappers. A suicide bomber in
Afula was caught by police when his bomb failed to
explode. A would-be suicide backed out in Haifa and led
police to his bombs. Late last week a 16-year-old was
pushed off of a bus together with the suitcase he was
carrying. Police said that if the bomb had gone off in
the bus, there would have been little left of the
vehicle or its passengers. A 23-year-old woman was
stopped in the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station on Friday
with a deadly bomb.
This is all in addition to hundreds of "routine"
shooting incidents in which no one is hurt.
There is no doubt that we all owe tremendous gratitude
to Hashem. However, we also note the individual
mesirus nefesh that characterizes some of the
incidents, and also the general efforts that are made by
all the security services operating at high alert.
To its credit, the political arm of the government has
not engaged in the gratuitous and often hollow-sounding
bragging that many Israeli politicians enjoyed in the
past. They have maintained a low-key approach that tries
to take a moderate road that restrains the extremists
from all directions.
It seems to us that they are also taking an approach to
defense new to Israeli governments. For over fifty years
the Israeli approach to conflict with our neighbors has
been the policy originally laid down by the Left-wing
politicians in the early days of the State: wait until
the Arabs do something and then retaliate as you
choose.
This was the approach followed from the Six Day War,
when Israel was responding to the closing of the Straits
of Tiran to Israeli shipping by Egypt, through the Yom
Kippur War when critics say that Israel waited very long
to even mobilize its reserves so as to make it
absolutely clear that the war was an Egyptian
initiative, and it was even in force just over a year
ago when Israel withdrew (or retreated) from south
Lebanon, when the prime minister and foreign ministers
declared very loudly that now they would feel free to
retaliate massively to any attack from Hizbullah.
The policy of targeted attacks on terrorists is a
significant departure from this old approach. It takes
the initiative in attacking and often eliminating
identified terrorists while minimizing casualties of
bystanders.
Let us hope and pray that we be worthy of the
continuation of these miracles and that Hashem agrees
that we have had enough troubles.
