A massacre at a Jerusalem rabbinical seminary: 8 young students dead, many maimed and wounded. Daily shootings and missile attacks on towns and cities within Israel proper, such as Sederot, and this week Ashkelon. This cannot go on. No country can sustain what Israel is sustaining.
Almost two centuries ago, the French tyrant Napoleon Bonaparte was master of Europe. In Spain, an embattled English army under the Duke of Wellington was resisting his advance. One day a young lieutenant came into the British general’s tent clutching a map in his trembling hands:
“Look, General the enemy is almost upon us!”
“Young man,” the general replied coolly, “Get larger maps, the enemy won’t seem so close.”
For three decades, many Israeli leaders said give the Palestinians land, their own state and then we will have peace. Others argued: They don't want their state; they want OUR state. They claim not just Ramallah but Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as well. If you make territorial concessions in this tiny country, “the enemy will be upon us.”
And those same leaders responded: Don’t look at the small map, but rather at the “larger road maps to peace.”
Alas, today the enemy's terror campaign is upon us.
Terror is worse than war. In war, there’s a battleground with obvious combatants. In terror, a coffee shop, a bus, a rabbinical seminary become the battleground. In war, there are specific targets; in terror everyone is a target - children, students, innocent pedestrians. The goal is to make Israeli life intolerable and to force Israel's surrender and ultimate elimination.
Israel has a strong army, but it failed to protect its citizens from this terror. Why?
In Hebrew there are two words for strength: koach and gevurah. They mean very different things: Koach is physical strength, the ability to overcome your adversaries. Gevurah is internal, moral strength to live by one's convictions. Defining gevurah, the sages said, “Who is strong? One who conquers the weakness within himself."
For many years Israel has shown, with G-d’s help, unparalleled koach. Since its rebirth it has had to fight wars, sometimes against overwhelming odds, merely in order to survive. No other country has been surrounded by states who deny its very existence, its very right to be. It fights impossible wars and wins. But in recent years many of Israel’s leaders and thinkers have shown a lack of gevurah. It took immense weakening of gevurah for Israel’s leaders to entrust the security of the Jewish state into the hands of its sworn enemies, who practice, support, and glorify terrorism.
The Jewish people have not always had “koach,” but they had gevura, which sustained them. The behavior of some Israeli leaders today reversed this winning formula. We have a lot of koach, but very little gevura.
Israel’s inner strength atrophied when it began tolerating the murder of its citizens, based on the myth that by restraint, it will bring an end to the ill feelings of its enemies and thus to the terror. In reality, what the last few years have proven is that when you are confronted with neighbors who wish your destruction, any such tolerance encourages more bloodshed.
How much more innocent blood needs to be spilled before we abandon the failed “larger road maps?" How many more young Jews will die before we say this cannot go on?
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Rabbi Dov Greenberg is the executive director of
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