Remembering... Forty Years Since The Yom Kippur War, A Grave Reminder

It's now forty years plus since the Yom Kippur War, which took place in 1973.  The big lesson from that war should be that all of the political ideological "conceptions," theories, wishful thinking that were believed like a religion by the Israeli government, IDF etc. were dangerously false.

Israeli policy and defense were based on the fallacy that after our great victory in June, 1967, the Arabs wouldn't dare attack us again and that we'd be able to negotiate a real peace treaty by offering generous portions of the land we had inadvertently found ourselves "occupying."

The two-pronged Arab attack on Yom Kippur 1973 was a rude awakening which the Israeli mentality has never fully understood.  The war was a very deadly one.  We, from North American Betar, lost two close friends and still meet every winter by their graves in Mount Herzl Military Cemetery.

Time doesn't stand still for the living.  Grandchildren our dead friends also come to the annual Azkarah, Remembering Ceremony.  They give the dead life.

The only thing that doesn't seem to change is Israeli policy. Our governments are still convinced that that can somehow bribe our enemies into a peace treaty by handing over Land.  The "movers and shakers" haven't progressed since the "battle plans" of the 1967 Six Days War which just concentrated on preserving the status quo of the Auschwitz borders, which were the cease-fire lines of 1949.

For some totally illogical reason, there are Israelis who actually believe that we could survive with a version of those borders.

The family and friends who come to honor the dead every year live all over Israel, from the north to the south to the east to the west, in areas always part of the State of Israel and those liberated in June 1967.  Every year the IDF soldiers assigned to our Azkara are impressed and amazed by the fact that we still get together every single year.  It doesn't matter how busy we are, what's going on in our lives, we make every effort to visit the dead and then sit together catching up and remembering.

It saddens and frightens us that most Israelis refuse to accept reality.  We met as teenagers in Betar, the Revisionist Jabotinsky zionist youth movement.  We learned young that we can't trust the mainstream zionist leadership.  Nothing is new.

Peace won't come from American brokered negotiations, nor giving Arab terrorists more precious land. The Arabs just want us dead, and then they will destroy the State of Israel and defile the cemeteries. The world will just look on and add exhibits to their holocaust museums.  G-d forbid...