Ninth of Av, When Will We Ever Learn?

As I thought that I had read of enough Kinot, those sad, depressing elegies said on Tisha B'Av, the ninth day of the Jewish Month of Av, which is the date so many awful things happened to the Jewish People over the millennium, I turned on the television news.

Protection doesn't come from the Iron Dome, which only works when G-d wants it to.
Photo, Times of Israel

Oy, this year with a war going on and the three Israeli Hebrew news channels just broadcasting war news, I don't have to worry about catching a musical or comedy. I find the news much less pleasant than the most depressing readings in my special Tisha b'Av siddur.

One commentator was saying that the Arab terrorist group Hamas which controls/rules/was elected to govern Gaza is or will be telling everyone that they are the victors over Israel. They could have gone on, but Israel gave up. They won the war. Unfortunately, I agree with them. We blinked first, and we blinked on numerous occasions.

• We blinked when we sent out the warning notices to protect innocent civilians in Gaza.
• We blinked when our pilot turned back and didn't bomb a building, because he saw there were children there.
• We blinked when we suggested or agreed to ceasefires.
• We blinked when we sent in food and medical supplies.
• We blinked when we took in injured Gazans to our medical facilities.

We blinked as if we were having some sort of neurological fit/attack. The State of Israel has not acted in a way to prove to the world that we want to protect our country, our innocent civilians and our children, spouses, siblings, nephews, grandchildren, neighbors, friends who are the soldiers in the IDF. Our government has forgotten their basic main responsibility, which is to protect us!

Yossi Beilin  Photo: AFP/GETTY

At one point on television I thought I was listening to Yossi Beilin, one of the extreme Leftists involved in the illegal, although later ratified, Oslo Accords. It was just that the speaker seemed a bit too young to be him.

Danny Ayalon

The speaker, who ended up being Danny Ayalon, was talking about controlling Gaza by bringing in "effective, reliable monitors" to police it. His suggestions of Egypt and Abbas's Fatah had me wondering about his sanity. Or could I have been hallucinating? Just a very short while ago Egypt was in total turmoil, political and security anarchy. How could anyone be sure that they would be up to such a job. They are happy that Fatah is in Gaza with Israel getting the brunt of their terrorism. And how could anyone forget that just days before things "exploded" here, Fatah and Hamas signed a treaty? I found a recent CNN interview in which he described some of his ideas.

There is a very basic flaw in his reasoning, and that is "projection," when one projects their own values on other people. Israelis, especially on the Left or Center use this as the basis of their belief that we can live in peace with the Arabs, because, according to their theory, your typical Arab has the same wish for a peaceful coexistence. They keep blacking-out, deleting from their minds the pictures of Arab mothers celebrating the suicide bombings and other terror attacks by their children, because they resulted in the deaths of Jews.

In the Tisha B'Av prayers, Eicha, Kinot etc we read that G-d punishes us for worshiping foreign gods and false prophets. When will we ever learn....?