A handful of tanks, a few attack helicopters aloft, some strategically placed infantry, and Hamas’s attacking force could have been wiped out before they’d stepped foot in Israel. Instead of the greatest Jewish disaster since the Holocaust, images of Nukhba men killed as they assembled at their jump-off points would have echoed throughout the Middle East.
What plagues me is the thought of how many things could have gone wrong for Hamas, yet didn’t; how many things had to go wrong for Israel, and did. Like the Six Day War but in reverse, Israeli commanders were left reeling by the audacity of the surprise attack. On that black morning 100 days ago, seemingly everything that our enemies touched succeeded; everything that we did turned to ash.
It takes a great person to find the right words for a situation of this magnitude. That great man was in fact Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, whose thoughts about the onset of the Second World War seem to describe our times as well.
In a striking passage in Michtav Me’Eliyahu (Vol. I, p.203) he discusses the meaning of the Jewish People being struck by disasters that seem to transcend the normal course of events.
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