Half a Million Jewish Heroes

And a hundred thousand freeloaders

Iran, Iran, Iran. That’s the war that most people are hearing about non-stop. And it does affect us all, especially here in Israel. Just the other day, exactly when I was in the middle of having serious and very painful surgery to remove a vestige of my ancestors’ evolutionary path, frantically trying to draw as much Novocaine into my lungs as possible, the siren sounded. They had to take off the Novocaine mask and half-carry me down the steps to the safe room! Thank God that’s over and I’ve managed to get back to work.

Iran is certainly the biggest threat, and thank God (and the IDF and USA) we are making tremendous progress on that front. But there’s another serious war going on which I suspect most people outside of Israel don’t know much about. And that’s the war for the north.

Hezbollah has been firing hundreds of missiles and rockets over the last few weeks, and was preparing to send fighters to try to infiltrate Israel. My oldest son managed to call me the other day from Lebanon. He was in a recently-abandoned house which looked like a perfectly normal family home, until he entered the bedroom and found all kinds of Hezbollah weaponry and paraphernalia. The house next door had UN uniforms.

The State of Israel is now preparing for a significant escalation in defending the north of the country with a massive ground invasion of Lebanon to root out Hezbollah. According to a report by Kan 11 News, in the coming days the government will be approving raising the maximum reserve mobilization quota to 450,000 soldiers, to add to the standing IDF forces of around 50,000 soldiers. With such a massive operation, it’s expected that there will be casualties.

Half a million Jewish heroes. The truth is, the number is actually much larger. There are many more Jewish heroes here than just the men and women actually in the IDF. There’s the spouses who have to hold themselves and the family together. There’s the parents who send off their sons. There’s the children who have to say goodbye to their fathers - and in some cases, their mothers. Did you know that Israel has a human milk bank that is sending gallons of breast milk for all the babies whose mothers have been called up to reserve duty?

Meanwhile, this very same government that will approve calling up half a million men and women to reserve duty, with all the consequences to their careers and marriages and families and lives, was not interested in calling up the hundred thousand or so charedim that could have been in regular service and spared countless reservists. In fact, it plans to formally exempt them and even pay them for the privilege.

There are 7.5 million Jews in Israel. There are about 6 million who are part of communities that believe in defending and supporting everyone else. And there are about 1.5 million who are part of a community that believes in benefiting from the sacrifices of everyone else, extracting resources from everyone else, and not contributing.

Things need to change. The Iran threat will hopefully be neutralized for many years. But there will be other threats - there are millions of Arabs between the river and the sea, many of whom are hostile. We need a unified, strong nation.