the strategy must change

Israel's security cabinet unanimously approved expanding military operations in Gaza. According to an Israeli source, PM Netanyahu said that Israel's plan included "the occupation of territory and a sustained Israeli presence in Gaza," and relocating Gaza's population to the south of the enclave. Far-right minister Smotrich said the cabinet decided that Israel will not retreat from territories it occupies in Gaza, "not even in exchange for hostages." The Hostages and Missing Families Forum said that the plan proves that the Netanyahu government decided to "give up on the hostages." The government decided not to establish a state commission of inquiry into October 7. (Haaretz) 

 

"There is a painful truth at the heart of this war: Israel's military campaign, while degrading Hamas' military capabilities, is also devastating the lives of ordinary Palestinians. If there is to be any hope of ending this war without planting the seeds of the next generation's extremists, the strategy must change" – Lieutenant Colonel (Res.) Peter Lerner

Zionism and the Shema

Rav Hirsch:

It was not the land that Moses had been commanded to proclaim to his people at the outset of his mission as מורשה, as the inheritance they were to preserve (Ex. 6,8). The Law, to be translated into full reality upon that soil, was to be the true מורשה, the one true, everlasting inheritance, the one true center around which the nation and its leaders were to gather as one united community. Herein lay the goal and the destiny, the character and the significance of the people.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch "The Kehillah," Collected Writings, Vol. VI, p. 62


The land of the Divine Torah is there for the people who live in it. Its most valuable product, the purpose and goal of the whole of God's Blessing directed to it, is every human life nourished by it, through its means able to dedicate itself to making God's Torah into a realisation. The land is only given on the condition of every human life respected as being unassailably sacred to the Torah. One drop of innocent blood shed and no notice taken of it drops a stitch in the bond which connects the land with the nation and both with God. (see verses 33 and 34). This holding human life to be so sacred is to be made evident immediately on taking possession of the land in the division of it by instituting the arrangement which the Torah had already referred to in the fundamental laws of Torah social life. (Ex. XXI, 13).

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch on Bamidbar 35:10

Why Fires?

 All of Israel smells like smoke right now. What is Ha-Shem trying to tell us? 

Destruction is not the goal

"The Lord will cause your enemies who rise up against you, to be beaten before you; they will come out against you in one direction, but they will flee from you in seven directions." (Devarim 28:7)

"The Torah's ways are pleasant ways and all its paths are peace." (1) Therefore even the defeat of the enemies of the Jewish people need not lead to the annihilation of those foes. Instead, they will flee from the Jewish people but continue to live, thereby enabling them to make peace with the Jewish people and ultimately conduct themselves according to G-ds desires, observing the Seven Universal Laws Commanded to Noach and his descendants." (2)

Lubavitcher Rebbe

Likutei Sichos, Vol. 29, p. 307 in The Divine Prism, p. 210.

(1) Proverbs 3:17

(2) Mishneh Torah Hilchos Melachim 9:1

The real never again

 “When, during the reign of Hadrian, the uprising led by Bar Kochba proved a disastrous error, it became essential that the Jewish people be reminded for all times of another important fact; namely, that Israel must never again attempt to restore its national independence by its own power; it was to entrust its future as a nation solely to Divine Providence. Therefore when the nation, crushed by this new blow, had recovered its breath and hailed even the permission to give a decent burial to the hundreds of thousands who had fallen about Betar as the dawn of a better day, the sages who met at Yavneh added yet another blessing to the prayer for the restoration of Jerusalem. This fourth blessing is an acknowledgement that it has always been G-d and G-d alone Who has given us, and still gives us to this very day, that good in which we have had cause to rejoice; and that for future good, too, we may look to none other but G-d, and none besides Him." 

R' Samson Raphael Hirsch, Commentary to the Prayer Book, p. 703