One year after October 7
Opinion

One year after October 7

Max L. Kleinman

Max Kleinman of Fairfield is the CEO emeritus of the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest and president of the Fifth Commandment Foundation.

Writing on the first anniversary of the October 7 massacre, Tom Friedman asserts that no side in the conflict has won “the battle of the story.” He is so contemptuous of Prime Minister Netanyahu and fixated on his illusory, for now, quest for a two-state solution that he has blinded himself to facts on the ground.

Friedman grew up in the predominantly Jewish Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. It had a communal supplementary school for Conservative synagogues, Talmud Torah, which he attended. The school was immortalized in the Coen brothers’ movie “A Serious Man,” their take on the Book of Job.

When I was the director of the Minneapolis Jewish Federation, I moderated a closing event celebrating the conclusion of our Operation Exodus Campaign for Soviet Jewry, which raised more than $12 million. Our guest speaker was Tom Friedman, who regaled us with his experience of growing up Jewish in St. Louis Park.

Years later he has seemingly downplayed the Jewish story he was taught at Talmud Torah, and that a year after October 7 we are all relearning. That the Jewish people still exist, while our enemies have disappeared into the dustbin of history.

The Israelis and secondarily we Jews are the most resilient people on the planet. Three years after the most devastating horror of the Holocaust, the State of Israel was born.

A year after the worst intelligence failure in Israel’s history, rivaling Pearl Harbor and 9/11, Israel is on the cusp of vanquishing its enemies in the most dramatic way, using brute force and incredible guile and technology.

Israel, with the help of the U.S. military, has displayed the most sophisticated missile defense system in history, bringing the once quixotic “Star Wars” fantasy into reality, while saving thousands of lives.

And now Israel is the only force in the world fighting Iran, a murderous regime supplying arms and drones to Putin’s killing machine. As such, it is fighting the free world’s fight, while the latter is largely sitting on the sidelines.

The IDF has achieved so much while largely maintaining its standard of tohar haneshek — purity of arms. Despite fighting in the most difficult urban landscape with underground tunnels, civilians used as human shields, and schools, hospitals and mosques used for military purposes, Israel has achieved the best ratio of limiting civilian casualties against killing combatants in history. This is according to leading generals in the U.S., Great Britain, and elsewhere.

And as David Makovsky has written, “taken together, Israel’s operational successes have led to the belief that Israel’s vaunted deterrence, shattered last October 7th, has been restored in no small measure…. Some analysts have equated Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah … as the biggest unalloyed victory on par with the 1976 rescue of Israeli hostages in Entebbe.” So the IDF invoked the biblical imperative to remember Amalek.

In the Middle East, the hard power that Israel has unleashed, not the soft power of diplomacy and sanctions, earns the respect of Arab countries and may lead the way to Israel-Saudi normalization.

Our story also reminds us that the moral rot of antisemitism re-emerged after being submerged for decades after the horrors of the Holocaust was revealed. We need significant reform in higher education and K-12 schools to respect diversity and basic civility, while invoking the power of the government to cut funding for offenders who allow a hostile environment for Jews to fester.

Finally, a year later with our sense of isolation and bonding with the State of Israel, we have witnessed a surge of greater engagement by Jews with other Jews with record-setting philanthropic support for Israel and record-breaking demonstrations of support.

As I was joined by three thousand others on October 7th at B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills, we grieved for our losses, prayed for the release of the hostages, but also joined in singing Israeli songs as we reveled in the power of k’lal Yisrael, the enduring Jewish story.

Max Kleinman of Fairfield was the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest from 1995 to 2014. He is the president of the Fifth Commandment Foundation and consultant for the Jewish Community Legacy Project.

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