Deja vue again

The thought of my daughter and her family cowering in their safety corridor in Beersheva while enemy missiles fly overhead seemed familiar to me. Then I realized why, I had the same experience when I was a kid growing up in London during the Blitz of WWII, when bombs were being dropped on us by the Germans and the buzz-bombs and doodle-bugs were flying over. How is it that history is repeating itself, when the founding of Israel was supposed to change Jewish history fundamentally?

Of course, there are many differences. In London it wasn’t only Jews who were being targeted, all of the population was in danger. But, actually Hitler had given an order to the Luftwaffe to concentrate on East London because of the preponderance of Jews living there. Luckily the British managed to trick the Germans into believing that their missiles were hitting further west (by modifying newspaper reports) and so they kept lowering the trajectory, thus saving East London and hitting the countryside in rural Kent. However, East London was decimated by the German bombing and I grew up there in the 1950s surrounded by ruins.

You may have noted the word “cowering”, not exactly correct. First, we have the Iron Dome anti-missile system that has a 90% success rate, second we have a very active IAF that has wreaked death and destruction in Gaza and third, our people no longer “cower.” We might tactically take cover, but our strategy is to protect our population (not one Israeli was killed by more than 200 missiles in the lastest round) and hit back even stronger than the enemy. They lost 22 PAlestinain terrorists most of whom were launching missiles. So Iran watch out, a few more steps towards nuclear weapons and the die is cast. We intend to break the chain, so that my greatgrandchildren will not have to take cover from anybody’s missiles.