Many of us, after absorbing the magnitude of the fear experienced by all the passengers on a flight that came within a hair’s breadth of a personal tragedy and a national disaster, are asking the most basic question: So who is responsible for this madness, which could end this way from the moment we board a flight to anywhere until we get off?
Netanyahu rushed to Ben-Gurion Airport, and his aides publicized the embraces with the incomparable Yaniv Hayun. Butjust before the memorial ceremonies for the pogrom we endured on Simchat Torah three years ago, we learned once again that the concept of accepting responsibility does not exist here.
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So who is responsible for this madness, which could end this way from the moment we board a flight to anywhere until we get off?
(Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad)
Mr. Netanyahu, you are responsible for the fact that such a “breach,” as you described co-pilot Hammam al-Hamami’s intention to crash the plane with everyone aboard on Israeli soil, flew an aircraft from Dubai to Ben-Gurion Airport. Mr. Netanyahu, you are supposed to be running this country, which invests hundreds of millions in securing passengers traveling to and from Israel. Did no one wake you up again? Our tragedy is that on your watch, Mr. Netanyahu, the gravest disasters and failures involving matters of life and death occur. And at least until Oct. 27, we will not know whether your unwillingness to accept responsibility for all these terrible events will cost you your position.
“We could have secured the release of all the hostages a year before it happened, without affecting the outcome of the war.” Maj. Gen. (res.) Nitzan Alon made that stark and unequivocal statement in Washington over the weekend. Please take note of this assertion from one of the most credible figures in the Israeli establishment, the man who led the effort to secure the release of all the hostages in the face of a callous government that promised “total victory.” According to Alon, all the government spokespeople’s talk of “total victory” turned out to be “baseless lies.”
We learned once again that the concept of accepting responsibility does not exist here. Netanyahu
(Photo: ANGELA WEISS / AFP)
To Gadi Eisenkot and his partners in the effort to persuade voters, I would recall the words attributed to Rabbi Akiva, who began studying Torah later in life: “It is not the force of a drop of water that wears away a rock, but its persistence.”
Having covered Israeli election campaigns since the days of Menachem Begin, I wonder every time why they want so badly to become prime minister. Harry Truman, a president about whom I have read almost everything ever written, said: “My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.”
I believe with all my heart that Gadi Eisenkot entered politics out of a powerful desire to set things right and offer our people a kind of leadership they have not known before.
Gadi Eisenkot
(Photo: AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
I rarely encounter a few lines of poetry that express an entire world. Such is the case with Shulamit Apfel’s poem “Footprints in the Sand”: “Even if every finger has a melody of its own, the song is still only another journey whose end will be written by time, for we are only grass and sorrow, incomplete writing and footprints in the sand.”
The search for meaning in our lives finds fascinating forms of expression. Last Tuesday, I visited the home of Rabbi Matanya Amar in Ramat Gan. It is a third-floor apartment with no elevator. Many people, secular and religious, came to the sukkah built on the roof. They talked about life and interspersed their hours together with moving songs.
One of the songs performed by a group that joined the gathering was “A’ufa Eshkona,” a piyyut, or Jewish liturgical poem, by Rabbi Yitzhak Abuhatzeira: “I will fly away and dwell afar, I will wander far away. In the wilderness I will lodge, and perhaps I will find my beloved ... My beloved fled from me, went away and left me. Which path shall I take, that I too may go? ... I went out to seek my beloved among friends.”
In other words, another way of searching for meaning. And lest anyone get the wrong idea, no one there tried to draw me into a religious life. I simply came away with some new friends.