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The passing of Leonard Cohen was the source of great mourning in Israel. The Canadian Jewish legend had always seen himself as a brother to all Israelis.
During his nearly 60-year music career, Cohen often visited Israel and even worked on a kibbutz for a time in the 1970s.
But his most notable visit came during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when he put a European tour on hold and rushed to the Sinai to be with Israel’s frontline troops. His impromptu first performance in the desert dust standing amid tanks and other military equipment was a huge source of comfort to Israel.
Cohen himself was so overwhelmed by the experience that he retreated to a rock at the corner of the encampment and penned the popular song “Lover Lover Lover.” In the final verses of the song, Cohen offered encouragement to Israel’s soldiers:
And may the spirit of this songMay it rise up pure and freeMay it be a shield for youA shield against the enemy
For a full eight weeks, Cohen traveled with famed Israeli musician Matti Caspi, visiting the widely dispersed Israel Army camps across the Sinai and uplifting the exhausted soldiers fighting for the survival of the Jewish state.
Cohen at the time was already a world-famous musician and performer, having previously given two concerts in Israel. Caspi later recalled how he, Cohen and two other popular Israeli singers - Oshik Levi and Pupik Arnon - drove from base to base in an old Ford Falcon. The quartet called themselves the “Geneva Conference” after the international forum that was attempting to bring an end to the bloody conflict.
His traveling companions noted that despite his international star status, Cohen refused a special tent or room, preferring instead to sleep on the ground amongst the soldiers.
Many of the soldiers who met Cohen during his desert tour told of the great love he had for the people of Israel. When he returned to perform in Tel Aviv seven years later, Cohen told the audience about how the courage of those soldiers had inspired him.
Shortly after the Yom Kippur War and his time in the Sinai, Cohen published one of his best albums, New Skin for the Old Ceremony. The lyrics of several of the hit songs were clearly influence by the war and his experiences with the Israeli troops.
In the upcoming December issue of Israel Today Magazine, I write more about Leonard Cohen, who was an inspiration to so many Israelis, myself included.
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What might happen if Muslims and Jews prayed for each other? (Flickr )
What, an Egyptian Muslim Praying for Bereaved Jewish Families?
This became all the more so after the 1973 Yom Kippur War when, albeit that Israel won, the notion that Egypt and Syria would attack Israel on the holiest and most sacred day of the Jewish calendar underscored their ultimate intentions. The university town in which I grew up was a magnet for intellectuals and scientists, and I remember having an Egyptian girl Nahla, in my fifth-grade class. I viewed her with distrust despite the fact that we were only 10.
My perception began to change in the late 1970s when I met Arab relatives who were lovely (that's another long story), and when Israel and Egypt signed a peace agreement in 1979. Albeit in suburban New Jersey, my father was in his glory seeing a light at the end of the tunnel at least with the largest and most powerful Arab country ending its state of war with Israel. Of course, Israel hasn't known a day of peace since then, with all but one other Arab country still being at war with us. But, it was and remains a point for optimism and gratitude.
Over the years, I have gotten to know Arabs in a variety of settings. I have worked for and with Arabs, hired Arabs to work for me, and befriended many. Living in the Judean Mountains south of Bethlehem, I interact with Arabs almost daily. I'm both older and more mature now, and know that not all Arabs are bad and not all want to kill us. Many want to live in peace with us. Unfortunately, many still don't.
Not a week (perhaps a day) goes by when some Israeli family is not observing the anniversary of the death of a loved one, killed in war or terrorism. We have lost about 24,000 people since Israel was reborn, about one a day since May 1948. This coming week, one of the biggest collective national traumas will be revisited in the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Thousands of Israelis were killed. "Children" my age have grown up without fathers for the last four decades.
Despite the time that's past, the national trauma is made up of tens of thousands of personal losses. As Israelis flock to military cemeteries to remember their husbands, brothers, sons and fathers this week, old wounds will be opened and decades past will flash back to the 1970s, remembering those lost, for those old enough to remember.
In the ensuing years since Israel and Egypt made peace, there's also been some degree of reconciliation. I've heard of many accounts of "reunions" of veterans of the Yom Kippur War from both sides, where once enemies on opposite sides of a bloody battlefield have embraced and put the past in the past. Sometimes they bring their children or grandchildren to show hope for the future.
Recognizing the grief that was being felt by thousands who lost a loved one in Israel's most recent war, I launched a project this summer to receive prayers for the bereaved families. Prayers came from 44 U.S. states and 45 countries. Among the most outstanding was the prayer received from a friend in Egypt, a Muslim peace activist.
Ahmed Meligy's impassioned prayer underscored the notion of reconciliation. We're too young to remember the trauma of the 1973 war vividly and personally, but I couldn't help hear in his words echoes of some of the reconciliation about which I have read over these past decades. It's hopeful and inspiring. It's brave, and I even expressed my concern for him and his safety in participating in this prayer project.
Having a prayer from an Egyptian Muslim for bereaved Israeli families, for Israel in general, and indeed all the Jewish people is a bright ray of hope in a region that's so dark and from which millions are fleeing. That's especially so this week, during the Ten Days of Repentance, the most sacred season on the Jewish calendar, and especially with Yom Kippur upon us, our most solemn day of the year, but also the anniversary of the beginning of the war that left more than 2,600 dead and more than 11,000 wounded.
There's more than enough hate and violence to go around, but listening to Ahmed's words is inspiring. He is part of the process of healing, reconciliation and indeed peace. Similarly, Heart to Heart gives hope and comfort, of course for all Israeli Jews whether the victim of a terrorist attack or heart attack. But by supporting Israel's national ambulance, EMS and blood service, Heart to Heart also helps Israeli Arabs, Syrian Arabs injured in their own civil war, Palestinian Arabs suffering disease or requiring all kinds of medical attention, even terrorists who have committed bloody attacks against Israeli Jews.
Some might say this is crazy, but the affirmation of the sanctity of life that too many of our neighbors don't respect, does indeed provide comfort, healing and reconciliation. It's impossible to reconcile the hate with which so many Palestinian Arabs are raised and the fact that as many as a dozen Palestinians from Gaza alone are treated with care, respect and outstanding medical attention that Israel's national ambulance, EMS and blood service are known for.
Ahmed's message and that of Heart to Heart are ones of shared humanity. When I first received his prayer, I listened while driving and was stirred both by his words, but also by the background music. It struck me because it's a familiar Jewish prayer, but one that is relevant to all humanity exalting God, the Creator of the universe.
"God is the Lord of all creation
Blessed and praised is He by every soul
His greatness and goodness fill the universe
Knowledge and wisdom surround Him
He is exalted above the celestial beings
And adorned in glory above the chariot
Purity and justice stand before His throne
Kindness and mercy are in His glorious presence
Good are the luminaries which our God created,
made with knowledge, wisdom and insight
He placed in them energy and power
To have dominion over the world
Full of splendor they radiate brightness;
Beautiful is their brilliance throughout the world
They rejoice in their rising and exult in their setting
Performing with reverence the will of their Creator
Glory and honor do they give to His name,
And joyous song to His majestic fame
He called forth the sun, and it shone;
He saw fit to regulate the form of the moon
All the hosts of heaven give Him praise;
All the celestial beings attribute glory and grandeur."
Ahmed Meligy's message is simple and should be shared widely in the hope that it will inspire others. It's especially relevant the week of Yom Kippur, a time of healing for tens of thousands of veterans and bereaved families but also as, according to Jewish tradition, we honor and worship God in whose hands all our fate rests, and whose creation honors Him.
Jonathan Feldsteinwas born and educated in the U.S. and immigrated to Israel in 2004. He is married and the father of six. Throughout his life and career, he has been blessed by the calling to fellowship with Christian supporters of Israel and shares experiences of living as an Orthodox Jew in Israel. He writes a regular column for charismanews.com's Standing With Israel.
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In January 1985, as a colonel in the Israeli Air Force, I was running a course for high-ranking officers of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), focused on lessons from Israel’s wars. One of the case studies to be discussed was the battle of Um-Katef/Abu-Ageila, in the Six-Day War, when the division of Gen. Ariel Sharon broke the backbone of the Egyptian army and enabled the breakthrough into Sinai, thus paving the way to Israel’s great land victory. This highly complex combined operation, executed impeccably at night, has been studied since in many military academies all around the world as a model for generalship at its best. Needless to say, I was going to invite Sharon to speak about this battle.
The problem was that Sharon was in New York at that time, suing Time magazine for libel. The trial was nearing its end, so I called Sharon’s hotel in New York, hoping to speak with his close friend and confidant, Uri Dan. Instead, Sharon himself answered. “Of course,” he said immediately. “I’ll be in Tel Aviv in a few days and will speak to your course.” Then he had a very strange request: that an officer should wait for him at the airport, to take him straight to the IDF History Unit. When he arrived after the long flight, instead of going home, he spent six hours studying the details of the battle he had fought 18 years before.
The following day, he arrived at our course and gave a mesmerizing lecture. Escorting him to his car, I couldn’t help asking why he needed to refresh his memory about a battle he had probably known by heart. He looked at me and said: “Young man, I just spoke to a group of serious people. You have to prepare for that.” Then he added: “Whatever you do, do it properly.” (“Kmo she’zarich,” in Hebrew.)
Actually, for Sharon, kmo she’zarich wasn’t exactly “doing things properly”; in his dictionary, the more precise translation was “doing things as they should be done,” with Sharon himself deciding the criteria. Sixty years ago, when the newborn Jewish state fell victim to ceaseless terrorist infiltrations on its Jordanian and Egyptian borders, and the IDF seemed incapable of stopping them, Major Sharon established Unit 101, a semi-partisan band of warriors who spread havoc in Jordan and Egypt using highly unconventional methods. Many in the IDF and the Israeli government felt that this wasn’t the proper way to do things, and Sharon would pay a price with his military career, but Israel regained its deterrence.
Retiring from active duty in the summer of 1973 and hungry for a political career, Sharon was confronted by the hostile Laborite establishment, which had ruled Israel for ages and had viewed the charismatic general with suspicion. Instead of bowing to the existing powers, Sharon surprised them by establishing the Likud Party, which, four years later, snatched the hegemony from Labor.
During the Yom Kippur War, he did a lot of things that his superiors thought were improper — so much so that they even talked about firing him. Luckily for Israel, they didn’t. His performance during the first dark days of the war, when he calmly and expertly led his troops in containing the invading Egyptian army, will go down in our history as the quintessence of Israeli resilience. Not to mention his crossing of the Suez Canal, which turned the tables on the Egyptians.
In 1982, as defense minister, when he felt he’d had just enough of the Palestinian intransigence coming from Lebanon, he manipulated Menachem Begin’s government into the first Lebanon War. Again, was it done kmo she’zarich? Depends on whom you’re asking. The Kahan Commission of Inquiry, established after the Sabra and Shatila massacre carried out by Lebanese Christians, then Israel’s allies, obviously thought it wasn’t, and sent the defense minister home. Sharon, on the other hand, believed that he had done the right thing by kicking Yasser Arafat and his terrorist apparatus from Lebanon, thus hammering in the message that you can’t mess with Israel for so long and get away with it.
Ten years later, as housing minister, he was entrusted with the awesome task of accommodating 1 million Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union (the equivalent of accommodating 50 million immigrants in the United States in one year). He stood up to the historic occasion. Did he do it properly? The state comptroller, who had investigated it later, didn’t think so and reprimanded Sharon for ignoring budgetary constraints and normal government procedures. Yet, by giving these people a home in Israel, Sharon achieved one of the greatest feats in the history of our country.
Finally, as prime minister, he came to the conclusion that Israel shouldn’t be ruling millions of Arabs, and that it has to adjust its borders accordingly. When he met opposition within his own Likud Party, he again broke away from the impasse by creating a new party, Kadima. The way in which he disengaged from Gaza was not the proper one: He should have given Gaza to Abu Mazen, instead of letting it fall into the hands of Hamas. But, again, this was Sharon’s way: He didn’t believe that there was a credible Palestinian partner and therefore did what he thought was good for Israel, unilaterally.
Today, when many Israelis feel that their political leaders can’t accomplish much in any given area, the imminence of Sharon’s final departure, even after a long illness, is especially painful. Controversial as he was during his lifetime, Israelis today salute a warrior and a leader who — for better or worse — knew how to do things kmo she’zarich.
Col. Uri Dromi, who now serves in the Israeli Air Force Reserve, is director general of the Jerusalem Press Club. From 1992 to 1996, Dromi was director of Israel’s Government Press Office, serving as chief spokesman for the Rabin and Peres governments. As former prime minister and retired Gen. Ariel Sharon’s health was in serious decline this week following eight years spent in a coma, the Journal invited Dromi to reflect on Sharon’s legacy.
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Fmr Israeli Commander: God Protected us in Battle By Chris Mitchell CBN News Middle East Bureau Chief Friday, September 13, 2013
JERUSALEM, Israel -- Like most Israelis just before the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Effie Eitam didn't expect an Arab attack on the holiest day of the Jewish year. Eitam was leading a routine reconnaissance patrol on the Golan Heights. Moments later, he was facing the might of the Syrian army.
"I saw hundreds of Syrian tanks moving forward, and they were painted in a camouflage of green and yellow," the former Israel Defense Forces commander told CBN News. "And I remember, I thought to myself that they're kind of prehistoric lizards, you know, who just came out of a cave because they came out of nowhere. I didn't see them before."
For days, the surprise attacks dealt a serious -- nearly fatal -- blow to Israel. The men on the front lines bore the brunt of the battle.
"The first three days were hell, you know," Eitam continued. "We didn't have any anti-tank weapons, and we had to shoot them with American World War II-made bazookas, you know, a very primitive anti-tank rocket launcher, and we had to shoot them from distances of 50-60 meters [yards]. People just got killed. Some of them were smashed by the tanks, you know, from such a short distance."
During the first few days of the war, the Israelis paid a high price in lives lost. But they held on and contained one of the most fearsome attacks ever made against the nation.
When Israel counter-attacked, Eitam received orders for a daring mission: Go behind enemy lines and take the Syrian Division headquarters. Like many commando raids, this assault meant close quarters and face-to-face, sometimes hand-to-hand, combat.
Eitam was a highly trained soldier, but he wasn't prepared for what faced him when he went around a corner in the Syrian bunker.
"We came there and we started to 'clean'-- in other words, to kill -- the generals who were there and their guards. I was throwing hand grenades, shooting, you know, in the broad concrete corridors," he said.
"And then when I turned, behind one of the corners of the corridors, which was full of smoke and dust, I saw a silhouette -- a kind of something coming out of the dust and smoke toward me," he recalled. "I was very sure it's a Syrian soldier, and I took my rifle and I was aiming the rifle and was ready to pull the trigger, and then I saw a bird coming out of the smoke. She just flew behind my head and she stood on my right shoulder."
At first, Eitam thought the bird was actually a bat, living in the cool, dark corridors of the bunker. So in the midst of an intense firefight, he found himself trying to shoo away a bird.
"So I just whipped her out, and she turned again and stood on my left shoulder," he explained. "I didn't have time to have all kinds of arguments with a bird: 'What are you doing here, who are you?' It was in the middle of a shooting battle."
"So I completed the assault and hand grenades and everything. And when I went out of the corridor of the bunker, I saw a dove, a pigeon, standing on my left shoulder. I just tried to let her out of my shoulder. She turned and was very determined not to leave me. I put my hand just like that and she stood on my hand."
Despite Eitan's attempt to get rid of the dove, she stayed with him and his unit for the next 10 days in some of the most intense battles of the Yom Kippur War. During that time, Eitam's unit appeared to have supernatural protection.
"Since we had that angel protecting us, none of my company's soldiers was killed or wounded, and we were involved in very intensive battles," he said. "It's not that we stood in the rear or we sat there. We were involved in the middle of the most bitter battles, but she was there."
"What was unnatural and very interesting was that even in the night, when we had night operations and night battles, where usually these birds, pigeons, do not move at night -- they don't have a very good night sight -- she was with us patrolling, a little bit forward, looking (at) what's going on around (us), sitting here," he said, pointing to his shoulder.
Finally, after nearly two weeks of frontline conflict, Eitam and his unit were sent to the rear for a rest.
"And when I put my feet down in the vehicle that brought us from the front to the territory of the State of Israel, she flew away and disappeared," he said. "You know, you could have a little bit of questions whether it happened or not. But it didn't happen to me in the middle of a desert or me being alone in the middle of a jungle. It was in front of the eyes of thousands of soldiers."
Since that experience, through many commando operations, the sense of the miraculous and God's protection has never left Eitam -- the same protection promised in the 23rd Psalm.
"I trained myself to see miracles around me, around the operations that I conducted. It's as we know he said, quoting Psalm 23 in Hebrew: "Even when I am in the valley of death and evil, I'm not afraid because God is with me…."
Yom Kippur War revelations underline gravity of Iran dilemma facing Israel today
Testimonies from 1973 declassified on Thursday show decision-makers’ staggering incompetence and arrogance. Israelis can only hope lessons were truly learned
A wrecked Israeli tank during the early days of the Yom Kippur War (Photo credit: Wikimedia
The Yom Kippur War, in Israel, marked the end of the age of innocence.
Generals, previously untouchable, were stripped of their commands. The prime minister was ousted from office by popular demand. The tremors of the debacle eventually pried open the grip of the Labor-led left and, for the first time in the history of Zionism, ushered in an ideologically right-wing leadership.
Thursday’s revelations from previously classified testimony to the Agranat Commission, which investigated the war, fill in the already grim picture of October 1973 — of arrogance tinged with ineptitude at the very top, which produced, for some, a lack of faith in leaders that endures to this day.
The commander of the northern front, Yitzhak Hofi, testified to the Agranat Commission that despite the evidence of an enormous armored presence near the border, and despite explicit information passed on to him from the command’s chief intelligence officer, he was told, just days before the war, that the chance of war was low and that the reports were insignificant. When he called military intelligence headquarters, Hofi told the commission, none of the relevant officers was on duty. They were at home.
Only at six in the morning on Yom Kippur, October 6, was he told that war would break out and even then the stated time was six in the evening rather than the actual two in the afternoon.
Alfred Eini, an aide to Mossad chief Zvi Zamir, shocked commission members when he said that Zamir apparently “didn’t get” the urgency of a midnight cable from the Mossad’s man in Cairo. He told the five commission members – two former IDF chiefs of staff, two sitting Supreme Court justices and one state comptroller – that “never before” had the man asked for an urgent personal meeting with the head of the Mossad and that Zamir seemed drowsy, even though it was the Mossad that had been warning of imminent war for days.
Finally, the prime minister’s military attaché told the commission that the Mossad’s opinion of imminent all-out war on two fronts was never brought to him in an explicit manner; on account of inter-agency bureaucracy, it was buried in a sheath of material.
These are details that flesh out the picture of what Abraham Rabinovich, author of “The Yom Kippur War”, called “an existential earthquake” — a war that claimed 2,688 Israeli lives and served as “a standing reminder of the consequences of shallow thinking and arrogance.”
Rabinovich, in his superb reportage of the war, spread the blame around: from military intelligence head Eli Zeira to Prime Minister Golda Meir to southern front commander Shmuel “Gordish” Gonen – a tragic figure who was deemed unworthy of further command positions and exiled himself to central Africa.
Today, though, with Israel facing the looming challenge of a nuclear Iran, Israeli political and military leaders seem split: many of the military men look at 1973 and point to the failures of leadership; many of the politicians, certainly the defense minister, have their time clocks set on 1967, when the need for preemptive action trumped staunch American resistance.
Back in 1973, Israel’s current Defense Minister Ehud Barak returned from studies in the United States to command a tank battalion in the Yom Kippur War. He fought in the southern front and even helped rescue the trapped paratroopers in one of the deadliest and most senseless battles of the war, in what is known as the Chinese Farm.
When Barak looks at today’s reality, and especially at an Iran closing in on the bomb, he evidently focuses not on the appalling incompetence of 1973 but on the heroics of the late spring of 1967. Numerous recently retired security chiefs have made plain their opposition to preemptive action in Iran, and some of the current security chiefs are widely reported to share the view.
But Barak has repeatedly indicated that preemptive action now, however risky and complex, is far preferable to grappling with a nuclear Iran later on. Several months ago, according to Channel 10 reporter Alon Ben-David, he told the IDF General Staff that “with this kind of General Staff we never would have won in the Six-Day War.”
Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad, by contrast, has acknowledged that he views today’s challenges through the lens of the Yom Kippur War. He told Ilana Dayan in an unprecedented television interview in which he openly aired his disagreement with a sitting prime minister — terming a preemptive strike against Iran at this time a disaster — that he was speaking from his “formative experience” in 1973.
Dagan fought on the eastern side of the Suez Canal 39 years ago. He was part of a small commando team in Ariel Sharon’s division that hunted down Egyptian commandos on Israeli soil. The lack of coherence from the leadership, both before and during the war, sharply increased the number of Israeli dead. The leadership emitted “a sense of complete confidence,” Dagan said bitterly. “We will know everything. We know, there won’t be a war.”
His primary lesson of the war, Dagan said, was that just because “people were elected it does not render them utterly immune from making mistakes.”
Avigdor Kahalani, a decorated IDF veteran who commanded an armored battalion on the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War, repelling a far bigger Syrian force with a hastily assembled tank unit amid battlefield chaos, said Thursday that the chain of failure that so afflicted the Israeli leadership in 1973 simply “could not happen today.” Sufficient safeguards had long since been instituted, Kahalani said, to ensure that vital channels of communication worked effectively and that critical evidence could not be overlooked.
Israelis can only fervently hope that this is indeed the case, as the country’s leaders weigh fateful decisions on Iran — their mindsets shaped both by the preemptive successes of 1967, and the hubris and incompetence of 1973.