VOL. 54                     NEWSLETTER          JULY/AUG. 2006

Dear Friends of Israel and “Or Tzion”,

the peace of G-d be with you in Yeshua His Son, our Lord, and fill you with the joy of His Presence.

On the morning of Wednesday, July 12th, I sat down to breakfast and turned on CNN. The first thing I heard was that 8 Israeli soldiers had been killed and 2 abducted by the Lebanese Shiite terror organization Hizbullah. I turned to our Israeli news channels to hear our local reports. Later in the afternoon, Israeli news channels were still covering this event. Everyone was glued to the TV,  computers and  radios wondering – will this mean war?

Israel is as tight and tense as the string on a bow, and tired of the never-ending intifada, Jew-hatred, political and media manipulation. And I am "news-weary!" Don't want to listen to them anymore! 

For 19 years since we arrived 1987, the aggression against Israel has been relentless. First, the Palestinian leadership's lies and Arafat's Fatah suicide attacks were the order of the day, and now the rockets from Gaza upon Israel's Southern cities and the even more deadly Hizballah terror and bloodshed.

After the tiny new nation of Israel won the first wars against an enemy overwhelmingly superior in manpower and weapons, Israelis looked with confidence into the future. Surely now the Arab world would finally accept them and make peace with them. Years later we still are at war -- with a murderous “intifada”, a new sort of holocaust.

Now Israel’s hope for peace is foiled again, and as the proverb says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick...”¹ Not enough with this, almost one million people (the entire north) are forced underground while rockets rain upon their cities (by now more than 1,500 since July 24th). 

When I first came to Israel in 1983, most striking was that Israelis live life with a passion, celebrating it with such an intensity that even the air seems to have a heart beat, saying “life… life… life!” Israelis live life as though it could end at any moment – and so it does for too many. Throughout the past 3,000 years, over and over again Jews have lost all, even their very lives, under duress of pogroms and genocides aimed at annihilating them altogether. Hence, life has become something not taken for granted and is celebrated, tasted and lived to the fullest.

Nevertheless, Israel's daily reality is inescapable and this becomes so clear during something as mundane as breakfast. Israel’s hope for peace is deferred once again.

On Sunday, July 16th - again  at breakfast - the news reported a barrage of rockets hitting Kiryat Shmonah, Nahariya, Acco, Tiberias and Haifa, even Safed, Afula and the Galilee and several Kibbutzim. One rocket fell upon the very base in Karmiel where our grand daughter Isabelle first trained in Helicopter maintenance and where some of her friends remain. Haifa’s train depot received a blow resulting in 8 deaths and dozens of wounded. It was an all too familiar sight – puddles of blood everywhere with men picking up body parts and pieces of flesh.