An Iranian missile intercepted in the sky over Jerusalem (Photo taken by the author)
Author's note: The first segment of this blog will include my personal story about what I've been experiencing in the last two weeks. The second segment will include more general thoughts about the situation while the third segment includes my thoughts on what is likely to happen next. Readers should feel free to read the segments they're interested in and skip what they're not interested in.
Segment 1, my personal story.
As I'm sitting here writing this in my Jerusalem apartment, it's been almost 16 hours since we had an alert for incoming missiles. Over the last two weeks, we've had an average of 2 per day, and they've come at all hours of the day and night. Our friends in Tel Aviv are getting many more alerts then we are, and we see reports on the news that in some communities, people have basically moved into neighborhood shelters and even the subway system in Tel Aviv, setting up cots and tents, organizing makeshift schools for children, trying to work remotely if they can and otherwise doing their best to cope.
I'm very grateful that my life has not been disrupted to anything even remotely close to this degree. I've been working remotely from home for almost three years now, so that part of my life has barely changed at all. My wife is also able to work from home, but she goes into her office, which is a short walk away, frequently.
My children are home, doing "distance learning" just like in the bad old days of COVID. For my older son, it kind of makes sense, and he's making the most of it. But my younger son is in a stage of his education when most of what he's supposed to be learning is about how to be with other people in a social setting, how to communicate, how to work together in a group, etc. It's almost impossible to learn that kind of stuff through Zoom. I'm giving both of my sons extra reading to do and trying to find other ways to help them learn useful things, but the undeniable fact is that none of this is a substitute (no pun intended) for being in their regular schools with their teachers and all their little friends. I can only hope that this will not set them back too much.
Needless to say, our wonderful little dog also works from home, and as Snoopy once said, "being a dog is a full-time job."
It's literally true in our dog's case. Her presence in our home, and in the bomb shelter when we need to go down there, has the effect of cheering everyone up, which is badly needed. Some of the other dads who live in our building told me that they are grateful because their children love to pet our dog when we're down in the shelter and it makes them forget to be scared or upset. My hope is that this will help them emerge from this unhappy season without being traumatized. So far, no one is having nightmares or any other tell-tale signs of anxiety, so that's a good start.
It also helps that, as far as I know, there have not been any direct missile impacts here in Jerusalem, but debris from intercepted missiles has fallen here. A few days ago, some shrapnel fell in the parking lot of an apartment building just around the corner from us, causing some superficial damage to the car of someone I know who lives there. That's as close as I've come to being personally impacted, but of course, there are many indirect and less personal impacts on my life because of this war.
Our apartment building is old, and there's some graffiti someone scribbled on the door to the shelter, which includes a date from the summer of 1972. Little, if any, maintenance has been done on the shelter since then. There are old light fixtures but they don't work, so every time we go down there we have to bring flashlights. It's also quite cold down there, especially if the alert comes in the middle of the night, so I put a couple of blankets down there for my wife and children to wrap themselves up in. Other people saw me do that and started doing the same.
I also put other stuff down there, including the 10-liter water cooler I used to take on camping trips in happier times. Fear has a way of drying out one's mouth, and we've gone through three tubes' worth of disposable paper cups in the past two weeks and I've refilled the cooler twice.
My landlord, who owns three apartments in our building, bought a really good first aid kit to put down there, but so far, there's only been a few people who sprained their ankle or had a minor cut on their hands as they rushed to get down into the shelter.
There are grocery and hardware stores within walking distance of our apartment, so we are able to keep ourselves supplied without too much risk. The farthest I've been away from our apartment in the last two weeks is a nearby park, where I take the dog so she can run around a little bit. There is a public shelter near the park, so if there's an alert while we're there, we'll have a safe place to go. Our kehillah has been providing zoom meetings for the regular shabbat service as well as during the week for prayer meetings and children's activities. Once again, this reminds us of the bad old days of COVID, but unlike then, we can look forward to the likelihood of a return to our normal routine in the near-term future.
All in all, for my family and me, it's been an unpleasant but not terrible couple of weeks. If the war ends before the end of March, we'll probably be able to put this behind us and forge ahead without too much trouble and very little damage to our lives overall. But I think there are good reasons to believe that this war won't end before the end of March, and none of us will emerge from it unscathed. I'll talk about why in the second segment.
A US Air Force B-52 Strategic bomber prepares to take off in support of Operation Epic Fury (Photo credit US Department of War)
Segment 2, my thoughts on the general situation regarding Israel and the war with Iran's Ayatollah regime
One of the things that this war has highlighted, which we kind of already knew, is that there are many people in the United States whose hatred and contempt for President Trump is more important to them than every other consideration and every other issue. Many others hate Israel so much that it overrides every other consideration and every other issue. These people WANT this war to be a strategic debacle, which they can blame President Trump and Israel for. So even if it's a strategic success, they'll insist on talking about the ways it was less than fully successful, the mistakes, setbacks, casualties, and problems that have been encountered, as if that's all that anyone should be paying any attention to.
Many other people don't necessarily have any strong feelings one way or the other about the success of failure of this war. They are simply suffering from catastrophic levels of what my British friends would call "bloody-mindedness." They're confused, anxious, frustrated, and angry, and they're looking for someone to blame or even someone to lash out at.
The massive rise in anti-Semitic attacks in the US, Europe, and elsewhere is a symptom of this phenomenon, and I am quite certain it will only increase and accelerate going forward.
There are no rational reasons for this. It is a manifestation in the natural realm of a battle in the spiritual realm. This is a good place to remember something that my favorite Bible teacher, Derek Prince, once said, that "the kingdom of Satan is a kingdom of darkness, and many of the people who are in it, or who serve it, are unaware of it."
Another observation I'd like to add to what Derek Prince said is that in the Book of Daniel, we're given a peak into the spiritual realm, specifically in chapter 10, verses 12-14; Then he said to me, “Do not fear, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand, and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard; and I have come because of your words. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days; and behold, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I had been left alone there with the kings of Persia. Now I have come to make you understand what will happen to your people in the latter days, for the vision refers to many days yet to come.”
So, we should always remember that the demonic "Prince of the kingdom of Persia" is a supernatural being who REALLY has his act together, so much so that he can actually slow down and delay an angel sent by God Himself to carry out an assignment in this world. If he can do that, imagine what else he can do. Imagine the power he has to warp the minds of human beings, sow confusion among them and deceive them.
With all this in mind, it can be observed that many people in the community of geostrategic thinkers, analysts, and commentators are professionally, emotionally, and in many cases even financially invested in the idea that Israel is illegitimate. These people take it as an article of faith that any time something is happening which is good for Israel, it's coming at the expense of others. Any time something happens that is bad for Israel, it's because Israel did something to deserve it and/or Israel is engaging in a "false flag" operation in order to gain sympathy so they can do something even worse to someone else.
Additionally, many clergy and scholars in various religious streams are also heavily invested in false doctrines that can be placed under the general heading of "Replacement Theology," which causes them to regard Israel as inherently illegitimate, so no matter what it does or doesn't do, it's always wrong.
Do I even need to mention the legions of social media influencers who have no idea what they're talking about but have massive numbers of followers who have outsourced their thinking to them? Tucker Carlson is the most visible member of this group, and the things he's been saying lately are so bizarre that even President Trump finally appears to have run out of patience with him. But that is unlikely to convince his long-time followers that Tucker isn't telling them the real truth while everyone else is lying to them.
When watching these proceedings, I am often reminded of the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin, specifically the detail provided in Mark 14:56; "For many bore false witness against Him, but their testimonies did not agree."
However, in the current situation, there is general agreement among critics of this war against Iran, that Israel convinced President Trump to launch the war against the advice of his own advisors and (obviously) against the best interests of the United States.
There is no direct evidence that this is how it happened. There's not even any particularly good reason to think this is how it happened.
But because President Trump hasn't given a clear narrative of his own about what happened, and because there have been some confusing and contradictory statements made by some members of his cabinet, many who are predisposed to blame Israel for anything that happens that they don't like, and many others who hate President Trump and want to see him fail even more then they want to see their own country succeed, feel free to make the assumption that this is how it happened.
This has fueled what was already a toxic brew of anti-Semitism on both the political Left and Right, as well as among various religious and philosophical streams, "know-nothing" isolationist sentiment in the United States, economic chaos and uncertainty (which is also being fueled by the advance of AI and many other developments) and a general breakdown of the circumstances that made life for Jewish people safe and fairly comfortable in Western countries for the last couple of generations.
All of that leads into the next segment.
Jewish people making Aliyah to Israel (Photo credit Karen Hayesod)
Segment 3, my thoughts about what is likely to happen next
As the great American baseball player, coach and philosopher Yogi Berra once said, "predictions are hard, especially about the future."
With that important caveat having been put into the record, I need to add another one: I've never claimed to be a prophet.
However, I'm going to make some predictions about what's coming next.
To start off with, this war against Iran has already caused tremendous damage to the flow of hydrocarbons to the global economy. This was inevitable, and it's been cited by many of the war's critics as a reason why President Trump should not have launched this war in the first place. These critics ignore the fact that this day would have come sooner or later, one way or another, and that it was never going to be an easy problem to solve. It would have been even more difficult to solve it if Iran played this card in some future conflict that started on their terms instead of ours.
Critics and "Monday Morning Quarterbacks" always craft a deceptive narrative, emphasizing the things that support the points they're trying to make while ignoring the points that refute it. It's lame, stupid, and absurd, and so it is easy to dismiss them.
But in this case, we really can't dismiss them, because the difficult economic situation that hundreds of millions of people in the United States, Canada, Western Europe and elsewhere in the world were already feeling even before this war started is about to get much worse. Most of these people don't really have the time, patience or inclination to do a deep dive into all the reasons why this war was necessary; they're just going to look at the fact that their situation is getting more difficult as a result of it, and they're going to be looking for someone to blame. The false narrative that "Israel dragged President Trump into this war" is going to give these people the scapegoat they're looking for, and that's going to lead to a terrible wave of violence against Jewish and Israeli people all over the world. It's already happening, and it's going to get much worse.
I predict that Christian people who are outspoken in their support of Israel are also going to be targeted.
This is going to fuel a massive rise in Aliyah of Jewish people to Israel, and that's going to create an economic boom in Israel, and that's going to prompt all kinds of resentment and anger against Israel and Jewish people because the people who love to hate Israel and the Jews want Israel and the Jews to fail and be miserable. When we're not, it's going to make them even angrier and more resentful. This will cause them to lash out more, which will prompt even more Jewish people to make Aliyah.
Once again, these are manifestations in the natural realm of things going on in the spiritual realm.
If you're still reading at this point, I would urge you to very seriously and diligently pray into the issues I've tried to raise in this blog and if you can do more than pray, please don't waste any more time but get to it, because there's not much time left.
That's what I've got for you this week brothers and sisters. I hope it blessed someone.
