“We pilots of the (Israel) Air Force, flying in the skies above the camp of horrors, arose from the ashes of the millions of victims … and promise to be the shield of the Jewish people and its nation of Israel.”
So said the lead pilot some years ago in the Israeli Air Force flyover of Auschwitz, in commemoration of the million or more Jews murdered there, and the other five million murdered in the Holocaust.
The pilot, Amir Eshel, former Chief of the Israeli Air Force, is the child of Holocaust survivors … and victims. More victims than survivors, as much of his relatives perished in the death camps. His mother Edna survived to make the long journey to the new Jewish State, where her son, and many other sons of survivors like her, grew up to be the guardians of Israel.
The answer to Auschwitz.
In keeping with Eshel’s pledge, this “Shield of Israel” flew over a thousand miles in their fighter jets emblazoned with the Jewish star to confront an Iranian enemy pledged to destroy their Jewish State.
If there’s one important lesson Jews have learned from their history — through the Middle Ages, the Inquisitions, the pogroms, the Holocaust — is that when an enemy says they want to kill the Jews, the Jews believe them.
Yet the worst tragedy that could have befallen the Jewish people is not the Holocaust. That would be the second Holocaust. The annihilation of the Jewish state. Israel is one nuclear bomb wide. Seven million Jews in a country the size of New Jersey. Three or four nuclear missiles fired from Tehran and it’s over.
Forever.
The fanatics in Iran have been preaching for decades they’ll destroy Israel, which means killing every last Israeli (read, Jew). They’ve made no secret of it. And with an arsenal that was soon to cross the nuclear threshold, it’s amazing the Israelis waited this long to put an end to the Iranian threat. But they did, and that’s what matters in the end.
Since its resurrection in 1948, Israel has battled the onslaught of the Arabs led by Egypt, and for the past few decades, Iran. Or, as the natives like to remind the world, Persia.
Egypt and Persia.
If the cliche still holds that history repeats itself, look no further. Ancient enemies of Israel stretching back millennia. Yet in the modern era, Egypt, after losing several devastating wars with Israel, finally sought peace. A peace that has held for decades.
Since it appears the modern-day Israelites have finally conquered the Persians, will they follow the example of their Egyptian cousins and rise from their smoldering ruins and seek peace, or will they persist in their quixotic quest to smite the Israelites?
Only time will tell.
But for now Israel has defeated yet another ancient enemy, albeit a far more lethal one today. And it’s a brighter day in Jerusalem because of it.
Israel has won. Israel will survive.
Yet the paradox remains — for far too long, Israel has gazed into an empty grave for proof of its existence. Their victory over a genocidal enemy should finally put that to rest.
Thanks to those Jewish pilots from the Jewish state who prevented a second Holocaust.
Am Israel Chai.
Thomas Mountain is Vice Chair of the Massachusetts Republican Jewish Committee
