Almost Heaven
Well-known
A decade before there was any ‘Palestinian’ cause, and thirteen years before the 'West Bank; was conquered in the Six Day War, Muslim terrorists ambushed the bus. Ephraim Fuerstenberg, the driver, was shot dead, and his wife Hannah was taken out and raped and murdered. Men had thrown themselves in their dying moments on his two children to hide them. But his 9-year-old boy, Haim, raised his head to call for his sister, the Jihadist lifted up the body on top of him and shot him in the head, he would lie in a coma for 32 years before finally passing away. His sister Miri, who wrote the story in her book, ‘The Girl From Scorpions Pass’, survived only by hiding under the man who had thrown his body on top of hers to save her life.
The PLO would not be founded until 1964. An account of the attack on the bus in Time Magazine made no mention of ‘Palestinians’ because no such people had been invented yet. The 'West Bank' and Gaza, the territories at the heart of the two-state solution and the ‘Palestinian’ cause, had been seized by Jordan and Egypt, and were being used as the bases from which the Islamic terrorists operated.
Nor had Islamic terrorism entered the popular jargon. These Jihadis were known as the ‘Fedayeen’ or those who die for Allah. Their style of attacks closely resembled those perpetrated by Hamas on Oct 7. And the Israelis had no high tech, no border wall and not nearly enough manpower to come to grips with the constant Islamic Jihadist raids across the border.
The Islamic attacks escalated under the cowardly leadership of Moshe Sharett, Israel’s second prime minister, who had put all his faith in international diplomacy and the United Nations.
After the Scorpions Pass massacre, Sharett had refused to respond, arguing that, “an act in reaction to the bloodbath would only blur the horrifying effect and would place us on the same level as the murderers on the other side.” Israeli commandos, who had little respect for Sharett, a leftist hack with no understanding of the battlefield, began to go rogue against the Jihadis.
Long before drones, Israel responded with a more personal form of targeted killings. Small commando units tracked down terrorists inside Gaza and the West Bank and killed them. They also came after the Egyptian officers who, like the Soleimanis of today, were organizing them.
Throughout the early 50s, Jihadis raided Israel from Gaza, killed and raped those they could, including Leah Festinger, a young Holocaust survivor, threw a grenade into a room where a family was sleeping, killing the children, including a 3-year-old girl. Meir Har Zion, a war hero who excelled at penetrating enemy territory, responded to the murder of his sister by making his way to the West Bank with a few friends and hunting down the men he believed were the killers.
Finally a murder near Nahal Oz, one of the communities targeted by Hamas in the Oct 7 massacre, brought the situation into clear focus. Roi Rotberg, a young man who was patrolling the fields, was ambushed, had his eyes gouged out and his mutilated body left on display.
Expecting the international community to mediate peaceful borders had been tried and it had failed. Egypt and Jordan were never held accountable for Islamic terror raids, and only the Israeli responses to them were condemned by the White House and the United Nations. The Eisenhower administration had turned over its foreign policy to the oil industry and Arabists like Assistant Secretary of State Henry Byroade whose true allegiance was to Arab Muslim states.
And that was the setting for what was just another funeral, until IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, who knew Rotberg personally, delivered a famous eulogy that defined the new state of affairs.
Invoking the story of the biblical figure Samson, who had carried away the gates of Gaza on his shoulders from the Philistines, Dayan spoke of the small community of Nahal Oz which “carries on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, beyond which hundreds of thousands of eyes and arms huddle together and pray for the onset of our weakness so that they may tear us to pieces”.
“It is to us that the blood of Roi calls from his shredded body,” Dayan warned. “Although we have vowed a thousand vows that our blood will never again be shed in vain — yesterday we were once again seduced, brought to listen, to believe. Our reckoning with ourselves, we shall make today. We mustn’t flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may claim our blood. We mustn’t avert our eyes, lest our hands be weakened. That is the decree of our generation. That is the choice of our lives — to be willing and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword be knocked from our fists, and our lives severed.”
Read More...
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/380238
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/380238
The PLO would not be founded until 1964. An account of the attack on the bus in Time Magazine made no mention of ‘Palestinians’ because no such people had been invented yet. The 'West Bank' and Gaza, the territories at the heart of the two-state solution and the ‘Palestinian’ cause, had been seized by Jordan and Egypt, and were being used as the bases from which the Islamic terrorists operated.
Nor had Islamic terrorism entered the popular jargon. These Jihadis were known as the ‘Fedayeen’ or those who die for Allah. Their style of attacks closely resembled those perpetrated by Hamas on Oct 7. And the Israelis had no high tech, no border wall and not nearly enough manpower to come to grips with the constant Islamic Jihadist raids across the border.
The Islamic attacks escalated under the cowardly leadership of Moshe Sharett, Israel’s second prime minister, who had put all his faith in international diplomacy and the United Nations.
After the Scorpions Pass massacre, Sharett had refused to respond, arguing that, “an act in reaction to the bloodbath would only blur the horrifying effect and would place us on the same level as the murderers on the other side.” Israeli commandos, who had little respect for Sharett, a leftist hack with no understanding of the battlefield, began to go rogue against the Jihadis.
Long before drones, Israel responded with a more personal form of targeted killings. Small commando units tracked down terrorists inside Gaza and the West Bank and killed them. They also came after the Egyptian officers who, like the Soleimanis of today, were organizing them.
Throughout the early 50s, Jihadis raided Israel from Gaza, killed and raped those they could, including Leah Festinger, a young Holocaust survivor, threw a grenade into a room where a family was sleeping, killing the children, including a 3-year-old girl. Meir Har Zion, a war hero who excelled at penetrating enemy territory, responded to the murder of his sister by making his way to the West Bank with a few friends and hunting down the men he believed were the killers.
Finally a murder near Nahal Oz, one of the communities targeted by Hamas in the Oct 7 massacre, brought the situation into clear focus. Roi Rotberg, a young man who was patrolling the fields, was ambushed, had his eyes gouged out and his mutilated body left on display.
Expecting the international community to mediate peaceful borders had been tried and it had failed. Egypt and Jordan were never held accountable for Islamic terror raids, and only the Israeli responses to them were condemned by the White House and the United Nations. The Eisenhower administration had turned over its foreign policy to the oil industry and Arabists like Assistant Secretary of State Henry Byroade whose true allegiance was to Arab Muslim states.
And that was the setting for what was just another funeral, until IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, who knew Rotberg personally, delivered a famous eulogy that defined the new state of affairs.
Invoking the story of the biblical figure Samson, who had carried away the gates of Gaza on his shoulders from the Philistines, Dayan spoke of the small community of Nahal Oz which “carries on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, beyond which hundreds of thousands of eyes and arms huddle together and pray for the onset of our weakness so that they may tear us to pieces”.
“It is to us that the blood of Roi calls from his shredded body,” Dayan warned. “Although we have vowed a thousand vows that our blood will never again be shed in vain — yesterday we were once again seduced, brought to listen, to believe. Our reckoning with ourselves, we shall make today. We mustn’t flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may claim our blood. We mustn’t avert our eyes, lest our hands be weakened. That is the decree of our generation. That is the choice of our lives — to be willing and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword be knocked from our fists, and our lives severed.”
Read More...
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/380238
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/380238
