Walking Between the Missile "Raindrops"

What we know and what we'll never know

Part II of my Iran ruminating, as I try to understand what’s on people’s minds about this war, and how will we get through these endless days of waiting for the missiles to fall - what the news is calling a continuous rain drizzle of barrages after barrages (especially now that Hezbollah has joined the party) compared to June ‘25 when there would be short barrages. Read Part I here.

Safe-room selfie with coffee and hamentashen

What I know is that I’m fortunate. I have a safe room in my home. My married kids and their families are safely situated. Our youngest is here at home with us, as well as his care-partner, a Filipino man in his early 30’s for whom this isn’t his first Israeli-war-rodeo. He came to Jerusalem from his apartment in Tel Aviv where he was holed up on Saturday and Sunday, stunned by the missile barrage which is always heavier there, and continues to be so. I managed to make 2 kinds of hamentashen filling - poppy seed (because I’m a purist), and apricot/cranberry/pistachio - and baked them up in-between Purim megillah readings with our building’s neighbors (all of us within the required 1.5 minutes to our safe rooms). We’re already discussing doing outside Friday night services with our neighbors, what we did during COVID, our Minyan-on-the-Shvil/path, and run home as needed to our safe rooms.

It’s funny how the first place you often go after a siren is the kitchen. It’s reassuring to look in the fridge, to heat up and enjoy the last of the Shabbat leftovers, before heading back towards work - not that I’m getting much done. In truth, I was supposed to fly on Saturday night to NY. I was very excited to be attending the Tri-State Camp Conference in Atlantic City (!) where I’d be sharing a table with our friends at Keshet in Chicago. Keshet and Shutaf Inclusion Programs are both aligned in terms of our work with people with diverse needs and disabilities, especially in the informal education sphere. Oh well. I can’t exactly fly anywhere now, and even if flights start back up, I’m not leaving my peeps during this time.

The only country in the world where you know a missile’s arrival but not the bus!

I continue to stare at the news, read articles from various news sources, and marvel at how the news is served up to us. Consider the Ayatollah’s obituary from the Washington Post.

The lede, the supposedly most important part of any article, especially because who reads beyond the headline and the subtitle, reads “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is dead at 86. He played a behind-the-scenes role in Iran’s Islamic revolution, served as president in the 1980s and dominated the country for more than three decades.”

If you don’t read the rest of the article you might not know he “wielded ultimate political and religious authority in the Islamic republic, outranking the elected president and overseeing the country’s armed forces, internal security apparatus, judiciary, state media and foreign policy.”

Hmm. This was more honest, from The Conversation, with a header and lede that reads, “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruled Iran with defiance and brutality for 36 years. For many Iranians, he will not be revered.” Now I know something I didn’t know before, that is to say, if I’m one of those people who’s protesting to Free Iran from whatever, without knowing much more as to where Iran is, and what its citizenry has been through for many years.

Someone felt annoyed enough at the New York Times Khamenei’s obit, to post the below, offering up a pithy comparison of a would-be obit of Adolf Hitler in the style of both the Post and the Times.

Hard-line cleric who made Iran a regional power. That’s truly rich.

The Post’s obit reached the heigh of absurdity with these two paragraphs, astoundingly one after the other.

“When Iran was convulsed by widespread protests after the September 2022 death in custody of a young woman who was arrested by Islamic “morality police” for a dress-code violation, the supreme leader publicly blamed the United States and Israel and backed a deadly crackdown…

With his bushy white beard and easy smile, Ayatollah Khamenei cut a more avuncular figure in public than his perpetually scowling but much more revered mentor, and he was known to be fond of Persian poetry and classic Western novels, especially Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables…”

As they’d say here in Hebrew, מה הקשר or what’s relevant here? My jaw dropped as I read this obit, clearly intended to create confusion as to the death of this brutal and autocratic leader’s death by the hands of this shared endeavor of the US and Israel, most likely the Israel Air Force, at that point of the operation.

Maybe he also liked his mother’s stuffed grape leaves and his wife’s tahdig, her crispy rice, but I don’t give a damn. Tell me about the women disfigured by acid attacks or who’ve had their eyes poked out, especially during the ‘22 protests. (Read more here)

Of course, we all come by our misinformation honestly (meaning how can we know what’s true or not anymore), like the re-writing of Wikkipedia to reflect anti-Israel sentiment and ideas), or in the words of a pro-Iranian regime (!) protester in NYC, explained in a Nate Friedman interview, “Free Iran from imperialism (the person noted that Iran has fought short wars with Israel to prevent Zionist expansion to Iran), theocracy, racism and capitalism.” (I’ve watched this a few times and still can’t understand the points made really. - let me know what you think.) Check out Nate on youtube and catch his interview with professional-paid protestors making $70k yearly.

Another person interviewed felt that it’s questionable whether or not Iranian protesters were really killed in Iran in January - astoundingly, this was a person who fled Yugoslavian dictatorship for freedom in the US - but in this case, claimed that it was all propaganda.

I was reminded of an article by Gary Wexler in the Jewish Journal which blew my mind when I read it shortly after October 7th. Titled, “The Inside Story of How Palestinians Took Over the World,” Wexler describes how he was hired as a marketing consultant by the Ford Foundation during the happy and hopeful period of the Oslo Accords, in order to build a marketing effort around the work being done to build a shared civil society between Jews and Arabs.

The Jews, accordingly to Wexler’s experience, were excited to work together with Arabs, thinking about peace, co-existence as well as economic growth for everyone, while the Arabs spoke differently. He writes, “One person even told me she would never use the word “du-kiyum” (co-existence). “There is no such thing as co-existence,” she stressed. “We are just the tenants living on the property that the Jews now own. That’s not a balanced co-existence.”

And then he meets Ameer Makhoul, then the head of Itijaa, an Arab civil rights organization, who everyone Arab kept saying, speak to him.

Makhoul says to Wexler, “Just like you were a Zionist campus activist, we will create, over the next years, Palestinian campus activists in America and all over the world. Bigger and better than any Zionist activists. Just like you spent your summers on the kibbutz, we will bring college students to spend their summers in refugee camps and work with our people. Just like you have been part of creating global pro-Israel organizations, we will create global pro-Palestinian organizations. Just like you today help create PR campaigns and events for Israel, so will we, but we will get more coverage than you ever have.”

Wexler gives examples of how this begins to play on the public stage,

“…I began to see what Ameer Makhoul had laid out to me taking shape. The PR coverage was first: The Muhammad al-Durrah incident in Gaza, when a 12-year-old boy was shot to death on the second day of the Second Intifada, capturing global headlines. The Mavi Marmara, the Turkish Flotilla to Gaza that the Israelis stormed, killing several Palestinian activists, grabbing global headlines. I knew the Mavi Marmara was manufactured for the exposure it would gain.

Then the campuses: The creation of Apartheid Week worldwide. The growth of BDS. The student volunteers who began by the thousands to work in the Palestinian territories and its refugee camps. The shocking creation of anti-Zionist Jewish student groups.”

Read the article. Please.

Kurdish Academic and feminist, Hawzhin Azeez, wrote a few days ago, “One of the greatest moral failures of sections of the international left is their willingness to romanticise dictatorships simply because they posture as “anti-US.” …As if our decades-long grievances hold no legitimacy, no historical grounding, and no moral claim to justice or self-determination.”

Today I see leftists waving the flag of the Iranian Islamic Republic as if it were a symbol of resistance. It is not. It is the flag of a regime that for 47 years has imprisoned, tortured, and killed dissidents and systematically targeted minorities- especially Kurds, Baloch, and Baha’i communities. From Tehran to Sina, from Kermansha to Ilam, people have resisted this regime at enormous cost. They have filled prisons. They have filled cemeteries. And now they are celebrating the fall of the Ayatollah because 40,000 of them were killed by his regime in a week!”

I keep coming back to United Nations Secretary-General António Gutierres’s message congratulating (!) President Pezeshkian and the Iranian people on the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. Thank you the United Nations for making it clear what you believe in, despotism and terrorism. Of course Gutierres was in good company. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega also sent his congratulation along with Yemen’s Mahdi al-Mashat, and Qatar’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani but maybe he’s regretting that now?

You just can’t make this shit up.

What it looks like when the whole country is hopefully in their safe spaces

Last note from the homefront, this via Rabbi Matt Futterman. Before moving to Israel many years ago, Matt was a longtime fixture at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires. He lives in Ashkelon, a Southern city which has often been hammered by rocket fire. Writing to some Facebook friends who oppose the US’s actions, he wrote, “I want you to understand where I am coming from. After years of living with the Iranian threat to kill every single Jew both here in Israel and abroad, we lived through 2.5 years of butchery and missile attacks funded by Iran. And despite your president’s offers to make peace with Iran (possibly at our expense) Trump decided we should attack preemptively in order to keep Iran from becoming a nuclear power. This is where my presidents (Obama and Biden) failed the world - probably out of a sense of fairness…And most countries chose to condemn Israel instead of the butchers. And while I was proud of Joe Biden for having come here [post October 7th], I am still waiting for Obama and Harris to come see how we are doing.

The only one to keep showing up (for whatever misguided reason that I cannot imagine) is the holder of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize which he has yet to earn.

But thanks to him my family is most likely safe from terrorists for the foreseeable future.

If I had to choose between subterfuge in order to kill Hitler in 1935 or playing by Chamberlain’s rules of civil appeasement I would choose subterfuge.

Ditto for Iran. If Trump is going to keep my grandchildren safe while AOC or Omar were to leave them vulnerable then I choose Trump. (I cannot believe I wrote that).

Every Israeli hostage returned safely thanked him for rescuing them. We are in his debt and we know it.

The October 7 slaughters took place 15 minutes away from where I live. We know the families of 5 of those killed that day. Their only crime was their Jewishness. And we know we barely escaped intact…

It’s all just so complicated.

“War is not healthy for children and other living things”