Israel’s Operation Roaring Lion and America’s Operation Epic Fury, which began on February 28 with the swift elimination of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, readily provide material for a movie. The operations’ monikers even sound like movie titles.
But instead of waiting for a film, Israeli content creator Neta Cohen produced a video clip on social media (with English subtitles) called: “If the war was a series.” The talented comic imagines a conversation between two friends about a televised version of the events in the Middle East since October 7, 2023. One friend is still on Season 1, the Hamas war, when arch-terrorist Yahya Sinwar is knocked out. The other keeps dropping spoilers like: “The episode with the pagers is crazy; just wait” and “I’m on the Iran season.” The series started off local but has gone international, she says: “Everyone’s watching… There’s talk of another season involving Europe.”
The jokes are a coping mechanism – and they come fast and furious. Sitting in shelters and safe rooms during rocket attacks, people share video clips and memes, such as “Bomb Shelter Bingo,” a bingo scorecard with squares including: “Showering when the siren went off,” “Booms shake the windows,” “First time in a new shelter,” “You’re the youngest or oldest person in the shelter,” “Pet dog or cat in the miklat [shelter]” and “Someone barefoot in pajamas.” One square is reserved for the ubiquitous slogan: “Am Yisrael Chai” – “The People of Israel lives.”
The muses are not necessarily silenced when the cannons roar. Some people have become very creative. Along with the “Hooked” app enabling singles to find each other in local shelters, other war hits (in the positive sense of the word) include two apps dedicated to helping users find the best time to shower with the lowest risk of an alert. There is also an app found at miklat.run called Maslul Mugan (Safe Track) to help runners plan the best route with shelters on the way. Incidentally, Waze, an Israeli invention, has an option to type in “Shelter” and find the nearest safe spot.
Personally, I’m longing to get back to the pool again – rushing down three flights of stairs to reach a shelter might be good exercise, and certainly gets the adrenaline flowing, but relaxing it ain’t.
Humor and resilience in the face of danger
Beyond the Zoom lectures for all ages – museum tours, historical talks, financial lectures etc. – local parents have come up with some ideas to keep the kids busy and safe while school is still out. Some nearby parks and community gardens (with adjacent shelters) have hosted small fairs; one shelter held an activity for young children introducing them to snakes, of the zoological kind, not Khamenei father and son, et al.
On a more serious note, blood donation campaigns have been carried out in local shelters because this is war, after all, and there’s no way to pretend that it’s all fun and games; even young kids know better than that.
One of the best jokes I heard this week was unintentional. British journalist Nicole Lampert Brockman shared a photo from a demonstration in London that “speaks a thousand words” – if you’re willing to acknowledge the language.
At the rally, pro-Islamic Republic demonstrators merged with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War, the Socialist Worker, and even the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Brockman noted. “The irony is off the scale!... This is an anti-Western conglomerate linked only by their hatred of Israel and the wider West.”
Talk about a sick joke. Support by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament for the ayatollahs’ regime makes as much sense as the Queers for Palestine, which has been rightly likened to “Turkeys for Thanksgiving.”
It’s hard to portray our lives in Israel to those abroad, especially as the mainstream media can barely conceive of Israelis as victims. CNN might be proud of its reporting from Iran, but it is only there as long as the Islamic Republic regime permits it and can only show what the regime wants.
The same phenomenon has been seen over and over again in Gaza, where Hamas controlled every aspect of what was reported and how, hence the “genocide,” and “starvation” narrative. People believed what they wanted to believe – and too often chose to believe the jihadi terrorists over their Israeli victims.
Residents of Northern Israel this week were under almost constant threat of rockets and drones, often launched simultaneously from Lebanon and Iran. The source in both cases was the same. The Iranian regime continues to arm its proxy, Hezbollah, granting it millions of dollars every month to carry out its dirty war against Israel.
The Hezbollah threat will exist as long as the mullahs provide it with weapons and ideology. No tears were shed in Israel – or among much of the Lebanese government and people, for that matter – when the IAF managed to eliminate five senior members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gathered at a Beirut hotel where they conducted their business of financing and directing terrorist operations.
The media focus is out of focus – not sure where to point the camera and what to say. Take the brave members of the Iranian women’s football team who courageously chose to remain quiet as their national anthem was played last week at the Asian Cup in Australia. Iranian women under the current regime have nothing to sing about. The defection of six members of the team and staff, some of them later shown without their hijabs, should give the West a hint about what life has been like for them. But there are those who, no matter how many hints they receive, remain clueless.
And here lies another danger. Every skewed media report, every lie and blood libel jeopardizes lives. Just this week, shots were fired at three synagogues in Toronto. While local police were reluctant to declare the incidents related, it should be easy to join the dots – they were all fueled by Jew-hatred. And someone is taking care to fund and distribute that fuel, be it on social media, in mosques, or in right-wing or left-wing organizations.
Canada, once the epitome of calm and politeness, is no longer a safe haven for Jews. It mirrors Australia, which was also considered the bastion of laid-back good nature until attacks on synagogues and Jewish-owned business escalated to the Bondi Beach massacre in December when 15 were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s iconic coast.
In Liege, Belgium, a bomb exploded outside a historic synagogue on Monday. At least the authorities recognized it for what it was, in the words of Interior Minister Bernard Quintin: “An abject antisemitic act that directly targeted Belgium’s Jewish community.”
The broader threat: Iran, proxies, and global consequences
Despite the unfathomable failure surrounding the Iranian-sponsored, Hamas-led invasion and mega-atrocity on October 7, 2023, Israel’s intelligence capabilities and aerial skills have proven to be exceptional – the stuff of movies and TV series indeed.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed. Iran is not alone: It is part of an axis with Russia, China, and to a certain extent North Korea. These countries are also watching how Israel and the US act, as well as the rest of the world’s reaction.
As Pierre Rehov wrote for the Gatestone Institute: “For those invested in negotiated containment, the US-Israeli response appears destabilizing. For others, it represents the removal of a huge source of instability – the elimination of a regime whose worldview treats conflict not as a failure of policy but as the essence of policy. The divergence reflects differing premises about how order should be maintained and what price is acceptable for maintaining it.”
Iran has struck out not only at Israel – “the Zionist Entity” – but also at the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Azerbaijan, and Cyprus (including a British air base there). It has brought together an awkward but potentially game-changing alliance. It is clearer than ever that were Iran or its terrorist proxies to achieve military nuclear capabilities, nowhere will be safe. Such is the nature of global jihad. And not just nuclear capabilities: The potential destruction wrought by high-precision intercontinental ballistic missiles, even without nuclear warheads, is the fodder of dystopian movies.
Israelis haven’t lost their sense of humor, but we’re not joking around. When it comes to eliminating those who want to kill us, we’re deadly serious.