YEAR-END MESSAGE TO ISRAELIS: TODAH RABAH!

AS 2024 COMES TO A CLOSE, THE WORLD SHOULD BE UNITED IN GRATITUDE TO ISRAEL’S PEOPLE.

Two words: Thank you.

In times of peace, Israelis give the world many of our greatest medical advances, much technological progress, great art and social progress.

In their far-too-frequent times of war, Israelis demonstrate not only a stunning determination to continue these positive contributions but, under conditions unimaginable to the flying moneys of the global anti-Zionist movement, Israelis have developed strategies to minimize harm not only to their civilians who are threatened with genocide, but also the oppressed citizens of their enemies.

As we close out a year that has seen Israel pilloried and condemned, singled out as uniquely evil ahead of the world’s most despotic regimes, mass murderers and worst violators of human rights, amid an avalanche of commentary, only one thing seems to have gone unsaid. There is something no one seems to have told Israelis that desperately needs to be expressed.

Todah rabah!

Thank you!

Thank you, Israelis, for demonstrating, yet again, to me and to anyone who cares, the profound model of human resilience your country and your people represent. Bombarded by missiles from your neighbors and by hatred from the world, you have redoubled your determination. Under fire, you have not abandoned your principles, but clung to them and demonstrated them in extremis.

Thank you for minimizing casualties while effecting a just war under unimaginable conditions. You face an enemy that recognizes no rules of engagement, that spits on the Geneva Conventions and that strives to maximize the number of dead on their own side, knowing that the world will look at the inflated numbers and blame you. Your enemies have hundreds of miles of underground tunnels where civilians could shelter amid the war their leaders launched. Instead, their leaders push innocents into harm’s way and, rather than blaming the perpetrators, the world tallies up the dead like it’s a sports tournament and declares Palestinians the moral victors. In the face of this immorality, you have not abandoned your commitment to do what’s right, but done it nonetheless even as you are condemned as inhuman monsters. Thank you.

In a region where ideas and dialogue are brutally suppressed, you have achieved a summit of pluralist democracy. You are demonstrating both social cohesion — united as a people in a time of unprecedented external assault — while raucously debating the best and most moral way forward domestically and internationally. Israeli democracy is a masterpiece of its kind. Social engagement in your country is a passionate artform, regardless of outcomes. It is a flourishing of human ideas that should be emulated across the region. Instead, it is maligned and attacked. For modeling what democracy can look like in a region where it is truly (as your enemies like to say) an alien imposition, thank you.

You are a country built, in part, by survivors of the Nazi campaign to eradicate Jews from the world. And when your uniformed children defend you and your grandchildren from the contemporary incarnation of that ideology, you are accused of the very thing that was done to your people in Europe and that your enemies are determined to do to you in the Middle East. The words “genocide” and “holocaust” had to be invented to describe recent Jewish history. And a cadre of the very people who invented the concept of triggering phrases, safe spaces and not putting “emotional labor” on members of communities, rub these terms and this history in the faces of the very people for whom these terms had to be invented, maximizing the emotional pain even as they cheer on the physical attacks against you. In response, you are undaunted, continuing the military campaign that is necessary to secure peace in the region, while maintaining a stunning degree of normalcy domestically. Thank you.

Of course that normalcy must be a façade, to an extent. The trauma experienced by survivors of October 7 and every citizen under barrage of enemy fire for more than a year has created a pandemic of PTSD. In response, your society has not mounted a global woe-is-me PR campaign to exploit the tragedy, but instead built new hospital wings to treat those experiencing the effects. This response is a model of Israeli resilience that should be imitated worldwide. Instead, again and of course, the world’s response is along the lines of What about the trauma of others?! Because it is a particular phenomenon of human civilization that Jewish concerns are dismissed and attention diverted to the concerns of others — which is, at root, the reason your country exists and must continue to thrive. Thank you.

Civilizations throughout history have been driven by self-harming antisemitism to reject the gifts Jewish and Israeli people have brought to the world. Today, the world cuts off its nose to spite its face by boycotting Israeli products, knowledge, ideas and people. In response, you do not whine, complain or throw tantrums. You research, develop, innovate, improve. Thank you.

Israel is a modern miracle. It is probably the greatest example of successful postwar decolonization and state-building. In an unnecessary act of profound generosity, the Israeli people shared the knowledge and skills they gathered in their earliest years with emerging nations in Africa and Asia — like basic statecraft and practical technologies that turn desert into arable land. But, after 1967, the Arab League convinced those beneficiary countries to reject Israeli assistance, plunging so many societies back into darkness. This is yet another example of how antisemitism harms non-Jews. In response, Israelis found work-arounds. They continued to help developing societies, surreptitiously when necessary, transmitting aid and know-how. Thank you.

Even when governments would rather let their people die than accept lifesaving support from Israelis, you have done what is right. I am reminded of one of the great triumphs of Jew-hatred over self-interest. In 2003, a massive earthquake struck around the city of Bam, Iran, killing tens of thousands and injuring and displacing hundreds of thousands. Israel, because of history and geography, has probably the world’s foremost disaster-response capabilities. Typically, Israel offered the ayatollah’s regime immediate assistance. They were rebuffed. In response, Israel snuck in humanitarian aid under cover. The Iranian regime would rather let their people die than engage with the Zionist entity. In that case, as in so many more, Israelis found a way to help anyway. Thank you.

Today, your government and military facilitate the transport of humanitarian aid, food and supplies to civilians in enemy territory above and beyond what any other belligerent nation is called upon to do — and in return you are accused of starvation and genocide. And still you do it. Thank you.

In this moment of existential challenge to your country and your people, the opinions of the world should be your last concern. And yet still you struggle to respond to what the world thinks of you, attempting, admittedly often not well, to counter a tsunami of bad PR.

Were I in your shoes, I would say to my enemies, regional and global, Fine, screw you. Instead, in acts of humanitarianism I cannot even fathom, you find work-arounds. You go over the heads of totalitarian regimes to help their citizens. You minimize casualties of war even when your enemies do everything in their power to maximize them. You prioritize what is right and necessary even as the entire world employs the most incendiary, sadistic language humankind has invented to condemn you.

I could find hundreds more examples. But you are, in short, an inspiration for human resilience under unimaginable conditions. The world, were it rational, would unite in gratitude for your model of national determination and hardiness.

None of this even approaches the ultimate self-interest for which people worldwide should be knee-falling in gratitude to Israelis. Singlehandedly, in recent months, Israel has undercut the power and legitimacy of the world’s foremost fomenter of violence and terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran. With little but condemnation from the beneficiaries of their efforts, Israel has stanched, for now, the advance of the most regressive forces on the planet, effectively decapitating Hezbollah and almost eradicating Hamas, in the process massively undercutting the state sponsor of their terror. Thank you.

The people of Vienna apparently have no idea how close to their gates the barbarians have advanced. Israel alone has stood against this onslaught. And not only have they stood alone, they have withstood the slings and arrows of the very people whose future they are defending — a future of democracy, feminism, queer rights, pluralism and Western civilization itself.

It is a symptom of the topsy-turvy moral universe we live in that it seems, amid the billions of words spilled this year in discussion about Israel, no one else seems to have uttered the two that most need to be said.

Todah rabah.

Thank you.