My Father's Day wish
So, what do I want for Father’s Day this year? It’s simple. I want Israel to decisively win. Am Yisrael Chai!
Today is Father’s Day. Invariably, in the days leading up to Father’s Day each year, a question is posed to me: “What do I want for Father’s Day”? I seldom ask for much, except to be together with my family and be happy, whatever we end up doing. I don’t want to plan well in advance, and I don’t want another polo shirt or something else I don’t need.
According to one of my brothers, when my Dad was dying, he asked my brother what was going to happen to his clothes. I kept some of them, including a pair of suspenders my wife and I gave him about a year before he died. I don’t wear his clothes often, but I went out with my family yesterday and wore one of his favourite polo shirts.
I thought about Father’s Day approaching and the mitzvah of wearing my Dad’s shirt. I thought about how proud he was in 1992 when I reclaimed his family name, Mandel, and how proud he was again in 2010, when my wife and I gave him a grandson, Jacob, carrying on our family name.
As I’ve written about before, my Dad was a Holocaust survivor. He had seen the dark side of humanity close up and understood that life was unfair, that people could be cruel, that normal life could be turned upside down, and that innocent people could be murdered for simply being who they were born as. Jews, for example.
People like his parents — my grandparents — who were murdered for the crime of being Jewish at the wrong time in history. They did nothing wrong. They were shopkeepers who worked hard and devoted themselves to the welfare of their extended family. Still, because they were Jewish, everything was taken from them, including their very lives.
Imagine learning that your parents were murdered after returning from being a slave labourer. An only child, he had no sibling to help him cope. And yet he survived and pushed on. It is impossible to fully understand what that must have been like. It is even impossible for my children to know what it must have been like for my brothers and me to grow up with the knowledge of what our parents went through.
Since October 8, Jews in the Diaspora have experienced a renewed daily assault on our identity, and sometimes we feel besieged. And the assaults are increasingly physical. Naturally, we feel disconnected from the rest of society because it isn’t sufficiently outraged at what is happening to our small, peaceful and highly productive community.
The alienation that we feel in society today, however, for the first time, allows us to connect slightly better with those who went through the Holocaust. I say “slightly” because we are not going through anything close to what people like my parents had to endure. However, our current mistreatment in society gives us a small taste of what the very early days in Europe, leading up to the Holocaust, might have been like.
Others do not understand that, for Jews, the extrapolation from “early signs” to what might come is not only natural, it is imperative. We were targets of total annihilation less than a century ago, and we have been targets of subjugation by powerful rulers for thousands of years.
If our reactions seem excessive, it is because others do not know what our people have lived through and how well we strive to preserve our history in memory at a personal level. If we hadn’t done that so well, we would not have endured as a people long after those powerful empires that tormented us turned to dust.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post arguing that Jews cannot let “Never Again” be a mere slogan, a self-deceptive affirmation that if one merely says it, all will be okay. All will not be okay without vigilance, intelligence, cunning and courage in a world in which too many people wish Jews harm. Today, the greatest and most dangerous expression of Jewish antipathy comes in the form of antizionism.
Why does Israel trigger a derangement syndrome in the West, when it is the only democracy in the Middle East; when it is a pluralistic society where Arabs can join the Knesset; where people of many religions, ethnic origins, and sexual orientations co-exist peacefully; and where the country is a powerhouse of technological innovation — the startup nation, as it’s often called?
Why does it trigger rage when it does what any nation would do if it were brutally attacked by savages who rape, butcher and kidnap helpless civilians, including babies, children and the elderly?
Why is it smeared with lies about it committing genocide when even the ICC judge who ruled on South Africa’s despicable case made clear that the court never said there was a plausible case of genocide?
Why is it accused of being a colonialist project when the Jews are the indigenous people of the land, going back over 3000 years, well before the term Palestine was ever coined by the Romans?
Why are the IDF (the Israeli Defence Forces) treated as if they were war criminals when they set international standards for the highest care of civilians ever exercised in the history of urban warfare?
I could go on, but you get the picture. No matter what Israel would do, short of slitting its own throat and then saying thank you for the opportunity, nothing would appease those who vilify Israel today.
Thanks, but no thanks. Jews in Israel and the Diaspora have learned the hard way. The world has given us a tough educational environment. Wraps on the knuckles for every misstep, however minor. Wraps, especially when we succeed.
As a result, we understand that “Never Again” does not mean saying it makes it so. We understand, rather, that the Begin Doctrine makes it so. The Begin Doctrine stipulates the moral imperative of Israel to prevent another Holocaust by pre-emptively destroying its adversaries’ capabilities of mass destruction.
As a second-generation Holocaust survivor who honours the memory of his parents and all those who survived or were murdered in the Holocaust; as a Jew who remembers the pogroms committed against his people throughout history, of their enslavement and mistreatment under various empires, and as a Jew who sees the seething Jew-hate in the form of antizionism expressed today in virtually every Western country including my own, Canada, despite the horrific crimes against humanity that Hamas perpetrated on October 7 and every day since as they continue to hold Jews in captivity, I do not doubt for one split second that the Begin Doctrine is the most important expression of “Never Again” in the twenty-first century.
Not Holocaust education. Not allyship. Not trying to win hearts and minds in the information war. Not “deals” nor “ceasefires”. No. None of that matters as much as successfully destroying the capabilities of tyrannical regimes that wish to annihilate my people, the Jewish people. There is nothing so important that would make us want to give up on our existence, trust me. If anyone doubts it, I invite them to try it first.
So, what do I want for Father’s Day this year? It’s simple. I want Israel to decisively win, and I hope that it can do so while sustaining minimal harm and causing minimal collateral damage to the Iranian people, multitudes of whom desperately yearn to be free of the current theocratic tyranny.
Menachem Begin destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981. Ehud Olmert quietly put an end to Syria’s nuclear ambitions in 2007, and now Benjamin Netanyahu is putting an end to Iran’s nuclear and ballistic programs.
In carrying out these missions, Israel has done the world’s dirty work for it for free. Actually, for less than free since antizionists will use Israel’s actions as the basis for further vilification.
Oh well, Jews are used to that, but, guess what? We much prefer to be alive and vilified than loved as dead Jews. We don’t need anyone’s crocodile tears.
All three operations were acts of military and intelligence genius, designed to neutralize the existential threat, not punish the civilian population. The same cannot be said of the adversary, which lobs missiles toward Israel in the hopes of killing as many Jews as possible.
That’s all I could ask for. A decisive victory, meaning the destruction of Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities.
Well, okay, maybe I will also enjoy reading my kids’ handmade cards while they serve me coffee in bed. Maybe I’ll go for brunch at Romi’s and enjoy some good Israeli food. Maybe I’ll even take in some live Klezmer music at Christie Pitts in the evening. We’ll see. I don’t like to make big plans, but I hope with all my heart that Israel succeeds in its plans and mission. That would make this Father’s Day extra special and I would finally get to breathe a sigh of relief after so many years of dread.
Am Yisrael Chai, and Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers reading this. May you honour your fathers and be honoured by your children in turn.