April 14th was a day of a historic victory for the state of Israel. To me, it was like the first day of the Six-Day War. That day, Monday, June 5th, 1967, Israel attacked the Egyptian air forces and destroyed all their planes before they could take off. Within a few hours, Israel had won the war and demonstrated its offensive power to its enemies.
Yesterday, for the first time in history, Iran attacked Israel. Iran threatened Israel many times before but had never carried out those threats. Iran has its proxies: Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, or the Houthis from Yemen. An Israeli commentator of Iranian origin once explained Iran’s tactic in its relentless (and inexplicable) struggle against Israel: What is the most critical piece of a chess game? The king. And the king is the one who moves the least. Iran is the king. Iran always attacked Israel through its disposable pawns. But Israel forced the king to move. And you don’t need to know much about chess to understand that when the king moves, the king is in trouble… It was a masterful check by Israel that forced Iran to act on its own.
And Iran failed.
While there were no fatalities, Iran attacked with everything it had.’ It fired 60 tons of explosives in hundreds of drones, 36 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles. Israel intercepted 99% of everything Iran sent. This same attack power, which Russia uses, for example, in Ukraine—with drones provided by Iran—has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. A similar attack, although much less intense because it consisted of only 30 drones, occurred on September 14, 2019. That day, Iran attacked Saudi Arabia and destroyed 50% of its oil wells in the Aramco region. The results of that attack? ‘The biggest daily disruption of oil supply in history.’
See here (https://www.csis.org/analysis/attack-saudi-oil-infrastructure-we-may-have-dodged-bullet-least-now
The Israeli Air Force destroyed all the drones in the air, and most were intercepted outside Israeli territory by Israeli and American planes.
Israel also intercepted Iran’s most powerful weapon: the ballistic missiles. Unlike the drones, which take from 6 to 8 hours to reach Israel, these advanced missiles sent through the stratosphere can get from Iran to Israel in 10 minutes! General Abibi said today on the HAPATRIOTIM ((https://youtu.be/_fA5aoz-Asc?si=ATklE2qI3KlMeQCN, see from minute 10:30 to 11:30) that these missiles were shot down directly by Israel ‘because no other country in the world can do so.’
Israel used its CHETZ system and demonstrated to its enemies—and the entire world—its military superiority. It was an impressive, overwhelming victory and a display of Israel’s power to her enemies and to her allies.
Today a friend told me a little bit concerned ‘that Israel paid a very high price for the Iranian attack’, since activating all these defense systems costs Israel billions of dollars. I’m not an economics expert, but my common sense tells me that Israel yesterday “invested billions in activating its defense systems and is now in a privileged position to make 100 times the profit from that. Why? Because no country can afford not to have this fantastic defense system. All countries in the world, especially in Europe, will run to equip themselves with the Israeli defense systems that demonstrated its phenomenal effectiveness in a real war!
It has been an incredible day for Israel on all fronts!
One last thought: allies apart, despite the amazing defense systems that Israel has, as we know, things can always go wrong in war… There are unpredictable elements, such as accidents, human errors, or countless failed missiles. On April 14th our main ally, BORE OLAM, showed us again that He is on our side. In the past, I wrote that we should ‘update’ our visualization of the ‘anane kabod, ‘the clouds of glory’ that protected the people of Israel when we left Egypt. We must not understand—as they do in kindergarten—that those were like the ‘white clouds’ in the sky. We should visualize these ‘clouds’ (except for the seventh, which acted like a GPS) like virtual clouds or firewalls, an invisible dome of Divine protection, which we remember every year through the festival of Sukkot and, in fact, every night when we bless HaShem for protecting us with His Sukat Rachamim Veshalom, “the invisible protection dome of compassion and peace” with which HaShem surrounds us.
The survival of Am Israel depends on the intelligence, courage, and determination of the Jewish people and the invisible but omnipresent assistance of Bore Olam.
May God protect us from our enemies as He protected us when we left Egypt and grant Medinat Israel victory on all fronts. AMEN!
