So is Ashkelon and Beer Sheva and Netiv HaAsara and Nahal Oz to name a few. It’s the undeniable intersectionality of Jews and their haters.
Over 300 rockets hit Southern Israel. A kindergarten (school was cancelled), a bus, a residential building, were among the places hit in the communities along Israel’s border with Gaza as well as communities a bit farther away. People were injured. Some critically. Hamas and Islamic Jihad killed a Palestinian father of 6 who was working in Ashkelon. After a while living the conflict you get used to the irony but not the sadness of loss of life. All that remains to be seen is if the mental gymnastics of the Palestinian leadership, Hamas and Fatah, can turn him into a martyr.
So the question is, did you stand with the Jews in Pittsburg? In my last piece I wrote about antisemitism. I asked the readers to stand with Israel like they stood with Pittsburg. Some may find it curious. Thousands of miles separate Israel from the US. Two entirely separate countries. The perpetrators are different. In fact, it’s more than likely that they despise each other.
But for all these differences, the motivating factor is exactly the same. All Jews must die. Those are the words of the man who murdered in cold blood, eleven Jews praying in a synagogue in Pittsburg.
All Jews must die = “The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ Only the Gharkad tree would not do that, because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” from the Hamas Charter
There is no distance between those two statements. That same distance should be our stance on Pittsburg and the victims of the rocket barrage from Hamas in Gaza.