I find my self increasingly struck dumb by 'the situation'. All my life I've heard that I am verbal ? too verbal, good with words, and so on ? but I find that I am nearly out of words.



I no longer want to write about this situation. It sits in my throat like a bone. I feel like I am suffocating, but air flows into my lungs and goes on its way. Automatic oxygen robotically circulates through my blood. What is happening in Israel is a macabre joke, except it is not a joke. I just read a list of the wounded from the latest suicide/homicide bus bombing in Jerusalem. Names and ages, injuries and so on.



It's not supposed to make me numb, but everything about this situation is making me numb these days. We, the Jewish people inside and outside the state and Land of Israel, have come to a crossroads. A battle for Israel's survival is going on. 'Palestine' as a recipe for peace has proven a sham, yet 'Palestine' continues to resonate, somehow. This, despite the continuously updated revelation that 'Palestine' is code for 'We, the Muslims, will destroy Israel and rip the Jews from their land forever.'



All the fog, all the protestations about suffering and quests for dignity ? is all malarkey. The Palestinians do indeed have a collective identity, as Arab Muslims in the forefront of the ummah's effort to sweep 'Muslim' Palestine of all traces of Zionism. That is what they mean when they send teenagers to explode buses in Jerusalem. Severed legs and heads ? they, too, are traces of Zionism. Every new erased trace that this genocidal assault produces serves the cause. The nation of Islam, the ummah, believes it is destined to rule the world, or much of the world, and certainly the lands of Dar Al-Islam, where Israel sits.



Islam scorns Zionism, scorns the Jews, and scorns the concept and reality of Israel. Islam is a one-world totalitarian vision, a humbled humanity submitting to the Prophet and Allah, women as dehumanized baby-making machines, wombs for the soldiers of the Prophet on their inevitable march across this green globe. First, they will turn it red, the color of the blood of those who would resist their One Truth.



I read often on this site, and sometimes on other sites, of the slumbering power of the Jewish people. Religious Zionists write of the strength that will come from the Torah and proud secularists scribble words about the inherent strength of the Jews.



Yet, what I see these days are Jews and Israelis, secular and religious, in the firm grasp of numbness. I see a prime minister who has folded himself into a shadow as he maneuvers to form a government that will facilitate his unilateral disengagement plan. I am supposed to believe that when this plan is executed, it will set Israel behind 'permanent' boundaries that include annexed pieces of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, including important settlement blocs.



Instead, I see collapse in stages, including a prisoner exchange that took place partly because families lobbied and partly because the security establishment has no answer to Hizbollah missiles. The politicians have no will to war against this deadly enemy of Israel. I see the announcement to the world that Israel will pull all its civilian settlements out of Gaza. It will rush to finish the fence/wall, mostly because it has no more will to fight the Palestinian Authority's terror.



This is an Israel that seems out of options, at once frozen and contracting. Numb. In a time of war, in a time for war, we choose unilateral redeployment, while the enemy advances, his deadly agenda visible for all to see.