Trump now is peripatetic in Arabland — both geographically and in other ways — as he dreams of getting a new plane for Christmas. Meanwhile, closer to home, the most stern and severe warnings are issuing from Israel’s highest defense leaders that — this time, finally — it’s time for real business. Thing is, every single one of us knows that they huff and they puff and they even blow the house down but we can only pray they finally do get it down. Amid all this, can we pause for a moment, amid Lag Ba’Omer season, to celebrate some of what is good?

No, do not forget to cry over this beloved mother. And yes, by all means, continue to kvetch about more minor issues. But - maybe another Sinwar is dead. And even if he is not, a Jewish girl who was an inch or milimeter away from being massacred and worse only 18 months ago will be performing on an international song stage, staring down a continent full of antisemites while projecting Jewish pride and being normal. And even if there are issues regarding standards of modesty and a woman’s singing voice, she is a heroine for just daring to represent Israel and the Jewish people in the face of haters wanting to finish what Hamas started.

So this Lag Ba’Omer season seems OK for a brief detour to be grateful. HaRav Avigdor Miller zt”l once celebrated life by saying: “Most people look at a glass partially filled with water and see it either half-empty or half-full. However, I see it completely full: half with water and half with Hashem’s life-preserving oxygen.” (And some kvetcher will write back that the oxygen is only 21 percent of the air.) So please forgive me for celebrating these aspects of the past year or two, which I will refer to as “THEN” and “NOW”:

1. THEN: We were facing 150,000 Hezbollah precision missiles and thousands of armed fighters organized in units like their Radwan Force. Retired General Itzhak Brick was on TV and in print with a weekly front-page Jeremiad in Maariv predicting Doom and Destruction.

NOW: Their missiles are almost gone. From Fuad Shukr to Nasrallah and more, all their leaders are evaporated, like in the song “Ya Ya Nasrallah.” Thousands of their fighters either lost their hips and reproductive organs or their hands and eyes from pagers and walkie-talkies, so are retired from fighting. Hezbollah’s patron was ousted from Syria, and so are they. That’s good.

2. THEN: Hamas was ruling, and Gaza was bustling. Every single day, rockets were fired into Ashkelon, Ashdod, Sderot. Incendiary balloons wiped out Israeli forests daily, and all Israeli bombast could not stop it. Everyone was terrified to send ground troops in because the Gazans live in teeming “refugee camps,” on top of each other, with snipers in every window, and any ground invasion would see our boys massacred day after day.

NOW: Most of Gaza is flattened like the Flintstones’ Bedrock, and a new offensive may very well finalize the pancaking of Gaza. The IDF craters may give rise to a new form of “Street Golf” for tourists in Trump’s Gaza Shangri-la; they now have the holes and the sand traps. Rafiach (Rafah) is being cut off, Herzi Halevy is out, Gallant is out, and the end may be in sight.

The American president has lifted embargos and told everyone to unleash Hell. Hillary, Kerry, Tillerson, and Blinken are replaced by Rubio. Indyk, Kurtzer, Nides, and Lew are replaced by Huckabee. Austin is replaced by Hegseth. Biden and Kamala are replaced by Trump. Mohammed Deif is dead, Yahya Sinwar is dead, Ismail Haniyeh is dead.

And the world has no remaining enforcement tools against Israel because (i) they already have issued arrest warrants which have added up to nothing, and (ii) declared “genocide,” which leaves them nothing else. America does not recognize the ICJ or ICC, and that’s enough. Nor do we need Netanyahu traveling to Italy, Spain, or France. Better that he stay home and focus on finishing with Gaza and Iran. (Besides, who has time to visit Macron and the Pope or fight a seven-front war when the Attorney-General needs him accessible to answer for cigars?)

3. THEN the International Court of Justice issued arrest warrants against Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant, and the International Criminal Court found Israel guilty of war crimes and genocide.

NOW: We have seen it means nothing. NOW: We have new friends: Hungary, which helped murder 800,000 Jews in 1944, now has an amazingly pro-Israel leader in Victor Orban, who defied the ICC and ICJ, and hosted Netanyahu on a red carpet and along the Danube. Argentina, which once was the haven for Hitler Nazis up to Mengele and Eichmann, now has the most pro-Israel leader in the entire world, Javier Milei, who (truly) is better on Israel than any Reform rabbi and may even will convert to Chabad when he retires from politics. Geert Wilders in Holland. Friedrich Mertz, the guy in in Germany. Bart DeWever, newly elected in Belgium. All improvements for Israel, conservatives replacing global leftists. Even the guy in El Salvador is pro-Israel.

4. THEN Assad hosted Hamas, Iran, and Putin. Iran smuggled resupplies to Lebanon through Syria. While new headaches are on the way with the new ISIS guy and Erdogan, that’s for tomorrow, and it is bringing even the anti-Israel Syrian Druze closer to Israel (the ones in Israel are in the army).

NOW: Hamas is ousted from Syria. Also Iran. Putin has had to move his entire Syrian apparatus to Libya. Israel has done so much damage to Syria’s air defenses, and Putin is so out of Syria that, right now, those air lanes are open to Iran.

5. THEN: The Houthis came outta nowhere and became a menace that Biden and Harris allowed to take root.

NOW: With the obliteration of their international airport (despite their claims it is up and running) and key ports and cement factories, it is incontrovertible that the only reason they still exist is that Israel refuses to obliterate their electricity, fuel, communications, and water systems. Clearly, after taking out the international airport in 15 minutes, Israel has revealed she can take out the whole place. The rest of the world would condemn but secretly cheer, as when Begin took out Saddam’s nukes. The Houthi menace is only one or two days away from eradication.

6. THEN Biden reversed all of Trump’s sanctions and Made Iran Lethal Again. Kamala Harris, a pure idiot, was promising a “Two State Solution” while giving a million dollars to Oprah’s production company, a million to Al Sharpton, a million to Beyonce, buying endorsements at one million a clip, and not quite clear which two states she was talking about.

Josh Shapiro reversed 30 years of his documented strong Zionism and opposition to a “Two State Solution,” dating back to his proud college days, just to mollify the Woke and beg his way onto the Harris ticket.

NOW: Harris and Walz are forgotten (except for this brief reminder). Her cackling no longer rings in our ears. Biden is lost, and his own party leaders mock him daily. Trump has reinstated the Iran sanctions even heavier. Iran has lost almost their entire Russian-made air defenses and 80 percent or more of their capabilities to manufacture ballistic missiles. Really, the “shulchan” is “arukh”: With or without Trump, the table is all set. And, while the peripatetic Trump makes everyone around him meshuggah, the Obama JCPOA, revived by Biden, will not be Trump’s legacy. The resolution of Iran’s nukes are not a matter of “IF” but “WHEN.”

7. THEN: Since 1948, and even more since 1967, and especially since Oslo 1993, Israel has always been pocked by sizable numbers of foreign-funded (Europe, Soros, Reform Judaism) leftists agitating to hand over half the country, from the River to the Sea, to Arafat, Abbas, and any other Arab who will bomb them and cut their throats. Active Prime Minister candidates actually once included near-saboteurs like Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, each of whom caught Arafat off-guard by offering him more than he asked for.

Yair Lapid, Israel’s shortest-serving Prime Minister (only six months longer than you), won 24 seats to head the Opposition.

NOW: Over 80 percent of the Israeli public and Knesset seats are determined never to allow an Arab sovereign ever to arise between the River and the Sea. Some 80 percent have declared, 30 years after Oslo, that Judea and Samaria no longer are on the table for Arab sovereignty. That ship has sailed. Abbas (age 89½) soon will be dead, one way or another, and then Hamas will formally gain control of Judea and Samaria, which will leave the likes of Macron and Josh Shapiro befuddled while it will open a golden opportunity to finish flattening the Arab entity there, as now is underway in Jenin.

Despite Lapid’s emaciated Yesh Atid, the Marxist-oriented Labor and Meretz (“Democrats”) extremists, and the ten Knesset Arabs, more than 70 percent of Israel’s present and next governments are firmly on record that they will permanently hold Judea and Samaria, either by annexation or permanent military oversight. Gantz has transitioned to Judea-Samaria permanence. Bennett, who cannot be trusted, will not cross that red line either. Liberman lives there, and it’s all about him.

After Hamas replaces Abbas, Judea-Samaria becomes “game-set-match.” For the rest of time, the debate will be between “annexation / reunification” and “permanent security presence / occupation.” The Arabs, before our very eyes, shuffled themselves out of their phony “Palestine.” Meanwhile, nearly one million Jews now live in the eastern districts of United Jerusalem and the remainder of Judea and Samaria — 100 times the population of Gush Katif, too many to uproot, relocate, educate and employ elsewhere. “Palestine” is over.

8. THEN The American colleges and universities all were pocked with tent encampments. Jewish kids were afraid. Student bodies were teeming with foreign-born Arab Muslims financed by Arab Muslim countries studying under foreign-born Arab Muslim professors dedicated to overthrowing America and destroying Israel.

NOW: Fewer than eight or so campuses among hundreds have had small one-day eruptions, and Rubio, Tom Homan, and Kristi Noem have Trump’s green light to throw them all out. The haters are scared. They wear masks, whether keffiyes or N95’s, not for Arab solidarity but terrified of detection, while schools and cities are banning the masks under old KKK laws. Last year’s cowardly college deans now call in the cops to arrest the mongrels, and the cops remove the masks, take permanent mug shots and fingerprints, and share with ICE.

The befuddled mongrels now are so off balance that, instead of protesting for their original vulgar cause “From the River to the Sea,” they now focus all demands on getting last year’s mongrels released from prison before they are shipped off to El Salvador, Libya, or where they came from.

Trump has cut $400 million from Columbia, $1 billion from Cornell, $2.2 billion — and more — from Harvard, and those moral cesspools all are beginning to see the light. It turns out that Jews are not the only people on earth who care about money.

So I am grateful. It is like the last sugya (segment) of Mesekhet (Tractate) Makkot at folio 24. Other sagacious rabbis saw foxes roaming on the holy Temple Mount and wept, but Rabbi Akiva found reason to be positive. He said that if the Bible’s severe warning came true that, one day, the Temple Mount would be degraded to being a sanctuary for foxes, then he was certain that the other Biblical prophecy also would come true: that, one day, Mout Zion would be restored and the Temple rebuilt.

There is always good reason to kvetch. But please forgive me for being grateful to Hashem and his messengers on earth for all the good...

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