“We pilots of the (Israel) Air Power, flying within the skies above the camp of horrors, arose from the ashes of the tens of millions of victims … and promise to be the protect of the Jewish individuals and its nation of Israel.”
So mentioned the lead pilot some years in the past within the Israeli Air Power flyover of Auschwitz, in commemoration of the million or extra Jews murdered there, and the opposite 5 million murdered within the Holocaust.
The pilot, Amir Eshel, former Chief of the Israeli Air Power, is the kid of Holocaust survivors … and victims. Extra victims than survivors, as a lot of his kin perished within the demise camps. His mom Edna survived to make the lengthy journey to the brand new Jewish State, the place her son, and plenty of different sons of survivors like her, grew as much as be the guardians of Israel.
The reply to Auschwitz.
In line with Eshel’s pledge, this “Protect of Israel” flew over a thousand miles of their fighter jets emblazoned with the Jewish star to confront an Iranian enemy pledged to destroy their Jewish State.
If there’s one necessary lesson Jews have discovered from their historical past — by means of the Center Ages, the Inquisitions, the pogroms, the Holocaust — is that when an enemy says they wish to kill the Jews, the Jews imagine them.
But the worst tragedy that might have befallen the Jewish individuals will not be the Holocaust. That may be the second Holocaust. The annihilation of the Jewish state. Israel is one nuclear bomb vast. Seven million Jews in a rustic the scale of New Jersey. Three or 4 nuclear missiles fired from Tehran and it’s over.
Without end.
The fanatics in Iran have been preaching for many years they’ll destroy Israel, which implies killing each final Israeli (learn, Jew). They’ve made no secret of it. And with an arsenal that was quickly to cross the nuclear threshold, it’s superb the Israelis waited this lengthy to place an finish to the Iranian risk. However they did, and that’s what issues ultimately.
Since its resurrection in 1948, Israel has battled the onslaught of the Arabs led by Egypt, and for the previous few many years, Iran. Or, because the natives prefer to remind the world, Persia.
Egypt and Persia.
If the cliche nonetheless holds that historical past repeats itself, look no additional. Historic enemies of Israel stretching again millennia. But within the trendy period, Egypt, after dropping a number of devastating wars with Israel, lastly sought peace. A peace that has held for many years.
Because it seems the modern-day Israelites have lastly conquered the Persians, will they observe the instance of their Egyptian cousins and rise from their smoldering ruins and search peace, or will they persist of their quixotic quest to smite the Israelites?
Solely time will inform.
However for now Israel has defeated one more historical enemy, albeit a much more deadly one right this moment. And it’s a brighter day in Jerusalem due to it.
Israel has received. Israel will survive.
But the paradox stays — for much too lengthy, Israel has gazed into an empty grave for proof of its existence. Their victory over a genocidal enemy ought to lastly put that to relaxation.
Due to these Jewish pilots from the Jewish state who prevented a second Holocaust.
Am Israel Chai.
Thomas Mountain is Vice Chair of the Massachusetts Republican Jewish Committee


Leo Correa/Pool/AFP by way of Getty Photographs/TNS
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Getty Photographs, file)
