PELONI: When you are faced with a constant state of siege, it teaches the need for adopting and acting upon a personal sense of agency, a responsibility for all happens around you. This is why increasing the abilty of Jews to act in their own defense has always been a vital aspect of Jewish life, both in Israel and in the Diaspora. It is also why the one thing which strike abject terror into the minds of our enemies is a Jew who actually able to defend themselves. Furthermore, it is also why so many object to Israel, why it is so necessary to act to deligitimize, to dehumanize and to apply double standards to both Jews and the Jew Nation of the world.
In Bob Goldberg’s insightful article below, he touches the real state of affairs when he states that
“Allies are welcome, and institutions should be held to their word. But responsibility for Jewish safety was never anyone else’s. It is ours alone.”
On Simchat Torah, as we mark three years since this holiday celebrating the Torah and Jewish learning was scarred with the rigors of war slaughter and the greatest organized slaughter of our people since the Holocaust, it is important to grasp the fact that acting upon a sense of personal agency is how we survived October 7, how we will survive whatever rigors are coming next, and how we will once again smite our enemies with a terrible vengeance which can not be expressed in any way more terrible than to thrive in the wake of their assaults, which is exactly what is taking form today.
What Israelis on flydubai FZ1073 and MIT can teach American Jews about courage
Bob Goldberg | Sep 30, 2026
On Wednesday morning, flydubai Flight FZ1073 left Dubai for Tel Aviv with roughly 170 people aboard, more than 100 of them Israelis. As the plane neared Israel, according to Israeli officials and passengers, one of the pilots stabbed the other. Flight-tracking data show the Boeing 737 falling some 14,000 feet in well under a minute.
Passengers overpowered the attacker. One of them yelled at two off-duty pilots in the back to run forward and take the controls. They did. The plane landed in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Everyone walked off.
One wonders what would have happened had the passengers not been Israelis but American Jewish leaders. Or Hillel directors. Or Rabbis for El-Sayed. Or me.
Jake Wallis Simons writes today: “Societies, he wrote, either cultivate nerve and responsibility or teach their people that danger is ‘always somebody else’s department.” Israelis live with the knowledge that help may not arrive in time. Most have served. All understand that collective survival depends on individual action. This knowledge comes at a terrible price, and no one should romanticize life under permanent threat. But it produces a seriousness about defending life that comfortable people mistake for an appetite for force.”
Which raises an uncomfortable question closer to home. Why can’t American Jews confront a threat?
I do not mean tackling a man with a knife. I mean something far less demanding. For three years – actually for a decade or more –, anti-Israel forces have run the American campus more or less at will. Anti-Israel and Zionophobic forces dominate the media, entertainment and podcasts. American Jews have responded with statements, task forces, letters of concern and pleas to have elected officials recite their condemnation of antisemitism
At MIT, a group of Israelis responded differently. One of them, Yossi Sheffi, tells the story in Unsafe at MIT: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews.
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