In early August, Rom Braslavski, who spent 738 days in captivity in Gaza, heard that the IDF had eliminated one of his captors. Braslavski, who as we see in the video above, learned fluent Arabic from his captors, filmed a quick video in which he warned the other still-living captors that they are living on borrowed time. The IDF got the one guy, he said, but it will also get all the others, too.
Bravado?
Turns out, no. Israel has now acknowledged that it intends to eliminate all 5,000 terrorists who either planned or participated in the October 7 attacks. Some 1200-1300 were killed on the day of the attack. Another 1300-1500 have been killed since then. Some 300 are in Israeli prisons. That still leaves about two thousand more terrorists that Israel plans to eliminate.
The operation is called Operation Nili. As I explain above, “Nili” is an acronym for נצח ישראל לא ישקר, the Eternity of Israel Will Not Lie. That’s a biblical line with a very particular context. The prophet Samuel said it to King Saul, and we examine that context and what it means today.
Nili was also the name of an early Zionist spy ring in the early years of the twentieth century. We look at the story of that spy ring, how and why it ended, and what naming this present operation after them might suggest.
Finally, we look at Operation Wrath of God, in which Israel also promised to eliminate all the terrorists who participated in the Munich Olympic massacre — an operation that did not entirely succeed.
This new operation, then, has biblical antecedents, early Zionist roots and even more recent ones. Today is an introduction to all those elements of a government policy that — precisely as Rom Braslavski promised — still plans to take out a lot of people who, as far as Israel is concerned, signed their own death warrants when they attacked the Jewish State on October 7, 2023.
In coming weeks, we’ll be launching a video series on the survival techniques that the Jewish people used in the past when it was in crisis. Given that our nation is in crisis once again, what can we learn about what worked in the past and what didn’t — and how might that help us as we think about how to shape our future?
Just a reminder to our subscribers: we provide transcripts of podcasts in which I interview other people. The ones, like today’s, in which I am speaking alone, do not have AI-generated transcripts.
