10/7/23: The cup of wrath still overflows

It is difficult to understand how personal this is

Five thousand nine hundred twenty days before October 7, 2007, Dr. William Petit experienced the worst day of his life. I ask you to prepare yourself mentally. Two men had followed Petit’s wife and 11-year-old daughter home from the grocery store. In the predawn hours, they broke into the Petit home, beat Dr. Petit with a baseball bat, then bound him in the basement. They tied the couple’s two daughters to their beds and forced Jennifer Hawke-Petit to go to her bank and withdraw $15,000 in exchange for her family. It went badly. Upon returning, one of the attackers “just snapped,” as he told CBS News in an interview from his jail cell.

Image: Grok

The attackers raped Dr. Petit’s wife and daughter Michaela, strangled Jennifer to death, then doused the house with gasoline and set fire to it. Dr. Petit escaped, but his daughters, Hayley and Michaela, perished in the fire. Both of these demons were caught by police and are serving life sentences—commuted from death—in maximum security prisons in Pennsylvania (the crime took place in Connecticut).

I think Dr. Petit understands October 7 and how Israel feels.

I know people who witnessed 9/11, who saw the planes hit the towers with their own eyes. I have relatives whose flight from Boston—immediately after the terrorist flight took off—flew over the WTC and observed the smoke billowing into the clear blue September sky. Compared to 10/7, 9/11 was as impersonal as an earthquake for many Americans. People under the age of 30 have dim or no memory of it, other than the news. There are those who lost parents or relatives, but as a percentage of Americans, it’s not a large number. 9/11 hurt—it was soul-changing—but it was not face-to-face personal.

The United States reacted after 9/11 by lashing out, killing hundreds of thousands of Afghans, Iraqis, and radicalized Muslims in those nations. The number of deaths caused directly or indirectly by our decades-long war in the Middle East runs in the millions. But that war, except for those who carried a rifle, manned a .50 caliber Ma Deuce on the back of a Humvee, or zeroed an A-10 Warthog’s rotary canon on a target, was not personal. The enemy “was killed.”

On 10/7, three years ago today, Gazans did not “just snap.” They had carefully, meticulously, planned their incursion into Israel. They planned the rape, slaughter, and torture of Israelis. They were primed for it. These men murdered 859 civilians, most of them hiding in their homes. They killed 57 police officers, 282 IDF soldiers, and 10 Shin Bet operatives. These were not rocket casualties, or artillery strike deaths, but up-close murders, one by one. These murders happened before the eyes of others who followed in death, and some who survived.

Many survivors endured unbelievable conditions, torture, deprivation, and abuse in underground tunnels for up to two years.

It is us, safe in our homes, free to go out and wave “Free Palestine” flags, or observe country music stars wearing a T-shirt while performing, who do not understand 10/7. The people praising Zach Bryan paid over $300 per ticket to see him play. If they cared that much, they’d send that money to Gaza. Or they’d go to Gaza and see for themselves.

The money would be used to dig more tunnels, construct more rockets, and kill more Israelis. If left alone, “Free Palestine” would be a never-ending, overflowing, cup of wrath against Jews, like it has been for 80 years.

In a two-month span in the summer of 2005, the IDF physically removed Israeli citizens, forcing them to abandon their homes, property, and businesses, from northern Gaza, and turned the territory over to the Palestinians. The Palestinians chose Hamas as their representative government (it took a mini-civil war for Hamas to cement their control in 2006). Hamas burned all the Israeli homes and businesses left to them, including some valuable greenhouses that produced and exported flowers. Now we hear how Israel choked the Gazan flower business. Twisted history.

Hamas declared that no Palestinian should live in a house that a Jew has lived in, or work in a building that Jews built—even if Jews gave them those things in a bid for peace. The cup of wrath just keeps flowing.

These luxe agitators on campus for Gaza, who sail million dollar yachts bringing a few cases of food to Gaza, when Israel sends thousands of tractor trailers, which are promptly seized by Hamas and the food sent underground for their fighters. The people above ground are there to be sacrificed as human shields.

On 10/7, Israelis experienced what Dr. Petit experienced. Except Dr. Petit’s attackers didn’t plan to kill his family, only rob them. The whole point of 10/7 was not to free Gaza, but to slaughter Jews, rape Jews, torture Jews, take Jews hostage and abuse them, or use them to trade for others locked up in Israeli prisons who have done the same thing.

I don’t think we understand the restraint showed by Israel in its wrath. Let me be clear: nothing could have restrained Israel if the country had decided to wipe out Gaza, Judea and Samaria, to the last man, raze it to the last home, bury it under rubble, letting the corpses dry in the sun, and burn the remains to ash. Nothing short of destroying Israel with a nuclear weapon would have stopped them (and it was Iran’s intent to use a nuclear weapon on Israel, make no mistake).

Israel’s wrath has been restrained in a way that we cannot understand. The Hamas attackers, with their own hands, murdered Israeli men, women, and children, videoed themselves doing it, and sometimes posted those videos on social media, gloating over their barbarism. The evidence of this is solid.

When the 45-minute film put together by Israel was shown at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in early 2024, “People walked out of the room in silence simply crying or shell shocked.” Yet antisemitism was not a big topic for the world’s top CEOs and government leaders. The world scantly cared that up-close-and-personal, Israelis—Jews—were violated and murdered. Look how the jet-set cares so much that Israel has perpetrated a war to disarm those who murdered them.

The cup of wrath will continue to overflow, and the world will condemn the Jews for daring to defend themselves, while pogroms, Hitler-apologies, and other disgusting rhetoric issues from the Davos set, millionaires, entertainers, and other useful idiots.

This is how to understand 10/7. Israel’s wrath is restrained, but the more the cup flows, the more souls are seared, and the further both sides are willing to go to satisfy the need for vengeance and wrath. It only takes one act for the cup of wrath to stop flowing. And there’s only one side of the conflict that can make that act happen. Israel has tried. Only the Palestinians can make peace. I pray that they will find a way to do it¹.

1. I know the Way to do it. Thousands of Palestinians have dreamt dreams of a Man in white, Yeshua, or Yeshu. Jesus Christ. They have pledged their lives to follow that Man, at the risk of their own deaths from their rulers. A revival of mercy and grace in Gaza will bring Israel to jealousy, as Romans 11:15 says. “For if their rejection and exclusion from the benefits of salvation were [overruled] for the reconciliation of a world to God, what will their acceptance and admission mean? [It will be nothing short of] LIFE FROM THE DEAD!” (Amplified Bible).