Tel-Chai Nation

Almost a year after the October 7, 2023 tragedy, a special emergency team is training for how to prevent these horrors from occurring again so easily:

Last summer, David Roytman felt that his upscale neighborhood in central Jerusalem was one of the safest places in the country, if not the world.

Now, an armed Roytman patrols its streets regularly with 20 other volunteers from the emergency team he had established, as they use equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare for wartime scenarios that mere months ago would have struck them as the laughable fantasies of an overactive imagination.

Like millions of Israelis across the country, the Hamas onslaught of October 7 radically undermined Rotyman’s feeling of personal security. He is now one of the thousands of men and women who either started or joined emergency teams — kitot konenut in Hebrew – to defend their immediate communities.

[...] Informed by the October 7 onslaught, in which terrorists easily overwhelmed multiple emergency teams despite their fighters’ heroic resistance, the members of Roytman’s emergency team, named Jerusalem Shield, train under the assumption that they would need to fend off well-armed terrorists for hours without external assistance.

The assumption is reflected in the gear at Jerusalem Shield’s disposal, which sets it apart from other units. Roytman, a Ukraine-born businessman who divides his time between Jerusalem and New York, has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from his Jewish contacts to buy Jerusalem Shield equipment. “I set up this unit so that if something happens, I will know I did my part to defend this piece of the country so that we will never be caught off-guard again,” Roytman told The Times of Israel.

And he's doing the right thing.

“With all the goodwill in the world, if there are terrorists in the neighborhood I’m not leaving my family alone,” one member, a reservist in his 30s, said. “But the logistics of moving 20 families in the middle of an onslaught isn’t practical,” another argued.

The debate “would have sounded ridiculous before October 7,” Roytman later told The Times of Israel. But after the onslaught, “a scenario of thousands of terrorists raiding the city center isn’t very difficult to imagine,” he said.

Cutler, the volunteer, said that his understanding of the area’s security situation was formed during the Second Intifada.

“There were suicide bombs, shootings, stabbings, you name it. It can return immediately,” said Cutler, a tour guide from Moshav Beit Zait near Jerusalem.

[...] “Long-term, building a unit like this requires people to like volunteering in it,” Roytman said.

“The shock and alarm of October 7, however profound, will wear off. When it does, the quality of the unit will determine if it remains ready for an attack that, at the end of the day, we now know is much more likely than we liked to think,” he said.

Even before the tragedy, it shouldn't have sounded ridiculous, yet there's only so many people who vehemently refuse to be realists, and that failure is exactly what led to even the jihadist attack on the Bataclan in France nearly a decade ago. The huge problem is how there's a whole segment of society that doesn't want to deal with serious issues, even within the military, recalling how it was told a senior officer shunned the warnings of an observer who noticed what was going on about a year before the tragedy. That kind of mentality could stem from anti-war mentality, and it's more than apparent it's severely dangerous. Anybody as rude as that military commander was to the observer cannot continue to serve in the army.

Labels: anti-semitism, dhimmitude, islam, Israel, Jerusalem, jihad, military, misogyny, political corruption, racism, sexual violence, terrorism, war on terror