While the World Holds Its Breath, Israelis Are Braving a Psychological Terror Campaign

A billboard depicting Iranian ballistic missiles is seen in Valiasr Square in central Tehran, Iran, on April 15, 2024. Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

Perhaps the most thought-provoking article exposing the psychological war being waged against Israel was written by Yaakov Katz, an American-born Israeli journalist and former editor of The Jerusalem Post.

In his article, “Iran’s campaign of psychological torture has been a strategic win,” Katz claims that Iran’s “strategy of suspense” has “inflicted considerable harm [on Israel] without firing a single shot.”

It was nice to hear someone finally say it.

Ever since the massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, and certainly since the killing of both Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah military chief Fuad Shukr, Israelis and their supporters worldwide have been holding their breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Caroline Glick, in her JNS TV show by the same name, summed it up best when she said: “We may get smacked at any moment. Obviously, we’ve been in this holding pattern. Kind of annoying to me. We should be preempting it; there’s no reason for us to be sitting around waiting for somebody to kill us.”

And that’s exactly what it feels like. Every morning, I check the news to see if Israel has been smacked, to see the names of the innocent people who won the lottery of death that day. It’s absurd; no other civilized democracy in the world would be forced to tolerate such a thing.

On Aug. 6, the IDF confirmed that search and rescue battalions had been deployed to Tel Aviv and other major Israeli cities to prepare for possible Iranian and Hezbollah attacks. Sure, that’s a smart thing to do, but one envisions troops arriving, meeting locals, and saying: “Hey, how are you? Say, everything seems OK now, but if the bomb falls on your house, have no fear, I’ll be here to take what’s left of you to the hospital or recover your body.”

Katz rightly pointed out that “just by threatening Israel, Iran and Hezbollah have brought international travel to a standstill, have led the Americans to divert significant forces to the region and have put Israel on the highest level of alert since Oct. 7.”

He emphasized that almost all flights in and out of the country are canceled indefinitely, the economy is suffering, and a larger conflict could cause unprecedented damage to infrastructure, businesses, and the import and export of goods.

This means that every time Israel takes action to defend itself, Iran will threaten to attack.

“This means that the conflict is no longer just with proxies and along Israel’s borders with Lebanon or Gaza,” Katz concluded, “but it is much bigger and wider, with far-reaching implications.”

Another JPost.com writer described “Iran’s attack on Israel’s consciousness” as a new kind of cyberattack. Writer Lia Tsur described attackers taking over billboards in Tel Aviv right after Oct. 7, 2023, with “pro-Palestinian slogans and disturbing images from the massacre.” Most recently, attackers impersonated Mako, a website popular with younger Israelis, with the chilling headline, “The Home Front Command updates that it is forbidden to leave the house after 22:00 due to a predicted attack by Iran on all of Israel.” Tsur then described a “method of sending fake SMS messages ... [that] infiltrate automatic response systems so that if you call a call center, you receive frightening messages that Israel is nearing its end.”

Tsur, a cyber expert, warns those who receive frightening SMS messages to not respond, to simply block and ignore. Similarly, when receiving threatening phone calls, block and ignore. And again, “if you see a fake profile on social media posting malicious content, block it and do not share or spread it further.”

Since Oct. 7, 2023, 689 Israeli soldiers have been killed and 4,303 wounded. Yet the world needs to acknowledge the psychological campaign of terror being inflicted on millions of people—a campaign that is running concurrently alongside the hot war.

Finally, another writer, Zina Rakhamilova, co-founder of “a digital marketing firm that specializes in geopolitics” tells us that no matter how bad the threats from Iran, Jews will never leave Israel.

Rakhamilova writes that right after Oct. 7, 2023, immigrants to Israel were pressured by their families to come back to their home countries. She wrote that many immigrants and native Israelis did indeed choose to flee for “fair and understandable reasons.”

“[However,] it is not a sign of ‘weakness’ to flee to safety when such a level of unprecedented terror and barbarity occurred just an hour’s drive from where most of us live,” she wrote.

But like so many other Israelis she asked, “How could I leave when my country needed me?

“There was collective trauma, but there was also collective healing, and I don’t think leaving Israel would have made me feel safer or better about what was happening to us.”

And so, she and millions of others choose to stay in Israel, choose to risk getting “smacked at any moment,” as Glick phrased it.

“The Islamic Republic and its threats are just one of many in the long list of entities that want to eradicate the Jewish people,” Rakhamilova wrote. “They will not succeed.”

Indeed, the world is watching, and many are praying that she is right.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.