A testimony from the Golan Heights:

I want to tell you something I have carried since that morning.
For a long time I did not know how to say it.
I think the time has finally come.

On the seventh of October, while the south of my country was burning, I was here.
In the north.
In Natur, on the Golan Heights, in the very house I am writing to you from right now.

You know what happened in the south.
The whole world saw it.
What the world did not see is what was waiting in the north.

I am a soldier in the reserves.
In the days that followed, I crossed the border into Lebanon with my brothers.
And I saw it with my own eyes.

I saw how ready they were.
Hezbollah.
Not far away. Not someday.
Meters from the border.
A short walk from my own front door.

The gear was there.
The positions were there.
The plan was there.
They were ready to pour across and do to the north what was done to the south.
Only larger. Much, much larger.

I will not pretend to know the numbers.
No one can.
But I know what I saw.
And I believe with everything in me that it would have been a disaster this land has never known.
Thousands.  Tens of thousands.
Homes like mine.  Families like mine.  Children like my children.

It was meant to happen that same morning.
Synchronized.  South and north at once.
A double blow aimed straight at the heart of Israel.

And it did not come.

I have asked the soldiers.  I have asked myself.
No one can explain why the north did not fall that day.
The enemy was ready.  The hour was set.
And the hand that should have struck simply did not.

I am not a man who reaches for easy miracles.
I have buried friends.  I have seen real war.
I do not say the word lightly.
But I have no other word for this.

It was God.

If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, the psalm says,
when men rose up against us, they would have swallowed us alive.
Blessed be the Lord, who has not given us as prey to their teeth.
Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers.
The snare is broken, and we are escaped.

That is not poetry to me anymore.
That is my street.
That is my house.
That is the morning of the seventh of October on the Golan Heights.

He who keeps Israel does not slumber and does not sleep.
That night He did not sleep.
While the enemy waited in the dark, the Keeper of Israel was awake.
And the north is still standing because of it.

I am telling you this because you pray for this land.
You need to know what your prayers have been standing against.
And you need to know Who answered.

A thousand may fall at your side, the psalm says, but it shall not come near you.
I have stood in the very place where it should have come near.
And it did not.

So I will not be quiet about it.
Not now.
Not in days like these, when the world forgets so quickly.

God saved my life.
God saved my family.
God saved my home.
And I believe He saved more lives that morning than any of us will know this side of heaven.

Tell it where you are.
Tell it in your church.
Tell it to your children.
The north did not fall, and only heaven can explain why.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
And give thanks to the One who kept watch over the Golan,
on the morning the Keeper of Israel did not sleep.

From the north, still standing,
Tai ”