Each morning when my grandchildren arrive at their Jewish day school here in my hometown, a man is already standing outside the building.

He is the armed security guard posted in the parking lot at the entrance. Over time we have gotten to know him the way you get to know people who quietly become part of daily life. Parents nod to him as they pull into the drop off lane. Kids wave on their way through the doors.

We usually stop and chat with him for a moment, most often about the weather. Sometimes the kids, Max, Abby, and Cam, wave to him again before running back to the car. It is a small, ordinary ritual, the kind that happens outside schools across America every morning. But the reason Steve is standing there is never far from our minds.

Security has become part of ordinary Jewish life.

A generation ago the idea that Jewish day schools would need armed guards would have seemed extraordinary. Today it barely registers as unusual. It is simply part of daily life in Jewish communities across America.

This morning, the news out of Detroit made that reality feel even closer.

Early reports say that a man drove his car into the grounds of the largest Reform synagogue in the United States, located outside the city. According to early reports he exited the vehicle carrying a rifle before being shot by synagogue security guards. The incident is a grim reminder of the world Jewish communities increasingly inhabit.

Sadly, scenes like this have become increasingly familiar. Fortunately, someone like Steve was standing there too, making sure that children and families could leave the building safely.

For many Jews, threats are rarely treated as abstract rhetoric. History has taught us that the most dangerous words are often the ones people assume cannot possibly be meant literally. The guard outside the school, the barriers outside synagogues, the cameras outside community centers all reflect the same truth.

Israel exists, in part, because Jews learned that sometimes the only reliable security is the ability to defend themselves. For Jews in Israel, this instinct operates at the level of national survival rather than community security.

Which helps explain a remarkable fact about Israeli politics right now.

A country famous for political division has suddenly reached an extraordinary level of agreement. Roughly ninety percent of Israeli Jews support confronting the Iranian regime. Israelis have spent decades living with enemies who openly describe what they intend to do. When someone says they want to destroy you, you learn to take them seriously.

That level of consensus is rare in Israeli politics. For years Israel has been locked in one of the most bitter domestic struggles in its history. Hundreds of thousands protested Benjamin Netanyahu in the streets. Former military and intelligence leaders attacked his policies. Many Israelis blame him directly for failures that contributed to the catastrophe of October 7.

Concern about Iran is not new in Israeli strategic thinking. As early as the 1990s, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin warned that Iran’s long term ambitions posed one of the most serious threats Israel would face in the future. Rabin believed Israel needed to reduce immediate conflicts in order to focus on what he saw as the larger strategic danger emerging in Tehran.

Yet on the question of Iran, the argument largely disappears. But that raises an obvious question:

If Israelis across the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)