Dr Anjuli Pandavar is a British writer and social critic who holds a PhD in political economy. She was born into a Muslim family in apartheid South Africa, where she left Islam in 1979. Anjuli is preparing to convert to Judaism. She is one of the staunchest defenders of Israel and a constructive critic of the Jewish state when she believes it is warranted. She owns and writes on Murtadd to Human , where she may be contacted. Operation Badr, the name for the Egyptian opening attack of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, was in some ways more damaging than the Hamas attack on October 7, in that its effects were entirely devastating, leaving Jew fighting Jew, a fight intensifying to this very day, with Israelis coming close to tearing their own country apart. The October 7 attack, on Simchat Torah, close to the 50th anniversary of that fateful Yom Kippur, was also a brilliant psychological attack, but it had an up-side: it woke up the Jews. The genius of the Yom Kippur psychological attack was that Muslims gained an exact measure of the value of psychological warfare against the Jews: in short, the Jews seemed helpless against it. Once commemorative days, especially religious days, were opened as a new front in a psychological war, the attacker, of course, expects that the victim of the first such attack will from then on be alerted to the new tactics. Not so the Israelis, for to this day, most of the population, as well as their leaders, remain unaware that on Yom Kippur 1973, the principle attack was not military, but psychological. After that, instead of the country each year going on high alert in the run-up to and during the High Holidays at the very least , well, we all have the example of what transpired on the night of 6-7 October 2023. There is a whole other learning that the Jewish nation still needs to undergo. Just how far Israelis have progressed in engaging their enemy in its psychological war on the Jewish people was in evidence this weekend, when the killers that Israel released from her prisons on Saturday emerged each wearing a prison-issue T-shirt bearing a blue Star of David over the words, in Arabic, “We will not forget or forgive.” It was a brilliant psychological attack that soiled each of those murderers in a way that no fire can ever cleanse. Of course they flung the garments into a furious bonfire at the first opportunity, but nothing can ever erase the fact that those words and that star were on their bodies, and that will gnaw at their hearts forever. They bear a stain that can never be erased. It is a burden that will grow heavier with time, and increasingly unbalance whatever counts as normal in they accursed lives. Mazel tov! But you would be forgiven if you learnt nothing of the sort from the Israeli media and Left wing opinion-makers, who lost their minds in a frenzy of condemnations, the continuing results of the psychological blow Israel suffered on Yom Kippur fifty-one years ago. The T-shirts are the start of the nation’s long overdue answer, and a very modest one, indeed, to Operation Badr on 6 October 1973. May this be the harbinger of many great psychological warfare escapades to come. But first, Israel owes her Prison Service an enormous debt of gratitude.
