Re: Our upcoming Holocaust
Iran is planning a Holocaust for Israelis in the next two years. Should we cancel our mortgage insurance?
Day 244 of The October 7 War. 56 years ago this was Day 2 of The Six Day War.
It’s around mid-morning. Going about my day; kids are finally out the house, the dog is back asleep; with a fresh second coffee I am become the destroyer of work. With so much going on, hardly anything registers for very long.
But, this did catch my eye, and I lingered on it a bit.
If Iran is allowed to create a ‘nuclear umbrella,’ it will use the deterrence it has obtained to launch a devastating strike. Israel will be attacked with the aim of destroying it from several fronts with tens of thousands of missiles at the same time. They are planning a holocaust for us in the next two years.
That’s according to Avigdor Lieberman, a member of Israel’s Knesset. I met Lieberman several times as a journalist in years past. He’s a character —his first job was as a bouncer at a Moldovan nightclub. He lives deep in the West Bank. He’s not one to lose his cool. I’ve never seen him to loose his shit. If you see him lose his shit he’s most likely doing it on purpose.
Also, he’s been around for a long time, serving respectively as defense minister, foreign minister, deputy prime minister, minister of strategic affairs, and minister of finance. Also, he was a member of the Knesset subcommittee for intelligence and secret services, and a member of the foreign affairs and defense committee.
All that to say, he knows.…stuff.
So when Avigdor Lieberman says Iran is planning a Holocaust for us Israelis in the next two years, I assume he knows his shit.
What to make of this? Assuming there is absolutely nothing I, or anyone I know, can personally do to prevent this ~2-year Holocaust plan, should I worry about it? I’ve been trying to worry less about things I can’t control, and that’s been overall a good thing. This seems to be one of those situations. Potentially even THE situation. The situation to end all situations. Our doom: it’s too terrible to think about.
There’s nothing I can do about it. So I’m not going to think about it.
I was ready to move on.
Yet…this news does pose some logistical, financial, and parenting questions. For example, do we still fight the kids to do their homework and prepare for exams? Come to think of it, should we even send them to school? They hardly learn anything anyway. What else could they be doing with the time left to them? See the world? Honestly they’re not that fun to travel with. Make money? How much can they realistically make as cat sitters? Memories? What’s the point of making memories if you’re not going to be around to remember them?
Of more immediate concern: how strict should we be about sweets and screen time? Do we carry on as normal, meaning, alternating between giving them sweets to get off their screens and screens to get off their sweets, or do we just sit back and watch them become underage diabetics with bad teeth and ADHD? That would probably make them the happiest, and who has time for these fights now anyway? They only have 2 years left, might as well spoil the darlings, no?
What about our mortgage? I think it’s a 20-year, variable interest mortgage, but that’s not relevant anymore. Will the banks operate on this Iran Holocaust timeline? Will they make us pay all of the mortgage back now? Can they do that? Seems plausible given that Lieberman was finance minister and currently serves on the Economic Affairs Committee. Maybe the bank chiefs also take him seriously. Should we cancel our mortgage insurance?
What about our other insurances? We have life insurance, car insurance, private health insurance. That adds up! Doesn’t seem like we really need those anymore. A “nice to have” not a “must have” given the situation. Same goes for our pension plans. No sense paying in to them anymore.
I’m not trying to belittle this Holocaust warning, I’m really not. It’s very serious. Shocking actually. Unexpected. Disappointing also. We have a strong country, a powerful army, nuclear weapons (apparently), a superpower as our ally. We control the world’s banks, the media, global institutions, some governments. We even control Hollywood.
Yet here we are. There was a Holocaust 2,000 years ago. Another one 80 years ago. And there’s going to be another one in 2 years.
But there’s nothing I can personally do about it, so I will my mind to focus on the things I can control, like, should I carry on exercising, or can I drop that now and really let myself go?
Assuming this comes to pass —and these days I believe anything is possible and likely—how do we make the most of the time we have left? Do we splurge on what we want with whatever we have? Go out designer guns blazing.
Do we liquidate our savings? What about our stocks? Should we sell, take the tax hit and use the cash to do cool shit, like go to Club Med in winter and summer, or buy that completely unnecessary MacBook Pro 14 with the 11 Core CPU?
We’d need to keep working, of course. Just because we’ll be dead sometime in the next 24 months— 8 business Quarters— doesn’t mean our foreign partners and clients should be put out. Business is business. They have bills to pay too. The world keeps turning.
What will they say about the Israelis when we’re gone? We’ll find out in 8 Quarters, 2 years, 24 months, 104 weeks, 15 days, 13 hours, 44 minutes, and 38 seconds.
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