why Israel fights

Read the lament of Orna Shimoni, the mother of a fallen soldier and one of the founders of the Israeli peace movement Four Mothers, which eventually spurred Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000:

“This is an existential war. A war over our actual lives. For a long time I have had this feeling: What will happen if one day the IDF comes down with a virus? Nothing serious, the flu. But even with the flu and a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius and no strength, you can’t do anything. So what will happen if the IDF gets the flu? If all our soldiers have a temperature of 40 degrees.

“Today I know what will happen: there will be a slaughter here. We will not be in the sea, because we will simply be slaughtered. Not one person from the nation of Israel will remain. If the IDF comes down with a virus, no one will defend us, including our friends in the United States. So I feel that despite the terrible pain, this war is just and necessary to protect our lives. And I think that even when we remove hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in Lebanon, that is not only right, it is also moral. Because I do not want them to be killed in our shelling. But we have to shell. And we have to fight. Because this time, it’s not over the security zone [in southern Lebanon], this time it is over our lives.

“That’s why it makes me so angry to see the extreme left now demonstrating and breaking the consensus. Because the left is me. Shulamit Aloni is me. And the extreme left says that even now, even after we withdrew to the last centimeter in Lebanon and even after we withdrew to the last centimeter in Gaza, we are to blame. And to say something like that, is to say that we are to blame because we live here and not in Uganda. And then the extreme left is actually saying that we are to blame until we are in the sea. Because they will not accept us in Uganda, you know. Or in the United States, or in France. So the extreme left is now giving me a certain feeling of hatred. Because then, too, no one cared what happened to the Jews. No one prevented slaughter. And today I’m undergoing an experience of slaughter. More than ever before, I know that if the IDF comes down with a virus, the next day the State of Israel will not exist.”

Read the whole thing.