Hope and fear in a time of resolve
'You cannot negotiate peace with someone who has come to kill you', Golda Meir once famously said.
We wait with bated breath, clutching our phones as we wait for news from our loved ones in Israel. It is a ritual we have endured before, but over the past six days our emotions have grown ever more intense.
For it is not merely rockets and drones falling on Israel, this time it is wave after wave of highly destructive Iranian ballistic missiles.
At the same time, we understand that Israel’s current military campaign to set back Teheran’s nuclear ambitions is an absolutely necessary one. For years, we spoke in theoretical terms of reaching this point. Now that we are here it feels all at once surreal, tense, terrifying and yet somehow hopeful.
There is also pride; as Israel continues to strike Iranian military targets and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, we know that it is doing so not just to protect its own citizens but the broader region and the world from the regime’s malevolence.
And we are also frustrated, as political leaders in Australia and around the Western world talk of restraint and returning to diplomacy, which has failed for more than 20 years.
Again their double standard when it comes to Israel is evident. A more appropriate course would be to merely say thank you.
Because as the statement widely attributed to Golda Meir says, “You cannot negotiate peace with someone who has come to kill you.”
The Iranian regime has made it clear that it seeks the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state. Its leaders have said it again and again. They won’t be talked out of it; the only solution is to destroy their means to do so.
Likewise, the double standards being displayed by the usual so-called human rights activists who are condemning Israel rather than one of the world’s worst human rights abusers is laughable.
They would do well to listen to the Iranian people, who know very well who the true enemy is.
We hope that those brave Iranians who are calling for change have their prayers answered with freedom. They have our admiration and our friendship.
And we hope that we never again have to wait with bated breath, clutching our phones waiting for news of our loved ones in Israel.