“This is a war against the return of Jewish helplessness.

Much of the world reacted to the massacre by calling the atrocity scenes unbearable. When Israelis say those images are ‘unbearable,’ we mean it literally. We cannot bear this, cannot allow the massacre to redefine us as a nation. We are at war to erase the catastrophic perception of Israelis as victims.

Even more than the atrocities themselves, what was so – yes – unbearable to many of us was the helplessness of our fellow Israelis. Nothing is more antithetical to the Israeli ethos than for Jews to be burned alive with their hands bound behind their backs, with the IDF nowhere in sight.

In the days immediately following the massacre, I received calls from several European journalists, asking if I saw this as a ‘Holocaust moment.’ They were sympathetic; they meant well. But I couldn’t give them the answer they were seeking.

I don’t need Auschwitz to motivate me to defend myself against Hamas, I replied. I live in the Middle East; the fate of the Yazidis is more relevant to me than Babyn Yar. Nor do I trust European sympathy for Israel that is based on the Holocaust. That support is unstable; today it is applied to dead Jews, tomorrow to dead Palestinians.

The support I seek is based on the understanding that Israel faces a genocidal regime on its southern border, that that regime must be destroyed not only for our sake but for the sake of the region, and that the only way to destroy a terrorist infrastructure embedded in a civilian population is the way the IDF is proceeding.”

Read the full article on Times of Israel.