Yom Hazikaron: Israel's Memorial Day

On the sorrowful state of Israel and the tragic loss of life by Israel's brave soldiers

Photograph: Chaim Goldberg, Flash 90

Last week, Israel commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day. Today is National Memorial Day, “Yom HaZikaron”, to remember the fallen soldiers and civilians killed in wars and terror attacks. These are always emotionally challenging two weeks for Israelis.

This year, it’s different.

The last year has been the most turbulent year since Israel’s foundation. The October 7th massacre and the ensuing war in Gaza and southern Lebanon have taken the lives of over 1,500 Israelis, 822 of whom are civilians. Many of them have been brutally raped and burned alive by the Palestinians. 132 are still being held hostage by various Palestinian factions.

Israel is fighting for its existence against an enemy that wishes to eradicate it from the face of the earth. From this perspective, the similarity between Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day is bone-chilling.

But unfortunately, the way in which Israel is waging this war is as if the two events are unrelated.

The military aid that Israel has been allowing to enter the Gaza Strip since the beginning of this war is one testament to that. Can you imagine Israel feeding the Nazis while waging a war to liberate Auschwitz?

This military aid, masked under the friendly name “humanitarian aid," feeds the Palestinian murderers, those who fight the Israeli military, and those who instigated that terrible pogrom. Those who took women, children, and Holocaust survivors hostage from their beds to their tunnels. And those who fight our brave soldiers on the front lines throughout the Gaza Strip.

Yet, the mourning state of Israel continues to feed its killers.

A state’s most fundamental duty is to protect its citizens lives. Not only did Israel fail disastrously on October 7th to perform its duty, but it continued to fail and betray its own citizens by feeding enemy soldiers and the population.

Not only does Israel feed its enemy, but it’s also guilty of sacrificing its soldier’s lives for the sake of protecting the enemy population. This sacrifice is manifested by the Israeli air force deliberately not bombing some military targets due to the fear of killing civilians in the process.

This is the ultimate betrayal.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Israel has been sacrificing its citizens and soldiers for these Islamo-Nazis for decades.

The Oslo Accords, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Israelis since Israel imported Yasser Arafat, the biggest Jew-killer since the Holocaust from Tunesia, to rule the newly founded Palestinian authority in the West Bank and Gaza, and all the various military operations and indecisive wars in Lebanon helped to eternalize instead of ending this conflict, leading to many more Israeli deaths.

There are indeed lots of international pressures at play. The many US presidents who pressured many Israeli PMs to sacrifice themselves have Israeli blood on their hands.

But the meaning of being an independent country is that it’s able to stand up for itself and do what’s necessary to fulfil its duty.

A country that betrays its own citizens in the name of “international laws” and other pressures from its various “allies” is a dependent country, not independent.

A country that exists for the sake of pursuing anything other than the protection of its own citizens is an immoral state.

One Israeli life is worth more than that of 100,000 Palestinians. Every soldier who dies to protect enemy life is committing a heinous moral crime of the worst order.

This is the biggest tragedy for Yom HaZikaron.

The Israeli soldiers who are fighting right now in this war on many fronts are truly heroic human beings.

They are fighting bravely to protect their homes.
They are fighting to make sure that no Israeli will ever be taken hostage.
They are fighting to make sure that their babies will never again be burned alive.
They are fighting so their daughters will never again be raped and murdered inside their own homes.

The cause these soldiers are fighting for is the greatest of all—their own lives and their ability to pursue their happiness. There is nothing worth dying for.

But to ensure that their fight and their tragic deaths on the battlefield are not in vain, this war must be won. If the fire will cease before victory is achieved, all these deaths have been for nothing.

The bravery of Israeli soldiers stands in such stark contrast to the despicable protests and calls for the annihilation of Israel happening around the world. There is absolutely no comparison between the two.

The soldiers and other civilians who have exerted the most amazing acts of courage are unworthy of Israel’s terrible political leadership. It is thanks to the virtues of the great people of Israel that Israel still is, despite all of its crimes against its own citizens, a shining moral beacon.

Let us hope that Israel’s political class will stop the grovelling and embrace, once and for all, the self-esteem and decisiveness to achieve justice, and thus make the loss of all these great soldiers not be in vain.

May these sad and dark times give rise to a new generation of Israeli leadership that will never allow the sacrifice of a single Israeli life for it’s enemies ever again.

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