I’d like to share with you a small part of a letter written by a captain in the Israeli Army to give you a sense of the Jewish warriors who are fighting to protect the Jewish state.
“To the Palestinian people of Gaza: We don’t hate you. We don’t wish you ill. We want only to live in peace side by side with you. When you come out of wherever you’ve been able to take refuge, ask yourself why Hamas never built you any shelters to protect you. They’re great at digging tunnels after all. They’ve dug them under our border, intending to murder as many of our civilians as possible; our women and children, gathered in agricultural village dining halls. Not soldiers, not warriors, but our women and children and old people.
“So they’re good at building tunnels. Why didn’t they build any for you to take shelter in? Then look at your neighborhoods, which are destroyed now because they housed the entrance points to those tunnels, not next to your homes but in your homes!
“They turned your homes and neighborhoods into rocket launching sites and weapons storage depots. Not by accident, but to make you vulnerable, to insure, in fact, that you would be in harm’s way no matter how many warnings Israel issued before it attacked. Ask why Hamas told you to ignore those warnings and that it was your duty to stay in those neighborhoods that they had turned into military targets.
“Look at your neighborhoods. How’s Hamas’s Holy War working out for you?
Are your lives better? Do your children have a better future? Do they have any future but suffering? Hamas and their ilk have been trying to drive us into the sea for over a hundred years now. How’s that working out for you?
“You’ve gone to war against us three times in the last five years. You’ve initiated each one and we’ve begged you, before each, not to launch more rockets at us. But each time you were promised a new divine victory. The rockets would be the sword that would defeat us. We invented Iron Dome.
“The tunnels would be Hamas’s “surprise” that would “open the gates of hell to us.” We’re inside those tunnels right now. Blowing them up. And who has paid the bitterest price? You. Is it worth it? Are you getting something out of all this?
“Here’s an idea. You’ve tried war three times in five years? Try something new. Try peace. You don’t even have to call it peace. . Just stop trying to kill us and prepare to be amazed at how good your lives will become. But what about the siege? The so called “siege” which is nothing more than a sanction regime, was put in place because you keep trying to kill us! So stop.
“You’re smart people. You’re industrious people. Stop trying to kill us and you won’t need to be a martyr to get into Paradise. You’ll have Paradise on earth. You can become the Singapore of the Middle East. You have beautiful beaches that can be developed for tourism. You’re on the Mediterranean for Goodness sake! You are creative and hard working and talented. Put those talents to use at trying to improve your lives instead of trying to end ours.
“You don’t even have to love us. You don’t even have to like us. In fact you can continue to hate us, if that gives you some sort of emotional comfort. It won’t bother us. Knock yourselves out. Just stop trying to kill us,
“Give it a decade. Try it. We’re not going anywhere. You won’t defeat us. You won’t destroy us. You won’t cast us into such despair that we leave the land we’ve yearned for, worked for, sweated and bled for, for two thousand years. We won’t withdraw from the Middle East. Because we live here. Our religion wasn’t born in Poland. It was born here. Our language wasn’t born in Russia or America or France or Ethiopia or Yemen or Morocco. It was born here. And I promise you, we won’t become war weary. We can’t afford to.
“Just stop trying to kill us.”