The Price of Standing Upright |
Yom HaZikaron, Iran’s War Against the Jewish State, and the Crime Hidden Inside Antizionism
On Yom HaZikaron, Israel does not simply remember its fallen. It pauses before the terrible cost of Jewish sovereignty — and, this year, before something more: the price of standing upright against a regime whose central project has been the annihilation of the Jewish state.
There is a silence in Israel on this day unlike any other silence in the democratic world. It is not the cultivated silence of monuments, nor the ceremonial solemnity of nations grown comfortable with their own existence. It is rawer than that. It stops traffic. It stills breath. It turns an entire country towards a grief so intimate that it cannot be staged.
This silence is crowded. Crowded with names, faces, uniforms, unfinished conversations; with parents who still wait for the sound of a key in the door; with children who know a photograph better than a voice; with friends who have grown older while the fallen remain young, unbearably young, forever suspended at the age at which they gave their lives.
But this year, remembrance cannot be detached from the war in which Israel now stands. It is not merely a war against rockets, drones, militias, or nuclear installations. It is a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran: a revolutionary theocracy that has spent more than four decades making the destruction of Israel not an incidental slogan, but a pillar of state ideology.
That fact must take centre stage, because everything else flows from it.
The Islamic Republic’s hostility to Israel is not a border dispute. It is not a quarrel over settlements. It is not a diplomatic disagreement susceptible to elegant communiqués, European formulas, or the usual theatre of “de-escalation”. It is a doctrine. It is a strategic architecture. It is an eschatology armed with drones, missiles, proxy armies, intelligence networks, clerical incitement, and a nuclear program.
For forty years, Tehran has funded and trained the forces that encircle Israel: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, militias in Iraq and Syria. It has exported not merely weapons, but a theory of annihilation. Israel is cast not as a state whose policies may be opposed, but as a metaphysical contamination to be removed. The Jewish state, in the imagination of the mullahs, is not an adversary. It is an offense against the order they claim to represent.
This is why the fallen of Yom HaZikaron must be understood not only as casualties of war, but as witnesses to the nature of the war itself. They died in the defense of a country whose existence is treated by its enemies as a theological provocation. They stood between Jewish life and a regime that has made Jewish sovereignty the object of its most obsessive hatred.
One does not answer such a regime by pretending it can be coaxed out of its own identity. One does not appease a revolutionary state whose legitimacy depends upon permanent enmity. One does not purchase safety from those who have built........