Explain to this mother in Israel like I’m five, how are we supposed to ask our sons and daughters to trust this government after this farce?

This is concrete dust and shattered glass. This is apartments ripped open like dollhouses. This is families buried — children! — and a nation traumatized.

This is an economy that was already strained, now staggering. Businesses closed. Tourism —POOF! Reserve duty stretching on and on and on and on, pulling parents away from children, dismantling any semblance of stability and normalcy.

We were told this war was necessary. Sometimes war is necessary. I do believe that.

The IRGC is a global threat. I know this.

But if we are in a war then it has to lead somewhere. It has to change something. It has to leave us safer, stronger, more secure in the long arc of things.

Instead, we are standing in the wreckage asking a very simple question:

What, exactly, was achieved?

Iran is still on its path to nuclear capability. The regime is not weakened in any meaningful, lasting way. If anything, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has emerged more entrenched — not less — holding tighter control over one of the most critical arteries in the world: the Strait of Hormuz.

And now — unbelievably — there is talk that we may have to pay for access to it. Pay, in one form or another, for something that was once open.

So let’s understand the full picture we are being asked to accept:

We absorbed the blows. We buried the dead. We crippled parts of our own economy. Our standing in the international world is now below rock bottom — it’s in foul groundwater beneath the lowest place we’ve ever been. Our kids are traumatized — and so are we. I don’t feel safer. And I know I’m not alone.

And the enemy we were told we had to confront?

Still there. Still advancing. I’d argue they’re even profiting.

This is a tactical Pyrrhic victory at best — and really, it lands more as a strategic farce because let’s tell it like it is: this is not how deterrence works.

In Israel, there is an unspoken contract — but it is understood by everyone:

We send our children to the army. We ask them to risk their lives. And in return, the state is supposed to act with seriousness, with clarity, with strategy that extends beyond the next headline or the next political cycle.

Not perfect by any stretch. But responsible.

Right now, that contract feels broken at least from where I sit with white hot rage and trembling hands.

If this was a victory, explain it to me as I prepare for my children to put on a uniform.

Don’t give me slogans. Don’t send me a meme. I sure as hell don’t want a song and a dance.

Explain it in terms i can understand as a mother when she looks at her babies in uniform.

Explain how this makes them safer.

Because if the answer is unclear — or worse, if the answer is that it doesn’t — then what we are left with is not strength.

It is something far more dangerous.

And disillusionment spreads quietly. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t protest in the streets at first. It settles in. It calcifies and becomes the thing people carry inside them when the next call-up comes, when the next war is declared, when the next speech promises necessity and victory.

We are a country that knows how to endure war.

What we cannot afford is the slow erosion of trust between a people and those who lead them into it.

Our social contract here is shattering. And our leaders must face the weight of this and fix it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)