An Israeli Voice Of Pride

Here’s a letter I received from Trish Bar-On in Israel. She wrote in response to my last Editorial Titled: Israel – The Pride And Confidence Are Gone.

I made a grievous mistake confusing the Israeli People for the current government. Her words are an inspiration for which I will be forever grateful.

By Trish Bar-On:

Not so, Howard. Our pride and confidence have just taken a battering.

Perhaps had we less pride and arrogance we would have taken measures to prevent Hezbollah expanding and digging in during the last six years. But we are not beaten, far from it. Just more human after this wakeup call.

Let’s hope that we don’t roll over and go back to sleep.

But believe me, Howard. We are a special people, and I would like to think that we are a cut above other nations.

While our boys are fighting for us, making sacrifices, showing incredible heroism in the face of this horrendous reality and learning from their mistakes and ignorance as well as those of their commanders, people on the home-front are amazing, taking countless northerners into their homes, visiting people in shelters, volunteering assistance, services and comfort on a massive scale.

I have yet to meet a person who has not contributed personally to the situation. Yet, being nothing more than human beings we make mistakes and we don’t always learn from them.

We bleed and we cry, and we carry on behaving like the precocious child that we are, considering our paltry 57 years of statehood. However, despite what the media would have the world believe we are a humane army.

The Hezbollah hide in civilian buildings, fire katyushas from civilian areas and our pilots and artillery corps take pride in their precision strikes and agonize over their mistakes.

Golda Meir once said “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”

This is what we have to fight against and we take pride in what we do. We agonize over it, but we retain our pride because we have no choice. And in retaining our pride, we find our confidence.

So Howard, raise your head and continue to be an integral part of a proud nation that is taking a battering but will prevail and come out all the wiser for the pain.

Trish Bar-On

Zichron Ya’akov, Israel