This article originally appeared on JNS.org on June 15, 2025
Israel’s children are brave. The red alert sounds and, still half-dressed, you go down to the shelter at three in the morning.
The children go down the dusty, steep steps two at a time. They go down into a dark room where, at most, there is a mattress on the floor. They are calm with their eyes are wide open. They do not whine. If you offer them water or a cookie, they just shake their heads.
They wait for the boom; it comes; three or four arrive. The children ask without showing anxiety, where the missile landed, if we have hit the missile, if it has reached our land. The radio does not say everything, so as not to mislead the enemy.
Afterward, you start to make some preparations to go out of the shelter, the children remind you to wait for 10 minutes, according to the rules, and to check on your cell phone if the Pikud Haoref (Israel’s Home Front Command) has confirmed the order.
On TV, the throngs of journalists who are usually engaged in fighting about internal politics and against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have spent hours passionately recounting the incredible actions of this small country, which has faced the most aggressive dictators in the world to survive.
Without any rhetoric, they speak with pride of the Israeli Air Force pilots who led the attacks on Iran as the destroyed remains of Ramat Gan buildings appear on the TV screen.
On Channel 12, a left-wing journalist sits next to an Israel Defense Forces general dressed in uniform who explains how, in just a few hours, Israel destroyed many of the deadliest and dangerous weapons in Iran with aerial maneuvers targeting sites more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away.
They recall Israel’s destruction of the Osirak nuclear site in Iraq in 1981 and a nuclear reaction in Syria in 2007. The United States led a chorus of international protests that followed these indispensable operations. Yet the message was clear then as it is now: Israel will do what it needs to survive.
The people of Israel understand something that the world fails to grasp: Survival comes first and we will do what must be done with skill and precise targeting and action.
The world must remember what Iran is and what it has done. The terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, were prepared with intense strategic collaboration with Iran. The Iranian proxy Hezbollah was ready to join in the fight, as were Iranian proxies in Syria and Iraq. All were ready to band together and complete a historic operation to destroy Israel.
Guiding the way was the same hands, the old Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), fierce and fanatical in their careful distribution of tasks in the destruction of Israel, in the planned genocide of the Jewish people.
With its money, Iran built factories of lethal weapons, ingenious cybernetic constructions, recruited scientists, engaged in the overt and covert enrichment of uranium, and trained assassins from South America to Gaza with just one goal: to kill Jews.
On the eve of its arch-enemy, the Islamic regime, building an atomic bomb, it was time for Israel to act. As former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once reassured U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, “Don’t worry, we Jews have a secret weapon in our fight: We have no place else to go.”
This truth has echoed through decades of persecution and war. And it continues to resonate today.
Just yesterday, a grandmother in southern Israel whose home was destroyed in a missile strike shared a chilling yet defiant moment.
“My three-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter asked what the loud boom was outside the door,” she said. “I told her maybe something fell. We slept in the shelter until morning—calm, locked in—and now, the house is gone. But we live.”
That phrase—“but we live”—is at the heart of Israel’s endurance.
Despite facing yet another existential war—this time not only against Hamas, but the entire Iranian axis—Israel endures. After two years of conflict in Gaza, Israeli soldiers and reservists still cross into perilous terrain. Fathers and sons, brothers and sisters risk their lives in a war where death is not a metaphor. Israel has lost more than 1,000 soldiers, suffered economic shocks, buried children and watched entire communities displaced.
And yet, Israeli families—especially the women—carry on. Mothers raising large families alone while their husbands serve on the front. Communities rebuilding with quiet strength. This is the element Iran and its terror proxies fail to understand.
Israel’s resilience is not a political calculation. It’s a deeply embedded survival instinct—sharpened through centuries of exile, war, and genocide. A people who learned to plow the land while teaching Torah, to build a modern nation while still haunted by the smoke of Auschwitz, cannot be intimidated by rockets or propaganda.
Still, some in the West repeat the delusion that Israel’s war policy is suicidal, or that Netanyahu is dragging the country into ruin. These voices misread both history and reality.
Iran made a fatal error when it interpreted Israel’s internal divisions as a green light for the Oct. 7 massacre. Khamenei believed that this was the moment to trigger Israel’s collapse through his proxy in Gaza—Yahya Sinwar—and that Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah would ride the momentum. He was wrong.
Khamenei believed Hamas’s horrific tactics—using its own civilians as human shields, fueling global antisemitism with false cries of genocide—would create an international trap Israel couldn’t escape. He believed that holding Israeli hostages would be a brilliant, bloody snare. On both counts, he was partially right. But he miscalculated the Jewish response.
What he failed to grasp—what all of Israel’s enemies still fail to grasp—is that the Jewish people do not die quietly. They do not submit to terror. They confront it at its root.
Even before kindergarten, Israeli children know how to say, “Am Yisrael Chai! The people of Israel live.
This isn’t bravado. It’s the daily reality of a people who have walked the razor’s edge of extinction and chosen to fight instead. It’s the miracle-road that Jewish survival has always taken—through war, through exile, through siege. And now, through another campaign of global antisemitism and regional aggression.
And the tide may be turning. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and even Syria have intercepted Iranian missiles over their skies. The strategic tectonics are shifting. A new alignment—perhaps a reckoning—is emerging.
Israel’s enemies still believe it can be broken with rockets or rhetoric. They are wrong. What they face is not just a strong state, but a powerful people for whom survival is not optional and for whom life itself is resistance.
