I Refuse

I am not sorry for defending myself from crazed terrorists whose own charter declares their intention to murder me and all Jews everywhere (not just in Israel, in case you have left out that simple fact). Nor am I sorry for the pain you seem to feel whenever I refuse to lay down and die because you are still not used to seeing Jews fight for their lives rather than bow their heads and extend their necks for the sword, No, I am not sorry for the anguish you hypocritically feel when you see photos of unfortunate civilian dead, killed by the Hamas policy of hiding under women’s skirts and behind kindergarten kids after you fire bombed German and Japanese civilians on purpose and burned thousands of them alive with napalm and dropped not one, but two atomic bombs on the hapless and innocent citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.. No, I feel no need to apologize for refusing to allow myself to retain lands that were mine before your countries were born by imperialist wars and rivers of blood. When your ancestors were worshiping rocks and committing human sacrifice to please stone idols, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon. I feel no apology necessary for the outstanding and exemplary conduct of the Israel Defense Force as much as you continue to aver that it is conducting war crimes as our pilots drop their bombs in the sea rather than take out a legitimate target because women and children are too close to the aiming point and we will not kill indiscriminately while your jurists say that it matters not that a UN school turned over missiles to terrorists that were hidden, incontravention of international law, in a classroom in a UN facility. Nor will I say I’m sorry for the fact that mercifully, so few Israeli citizens have been killed by Hamas rockets because we spent our precious resources providing our population with bomb shelters and safe rooms. We designed a system to defeat your rockets and save our people from death and destruction at great cost. The Palestinian Authority and its partner Hamas,  spent the billions of dollars, euros and other funds they received from the hard working American and European people’s taxes to build shelters for their  own cowardly leadership,  placing their own people at risk and putting most of the funds designed for their people’s welfare into Swiss banks that have vaults and shelters. While the people of Gaza are in a dangerous situation caused by their own leaders, those “men” are sitting poolside in a luxury hotel in Doha——hundreds of miles from Gaza city, Khan Yunis, Rafah and Beit Hanoun.

I refuse to feel sorry for returning to our homeland and restoring our sovereignty after 2000 years of our dispersion caused by foreign conquerors who massacred my people, destroyed our cities and sought to eradicate our existence.  I refuse to feel sorry that we have revived our Hebrew language and restored our culture after you have done your utmost to undermine our civilization through centuries of assaults on the practice of our faith and our observance of the Laws of Moses. A set of rules that make society just and allow people to respect and honor each other-a decalogue of laws that our enemies today reject and ridicule.

I refuse to feel sorry for despite all you have done, and continue to do, to erase my people, both culturally and physically, from this planet in a myriad of methods and places. that my neighbors’ children play games speaking the tongue of the prophets of Israel and watch, each morning in school, as the flag, adorned with the blue Shield of David, is raised at the entrance of their schoolhouse. Suicide is not in my play book and when my ancestors did so on a plateau along the Dead Sea in a place called Masada in 73 CE, it was a celebration of our victory, although a tragic one, that still demonstrated our contempt for our enemies.

I refuse to be a victim. I refuse to be a mendicant. I refuse to allow myself to be slaughtered to assuage your hatred and bigotry. I refuse to return to a condition that makes it easier for my enemies to kill me. I refuse to bow down to your false idols. I refuse to be dead to make you feel justified in your malice towards my people for surviving in a world that, in many places, whose soil is choked with the blood of my slaughtered people.

But mostly, I refuse to live by your rules and I refuse to die by them either. I refuse to die.