Nobody is digging graves in the parks this time

Before the Six-Day War, Israelis dug mass graves in Tel Aviv’s public parks.

That detail doesn’t make it into our consciousness often enough. But it’s documented. In the weeks before June 1967, as Egypt massed its forces and Arab leaders openly declared their intention to annihilate the Jewish state, Israeli authorities quietly prepared mass temporary burial sites in city parks for the tens of thousands of casualties they expected. Jonathan Sarna, then twelve years old in an American Jewish home, remembers watching it on television. A rabbi in the Bronx told his congregation: “If they wipe out Israel, there’s going to be a sign up: The shul is closed.” Yossi Klein Halevi, then a teenager in New York watching the broadcasts alongside his Holocaust-survivor father, later wrote that both of them shared the same dread: that some version of the Holocaust was about to reoccur. “That feeling,” he wrote, “was repeated across the Jewish world, from Moscow to Tel Aviv.”

Six years later, on the afternoon of Yom Kippur 1973, Egypt and Syria launched their surprise assault. Within twenty-four hours, Moshe Dayan told his senior commanders: “This is the end of the Third Temple.” He sought authorization to arm nuclear weapons. More than 2,600 Israeli soldiers were killed in three weeks of fighting. The country emerged victorious, but the margin had been razor-thin, and everyone knew it.

That was the zeitgeist in which Israel was built in its founding decades. A world where Jewish survival could not be assumed or taken for granted. The question “will Israel still exist?” was something real people asked about a real place they loved.

I’ve been thinking about that world a lot lately.

The Silence That Speaks

Something struck me when Iran’s retaliatory strikes began hitting Israel on February 28th. My phone was mostly still. Very few people from abroad checked in to ask if we were okay. Certainly felt like I received fewer messages than during the 12 Day War in June 2025.

I’ve sat with that – and so have many of my Israeli friends and family. My read is that people abroad sense, on the whole correctly, that Israel’s defensive capabilities have transformed what conflict looks like here. The Arrow system, David’s Sling, and Iron Dome are intercepting wave after wave of Iranian ballistic missiles and drones. Iranian attack waves peaked in the opening days of the war and have since dropped by more than 90 percent, attributed to a combination of Israel’s interception efforts and the systematic destruction of Iranian launch infrastructure. The architecture protecting us was decades in the making, built by Israeli engineers who understood that Jewish survival in this neighborhood requires invention, courage – and perhaps a sense of humor by making Israelis gather underground with their neighbors for hours at a time and seeing what comes of it.

And yet. Israelis have been murdered.

Dimona. Arad. Tel Aviv. Misgav Am. All have been hit. There was the apocalyptic hit on March 1st when an Iranian ballistic missile struck a synagogue in Beit Shemesh, people torn to shreds sheltering in the one place they thought they’d be safe. There is immense damage. People in the North of the country are spending hours at a time in shelters, peppered by Hezbollah fire. Families have spent days moving between bomb shelters and reinforced rooms. “Protected” and “safe” are not the same word, and the quiet from abroad, however understandable, still stings. We deserve(d) a check-in.

But I think something else is also driving the quiet, something that feels uncomfortable to name. The anxiety I’m hearing from committed Diaspora Jews has shifted from physical to moral. The question isn’t “will Israel survive?” It’s “is Israel right?”

A Reminder from Buenos Aires – Jews & Israel

Let me offer some context for anyone sitting with that question.

On July 18, 1994, a truck bomb destroyed the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Eighty-five people were killed. More than 300 were wounded. They were Argentine Jews: community workers, students, doctors, ordinary people who walked into their building on an ordinary morning and never came home. An Argentine court ruled in April 2024, after thirty years of investigation, obstruction, and delayed justice, that Iran ordered the bombing and Hezbollah carried it out. At the time, it was the deadliest attack on Jewish people anywhere in the world since the Holocaust.

Two years before that, in March 1992, the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires had been bombed by the same network. Twenty-nine people were killed. Over 200 wounded. The Iranian warlords targeted both a Jewish center and an Israeli embassy – they drew no distinction.

Both attacks happened in South America, thousands of miles from any Israeli military operation, against Jews who were simply living their lives. The Argentine Jewish community numbered 300,000 people, the largest in Latin America. Iran chose it as a target because the people inside were Jewish. An infographic published on Khamenei’s own website, just months before his death on February 28th, described eliminating Israel as “a religious, human duty.”

The man who wrote those words is now dead. His senior commanders are dead. The IRGC’s top brass, its chief of staff, its aerospace force commander, its drone and air defense unit leaders, were killed in the opening strikes of the 2025 Twelve-Day War and the strikes that followed. The jokes circulating in Israel right now are about whether there are enough qualified ayatollahs left to fill the vacant positions. Mojtaba Khamenei, a man whose main qualification appears to be his surname, has been named his father’s successor. That shift in tone, from the existential dread of Dayan’s “Third Temple” to the dry humor of a people watching its enemies scramble, says something real about where we stand.

Jewish blood is not cheap. That has been the founding promise of this country, paid for across generations of sacrifice and hard-won ingenuity.

What 1967 Felt Like in Brooklyn, and What 2026 Feels Like in Tel Aviv

When American Jews raised tens of millions of dollars in a single week in June 1967, the UJA collected more than $20 million in the New York area alone, close to $150 million in today’s money. They were acting out of terror. A congregant in Scarsdale took out a second mortgage to donate $20,000. Seven high school students raised $10,000 from their neighborhood in two days. People gave because they were frightened, because the graves in the parks were real, and because no one knew how it would end.

Yossi Klein Halevi later wrote that 1967 became the moment when many Jews felt they could speak about God “without too much irony.” The relief of survival was that total.

Living in Israel in 2026 feels different from that. The losses are real. The threat is scary. But we are watching something that would have seemed like a fantasy to the people who dug those graves in the parks: a Jewish state that shoots ballistic missiles out of the sky, that has systematically dismantled the military leadership of a regional power, and whose enemies’ supreme leader is dead. Decades of investment, engineering, intelligence work, and national determination produced this. A country that decided, a long time ago, it would never again leave its people’s survival to chance or to the goodwill of others.

What Diaspora Jews Should Be Feeling Right Now

I want to say something directly to my brothers and sisters abroad. There is so much to be grateful for – and proud of.

Be proud of this country’s pilots. They have been flying sorties into Iranian airspace, hitting hardened targets inside a country of 90 million people with a sophisticated air defense network, while their families sit in shelter rooms at home. Their precision, their courage, and their professionalism have been extraordinary. The IDF has carried out more than 7,600 strikes across Iran, targeting missile launchers, nuclear infrastructure, and IRGC command centers, with a level of intelligence-driven accuracy that military analysts across the world have described as unprecedented.

Be amazed at the engineering. The Arrow system intercepting ballistic missiles at the edge of space. Iron Dome batting away rockets. David’s Sling filling the gaps in between. This infrastructure did not appear overnight. It was built by Israelis who spent decades preparing for exactly the scenario now unfolding, and operated by young men and women who were students not so long ago. After two weeks of sustained Iranian attack waves, the number of incoming strikes dropped by over 90 percent.

Be moved by the stamina, sacrifice and yes, overused as it may be, resilience, of ordinary Israelis. People here have been running to shelters for weeks. They have had their children at home while trying to work. They have watched their loved ones head to reserve duty for the umpteenth time. They have kept businesses open, kept turning up for work, kept looking after neighbors. There is a particular kind of Israeli stubbornness, call it chutzpah or call it something less polite, that refuses to let an enemy determine how the day goes. It is something to witness up close – come visit for yourself – you might find yourself leaving inspired.

And understand that this war is not happening somewhere far away from you. Last August, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that the IRGC had directed arson attacks on a kosher restaurant in Sydney and on the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne. ASIO, Australia’s domestic intelligence agency, confirmed that Iran used a complex web of overseas cut-outs and local criminals-for-hire to carry out the attacks. Albanese expelled the Iranian ambassador, the first time Australia had expelled any foreign ambassador since World War Two.

Sydney. Melbourne. Buenos Aires. The IRGC does not draw a distinction between Israeli Jews and Diaspora Jews. It never has. The war being fought from the shelter rooms of Beit Shemesh and the cockpits over Tehran is also, in the most direct sense, being fought on behalf of the Jewish community in every country where the IRGC has built networks and paid informants and identified targets.

A Defining Moment

Something important is happening here that we should name clearly, without embarrassment and without false modesty.

Israel has emerged from these past few years as a genuine regional superpower. The Iran that existed three years ago, with its intact chain of command, its seasoned IRGC generals, its functioning air defense networks, its nuclear scientists and its missile stockpiles, is not the Iran that exists today. Its supreme leader is dead. Its most capable military commanders were killed before they could be replaced. Its missile launch capacity has been reduced to a fraction of what it was. The proxy network it spent decades and billions of dollars building, from Hezbollah in the north to the Houthis in the south, has been degraded to the point where those organizations are scrambling for survival rather than projecting threat.

None of this means the danger is over. Committed enemies are still dangerous even when weakened, and the region will take years to fully recalibrate. But what Israel has achieved here, together with the United States, carries the realistic prospect of buying years of genuine quiet: a Middle East in which the axis of violence that has targeted Jewish life for decades no longer has the capacity to threaten it at the same scale. That possibility, earned at real cost by real people, is worth pausing to appreciate – there is still much work to do.

The Jewish people have been waiting a long time to be able to say this: we have a state powerful enough to change the strategic reality around it. Not just to survive the next attack, but to reshape the conditions that produce attacks. That is something new in Jewish history. And it is something to celebrate.

What We Owe Each Other

A wedge is forming between committed Jews here and committed Jews abroad, and it worries me, not because I doubt the love, but because the moral confusion is real and growing.

To feel uncertain about whether Israel is justified in confronting the Islamic Republic, you have to set aside what the terror regime has actually done across forty years (to its own people too): the community centre in Buenos Aires, the embassy bombing two years before it, the sustained funding of every armed group that has attacked Israeli civilians and Jews around the world, and the declarations of genocidal intent, stated openly, repeatedly, and proudly by its leadership until the day they died. Destroying Jewish life is central to this regime’s identity from the beginning and they pursue it on every continent where Jews live.

Those of us living here in Israel have plenty going on right now – trying to balance lives, families, sleep deprivation, a relentless pace of work and life. And yet, we all have our brothers and sisters abroad, and when you do have those conversations, you have another job. To remind them of what is so obvious to those of us living here.

That this is the Jewish state that defends Jewish lives. We are a people that are not waiting to be rescued. And that we are a generation of Israelis who have built, from the memory of every previous vulnerability, something our grandparents dreamed of.

Nobody is digging graves in the parks. For anyone who knows their history, that sentence alone should stop you cold.