Yes, Pray for Peace but also for Victory!

It was bound to happen… Today we awoke to a Reuters dispatch stating that The Islamic Republic of Iran has been trying to get anyone who would listen to mediate an immediate ceasefire with Israel. I know the images from Tel-Aviv and the rest of the country are difficult to watch. We must be strong and stay the course! Here below, is a brief reminder of why a cease fire right now not only is a terrible idea but it simply is not an option!

On 7 October 2023 Israel awoke to the deadliest on-slaught of terrorism in a generation. Hamas gunmen—funded, trained, and armed by the Islamic Republic of Iran—flooded across the border and butchered entire families in their homes. Since then, diplomats abroad have urged Jerusalem to accept a cease-fire with Tehran, as though the masterminds of this carnage could be pacified by polite diplomacy. They are wrong, and the proof is written in blood across Israel, Gaza, and far beyond the region’s horizon.

I have traveled to Israel six times since that black Shabbat. Each visit peeled back another layer of anguish —and of iron-willed resilience: praying with grieving families in Be’eri, volunteering in hospitals in Ashkelon, and escorting farmers in the Galilee who now harvest under drone alerts. The most searing images come from a trip three months after the massacre, in early November 2024, when smoke still hung over the kibbutzim and the blood of our people was literally still on the walls of the homes where they were murdered. Children’s bicycles lay riddled with bullet holes and prayer books were strewn across synagogue floors, yet the survivors—drained but unbowed—spoke of rebuilding.

Iran’s fingerprints are everywhere. Hamas rockets, Palestinian Islamic Jihad mortars, Hizbullah drones, Houthi missiles in the Red Sea, and the IRGC’s own ballistic salvos of April 2024 all trace back to a single playbook: bleed Israel, terrorize Jews worldwide, and suffocate any hope of coexistence. A cease-fire would merely grant Tehran time to reload. We have seen this pattern before: after Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, Hizbullah amassed more than 150,000 rockets—not relief supplies—under the world’s distracted gaze.

The danger reaches well beyond the Middle East. Last July I stood in Buenos Aires before the shattered façade of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), where Iranian agents murdered eighty-five souls in 1994. Two years earlier the same terror network leveled Israel’s embassy across town. These bombings took place eight-thousand miles from Jerusalem yet sprang from the same ideology driving Hamas today: the conviction that Jewish life is expendable wherever it is found. If Iran can reach South America, why would anyone trust a signature in Geneva?

Some critics insist Israel seeks regime change in Tehran. That is a straw man. Jerusalem has no wish to occupy Persia or dictate its politics. What Israel must do—what should have been done twenty years ago—is deprive Iran of the tools it uses to murder Jews. That means disabling IRGC drone and missile factories, severing the smuggling routes that funnel precision weapons to Hizbullah, and choking the finances that fund Hamas tunnel diggers. No responsible government would tolerate less while its citizens are held at rocket-point.

Assertive action carries risk, but restraint carries a cost as well. When Iran creeps toward a nuclear bomb while the world dithers, escalation is guaranteed—on Iran’s timetable. Deterrence delayed is deterrence forfeited. Israel has endured decades of rockets, suicide bombings, and diplomatic scorn hoping reason would prevail. Instead, Iranian centrifuges spin faster, and Jewish schools from Paris to Mumbai hire guards to protect their children.

Israel’s fight today is not merely Israel’s; it is the front line of a broader struggle between radical theocracy and the right of free people to live without fear. A cease-fire that leaves Iran’s war machine intact would broadcast the message that barbarism pays. An Israeli victory that dismantles that machine would reverberate from Kyiv to Taipei, proving that aggression invites consequences.

I have stood at fresh graves on Mount Herzl and prayed at the still-scorched Nova festival site. The question that haunts those places is not “How can we pause?” but “Why did the world allow this to fester so long?” The only moral answer is to finish the mission now and ensure that no grandmother in Sderot—or worshipper in Buenos Aires—ever again hears the scream of an Iranian-supplied warhead.

Israel is not asking the world to fight for it—only to stand behind it, to reject the false symmetry between victim and aggressor, and to recognize that peace built on Iranian assurances will crumble like the AMIA façade. When the guns finally fall silent, let it be because Iran no longer possesses the means to pull the trigger. Then, and only then, can genuine peace take root. That is why Israel must reject any cease-fire with Tehran today. Any other course would invite tomorrow’s massacre.