On the eve of the Jewish New Year, Israelis are experiencing a sense of depression, as well as a sense of acceptance. We are smarter than we were last year, and more cynical. We have less faith in the world at large, but more faith in our own abilities to persevere. We are angrier than we were last year, but we are also more united and gentler with our own. We are a year older, a year wiser, and a year more isolated than we were before.



We have lost our fathers and mothers, our sons and daughters, our grandparents and doctors. We have lost our teachers and rabbis, our students and artists. We have lost a father the day after his son's wedding, and a father and a young bride the day before she was to be married. We have lost so much, and somewhere in the midst of all this loss, we have found ourselves again. Many have come here to live at a time when ?normal? people would be running in the other direction. Israel is ours and we finally understand that it does not matter what the world says or does. We cannot change them, cannot convince them. We can only do what we must.



Last year, we still believed there could be a peaceful solution, that a roadmap could be found to lead us out before we hit bottom. For the sake of peace, we thought last year, we would tear our land apart, divide our communities. We would cut our heart, divide our soul. We would sacrifice and achieve peace and, with that peace, retain access, if not ownership, to our history, portions of our land, places in our hearts.



This year, we hit bottom. We buried our babies and those about to be born. We ached in places we didn?t know we could hurt, cried tears we thought had long since been spent, and watched the blood flow in our land. And finally, across the political spectrum we understood that peace, the greatest of our dreams, our deepest hope, could not be attained through surrender, withdrawal, submission and acceptance. The price they demanded was simply too high, too much. But more importantly, they were not prepared to pay equally, not prepared to even deliver on what we paid for.



This year, as in the two that preceded it, they attacked our buses, our cafes, our way of life. They ambushed our soldiers, our young. They kidnapped, stoned, bombed, lynched and tortured us. They desecrated our holy places, burned them, smashed them. They terrorized our roads and our cities. They tried to deny our connection with Jerusalem, attempted to write their history by rewriting ours. Lies, murder, deceit, betrayal. An arsenal of immorality was cloaked in their holy terms of martyrdom.



But with the new year, comes rebirth. Fathers are raising their motherless infants. Wives who lost their husbands are birthing their children in a final promise to hold on to the connection between the future and the past.



Our planes flew over Auschwitz and we asked forgiveness to the millions who died there. We came 60 years too late, but it won?t happen again. Maybe this time, this time, we will not cave in to the demands and the blackmail of others. Our greatest allies and our cursed enemies all ask us to show restraint, while our children cry that they cannot take it anymore, that they are afraid. We are learning to listen to our children.



A new year is upon us. An anniversary of three years passing. Three years in which we have been hunted, while being accused of being the hunter. We have been bombed, while being accused of being the bombers. They tell us that we incite, we target, we kill. And yet, each of our operations comes in response to their actions. We target killers who have sent their booby-trapped sons into our midst drugged on the lies of future paradise.



It is hard, after three years, to believe that there will suddenly be an end to this violence, that the day will come soon when we can put our children on buses and not force them to call, when we can leave them at bus stations and not hold our breathes, fearing that we will hear a boom as we drive away.



But under the pessimism and the depression, as in the deepest months of winter, there is a blossom of hope and optimism beginning to grow. We will survive this. We have rededicated ourselves to the State. We will not surrender our rights to live here. So, despite Cafe Hillel blowing up, we still had to search for a table when we went out to eat. Despite the No. 2 bus being targeted, my daughter and son still have to stand on the ride home during rush hour. Despite the malls and stores that are being attacked, I still had to wait until the tourists had finished purchasing a whole load of presents before buying my husband his birthday gift.



Our eyes were watchful as we ate in the cafe. My daughter was nervous on the bus, and the tourist asked if we weren?t a little afraid to live here as she made her purchase. But we eat and drink, we ride the buses and we buy our gifts. In short, we live in our country, because that is the choice we were commanded to make long ago. ?I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore, choose life, that both you and your children may live.? (Devarim / Deuteronomy 30:19)



As we prepare to celebrate the new year, the last year can be summed up simply as a choice made. We chose peace long ago, and that has not changed. But peace is not an option so long as Yasser Arafat, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah will not allow it. And so, in the absence of peace, we have chosen life.



May we all be written into the book of life for the coming year, and may only our enemies know the sorrow they would inflict upon us.