Our children have been murdered, butchered by a great evil, sacrificed on the altar of the world’s indifference to antisemitism.
Their only crime, being born in the Jewish State and the only state in the region that believes in democracy and human rights.
It does not matter to their killers that they were Druze, not Jewish. The victims did not share the fanatical belief that all Jews must die, and therefore they were considered acceptable collateral damage at best, legitimate targets at worst. What else can be expected from people who send their own children to die, take children hostage, and hide behind children like the cowards they are?
It certainly will not matter to those masses who attack Jews outside synagogues, who deface monuments in Washington, who wave Hezbollah flags on the streets of New York. To these pogromists, he who commits an act, not the nature of the act itself, is what determines the morality of an act. So the murder of 12 innocent children is justified in their eyes because it was committed by the enemies of the hated Jews, their beloved Hezbollah.
Those are the people who, as US Vice President and presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris said, show “what the human emotion should be,” that's how they feel about the brutal murder of Israeli children.
Congratulations are in order to those paragons of Nazi-style morality who call for a “Final Solution” to Zionism, who call for “10,000” October 7s. You got a sliver of what you want.
The entire nation of Israel is grief-stricken. The entire nation is furious. The Druze are our beloved brothers and sisters. Their children are our children. All Israeli children, Jewish, Arab, Christian, and Druze alike, deserve to grow up free from fear, free to play soccer like children around the world.
Images of this massacre, and it was a massacre, are circulating online. Images of children with their limbs blown off by an Iranian rocket fired by a group of Iranian puppets. Body parts hanging on a fence. God in heaven, why?
Over 60,000 people have spent the last 10 months evacuated from their homes in northern Israel, but the Druze did not leave. And their children were butchered at a soccer field very close to the northern border, where they had no time to run to the shelter just feet away.
Israel must do more to protect its citizens, to protect its children. Hezbollah has repeatedly penetrated Israel’s air defences in recent months, taking videos of places like the port of Haifa with its drones. Iron Dome has never been 100% successful, making a tragedy, an atrocity of this magnitude inevitable when thousands of rockets are fired over the better part of a year. All it takes is one rocket to destroy, to maim, to kill.
The West, which for 76 years has done everything in its power to hold Israel back, must stop acting like the existence of Iron Dome means Israel can afford to let its enemies attack it every damned day forever and ever and never strike back, that it can afford to never take a single proactive step to protect the lives of its children.
When Iran launched its massive assault on Israel in April, firing over 300 missiles and attack drones at the Jewish State, the US was instrumental in helping Israel shoot down nearly all of the projectiles. But then the Biden Administration commanded Israel not to retaliate, to “take the win,” as if having millions of people run to bomb shelters in the middle of the night because ballistic missiles were fired at them is some kind of victory.
Left forgotten in the halls of Western power is Amina al-Hassouni, the 7-year-old Bedouin girl who was wounded in Iran’s attack, who came so frighteningly close to death but miraculously pulled through thanks to the efforts of the angels at Soroka Medical Center. Amina was discharged from the hospital just yesterday. She is another Israeli child who deserves better, from the country and from the world.
There is talk in Washington and London of ensuring that Israel is supplied with defensive military equipment such as Iron Dome batteries, but not offensive weaponry to strike back at those who try to murder our children.
Those proposing or considering such a move, can look the families of 10-year-old Milad Muadad Alsha’ar, 11-year-old Alma Ayman Fakher Eldin, 11-year-old Naji Taher Halabi, 11-year-old Jifara Ibrahim, 11-year-old Vinees Adham Alsafadi, 12-year-old Yazan Nayeif Abu Saleh, 12-year-old Iseel Nasha’at Ayoub, 13-year-old Johnny Wadeea Ibrahim, 15-year-old Hazem Akram Abu Saleh, 16-year-old Ameer Rabeea Abu Saleh, 16-year-old Fajer Laith Abu Saleh, and 16-year-old Nathem Fakher Saeb, in the eye and tell them that their country is not allowed to do anything but buy more Iron Dome interceptors. Can you look them in the eye and tell them that they must accept that since Iron Dome is not perfect, more children will inevitably be killed because you think that’s better than doing what is necessary to end the threats of Hamas and Hezbollah?
Can you look at Amina al-Hassouni and tell her that Iran has the right to fire ballistic missiles at her head because Israel does not have the right to strike back?
Can you look at the photographs of Kfir Bibas, the baby who has spent most of his life has a hostage in Hamas-controlled Gaza, and really say that the only thing Israel is allowed to do to get him back is to release more murderers of children to kill again?
Has all life even tangentially related to Jews become so cheap that this is what passes for morality in the enlightened 21st Century? Is Yahya Sinwar’s life worth more than that of Kfir Bibas? Is Hassan Nasrallah’s life worth more than the 12 children he just murdered?
If the US, the UN, the EU, and the whole world demand that Israel declare that the blood of its children is cheap, then Israel must ignore them. The blood of a child in Majdal Shams is just as red as the blood of a child in New York, in London, in Paris, and everywhere else.
When it comes to the lives of our children, no one, not the President of the United States, nor the Secretary-General of the United Nations, has the right to tell us that we must stand by and let their blood be shed. Anyone who tries to tell us that can go straight to hell.
Gary Willig is a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.