Photo Credit: courtesy

We are a country in great pain.

We try to hide it, make others think we are strong. We have to be invincible, don’t we? All they have to do is win one war, and we are gone. Every war poses an existential threat.
We are tired, so tired.

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We are so tired, we are taking to the streets of our country and protesting…there are so many protests, honestly, no one understands anything of what normal life used to be.
It is ironic that the world sees what they did on October 7 and says we are the ones committing genocide.

They see we target military bases and their combatants, while they target our cities and the not-honorable Senator Chris Van Hollen says WE are firing indiscriminately and imprecisely.

Let’s be honest – if we wanted to make Gaza AND Lebanon, Iraq AND Iran parking lots, we could have done it long ago. Instead, we have sacrificed more than 800 precious sons of Israel to this horrific war that we didn’t start…and the barbarians in the Hague sanction our leaders, our soldiers.

The hypocrisy chokes us and we need to breathe clean air, but there is none in this world. It’s all foul and tainted by the very same hatred we saw filling Europe 80 years ago…
There are pogroms in Amsterdam and how does the world react? They deny it was a pogrom.

There are days I can’t breathe…and there are days I want to surrender. More, there are days I want to build a wall a million miles high with one tiny little door and tell the world to go away. Leave us alone. Just leave us alone. We don’t care how you hate us. We honestly don’t like you very much anyway.

Your justice is tainted by hatred; your words are lies. Your streets are filled with blood and bones and horrific hatred that has poisoned your bodies and your minds. Go away.
Leave us to a land that is heartbreakingly beautiful, a people who are unlike any other. I have had people come from Europe and they look at me and wonder how it is possible that there is such peace here.

“Do you know that person you just spoke to?” they ask me. No, I answer, never met them.
“Why did they ask you?” they ask me. And I look at them with confusion, why not, I think.
My young daughter asked my son years ago why he doesn’t let the other soldiers in his unit work harder when he came home with a sore back and scratched arms. The army had taken them to a field to help a farmer in need. My son looked at her like she had lost her mind, “they are my brothers, why would I make them work harder.”

That son is now again in Gaza and my heart breaks. He is a medic. Someone who has helped people without looking to their religion. He is strong and beautiful and I am so afraid.

Two years ago, before the world went insane, I took them to Finland and Denmark, now I want to lock them away in this country, behind the million-mile-high walls. Go away. Just go away.


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Paula R. Stern is CEO of WritePoint Ltd., a leading technical writing company in Israel. Her personal blog, A Soldier's Mother, has been running since 2007. She lives in Maale Adumim with her husband and children, a dog, too many birds, and a desire to write.