As the father of a terror victim, as a Zionist and as an Israeli citizen, I quake with the report of every missile strike or terror attack against the Jewish state.
That is not a figure of speech. It is not political theater. It is the involuntary reaction of someone who knows what a phone call can mean, what a headline can hide, and how quickly an ordinary day can become the day that divides a family’s life into before and after.
The targets are always civilians.
They are people going about their lives, trying to make a shekel, waiting for a bus, walking along a street, taking a child to school, visiting a parent, finishing a shift at work or sitting down for dinner when a missile or terrorist strikes.
And so,24 hours after the latest wave of missile attacks, I am off to Israel. I am no hero for doing this. It’s just who I have become.
Iran’s latest missile barrage against Israel on June 7 was not an abstraction. It was not some distant geopolitical chess move. It was an attack on a living country—on families, on hospitals, on children, on the elderly, on the frightened and the defiant alike.
According to reports, Iran fired roughly 10 or 11 ballistic missiles toward Israel in several waves. The missiles were intercepted, thank God. But “intercepted” is not the same as harmless.
Every siren is a warning that murder is incoming.
Every scramble to a shelter is a reminder that Israeli children grow up learning how many seconds they have to live. Every hospital that moves patients underground is a rebuke to those who pretend this is a normal dispute between equal sides. A normal country does not force newborns, cancer patients, trauma victims and the elderly into underground wards because a terrorist regime has decided to test its missiles again.
Israel’s military response was swift. Israeli aircraft struck Iranian military and air-defense targets. The message was necessary: A regime that fires ballistic missiles at Israeli civilians cannot expect immunity because it hides behind distance, proxies or diplomatic fog.
But the deeper story is not only about this latest exchange. It is about the moral exhaustion that much of the world demands from Israel.
Israel is expected to absorb attacks, calculate proportionality under fire, comfort its traumatized citizens, keep its airport open if possible, reassure investors, educate its children, protect its hospitals, bury its dead when defenses fail, and then explain itself to governments and commentators who have never had to race a grandchild to a safe room.
No other country is asked to live this way.
When missiles are fired at Israel, the first question in too many capitals is not, “Who fired them?” It is, “How will Israel respond?” The world rushes past the aggression and begins grading the victim’s restraint. That moral reflex is rotten.
Iran is not a misunderstood neighbor; it is the world’s leading sponsor of anti-Israel terrorism. It arms, funds and inspires the forces that have turned civilian life in Israel into a target list: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen and other militias across the region. Its leaders speak openly of Israel’s destruction, and its weapons are aimed at the Jewish state’s cities.
This is not resistance. It is a strategy of civilian terror.
The world rushes past the aggression and begins grading the victim’s restraint.
I know something about that strategy. My daughter Alisa was murdered in 1995 in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian Islamic Jihad attack. She was 20 years old. She wasn’t a soldier. She wasn’t a policymaker. She was a young woman in Israel with her whole life ahead of her.
That is the point of terrorism. It doesn’t seek military victory in the ordinary sense. It seeks to make ordinary life impossible. It seeks to frighten parents, empty streets, cancel flights, close schools and convince Jews that sovereignty is too costly to bear.
Israel’s answer, for more than 75 years, has been the opposite.
The Jewish state builds. It votes. It argues. It innovates. It treats the sick. It buries its dead and sends its children back to school. It absorbs immigrants. It rescues strangers. It fights wars it did not seek and then goes back to planting trees, opening businesses, studying Torah, serving in the army, raising families and living.
That is why I am going.
Not because I am fearless. I am not. Not because I think nothing can happen. I know better than most that something can always happen. Not because I dismiss the danger. I feel it in my bones.
I am going because Israel is not an idea I support from a safe distance. It is part of my life and my family’s story. It is part of the Jewish people’s answer to centuries of helplessness.
There is a special cruelty in the way Israel’s enemies time their attacks. They know they are not only aiming at military systems. They are aiming at weddings, school trips, business meetings, Shabbat tables, airport reunions and summer plans. They want Jews everywhere to ask: Is it safe to go? Is it wise to visit? Should we wait?
Sometimes, caution is necessary. Israelis understand that better than anyone. But fear cannot become the permanent veto over Jewish life. The Zionist answer has never been that the danger is imaginary. The Zionist answer is that danger will not have the last word.
That does not mean recklessness. It means clarity. It means understanding that when Iran fires missiles at Israel, the issue is not only Israel’s security. It is whether the civilized world still knows the difference between a country defending its citizens and regimes or terrorist armies trying to murder them.
Israel’s enemies count on distance. They count on fatigue. They count on the world becoming bored with Jewish anxiety and impatient with Israeli self-defense. They count on Jews abroad gradually detaching, deciding that support is fine in theory but too complicated in practice.
They should not count on me.
I am boarding a plane not as a statement of courage, but as an act of belonging. I will worry. I will check the alerts. I will think of my family. I will remember Alisa. And I will land, God willing, in the country that our enemies have tried again and again to make unlivable.
Yet they have failed.
The missiles may shake the windows. They may send children to shelters and patients underground. They may delay flights and rattle nerves. But they will not erase the simple truth that Israel lives because Jews decided that we would no longer ask permission to survive.
That is why Israel responds.
That is why Israel endures.
And that is why, after the missiles, I am going anyway.
