I. Adagio: The Eloquent Voice of Surrender
There was a clip circulating online.
A pro-Israel advocate, calm and eloquent, speaking flawless British English.
She explained—according to international law—that Israel is not an occupying power.
She quoted conventions, cited precedents, and spoke with poise and legal fluency.
The clip was shared proudly.
“Look!” someone wrote. “Even the international courts agree—we’re not occupiers!”
This is what passes for a moral victory now.
Not our justice.
Not our freedom.
But our Compliance.
We don’t speak as a sovereign people.
We speak as defendants.
We don’t proclaim our cause.
We recite their clauses.
This is not pride. It is the poise of a well-mannered prisoner.
The eloquence of a condemned inmate begging not to be hanged.
It is the voice of a Jew who does not come to judge, but to be judged.
Who enters the courtroom of global opinion and pleads that her country is not guilty under the statutes of those who would gladly see it dismantled.
Yes, she was right on the facts.
But the facts are not the point.
The framework is the point.
And the framework is surrender.
To defend Israel by the standards of international law is to accept that the Jewish right to life depends on the approval of foreign courts.
That our legitimacy must be ratified by those who watched us burn—and now dare to restrain us when we resist.
This is the problem.
Not that we are treated unfairly.
But that we still seek to be treated fairly by people who have no moral standing to judge us.
That is where the collapse begins.
Because the framework she invoked—this so-called international law—has a long and bitter record when it comes to the Jewish people.
What did the international law do when we needed it most?
Did it stop the trains to Auschwitz?
Did it silence the chimneys?
That same “international law” that stood by while six million perished.
That raised no alarm as gas chambers hummed and smoke rose over Europe.
And today, that same international law did nothing—nothing—to prevent the burning of children in Kibbutz Be’eri.
It did nothing to stop the rape and murder of Jewish women on October 7.
Is this the moral authority you trust?
Is this the system that will come to our defence now?
You fool. You’re playing into their hands.
This is not a neutral arena. This is the battlefield they’ve chosen.
And you show up quoting their rulebook?
And what’s worse, we applaud it.
We share the clip, in Hebrew, among ourselves.
We whisper with pride:
“Did you know we’re not occupiers—even according to international law? Amazing! Let’s show the Gentiles, so they finally see we’re the good guys!”
This is not a strategy.
This is not pride.
This is narcissism.
It is the battered child showing his bruises to the bully, hoping to win mercy through eloquence.
It is the slave asking the master to validate his humanity.
And still, we think we’re clever.
We think if we speak their language, dress in their style, and behave in their court, we’ll finally be accepted.
Let me paint you a picture.
Imagine a Jewish lawyer in 1938 Berlin, brilliant and urbane, standing at gunpoint and leafing through the Nuremberg Laws to prove he qualifies for exemption.
“Look!” he pleads. “According to Paragraph 2, Section 4, I’m not technically a Jew!”
And the officer just smiles, cocks the Luger, and pulls the trigger.
That’s what we’re doing.
They don’t need tanks anymore. They don’t need an invasion.
They have microphones. They have commissions.
They have hashtags and resolutions.
And through your dignity, your poise, and your brilliant arguments, you legitimise them.
You give their courtroom meaning.
You enter their trial, and in doing so, you affirm their right to judge you.
But a Jew who explains himself to his enemies is not a free man.
He is a well-mannered prisoner.
And the deeper tragedy?
We have become proud of our captivity.
We’ve been on trial for 2000 years.
Enough.
But what are we beneath the verdicts?
What is the soul they seek to judge?
II. Andante: The Good and the Suicidal
Israel’s goodness does not flow from the ink of any treaty, nor from the neat geometry of clauses and footnotes. It does not come from Article 49, nor from Protocol X, nor from the shaky consensus of men in grey suits gathering in foreign chambers.
It comes from character. From the soul of a nation that rose from the ashes and chose to build. A free, imperfect, extraordinary state. A country whose moral centre is not in compliance but in creation.
Israel is a country of builders. Of engineers sketching out desalination plants in the sand. Of entrepreneurs raising glass towers above the ruins. Of artists who speak in paint and iron and cinema, who craft beauty out of trauma. Of families who plant trees on land their grandparents only dreamed of owning.
To create is to defy. The entrepreneur is not a conformist—he is a man who sees what others miss, who says no where others chant yes. Creation is not submission to consensus. It is rebellion in the name of life. And that is what Israel once embodied: not the safe path, but the sovereign one.
Our abandonment of this spirit—this daring, defiant energy—is not just a strategic error. It is a betrayal. A betrayal of the very thing that made us good.
Israel is a place where people live for life, not for death. Where the human individual, though battered and pressed, is still sacred.
Across from us stands a culture of ruin. A culture that reveres blood, that wraps its children in shrouds before they can read, that sanctifies murder and calls it martyrdom. Their heroes are not inventors, but bombers. Their teachers are not philosophers, but propagandists of death. Their art is not a celebration of life, but a rehearsal for dying.
This is the moral difference. This is what divides light from darkness, civilisation from savagery. Not some dusty paragraph filed in The Hague. Not some ruling from a court whose judges cannot tell the arsonist from the firefighter.
And yet—how quickly we forget. How desperately we reach for the mirror, asking not whether we are good, but whether we appear good.
We spend millions polishing our image for the world, while the foundations begin to crack. We explain ourselves to journalists who would sooner side with our killers. We dress our moral courage in legalese and PowerPoint slides. We mistake restraint for justice. We trade truth for optics.
And in doing so, we become less good.
Being good is not about being liked. It is not about being praised. Being good is about standing firm when it would be easier to bend. It is about choosing life, again and again, even when death is dressed as mercy.
Every day we forget that, we lose a part of what we are. We send our sons into battle with their hands tied behind their backs, not to defeat the enemy, but to look good on the BBC. We bomb empty fields and congratulate ourselves for our restraint, while our enemies reload. We delay. We negotiate. We apologise. We bleed.
And still we tell ourselves, “This is moral.”
But look closer. Who are we fighting? A death cult. A people who worship graves more than gardens. Who build tunnels instead of schools, who nurse hatred like it’s heritage, who dream not of peace but of fire.
They choose suicide, openly, proudly, as a statement of faith. And we, who claim to love life, imitate them in our own way. We commit slow suicide—not with vests and explosions, but with words and compromise.
They die in the name of hate.
We die in the name of virtue.
And the result is the same. The good is destroyed.
And the deeper horror, the unbearable truth, is this:
We are the ones doing it to ourselves. And we do it in the name of law, the very law that once stood silent while we burned.
{Reposted from the author’s site}
