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This op-ed was authored by Rachel Hirshfeld, the Israel-based Deputy Editor-in-Chief for the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM).
Iran has fired missiles at Israel before — twice since October 7, 2023. Each time, with the backing of our allies, the threats were intercepted — more spectacle than substance. The Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow aerial defense systems lit up the sky. Silence followed. We exhaled.
But this time is different.
After Israel struck Iranian nuclear and military sites early Friday morning, Iran retaliated with its most devastating barrage to date — raining missiles down on our cities, our skies, our lives. The attack was direct, deliberate, and unrelenting. Sirens scream through the night. Blasts rattle our walls — and our nerves — but not our resolve. Families across Israel are back in shelters, safe rooms, and stairwells. But we’re not holding our breath — we’re holding the line. Again. And again. And again. Because in Israel, resilience isn’t taught — it’s inherited, earned, and tested under falling skies.
The exhaustion is no longer just physical — it’s spiritual, generational, historical. It’s etched into the DNA of a people who have been hunted across generations — and who refuse to be broken.
We’ve lived in the shadow of October 7 for more than twenty months — haunted by the unspeakable. Entire families massacred in their homes. Women raped, tortured, mutilated. Children forced to watch their parents murdered. Babies burned alive in ovens.
Since that day, we’ve taken cover from Hamas rockets in the south, Hezbollah barrages in the north, and Houthi missiles and drones soaring across the Red Sea. Over time, these attacks — unthinkable anywhere else — became a haunting rhythm we learned to endure. The sirens still warn of danger. We know that. But after so many months, even urgency begins to feel routine. We normalized the abnormal. And we carried on — even as the quiet trembled with what might come next.
This time, the missiles didn’t just fall. They hit — hard.
Our aerial defense network — brilliant, but not infallible — can’t intercept everything when hundreds of missiles rain down at once.
The number of casualties keeps rising. Lives upended, grief spreading faster than the flames. Homes turned to ash. The blasts fade — but their echos linger in every soul they’ve scorched.
The world must understand: this isn’t just about Israel. Iran’s warpath doesn’t end at our borders. The danger is global.
The Iranian regime is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. It bankrolls and commands a vast network of violence — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. These are not disparate threats. They are Tehran’s frontline soldiers. Iran’s fingerprints are on rocket launchers in Gaza, precision-guided missiles in Lebanon, and drone factories in Yemen. Intelligence agencies have traced hundreds of millions of dollars, weapons shipments, and strategic training directly to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — the nerve center of Iran’s global proxy war.
Iran has hunted Jews around the world — from the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires, confirmed by Argentina’s highest court as an Iranian-orchestrated massacre, to assassination plots in Cyprus, Georgia, and beyond. In Athens, Greece, a terrorist cell plotted to bomb a Chabad house, reportedly offering €15,000 for every Jewish casualty. In Turkey, IRGC operatives armed with pistols and silencers were caught preparing to murder Israeli tourists vacationing in Istanbul. In Cyprus, Iranian agents tracked the movements of Jewish businesspeople. In Germany, IRGC-linked networks recruited local criminals to surveil and plan arson attacks against synagogues in Essen and Bochum. These are not isolated incidents — they are the coordinated steps of a regime obsessed with Jewish annihilation, everywhere.
The Iranian regime doesn’t just deny Israel’s legitimacy — it denies the legitimacy of Jewish life itself. To Tehran, Jewish existence is not a truth to tolerate but a threat to eliminate. It isn’t sacred — it’s subversive. Unwelcome. And from Tel Aviv to Toronto, Jerusalem to Johannesburg, that ideology turns Jewish homes, schools, and synagogues into targets.
This is the same regime that arms terrorists with drones, builds weapons factories beneath schools and hospitals, indoctrinates children, and glorifies martyrdom. The same regime whose parliament chants “Death to America,” whose supreme leader calls Israel a “cancerous tumor,” and whose former president declared that Israel should be “wiped off the map.” In 2020, Iran’s leadership went so far as to promote a “Final Solution” for the “Zionist regime” — language chillingly reminiscent of the darkest chapters in Jewish history.
When Israel struck Iran’s nuclear infrastructure last week, it wasn’t an act of escalation. It was an act of urgency. Just days earlier, the IAEA reported that Iran had amassed more than 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% — just shy of weapons-grade. That’s enough, experts say, to produce multiple nuclear bombs within weeks. Although Iran claims its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, there is no civilian justification for enriching uranium to such levels. The danger wasn’t theoretical. It was imminent.
We didn’t choose this war. We are a nation forced — again — to defend our right to exist.
Across every border, on land, at sea and in the air, our soldiers — our modern-day Maccabees — stand between us and annihilation. Their courage is etched into the soul of this nation. We owe them more than gratitude — we owe them the future they died defending. We mourn them. We honor them. And we carry them with us — always.
As Jews, we have always had to defend our right to exist — but for most of history, we had no army to answer our cries. No battalions to march in our defense. No jets to meet fire with fire. We had only prayers, courage, and the will to endure. Today, we have an army. We have a homeland. And we will not apologize for defending it.
My maternal grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. Every year at Passover, he and my grandmother would join us around the table. And every year, he insisted on leading Vehi She’amda — the passage in the Haggadah that proclaims, “In every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us.”
He taught us a melody he learned during the war, while fleeing from the Nazis. A melody passed down like a lifeline. His voice trembled, but not with fear — with pride. He sang it to remind us that we are still here. That we survived. That no matter how many times they try to destroy us, we do not disappear.
These past nights, I’ve watched parents turn dread into lullabies. Our children don’t understand geopolitics — but they know fear. They study our faces. So we steady our hands. We smile through the storm. We lie — soft, necessary lies — because their peace depends on our strength.
Israel is a nation of life. Of innovation. Of rebirth. We plant trees under rocket fire. We build hospitals between air raids. We marry, we dance, we dream — even as missiles fall.
To those outside of Israel: this is not just our fight. Iran’s missiles may be aimed at Tel Aviv, but its message resounds far beyond — against freedom, against democracy, against every society that dares to stand for life over death.
A regime that bankrolls terror, arms proxies, indoctrinates children, and openly dreams of genocide is not just Israel’s problem — it is the world’s warning.
Silence in the face of that evil is not neutrality. It is complicity. And it comes at a price.
The time to stop Iran is not after the next massacre. It’s before. It’s now.
Stand with us. Stand with Israel. Stand against the regime of terror in Tehran.
Because in this generation — as in all the ones before it — the People of Israel live. Am Yisrael Chai.
