MODIIN, Israel – Five times over the past two weeks, rocket attacks from distant lands have sent me running for the bomb shelter in my home in central Israel. When Israel came under attack from about 200 Iranian missiles last week, I huddled together with my wife and children and we sang songs while air raid sirens blared outside our shelter and the room shook from the booms of Israel’s missile interceptor defense system.

Just days before that, we had rocket attacks on two successive days by Houthi militants in Yemen ‒ the second while my three older children were with friends at a local park on a Saturday afternoon. With nowhere to shelter, they ran to a nearby wall and covered their heads with their hands, my 10-year-old son terrified and in tears.

Meanwhile, residents of northern Israel have been under incessant attack from Hezbollah, another Iran-backed Shiite militia, since Oct. 8, 2023 ‒ the day after Hamas terrorists stormed across Israel’s southern border, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 250 captives. More than 60,000 Israelis from the north have been displaced for a year, and many of their hometowns lie in ruins as a result of attacks by Hezbollah’s rockets, drones and anti-tank weapons. Nearly 50 Israelis have been killed there.

When, during the first of this string of attacks in late September, my children asked why we were being hit by Yemen, a country more than 1,000 miles away that has no apparent connection to Israel, it struck me that the answer is the same for almost all of Israel’s enemies.

They refuse to accept the existence of Israel.

'Death to America, Death to Israel'

That goes for Iran, the Islamic Republic about 600 miles away that trains, funds and supports the proxy militias attacking Israel in addition to launching its own direct attacks on the Jewish state. It goes for Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorist group that sits on Israel’s northern border. And it goes for militants in Syria and Iraq launching drone and missile attacks into Israel with increasing frequency.

Their rejectionism is not a response to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza to destroy Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that seeks to annihilate Israel. Rather, for years ‒ decades, even ‒ Iran, Hezbollah and others have made destroying Israel part of their raison d'être.

The official slogan of Yemen’s Houthis is “Death to America, Death to Israel, a Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.”

The supreme leader of Iran, which after the 1979 Islamic Revolution branded the United States the "Great Satan" and Israel the "Little Satan," repeatedly has said that Israel should be abolished.

Hezbollah’s 1985 manifesto says of Israel, “Our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated.”

Hamas’ charter “rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

Take them at their word.

Nobody else will bear the responsibility for the survival of Israel

The notion that Israel is the aggressor, as Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian argued in his speech recently at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, is a canard.

It’s no accident that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East ‒ a place where women enjoy full rights and being LGBTQ+ isn’t a crime. How ironic is it that Israel’s detractors in Europe and the United States frame their anti-Zionism as standing up for the oppressed while staying silent against oppression and violence against women, gays, dissenters and others by conservative regimes across the Middle East.

The root of the conflict in the Middle East is painfully simple: Israel’s foes refuse to accept it. It has been that way since Israel’s establishment in 1948, when the nascent state fought a war of survival against Arab armies from Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere ‒ and then absorbed more than 850,000 Jewish refugees expelled from their homes in Arab countries.

Fortunately, in the decades since, Egypt and Jordan gave up their ambitions of destroying Israel and signed peace treaties with it.

Israel’s enduring enemies don’t merely want to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 Six Day War. They want to reverse the outcome of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence and wipe Israel off the map.

What choice does Israel have other than to fight? Nobody else will bear the responsibility for its survival.

After the last war between Israel and Hezbollah, in 2006, a U.N.-brokered ceasefire agreement committed Hezbollah to disarming and withdrawing its forces from southern Lebanon. While Israel abided by its obligations and withdrew its forces, U.N. peacekeepers failed to enforce Hezbollah’s pledges. Instead, the Iran-backed terrorist group built up its military to unprecedented levels and massed on Israel’s border.

Israel does not covet territory in Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Iraq or Syria. Israel wants to live in peace with these countries. But they refuse to give up on their dreams of annihilating the Jewish state. So Israel must respond to their attacks, ensuring they never become capable of destroying it.

That’s what Israel’s response to Oct. 7 is all about.

Iran, Hezbollah, Houthis spread terrorism worldwide

The rest of the world should applaud Israel and offer it greater operational and intelligence support ‒ not just because it’s the right thing to do but also because these rogues threaten us all.

Hezbollah was behind the killing of hundreds of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s, the murder of 85 Argentineans in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, and the killing of thousands of Syrians in their civil war ‒ not to mention the murder of political opponents in Lebanon over the course of more than three decades.

That’s why many Syrians and Lebanese cheered Israel’s killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah late last month.

Likewise, Yemen’s Houthis have been attacking global shipping concerns for the past year in the Red Sea.

Iran is behind all sorts of troublemaking worldwide, from supplying Russia with ballistic missiles in its war against Ukraine to propping up Syria's murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad to being accused of plotting political assassinations in the United States.

Iran’s Shiite regime is also an active and ongoing agitator against Sunni Arab regimes, using its proxies to launch attacks or destabilize governments in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and elsewhere. Even though the last year or two has seen détente between Iran and its Saudi regional rivals, many Sunni Arab countries quietly support Israel’s effort to neutralize the Iranian threat, even if they won’t say so publicly.

 

Over the weekend, Jews worldwide celebrated Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and prayed for peace as part of the holiday liturgy. In Israel, we understand that peace will come only when the country’s enemies accept that Israel is here to stay.

Until then, Israel must be strong ‒ and continue to degrade those sworn to its destruction.

Uriel Heilman, a native of New York, is a journalist living in Israel. 

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