Remarks From The Solidarity Rally

Below are Esti Mayer's profoundly moving remarks from Thursday night's Solidarity Rally. I thank her for letting me reproduce them on my blog.


צבע אדום

By: Esti Mayer

צבע אדום

This COLOR RED alert has sounded some 6000 times over the past two years in southern Israel, sending men, women and children to scurry in 15 seconds for a shelter. That makes 6000 times that the world stood by in muted indifference, the same indifference and silence that greeted the murder of some 130 Israeli children since the year 2000, in coffee shops, restaurants, in the middle of the street, on buses, at school, or even in their beds. Where were those “counter demonstrators” then?

I am an Israeli woman. My uncle יעקב מאיר ז"ל died in 1967. I have lost two cousins and many friends. I know, in my flesh, the horror of war, how wide the concentric circles of sorrow, and how long the pain war causes persists. I want our neighbours, with whom we were fated to live, to be safe, for their children and our children to go to school unmolested, and I want peace and prosperity to grace their streets. Let them have a state of their own, but NOT at the cost of our annihilation, and NOT at the cost of our life and liberty.

This war is just. By any legal and moral standard, this is a defensive act against a terror organization that has placed one million Israelis in mortal danger for years. Let me share with you an anecdote that illustrates my indignation. My friends Eyal and Rachel Kadmon left their home in Gadid, which is in Gush Katif, after 30 years of green-house farming there. Now, in their small “cara-villa” of the displaced, they are being shelled daily by Qassam rockets fashioned out of the very water pipes Eyal left behind in his fields for putative Palestinian farmers, when Israel withdrew unilaterally from the Gaza Strip. The verse "וכיתתו חרבותם לאיתים" has been cynically, ironically and cruelly twisted as ploughshares are formed into weapons aimed directly at our children.

That, ladies and gentlemen, must stop. Our children have been traumatized and scarred by the 6000 צבע אדום alerts and 6000 bombs that have rained upon their days and their nights. Let us hope that henceforth, thanks to the heroic dedication of our IDF soldiers, our children’s dreams will once again be sweet and their days sunny.