This is real life

If you don't live in the Middle East, you don't get to judge how we deal with Iran.

Until you live with their threat hanging over your family every day, you don't understand.

I have felt a bomb explode at a local bus stop and felt the shockwave of the explosion rattle the windows of my home. I can still feel the blackout noise in my ears, the sudden power of the sound pounds through my chest.

I have called every single one of my friends in my neighborhood, making sure their children were alive, after a car ramming at a bus stop, taking the lives of children, teenagers, and their parents.

Frantically checked in on all my loved ones after too many sh*otings and st*bbings, all over the country.

I am currently sitting in a b*mb shelter, after these days of aerial warfare. Huddled with my family for the 50th time this week alone, listening to cluster b*mbs (designed for maximum civilian c*sualties) erupt over our heads.

We live in a tiny little country, surrounded by t*rror factions and nations that wish to wipe the fragment of our population that survived the Holocaust, about half the world's number of Jews.

We live with these actions, t*rror, threats, v*olence, d*nger- every day.

EVERY DAY.

We live here because this is where we come from.

Jews are from Judea.

Judea is the ancient land of Israel.

I live in a town where the Maccabi Warriors lived.

A newly built city on the foundations of our nation.

I choose to live here. I chose to come here. To return to my home after a millennium of exile, because I believe in our sovereignty. As all humans, we are imperfect and constantly in flux-

But I believe in Zionism, which is the right of Jews to live and self-determine in their own homeland.

I'm living it.

Once you understand that- there is something else you must grasp:

Iran has been the sponsor of almost all the evil and v*olence that has occurred here in the almost last five decades.

Iran has attacked 12 countries beyond Israel since this war began.

The IRGC is the source of all of this horror.

So I'll say this.

People who don't live with this existential threat don't get to judge the decisions we must make.

You don't get to decide about how we protect our people and our families until you are one of us; Jews, Arabs, Christians living here in the Middle East.

For all of us, this is not a hypothetical protest. It's not politics.

This is real life.

This is life and d*ath.