My Eternal Dilemma:This opinion below – with some edits – was one I left on the Metrowest News blog. I often have exchanges (sometimes heated but not always) on controversial issues with regular bloggers on that site. One blogger said and I quote what he said in pertinent part:

“ … except that I said in a previous post, Palestinians
should assassinate Zionist leaders, and I still think
that is a good tactic …”

Throughout the exchange I tried to entertain a balanced view. As I have said on my blog and in discussion, Gaza is an anathema to the human heart. It hurts me to watch the news of it. I understand the Palestinian side and I understand the quagmire that has been Israeli fate.

In the final analysis, though, I tried to think about my most basic view which was that I could never oppose the existence of the State of Israel, acquiesce to the assassination of so called “Zionists” (in my opinion an anti–Semitic cover word), and I cannot separate most Islamic states from their fundamentalist religious fasteners. I will be free, as all are in Israel to criticize Israel’s POLICIES but I will not countenance its demise. So I said the following to the blogger whom I believed, decidedly, did not take into account the position of the Jewish state. Clearly, my own blogging posts are mixed on this issue. When I gave it even more thought and irritated by the other blogger’s call to assassinate all "Zionist" leaders I iterated my basic view by posting the following:

I said:

The Zionists, as you insultingly call them, either show strength or the State of Israel as a Jewish state will cease to exist. It is that simple. When explosives are placed among families and children, when children are armed with guns and explosives, when an army is fired upon by its enemy, when a culture instructing young children to take up arms and wear exploding belts then the Jewish people, as I call them, have the right to defend themselves and the right to fire back. If one is shot at by a 10 year old he will be just as dead as if he were shot at by a 28 year old. We KNOW Hamas does unspeakable things to their own people and to their own children by placing incendiary devices among them. I too as you consistently say and as I said before, had an Iranian friend whom I thought was absolutely lovely. I have a Pakistani friend with whom I have shared meals. They are wonderful people. When we keep our conversation light things are fun but if we chat about Israel things get tense. So I stay away from that subject when I am with them. I know other Palestinian people who are kind, wonderful and would not hurt anyone. I love them. However, that does not mean I am not aware that as a political entity the states from which those people originate would eliminate my people in an instant. This cannot happen. This WILL NOT happen.

The world must know, and Israel's enemies respect nothing else, that the Jew will no longer cower in fear, act like a sitting duck and roll over because either a 2000 year old document moronically indicts it for deicide OR a Muslim picks up that baton and says Israel will be destroyed and the Jews thrown into the sea. It is, I know, sometimes a shock, to those who for centuries have not been used to Jews fighting back but since 1948 a hard lesson was learned. The lesson is IF Jews do not protect themselves then they will cease to exist and the world will care nothing. The lesson is simple. The Holocaust is the lesson for the Jew. It is immutable, ever present and all consuming to the Jewish mind. It is the rationale behind everything. No, Arabs did not create the Holocaust but most Arab states especially radical Islamic ones would be perfectly willing to pick up where it left off. Jews cannot and WILL not allow that!

Does it pain me to see anyone suffer? OF COURSE it does. Gaza is heart wrenching. But, truth be told again, I love my people, I love the state of Israel because it is the freest state in the entire Middle East, it is a secular state and it is a state which governs by respecting the religious separation concept. The Jewish people MUST have their homeland and they MUST have it with no threat of annihilation. That is an uncompromising existential fact. If it were not for, as you call them Zionists, then the Jewish state would not be. Fighting back is all Hamas, Hezbollah and the like understand. If this is all they understand this is what they get. When push comes to shove I am in love with the Jewish people and I will NEVER be unmindful of that. The Jewish people cannot falter again and they must not fail.