The Promised Land: An island of light in a sea of darkness

א' סיון, תשפ"ה

May 28, 2025

By Ashrei Ima Sari

The demonic genius of the intifada idea is that it creates enough chaos that our orderly democratic countries have serious difficulties in fighting them. I was only 7 when the first Intifada started. The reason for this 6 year war of terrorizing Israelis was a car crash. A truck driver accidentally hit two cars with four Palestinians in them. 

Because of that accident, I now had to learn how to protect my head and kneel at the back of the car so that we can make it to our house without any of the rocks hitting us. The less than 5 minute drive to our house became so unsafe, that my parents now owned a gun, just in case we get stopped by an angry mob of Palestinians and we cannot get out. My grandmother had a “Molotov cocktail” bottle thrown on her car and barely made it back home. Overnight, our peaceful reality turned into living in a war zone. 

The world would like to rationalize and explain why the Palestinians had any justification to start the first Intifada. Or the Second one. Just as the world is so eager to explain the suffering the Palestinians experience that led to the ‘justified’ Oct. 7th attack. 

Yet none of this was ever justified. Opening a war of terror against Israel was never right, justified, nor was it a fight for freedom from our oppression. This was a fight to kill Israelis and endless attempts to take over our lands. 

In 2000 I had the privilege to live through the second Intifads, which was called the Al-Aqsa Intifada -- the Jerusalem Intifada. This war of terror lasted 5 years and was significantly more brutal and dangerous than the first Intifada. 

Like the second Intifada, the Oct. 7th attack in 2023 had the name Al-Aqsa, ensuring that we know that even though Israel had left Gaza in 2005, and all though Gaza is not near Jerusalem, the plan was declared -- the conquering of Jerusalem and killing all Israelis and Jews along the way. 

In debates around the world, the idea of the right of the Palestinians to return to Palestine keeps coming up as something that should be a privilege of theirs.  

The idea of “the right of return,” like the rest of the projection and manipulative lies that Hamas and the Arab terror countries have created, was taken from the Jewish people. 

Jerusalem is the city that King David paid for, which he and his son King Solomon have extensively developed. This successful city has been conquered and occupied by many other nations over the years, all brutally killing and forcing most Jews into exile. 

The Jewish people have never stopped wishing to return to their homeland, where our forefathers are buried, where our history was formed and can be clearly found in countless archaeological digs around the country. 

“The right of return” that the state of Israel set as it was established came to correct the Jewish travesty that had occurred thousands of years earlier. Recognizing that Jews were not safe in other lands, Israel declared that every Jewish person around the world is immediately eligible to receive Israeli citizenship and is welcome back to his homeland. 

Since no other people or nation around the world went through what the Jewish people have gone through; endless exiles and being prosecuted, hunted and killed in every country they went to, no other country ever needed such a policy. Israel has set itself as the safe haven for all persecuted Jews. 

If it was not clear to anyone why exactly Israel did this, the latest anti semitic rise is a reminder -- Jews are not safe. The hate towards Jews is the oldest one our modern world knows. Based on past experience, as with Germany turning a successful western society into a Jewish killing industrial endeavour, the Jewish people need not wait for the next western country to turn its back on its own Jewish citizens -- by simply ignoring the rise of extreme hate in their own streets (as we are seeing today in places like Canada, Australis, Holland, France and more). 

The Jews need to have the right of return because their safety cannot be guaranteed without it. No other country offers this type of right, because no other country faces the type of hatred that is directed towards the Jews. 

The Palestinians did not like the idea of more Jewish people coming to the land of Israel. Their goal was and still is, to eliminate the Jewish people and take over the lands of the Jewish people. 

Before the declaration of the state of Israel, there were Arab and Jewish Palestinians. The majority of the Arab Palestinians are not native to the land. They came here with the different waves of colonial powers and settled in the land of Israel. They did not come as a people, and their country of origin is not Israel or Palestine. 

Yet, the idea of “the right of return” to Israel held so much power in it, that they decided to adopt it. In the 70s and 80s, as the Palestinians established themselves as “a people” to counter “the Jewish people” they also copied the idea of the right of returning to Palestine-Israel. 

Backed by the UNRAW unreasonable refugee status that caused more damage to the Palestinian Arabs than any other thing could have, they were now forced to stay as refugees until their non-existence “right of return” would be fulfilled. 

But a lie added to another lie does not make this story any truer. 

I am not saying that those who wish to return to live in the land of Palestine-Israel should not be able to do so. I am saying this is not a right that they have. If they wish to have the right to return to this land only to kill the Jewish people who are the only true native people of this land, then they cannot be here. 

Jews are from Judiah, an area that is now partly considered to be in the West Bank (Palestinian area). Arabs are from the Arabian Peninsula, which is not in Israel or Palestine. Hence, if the Palestinians Arabs are asking for “the right of return” they should be allowed to return peacefully to the Arabian Peninsula where their ancestors came from, just as the Jewish people have allowed all Jews to return to their ancestral lands. 

What “the right of return” shows us is the pattern of how the Arab League, the PLO and all terror organizations and their supporters have been manipulating the entire world. They notice what offers us, Israelis and Jews, most power of success, and they create their own version of it, spreading lies, manipulating and gaslighting the world so that their story becomes at least as powerful as the people they are trying to take over. 

This method makes it extremely difficult to fight their propaganda, as they use your own words and your own beliefs to weave a web of lies to position themselves as the rightful owners of what does not belong to them. 

We, the Jewish people, did not foresee how our neighbour would one day use our own paths to flourishing as a weapon against our right to exist. We did not know that not only they will try to mimic our very culture, faith and religion just in the name of taking over our land, they have managed to gaslight the entire world against us as they were doing it. True psychopathic behaviour on a systematic and organizational level that I am afraid no one in the western world saw coming. 

We had no choice, as we were hated, prosecuted, lied about and killed, in every country we went to. Hated for success, hated for failures, hated for our faith, hated for our way of living -- the reasons to hate us were and remain endless. 

We are not fighting about whether there should or should not be a Palestinian country. We are fighting a force that is darker than the Natzi’s were, and is even more dangerous. 

Hitler had an organized plan. An organized plan can be predictable and easier to dismantle. This force of evil that has taken over the Palestinian people and territory, with the aid of the Arab League nations, since the 1940s, is a force that perfected the destructive and uncontrollable power of chaos. 

The two intifadas that I grew up through, were an ecstatic experience for them. It was experimentation in how to bring the most death to the Jews and Israelis in the most chaotic of ways, so that the Israeli Defence Forces will have a much harder time to dismantle them. 

These powers of evil have no desire to be dismantled, they wish to expand. The Palestinian territories were just the first step. They are already trying to take over Israel, and now they have infiltrated the entire western world.

 Fighting Chaos is chaotic, yet Israel is doing so while adhering to international laws and all the ethical requirements the UN and others around the world have set up as the benchmark for “legal war” actions. 

Having friends that keep us in check is welcomed. Good friends are friends that can tell us when we might be coming close to crossing a red line, and it does not mean our relationship is broken. It only makes us stronger when we can have these challenging conversations. Let us not mistake friendships through hard times with a lack of friendship. 

The question remains: How do we fight against the chaotic forces of evil in our country? Do any of the western countries know how to fight such forces of evil chaos when they come to slaughter their people? Does any other country have this type of experience to share with us? 

Surrounded in a sea of Arab nations that came to destroy us time and time again, against all odds, Israel was and has stayed the island of light, peace and democracy in the Middle East. 

To confuse the powers of darkness with those of a just cause is a grave error. Anyone making this error is siding with the forces of pure evil.

As with Syria and Lebanon, it will be remembered and known to all that Israel was the one that had the moral clarity to do the right thing and bring down these forces of evil that have not only caused Israel much hardship and death, but has been causing havoc and mayhem in the Arab countries around us as well.

When this is all over it will be remembered that Israel was the one who had to roll up its sleeves and do the hard work of putting an end to these terror organizations, who have been brainwashing, manipulating and overtaking city by city, all the areas around Israel and now, the western world. 

In the end, as you have all come to learn airport security from Israel, you will all come to Israel to try and figure out how to deal with the terror cells growing in your own countries.  

You could choose to recognize this all now and stand by Israel’s right to defend itself. You could help the Gazan people and have them relocated until the mess of the terror they brought onto themselves is dealt with -- but that is not what you are doing now. 

You are choosing to stand on a balcony, with the pretense of having higher moral ground, when your foot has never touched the ground of battling such forces. 

Send your armies to aid Israel on the ground, or stop preaching to it how to fight. Send your commanders to aid with strategy, so you can have them tell you if what we are doing is the best option or not, or stop condemning. 

I condemn so many things, yet these are empty thoughts that no one needs to hear about. 

Your words are nothing more than a further manipulation game, enabling the manipulating forces of evil that have turned our world into a playground for terrorists and extremists. 

If what is happening in Israel is causing chaos in your country -- it is not because of Israel, it is because you have allowed the forces of evil into your own countries. You have not noticed how strong they are getting. You have not seen how they have been taking over the media -- spreading lies, actual lies, claiming them as truths. Using these lies to galvanize entire countries against Israel. 

According to the Jewish faith, this world was created with the word of G-d. It is His words that created it all. Your words of condemnation have no power over what G-d wishes to see happen in the Middle East. 

What the liars and manipulators wish you to think is that Israel is the problem, but Israel is the only one in this world taking action against these uprising forces of evil. 

Right now, Israel is the only one in the world not willing to roll over and let terror keep devastating its people. 

As for the Palestinian country -- show me a people that is willing to live in peace, true peace, without arms, and we will have a Palestinian country. Otherwise -- there shall be no room for a country of terror on the borders of Israel. 

No country of terror that has declared killing all Israelis and Jews as its actual goal will be established on the borders of Israel. There is no room for a country of terror on Israel’s lands. 

A country and its land was offered to the Arab Palestinians. They refused to establish it. Instead, they opened wars and only made it worse in the 77 years since. 

There were many chances they could have had. Israel went above and beyond to try and figure this out. They have no more choices. It will be by the hands of G-d, not Israel, that the Palestinian idea of a country will end. It will be by their own hate and their own desire to die that they will parish. It will be by the support of terror countries that they will find other places to live in. But they are not welcomed anymore on the holy grounds of the land of Israel. The land of our biblical forefathers. The land that has belonged to Israel for over 2000 years. The land that will stay Israel’s for the next thousand years and more.

The land of Israel has always been an island of light in a sea of darker regimes. It has given light to the world only when the Jewish people were able to live there and rule it with peace. If you wish to have peace in the world, understand that not everything you are seeing matches the stories you have been told. 

Their lies will fall to the ground, and our Truth, Israel’s truth, will rise and stay strong. You cannot break this Truth, you can only break yourself while trying to take it down. 

You will not break Israel, you can only die as you try to attack and terrorize Israel. Attack us with weapons, rockets, rapping, slaughtering, gassing us, or with your worlds of condemnation -- Israel is here, it will not move, and it will not make itself smaller for the sake of being kind to those who came to slaughter us in our own beds. 

We had a cease fire until they came to slaughter us. We will not be making that mistake again. Stand with us now, or this will only become worse later on. Force a cease fire now, and many more will die later on -- not because Israel wishes that to happen, but because that is the way these terror organizations work. 

The delusion of peace talks with them is over. Wake up. Do not drag your own western countries into the hands of radical Muslim groups. Stand in strong leadership against the extremist in your midst. And know that whether you choose to hate us now does not really matter to us -- but it will impact the degree of terror and hate that you allow spread in your own country. Great nations and civilizations have fallen for less hate. Do not make the mistake of thinking that it will not happen in your country. 

We do not want war. We want peace. We’ve always wanted peace. 

When I was a child I was told that maybe by the time I turn 18 our enemies won’t want to kill us and we will not need an army. When I was a teenager we still thought that maybe by the time I am 18 we will not need an army. 

This is how our children were being raised -- with the deep hope that we will have such a peace that we will not need an army. But I went to the army, as did all my friends and all Israeli youth since. I turned 18 over 30 years ago, and we still need an army. 

Now, I am a mother, hoping, praying, that when my children turn 18 maybe Israel won’t need an army. But after growing up in 2 intifadas, rockets from Hezbollah in the north, rockets from Hamas in the south, multiple attempts for peace, leaving Gaza and hoping they will build a peaceful country of their own, we did not get any closer to peace. Instead, the level of terror and evil has reached an all-time high. 

The mothers of Israel do not wish to send their children to fight against these evildoers. The mothers of Israel do not want to send their children into these fights. We do this because we have no other choice. We do this because if we won’t, who exactly in the world is going to keep our families safe? Is Germany? Canada? France? Italy? England? Are you going to send your soldiers, your children, to create a human shield between the terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank and our families? 

Who in this world is going to keep our homes safe when terror is flourishing on the other side of a border that the entire western world wants us to place there? Who are the ones living the outcomes and the consequences of your demanding a two state solution? 

We, the mothers of the Israeli children who are forced to go to fight this evil, will not be told what to do by leaders who do not live here. And my hope is that the mothers on the other side, the Palestinian mothers, some of them still believe that we can have peace, my hope is that not all of them have fallen into the darkness, the manipulation and the endless lies. 

We tried finding the way into a two state solution, and just like the massive failure of the UN and UNRAW, the two state solution has also failed. 

We are not saying that the Palestinians do not deserve a peaceful solution -- but the idea of the two state solution has failed. Its roots were not about two states but about a way to take over the entire land of Israel. 

It is madness to keep trying to come up with the same solution. For 77 years this solution has been failing both Israelis and the Palestinian people. What on earth makes anyone think that now, suddenly, after the worst terror attack the world has ever seen, that now this failing idea will suddenly succeed? 

Admit it did not work. 

It was a good idea that failed miserably. Stop forcing this solution on people who cannot make it work. They need a solution, yes, but a two state solution is not it. And as of now, what the people of Gaza need is to be allowed to be kept out of harm's way. But into the hands of Hamas everyone wants to keep pushing them, as every ceasefire Hamas manipulates and brings more innocent civilians into its ranks. 

This is not empathy. This is not global strategic thinking. This is cognitive laziness and it is just wrong. 

Repeating the same patterns and decisions that have gotten us this far, will not suddenly lead us towards a better path. 

This is the time to stop lying to ourselves and start seeing that all that was done so far has failed miserably. The aid the Palestinians need is not the aid that you are willing to give -- so stop preaching to give them aid that you cannot offer. Help them stay out of harm's way, do not try to talk and pressure Israel into sending them back into the hands of Hamas. 

As King David sat in the city of Jerusalem, over 2000 years ago, he wrote: “and from manipulation and Hamas He will redeem them, and so precious is their blood in His eyes” (Psalm 72, verse 14). We see all innocent dwellers of the promised land of Israel as being precious in the eyes of G-d. 

The Jewish ethical guidelines, which are the root of our country, are to value all life, as all life and all people are precious in the eyes of G-d. 

Those who were gaslighted and manipulated by the hands of terror organizations will believe that Israel is the power of evil, when in truth, and there is only one truth, Israel has always been a beacon for hope, light and peace in the Middle East.

Our valuing lives' is not reserved to the lives of our own people only. We value and wish for peace and prosperity for the entire region, including our neighbours -- those who still believe in living peacefully next door to us; those who David wrote about -- that G-d will redeem from the hands of Hamas and their deceptions. The question is, will you, leaders in the western world, see the truth for what it is and stand by Israel, or will you keep allowing gaslighting and manipulations to take hold in your cities, your countries and your governments? 

We truly do want peace for the Palestinians -- peace and freedom. May our neighbours not need to keep living under terror rule. May they finally be acknowledged as full citizens in the countries they live in and not keep living as second grade citizens due to their UN refugee status. A status that is designed to pressure the world to not let go of the failed idea of the two state solution (which they themselves refused to live by). And may we find new solutions for living in peace side by side. 

Right now, the people in Gaza and the West Bank are suffering because of the terror supporting regime of oppression and corruption, stealing funds from around the world and using it to build more terror infrastructure, to get more weapons and to pay monthly rewards to all who took part in terror attacks against Israelis. 

To help the Gazan people, we need to help them be free of their unjust oppression by Hamas. 

This is what Israel is trying to do, because it is needed for Israel’s safety, and it is the only way for the Gazans to one day have a better life. 

As long as Hamas has our hostages, and as long as the Gazans allow Hamas to stay in power, a government they themselves elected, that day of peace is not today. 

This day will come, with or without the world’s help, but at the very least, dear world, do not pressure us to stop what no other country has the courage to do: “and from manipulation and Hamas He will redeem them, and so precious is their blood in His eyes” (Psalm 72, verse 14).

Do not condemn and spread more hate. Instead, help us help them. Help us help them in ways that our mothers can tell their children that when they turn 18 we will no longer need an army. Help us make this true, for our side, and for their side. 

May better days of true and lasting peace arrive.