In a valley shrouded in the smoke of conflagrations and the
dust of ages, stood the last fortress. Not of stone and
mortar, but of will, forged in the crucible of history.
Israel, that giant on a besieged hill, felt the
tooth-and-nail-armed dwarfs swarming beneath its walls,
thirsting for its fall. Their shadows already fell upon
Jerusalem, their whispers merged with the wail of sirens,
and in their hands, they clutched not spears, but venomous
scrolls - propaganda, calls for surrender, advice from
well-wishers across the ocean. From across the sea, like
sirens from the island of Lemnos, their songs carried.
European and Turkish advisors, Athenian philosophers in
expensive suits, offered not shields and swords, but round
dances. "Change your commander!" they sang. "Open your
gates! Hold a solidarity rally with those sharpening knives
at your walls!" Their words were sweet poison, corroding the
spirit. They, these eternal experts in other people's wars,
did not see the enemy's face. For them, the battle for
existence was a political talk show, and the ancient saying
- "don't change horses midstream" - an outdated
superstition. And within the fortress, a titanic struggle
was underway. Not on the walls, where soldiers, like
Spartans at Thermopylae, held back the hordes, but in the
very heart - at the polling stations. It was a referendum on
being. Each ballot - not a piece of paper, but an arrow shot
into the darkness. A vote against the left-wing choristers,
who dreamed of deconstructing the country according to the
patterns of Zimbabwe or a mad Spain, was a bullet that flew
not into the ballot box, but into the forehead of
approaching chaos. The commander of the fortress, a man with
a face carved from the granite of anxieties, stood on the
tower. He was not loved. He was not trusted by infantile,
corrupt souls poisoned by the venom of left-wing propaganda,
where war is a hashtag, and survival is bad form. They, like
those Boers who celebrated the fall of South Africa, failing
to understand that their own pensions, social guarantees,
sacred relics, the very air of freedom - all of it were
targets in the crosshairs. They wanted change, dreaming of
the prosperity promised by the then-current TikTok bloggers.
But does one change the helmsman in the midst of a storm,
when the waves of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian Philistines
are already crashing against the hull? "We are suffering!"
cried the opposition, dancing on the red-hot stones of the
capital's squares. "You are suffering?" the roar of cannons
from the north and south answered them. "Ask those in the
trenches of Gaza and Lebanon. Then you will know what
suffering is. And if you win, your 'suffering' will become
the death rattle of an entire civilization." The leader of
the nation was no darling. He was a surgeon at an operating
table piled with the wounded. His advice was sharp and
ruthless, like a scalpel. He promised no elixirs of
immortality or youth. He simply stood where he was needed,
like Atlas, holding up the firmament from falling upon his
cities. All the threads of command, tangled and bloodied,
were clenched in his fist - and he did not let go. He was
always on duty, always amidst the smoke and roar of sirens.
What else do the besieged need? Pretty words, to be followed
by the click of unlocked gates? Israel's final battle for
existence was not only in the skies over Tel Aviv or in the
tunnels under Khan Younis. It was boiling here, in the
silence of the voting booths. It was the last frontier
before a world that could still be conquered. The people
were not asked for love. They were asked for only one thing
- not to betray the army. To let the giant, drenched in
blood and sweat, finish what it had started. To let it crush
the hordes of dwarfs, to bring the surgical operation to
success, to lead the country to victory, after which,
perhaps, that very peace and prosperity would follow. Or
perhaps not. But the fortress on the hill had no other
choice. Only to stand. Only to vote. Only to be.

Source: gopher://shibboleths.org/0/phlog/340.txt

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