Dear parents,
I am writing what may be the most painful letter of my life. Words from the heart of a father and grandfather to you, the parents of soldiers who are still alive.
Like you, I have not slept through a full night in more than three years. There is no rest. The thunder of planes tearing through the silence, and the sound of blood crying out from the ground. Every day brings more funerals. The circle of bereaved families keeps widening. Eulogies that break the heart, for the best and most beautiful among us, who will remain young forever, while those who loved them aged overnight and will never know comfort again. I weep for them in the night, and for the fact that they are forgotten almost at once by political mourners who have made mourning their trade and war their deepest longing.
I write to you at an hour that is neither night nor day. In a little while, four fresh graves will be opened in earth already soaked through. The holiday is approaching, and there is no joy in it. There is no home without death, without injury, without fracture, without fear. The slayer does not distinguish between firstborn and the rest of our children. It kills without mercy. I am like you, and my child is no different from yours, and that makes us closer than we have ever been. We are fathers and mothers hollowed out by dread for a child who only yesterday was a baby, a teenager, and today stands at the front of a brutal war. Your child, like mine, is not a data point or a news item. He has a name and a nickname, a small tender mark on his face, a voice, a smell that belongs to him alone. And nothing is coming to save him. The knock on the door or the ring of the phone will come. There is no escaping them.
Gently, carefully, I ask you the question that is tearing me apart: why, and for how long?
Do you also know, somewhere deep inside, that these wars have no purpose? That there is no solution in them, no salvation. Only an endless cycle of violence, hollow promises, and after them a long procession of mourners and graves. You, like me, are the victims of yet another damaged generation that could not break free from the cycles of hatred and terror. And despite every word of pride and bravado, each of us knows how fragile this reality is, and how small we are before the clash of forces we pretend to control. You were there with me in the Lebanon wars. We entered Gaza time after time. So why, Master of the Universe, did not one of those wars end in peace, or even in the quiet of “and the land had rest”? How many more times can we hear “this time is different” before the words themselves lose all meaning and the cemeteries fill again?
You promised your children something else. Not a perfect world, not absolute security, only a simple hope, almost elementary: that they would grow into lives better and safer than ours. You remember what your own parents promised you, and what you swore to yourselves as young parents when you held that beautiful infant and made him a vow with a full heart. How many generations have carried that promise? And now it turns out to be hollow. How many grandparents believed that this is what the future would look like, and then buried their grandchildren? And when you look now at the last photograph your child sent, you ask yourself quietly: how did it happen that we too promised, and did not deliver?
And when our children come home, if they are lucky enough to come home alive, we who brought them into this world know that something inside them has died. They have seen immense death. They have killed and faced death themselves. Sometimes at close range, sometimes from a distance, through screens and joysticks. Their hands have been washed in blood. Their souls have been stained and altered. And their love is no longer innocent, no longer what it was.
These are not dilemmas about the enemy, real or imagined. They are about us. Our political allegiances matter, but they are secondary. Above them looms a problem far larger and far darker. Why do we walk, half blind, after a man whose own children will never be asked to pay the price that ours do? What have we done to deserve these ministers who sustain entire populations that have exempted themselves from sacrifice, while sending those dear to us to sleep in field tents and die in killing fields? You see this, as I do. You wrinkle your nose, you suppress it, you refuse to look it straight in the eye because it is too hard. I understand. Perhaps you still tell yourselves the old Israeli story, whispering that it is good to die for our land. But deep in your heart you have known for a long time that it is not even good to live this way in our land.
And this too you know, perhaps more than anyone: there were other moments. There were other possibilities. There were crossroads where a different path could have been taken. Not one paved only with force, blood, and revenge. There were leaders who were not corrupt, who opened other paths. Not perfect ones, not without risk, but they did everything in their power to prevent the next war rather than lead us into it. Hands were extended in peace and refused. Through murder and fanaticism, the doors of peace were slammed shut and the gates of war swung open. Each time such a door closed, we were told it was for security. But what kind of security is this, when each generation only adds more layers of grief and stockpiles of vengeance? The security we long for is not growing stronger. It is only moving further away and becoming more costly. And the price, every single time, is our children who have not yet been killed. We, the anxious parents, have become pieces on a board, pawns marching in formation in the procession of folly and grief, and even cheering as we go: Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant, hail Caesar, those who are about to die salute you.
I am not expecting an answer from you. Because there is no single answer. Perhaps there is no answer at all. But I am asking that you ask, together with me: what is the price we are no longer willing to pay? And when will a parent’s love for their child become something else. Not the willingness to send them, but the courage to stop them before they charge once more into futility. I plead with you, as a father, as a grandfather, as a friend: dare to ask. Dare to demand another way.
Because beyond every ideology, every argument, every strategic analysis, there is only one thing that cannot be replaced. Life itself. The lives of our children.
Save them. Do not let them go. You can.
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