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I am so pleased to announce that I have been appointed Founding Fellow at the Mitzpe Institute, the brainchild of today’s author Uri Zehavi.

Mitzpe Institute is an intelligence and strategy organization focused on Israeli security, diaspora threat assessment and the strategic challenges confronting the Jewish people and the West. We produce daily intelligence, forensic analyses, strategic assessments and tactical briefings read by policymakers, military leaders and institutional decision-makers across more than 90 countries and all 50 US states — from the Knesset and the US Congress to allied governments, major policy institutions and Jewish organizational leadership worldwide.

Please enjoy the short and rousing conclusion to Uri’s serialised book and feel free to submit reviews. Today’s epilogue is free as a temptation to purchase the complete work. Subscribe as paid to read each chapter in its entirety (links below). - Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor)

Preface & Introduction: The Return of the Lie // Chapter 1: Setting the Record Straight // Chapter 2: From Balfour to Independence // Chapter 3: By Right, Not Permission // Chapter 4: Apartheid as Propaganda // Chapter 5: Colonialism and the Great Erasure // Chapter 6: The Genocide Libel // Chapter 7: The UN Assembly Line // Chapter 8: Campus Catechism // Chapter 9: NGO Lawfare // Chapter 10: The Jewish Right to Return // Chapter 11: Sovereignty is Not Theft // Chapter 12: Israel is the Non-Negotiable Nation

This book opened with the obvious that somehow became controversial: Israel is the homeland of the Jewish People, and our return is both just and lawful. We walked the reader through the libels and the factories that produce them. We named the lies and the liars. Now the last word is the first truth: Israel is not on trial and Jewish sovereignty is not a loan. We do not apply for it each season. We do not apologize for it between wars.

Those who deny that sovereignty are the ones under judgment. History keeps the docket. Pharaoh failed. Haman failed. Hadrian tried to erase Judea and ended up advertising it for two thousand years in every prayer book.

The Mufti who saluted Hitler did not win. The murderers of Munich did not win. Hamas will not win. They all misread the same opponent: a people that outlives its undertakers.

In 1948 the answer to a very old question became final: can the Jews live free on their soil? The answer is yes. It remains yes. It will remain yes. The charter that matters is not in New York; it is written in Hebrew on stone, on coins, on deeds, on graves.

We revived our language. We reopened our towns. We built a scrappy democracy that argues at breakfast and mobilizes by lunch. We grow oranges, and write code, and send our kids to the army, and then to university, and then to weddings where grandparents whisper Kiddush in accents from Baghdad to Vilna and Addis Ababa. Our enemies watch this and call it an anomaly. It is normal life, earned the hard way.

So let us be plain. Israel is here to stay. Its title does not depend on courtesy from Brussels or threats from Tehran. It rests on the unbroken bond between a people and a land and on the ordinary right every nation claims: to decide its fate without asking “May we?”.

Sovereignty is not theft. It is responsibility. It is the weight each generation accepts so the next can study, plant, create, pray, argue, love and sleep.

We want peace. Our prophets wrote the aspiration into the nation’s operating system. But they never confused the end of days with today. In the real world, the quiet in a nursery depends on a fence that works and a soldier who does not blink. The paradox is not complicated. An iron dome above is what makes a violin lesson possible below. We do not worship the sword. We keep it sharp and hope to be able to keep it sheathed.

The choir of deniers would prefer a different script. They reduce every Jewish right to a slogan and every Jewish town to a crime scene. They call Judea “occupied,” a Jew in Hebron a “colonizer,” the Western Wall an “issue.” Their vocabulary is a pry bar.

Our answer is shorter. No.

No to the erasure. No to the renaming. No to any map that treats Jewish presence as a sin to be expiated.

We owe no apology for locking our doors. We owe no deference to courts that confuse self-defense with aggression. We will not outsource survival to blue helmets or paper guarantees that melt in the first warm rain.

We place our trust in the pilot who intercepts the missile, in the infantry sergeant who checks the gate at 3 a.m., in the engineer who builds the next layer of protection, in the teacher who explains why Zion means home, in the parents who pass on a language and a story that does not end with the latest headline.

Peace will come when our neighbors value life more than our death.

Until then, we will do what free peoples do. We will guard what is ours, make more of it, and invite any neighbor who accepts reality to build with us.

We will keep our hand extended and our eyes open. We will remember the hard days and double the good days. That is the Israeli way. It is also the Jewish way.

Picture one last scene. A kibbutz in the south, days after the October massacre. Bullet holes in stucco. Windows boarded. The smell of smoke still in the laundry. An elderly woman, a survivor from Europe, stands at the edge of the yard she planted decades ago. Her voice is quiet. “I will not lose my home again.” That sentence is both policy and prayer. It sums up thousands of years and the next morning’s to-do list.

The world can pollute the air with slogans. It can hold conferences that rename our stones. It can shout “from the river to the sea” into microphones and think that abhorrent racket rewrites geology.

We will keep doing the work that makes a country: argue budgets, study Torah, write patents, bury our dead with tears and honor, celebrate births with laughter loud enough to reach the neighbors.

Israel is not a question mark. It is the living answer to Jewish history. Those who still deny it are not brave rebels. They are bit players in a very old rerun.

The last word belongs to reality. The people of Israel live. The State of Israel stands. We are home. No permission required. No apology offered.

Am Yisrael chai.