I don't know whether to laugh or cry when people overseas decide to lecture me on 1) "just stop this mutual baseless hatred with Iran" and 2) "war is bad". 

Because someone in the West who has never experienced war or living with missiles being lobbed at them clearly needs to explain to the person who's lived through years of it what war is like. We here wouldn't have a clue otherwise. We'd think it was hunky dory fun and games and glory. Not like we live in a country where running for shelter from ballistic missiles is a fact of life or where there is a national draft and people spend the cream of their young years serving their country. 

Forgive the sarcasm, but it's really getting a bit much to be lectured on how to best to protect our lives by people on the other side of the world who's main concern is the price of petrol and whether war looks bad on tv, rather than whether an Iranian missile is going to hit their home or whether Iran will get to have the nukes they keep promising to use to wipe our country off the map. 

War is horrific, but sometimes not fighting a war has even more horrific consequences. 

Which brings me to #1. There is no "mutual hatred" of Iran from Israel or even from most Iranians I've ever met. There is a fanatical revolutionary regime in Iran though which for 40 years now has been teaching its schoolchildren every day to chant "Death to Israel", and who's leaders burn with a passionate ideological hatred for Israel, believing the existence of a non-Islamic, let alone non-Shia state in the Middle East to be an affront to their faith and an impediment to the coming of the Twelfth Imam, meaning Israel must be destroyed to hasten the coming of the Mahdi and their version of "end times". 

By contrast prior to Khomeini's revolution in 1979 Israel enjoyed diplomatic relations with Iran, the two countries had close ties, include direct flights, tourism and commerce. 

Jews have had ties with Iran going back to the ancient Persia of biblical times, whether it's the Persian court drama of the Purim story or the Cyrus proclamation that allowed the Jews exiled by the Babylonian empire to return home to Zion and rebuild Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple with the Persian king's blessing. 

There is a mutual respect and affection between Iranians and Jews, two ancient Middle Eastern people still clinging to ancient language and culture that predate the Arab Islamic colonisation of our region, our countries dotted with ruins testifying to millennia old civilisations, spoken Farsi and Hebrew stubbornly preserving languages spoken by our ancestors. I have seen so many messages about this from Iranian people, both living as emigres in the global Iranian diaspora and from within Iran. 

There are huge numbers of Farsi speaking Jews hailing from Iran, Afghanistan and central Asia, including a significant and influential community in Jerusalem dating back around 200 years, among the builders of the first neighbourhoods outside the walls of the Old City. 

There are many Israeli Jews who have Persian Jewish ancestry, including senior politicians, rabbis and military leaders, as well as beloved popstars like Rita and Liraz Cherkhi. Iran is not some vast unknown to many Israelis, but a living culture that is part of their lives too. 

So no, this is not a war about peoples hating each other, ignorance of other cultures or a need for everyone to just learn to love each other. There is a serious ideological motivation for the Khomeinist Iranian leadership to oppose Israel, just as there is a serious historical cultural connection and mutual appreciation between many Israelis and the Iranian people. 

The deepest hope of the peoples of Israel and Iran is that this murderous Khomeinist regime will fall or at least be weakened enough so that our countries can again openly and officially be friendly with each other, to the mutual benefit of all.