Thanks to all our friends and family overseas who have reached out to us and my apologies if I haven't responded to everyone, it's been rather hectric around here.

I'm not online a lot these days, I find I have less patience for it than I used to and there is a weird cognitive dissonance in reading people around the world theorising from the safety of their distant countries about whether I and my people have a right to self-defense or whether we should just politely capitulate to people who proudly say they want to wipe us out. Me? When a bunch of people with a uranium enrichment programme have a clock in the middle of their capital city counting down to my country's destruction, I choose to believe it isn't just talk and they actually mean what they are saying. Not because I like war, but because I'm all too familiar with just how terrible war is and understand that sometimes there is no choice but to choose a pre-emptive strike against an enemy who is pledging to destroy you than to wait for that enemy to strike once they are at full strength and capable of making good on that horrific promise to erase your country from existence. Please don't patronise us with condescending talk explaining to us that "everything has a diplomatic solution", "war is not the answer", "nothing is ever determined by military means". Unlike people in countries which aren't under attack and haven't been for decades, I and my people are very aware of what war means, how very terribly awful wars are. We have paid the all too terrible cost of fighting for survival, everyone of us in Israel has lost someone or knows someone who has. We have no illusions of Hollywood action films and glorious war novels. We know exactly how ugly and devastatingly painful war is because our people have been forced to live it again and again and again. Unlike the Europeans and Americans lecturing us to just allow Iran to make a deal, what's the worst that can happen, we know what's the worst that can happen.