{"id":316431,"date":"2026-03-01T15:01:29","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T15:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/316431\/"},"modified":"2026-03-01T15:01:29","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T15:01:29","slug":"the-blogs-they-call-it-reckless-we-call-it-survival-rawan-osman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/316431\/","title":{"rendered":"The Blogs: They call it reckless. We call it survival. | Rawan Osman"},"content":{"rendered":"

While most Israelis support the attack on Iran, many around the world\u2014and especially in the United States\u2014are condemning American participation. Much of that opposition stems from a lack of understanding, and often a lack of empathy.\n<\/p>\n

This is a picture of one of my close friends, taken in 1991. He was eight, living in Israel. I was seven, living in Lebanon.\n<\/p>\n

The first time I truly understood what Israelis went through during the Gulf War was years later, reading\u00a0Yossi Klein Halevi<\/a>. He describes a country bracing for the unthinkable\u2014families sealed in rooms, children sleeping with gas masks, waiting for missiles that might carry chemical warheads. He also writes about the Six-Day War, when teenagers were sent into public parks to dig mass graves in anticipation of catastrophic losses. That is the scale of fear Israel has lived with\u2014and the context in which that image was taken.\n<\/p>\n

If I, who grew up in the Middle East, did not fully grasp this reality before immersing myself in it, how could the average Westerner understand the depth of that history?\n<\/p>\n

And yet, in the West, many confidently assign blame. The United States is often held responsible for the chaos in parts of the Muslim world where it intervened. Iraq is the standard example. The argument is familiar: there were no weapons of mass destruction, therefore the war was reckless, unjustified.\n<\/p>\n

But look again at this child\u2014my friend\u2014and consider how often such conclusions are shaped by distance rather than experience.\n<\/p>\n

Have you learned about the legacy of\u00a0Saddam Hussein<\/a>? About the Halabja massacre in 1988, when chemical weapons were used against a town filled with Kurdish civilians, killing thousands? A regime that gassed its own people, that deployed chemical weapons during the Iran\u2013Iraq War, and that openly threatened Israel in 1991. This was not a hypothetical danger. It was a proven one. A threat of annihilation.\n<\/p>\n

It is within that historical and psychological context that certain words resonate differently. Right before the ground operation in Gaza,\u00a0Benjamin Netanyahu<\/a>\u00a0referenced Amalek\u2014a biblical call to remember an enemy that seeks total destruction. Critics heard something else entirely, and in that gap between intent and interpretation, accusations escalated, feeding into narratives already primed to see the worst.\n<\/p>\n

This week\u2019s Torah portion is Zachor: remember. On October 7, the so-called \u201cAxis of Resistance\u201d revealed its intent with brutal clarity. What followed was not just another round of violence, but a turning point\u2014a line crossed, recorded in history.\n<\/p>\n

For many Israelis, the comparison to Amalek was not about rhetoric, but about signaling resolve: that the threat would be confronted decisively, not managed or deferred.\n<\/p>\n

Seen from within the region, this is not an isolated escalation, but part of a broader, long-standing pattern\u2014of threats, survival, and the necessity of confronting those who openly call for Israel\u2019s destruction. Not as prophecy, but as memory shaping action.\n<\/p>\n

If we want a future where such images\u2014children in gas masks, waiting for the worst\u2014belong only to history, then the goal must be clear: to confront and dismantle the ideologies and forces that seek destruction, once and for all. Only then can we begin to build a more stable future for the region.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tRawan Osman is a Syrian-born, German activist, content creator and writer who advocates normalization with Israel. Raised in Lebanon and educated in Germany, she studied Islamic and Jewish Studies at Heidelberg University. Her journey\u2014from being raised in an antisemitic environment to becoming a self-described “Arab Zionist”\u2014has inspired her work with organizations like Sharaka, the Center for Peace Communications and the Aseret movement in Israel.\u2028\u2028After October 7, Rawan founded \u201cArabs Ask,\u201d a social media channel to combat the misinformation propagated about Israel and the Jews in the Arab World. She is currently working on a book about her evolving relationship with Judaism and Israel. She is also the main figure in “Tragic Awakening\u201c, a documentary on the roots of antisemitism.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While most Israelis support the attack on Iran, many around the world\u2014and especially in the United States\u2014are condemning…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":316432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,87,46,155681,43,147971],"class_list":["post-316431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-israel-at-war","tag-news","tag-purim"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/316432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}