Why Jews Still Fight for Home — and What America Owes

I have a photograph of my father-in-law standing alone in a desert, holding a rifle. On the back, in Edna’s handwriting, it says: “Harry Brill, 1948, Israel — in the Army.”

He survived the Holocaust by hiding in the forests of eastern Galicia. In 1947 he boarded the Exodus with 4,515 other Jewish survivors bound for Palestine. The British rammed the ship, forced its passengers off, and sent them back to Germany.

There is another photograph — published in Life magazine — of Harry as a boy pressed against wire netting on a train to the displaced persons camp at Poppendorf. Even after surviving the forests, he was still a refugee.

He made it to Israel eventually. Within months he was standing in that desert with a rifle, fighting for a country that was days old, because five Arab armies invaded the morning after it was born.

That photograph is not history to me. It is family.

That photograph is not history to me. It is family.

And it is a reminder that for Jews, the war for a home did not end in 1945. It did not end in 1948. It has never really ended.

The Jewish people have been fighting for safety since before there was a word for nationhood. They fought Pharaoh. They were conquered by Babylonians and Romans. They were expelled from England, France, and Spain. They survived crusades, inquisitions, pogroms, and blood libels. For two thousand years they ended the Passover Seder with the same prayer:

Next year in Jerusalem.

The Holocaust proved, in the most brutal way imaginable, that exile was not safety. Assimilation was not safety. Gratitude from neighbors was not safety. No corner of someone else’s country would ever be secure enough.

So the survivors built their own.

And from the moment it was declared in May 1948, that state has had to defend itself — against five armies at birth, against annihilation threats in 1967 and 1973, against suicide bombers and rockets, against the massacre of October 7th. For seventy-eight years there has not been a single day of guaranteed peace.

Jews have learned what it costs to wait.

Jews have learned what it costs to wait.

That is why “never again” is not a slogan in my family. It is a scar.

My mother-in-law Edna escaped the Warsaw Ghetto at seven. She served as a courier in the Polish Home Army at nine, was wounded by a grenade, decorated with the Cross of Valor, and taken prisoner of war — all before her eleventh birthday. She later met Harry at Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot, the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz.

A girl who fought the Nazis married a man who fought for Israel’s right to exist.

I have heard her tell the story of the grenade that sent shrapnel into her body. I have seen the scar it left. I understand, in a way that is not theoretical, why Israel refuses to gamble with its survival.

So when I hear that Iran is pursuing nuclear capability — that its leaders speak openly about Israel’s destruction, that it funds and arms Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — I do not begin from abstraction.

I begin with that photograph in the desert.

I understand why Israel believes waiting could be fatal. I understand why preemption feels like prudence rather than aggression.

But I am also an American.

And when my country enters a war — especially in the Middle East — history demands another kind of vigilance.

We have been told before that urgency justified action. In 2003 we were told that weapons of mass destruction required immediate intervention. We are still living with the consequences of that war. Entire regions remain destabilized by it. American families still live with the cost.

My grandparents fled pogroms for America. My parents fought in World War II. My inheritance is both Jewish vulnerability and American responsibility. I carry both when I think about this war.

The lesson of the 1940s is that waiting can be deadly. The lesson of 2003 is that acting without sufficient clarity can be disastrous.

Both lessons are true.

Both lessons are true.

The question is not whether Israel has the right to defend itself. It does. That right was purchased in blood long before Harry stood in the Negev with a rifle.

The question is whether this — American bombs ordered swiftly, without congressional authorization — is the wisest way for the United States to stand beside the country he fought for.

I do not want to be the American who waited too long while an existential threat gathered strength. History has already shown us what that hesitation can cost. My family does not have the luxury of forgetting that.

But I also do not want to be the American who mistook urgency for inevitability, who accepted escalation without exhausting prudence, who helped widen a war that might have been contained.

The fear of waiting too long is real. The fear of being rushed is real.

And the tragedy of history is that they can look similar in the moment.

And the tragedy of history is that they can look similar in the moment.

I do not doubt that many in Israel’s security establishment believe delay carries danger. That belief is shaped by history, not theater.

But history also teaches that leaders are human, and politics is never absent from decisions of war. When escalation coincides with political vulnerability, citizens have a responsibility to ask harder questions — not fewer.

And once wars begin, they rarely stay confined to their architects’ intentions.

Israel must not be annihilated. That is not negotiable. That is not partisan. That is the lesson my family paid for in blood.

But what is negotiable — what must be debated — is how the United States chooses to help ensure that outcome.

Supporting Israel does not mean surrendering judgment. It does not mean bypassing Congress. It does not mean confusing urgency with strategy. It means asking, soberly and without illusion, whether this particular action strengthens Israel’s security or entangles it in something larger and less controllable.

Harry picked up a rifle in 1948 because there was no one else to defend the Jewish state. The world had already waited once.

I have always been on his side.

But standing with him now means insisting that if America fights beside Israel, it does so not out of impulse or politics, but out of necessity and clarity.

The war that never ended demands courage.

It also demands judgment.

It also demands judgment.

Janet Bond Brill, PhD, is the author of Little Edna’s War, based on her mother-in-law’s Holocaust testimony, published on January 27, 2026, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)