It is a painful day. Today, on Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day), we recall the thousands of soldiers who have fallen defending the State of Israel.

And the men, women and children who have been murdered in countless terror attacks.

Not that they are ever forgotten. Every precious soul is a universe and the ripple from every tragedy goes on forever.

But we have a day set aside each year when, as a nation, honour their memory.

Crowds sat in silence last night as the names of victims were read out in towns and cities across Israel.

Where I live, in Ra’anana, a couple of names stood out, those of two young men from the Anglo community whose lives were cut short in Gaza.

I was among the many thousands of mourners who shared the grief of their families and who attended their funerals.

We mourn. But our enemy rejoices.

I don’t mean our enemy rejoices at Israeli deaths. That’s a given.

I mean they rejoice at the death of their own loved ones. Read that again. I mean that if they held a ceremony like we do, they’d be bursting with pride that their son, husband or brother had become a “shahid” – a martyr – rather than feeling sorrow at their passing.

This is such a hard thing to comprehend because it runs counter to every value we hold dear.

It also goes a long way to explaining why the world demonises Israel with such ferocity and why it chooses instead to support regimes that represent the polar opposite of everything it believes in, such as democracy, equality, freedom of speech and LGBTQ rights.

Every war that Israel fights is an unequal war. Unequal for many strategic reasons, but ultimately for one core reason. Our enemies don’t mind dying.

More than that, they believe death and suffering are religiously redemptive.

They are quite literally beyond bonkers, so consumed by hatred that they will sacrifice their own lives and the lives of those they love.

This is a culture that will name a road after a suicide bomber, reward their family with wads of cash, and teach schoolkids that there is no better thing than martyrdom.

Don’t take my word for it. Check out muqawama, a core doctrine of the Iranian regime and of its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah.

Muqawama means continuous struggle, in which sacrificing one’s life in battle (especially against Israel and the West) is glorified as the most exalted form of martyrdom.

So what sort of battle is Israel fighting when its enemy doesn’t care about losing, because losing is winning?

Imagine a football game. Manchester United need a victory. But Manchester City (for argument’s sake) don’t care about winning or even drawing. They’ve decided, for whatever perverse reason, that they want to lose, and they want to concede as many goals as they can in the process.

Now think of Gaza. Hamas understands only too well that losing means winning. The bigger the death toll, the more global sympathy, the more pressure it puts on Israel.

It can do this because it treats life as plentiful commodity with little or no value. And because it knows that, conversely, Israel treasures every last citizen.

Hamas initiated a war on 7 October 2023 in the full knowledge that the world would be horrified for a full 10 minutes, that Israel would retaliate and that soon enough they’d be able to display enough dead baby pictures (real or AI-generated) to persuade the everyone that Israel was actually the aggressor.

Its cynical use of schools, hospitals, kindergartens, ambulances, mosques and even cemeteries for terror activity is well-documented.

But here’s something that is less widely reported. During more than two years of war Hamas didn’t allow a single civilian to take shelter in its vast network of heavily-fortified tunnels. What does that tell you about their priorities?

The “moral majority” – woke and well-meaning but ill-informed – sees and hears the same tropes against Israel again and again from a media that has long lost any semblance of objectivity.

The default position is that Israel is always bad, and its enemies are always good.

This binary appraisal applies no less to the Iranian regime, one that slaughters its own people in their tens of thousands, hangs rape victims and dedicates every last, worthless rial funding a bomb to eradicate Israel.

The moral majority will wring its hands, roll its eyes and insist I’ve lost the plot, especially the bit about are enemies wanting to die.

But they are wrong and they’ve been duped.

At the end of the day any culture that glorifies death is doomed. And one, like Israel, that treasures life will be blessed.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)