The most precious commodity on Earth is not gold or silver or oil, it’s liberty. Liberty is the fuel that makes human industry and productivity possible. It is accountable for an unprecedented age of human thriving. And yet, despite the fact that the benefits of this commodity are nearly self-evident, its use is exceedingly rare. Only a small number of countries around the world embrace liberty as a fundamental condition for human peaceful coexistence and thriving. One such country is Israel, the only one out of twenty plus others in the Middle East that holds liberty as a value.
In Israel, and only Israel, can you live in peace as an ethnic or religious or gender minority. Only in Israel can you freely express your dissent with the political class and still be safe. And yet, as we speak, this precious light of liberty is in jeopardy of being snuffed out by the forces of darkness, medieval brutality, ignorance and primitiveness. Make no mistake, the war that is presently raging in and over Israel is a war for modernity, tolerance, human progress, or its opposite. There can be no middle ground between modernity and primitiveness. Tribalism and individual rights cannot coexist in peace. A victory for Israel is a victory for the best that western civilization has given to the world. But for Israel to win, you who support liberty must be morally certain that your cause is just, and it is. I urge you now to stand with the only democratic state in the Middle East. I urge you to have the courage to stand against the rising tide of tribal hatred and intolerance and fight for the gift of liberty. Nothing less than your future depends on it.
Mark Pellegrino
