Sometimes I wonder if it was ever about Israel at all. Or if it was about me.

The land speaks louder than any man who tries to govern it. It devours leaders, eats visionaries, wears kings down to dust and forgets their names.

I tell myself I am different. I tell myself history will remember. But at night — when sleep slips and the old fears leak back in — I hear the land whisper otherwise.

It says: You are temporary.

I feel the weight of the fathers — the ones who fought with nothing, who built out of sand and blood and desperate faith. I walk in their footprints but mine feel lighter somehow, like they do not sink as deep, like the ground is not sure it wants to hold me.

I wonder if I have made Israel stronger or just heavier. More secure, yes — but at what cost? Division cuts deeper every year. Pride turns brittle. Faith turns violent.

Did I bind the wounds — or stitch the rot deeper into the flesh?

Sometimes, in the thinnest hours, I see flashes of collapse: the cities falling not from bombs but from emptiness, from forgetting. From growing so strong that we believe ourselves invulnerable — and from that arrogance, becoming fragile.

Sometimes I see my own face carved in stone somewhere in a cracked and empty square, and no one left alive who remembers why.

I wanted to be a shield. I fear I have become a blade too heavy to wield.

And deeper still — beneath pride, beneath strategy, beneath even duty — there is the smallest voice, the one I bury beneath mountains of will.

It asks:

Was it ever possible to save something that was born already under siege? Was survival itself a victory, or only a stay of execution? Was the dream always doomed, and I simply learned how to slow the fall?

I silence it. I must.

Because if I listen too long, if I allow that voice to bloom, then the hands I have kept so steady might start to tremble.

And if the hands tremble, if the mind breaks — then Israel cracks with me.

So I rise each day, harder than the day before, carving certainty over the bruises. Wearing the mask so tightly it becomes the skin.

Because whether or not I believe anymore —whether or not I am right — I must still stand.

The land demands it.

And no one else will carry it if I fall.