In 1956, an Israeli named Roi Rotberg was killed by Arab marauders while patrolling a kibbutz located on the Gaza border. Moshe Dayan, who happened to be visiting the kibbutz at the time, composed a brief eulogy for Rotberg that, in the words of Marc Livecche, “jolts us from our somnambulism and puts us instead on a footing for war.” Herewith, marking Israel’s Memorial Day, is the speech’s central paragraph:
A generation of settlement are we, and without the steel helmet and the maw of the cannon we shall not plant a tree, nor build a house. Our children shall not have lives to live if we do not dig shelters; and without the barbed-wire fence and the machine gun, we shall not pave a path nor drill for water. The millions of Jews, annihilated without a land, peer out at us from the ashes of Israeli history and command us to settle and rebuild a land for our people. But beyond the furrow that marks the border lies a surging sea of hatred and vengeance, yearning for the day that tranquility blunts our alertness, for the day when we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy who call for us to lay down our arms.
Read more on Philos Project: https://philosproject.org/moshe-dayan-strength-yields-strength-breaks/