77386 - Transcription of Podcast With US #55: Analysis of the Novel – The sacred freedom. Part II: The strategic respect

Ν. Lygeros

Let’s continue with the strategic respect. It may be strange to use this combination but we will see in the novel that it is based on history.

Even the method of the attack was a proof that enemies didn’t care about the Old City. So just to recall some facts. When they start to attack the Israeli position, in fact they use heavy weapons. So it means that the Old City was not sacred to them. This was a fact not an interpretation. It’s not just about how you do you think that they are thinking when they do this. No, it’s a fact, we can see it with their use of heavy weapons. They used machine-gun but quickly also mortar and recoilless rifle fire. On the other side, But our defense used only small-arms fire. In reality, we wanted to avoid hitting civilians, holy sites and of course the Old City. Do you see the difference? You make the attack and you say this place belongs to you, this is a position but the way you make your attack, is it relevant or not? Is it correlated to your thoughts? Is it correlated to your faith or not?

No matter what our enemies did or wanted to do we had to respect the holy time. Why do we mention time? Because it’s about Jerusalem. So this is not just an Old City, for us it’s a city of time, thousands of years. For us it wasn’t just a chessboard but the land of our history and it was a question of dignity. So you see it’s just it’s not a place, it’s not just the space, it’s time. So we are in time just at that moment and we are responsible for all the time against the enemy.

This was the core of our duty. The duty is quite general but the idea is that the core we do not have to protect the space, the land but also the history.

We had to protect the space of time. The small space of a big time. A small war for a big symbol, these are together.

We tried to convince them to stop their attack but they answered that the die was cast. The die was cast is an expression of that time. It was the answer to the attempt of stopping them. So it was the answer of the king. So the novel has a part of history.

They targeted many places not only military installations but also the symbols of our democracy. We are talking about many targets.

We had civilian casualties. But as if it was not sufficient, they damaged hundreds of our buildings and even the hospital. By the way in this hospital, I didn’t mention it because it’s was just a detail but you will see that it is important. The windows of the detail of this hospital it’s a work of Chagall, it was destroyed.

They had with them many allies and we were alone. At that moment even for their aircrafts they used guys from Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt, together to do one thing.

And we were alone. This was the reason for our victory. Maybe it’s strange for you but the idea is when you are alone, if you don’t do it, nobody will do it. So the victory was necessary.

It was a question of death or freedom. We have and we had this expression also in Greek but the point is more like a tsumego. So we have stones. Remember that Jerusalem is also a town of stones. so the idea was to put it in that way, to explain that no choice was possible. One option, victory. That’s all.