If I Had Lived: Anne Frank on Why Israel Must Always Defend the Jewish People

I was one of 1.5 million Jewish children consumed in the Holocaust. Our crime was not treason, not conspiracy, not violence. Our crime was being born. I often wonder what my life would have been had I survived. I might have grown old, written books, married, seen children and grandchildren. But history denied me that chance.

Yet if I am to lend my voice now—it is to say this: the Jewish people must never again be defenseless. Never again can we rely on the “good will” of the nations. Never again can Jewish children be offered up to slaughter without a shield, without an army for protection, without a country of our own.

The Silence That Kills

In Amsterdam, in hiding, I dreamed of freedom. I wrote of my hopes that humanity was good at heart. Yet what I did not fully understand then was how silence kills.

During the war, the world knew of our suffering. Reports of mass shootings, of gas chambers, of transports, reached Allied leaders. And still the trains rolled on. Armies fought Hitler, yes, but no armies were raised with the purpose of rescuing the Jews.

“What would have saved me was not words, but power—the ability of Jews to defend themselves.”

That is why, when I look at the State of Israel and its army—the Israel Defense Forces—I do not see just soldiers. I see the guardians of Jewish existence. Every Israeli soldier is the shield my family never had.

October 7: The Old Nightmare Returns

On October 7, 2023, Jews again saw what happens when their enemies believe they are weak. Hamas, heirs to the same murderous Nazi hatred that consumed Europe, invaded Israel’s borders, massacring families, raping women, burning homes, and dragging children into captivity.

It was a pogrom in the modern age, proudly broadcast on social media.

I saw in those horrors the same dark patterns I once lived: babies torn from mothers, women degraded, Jews shot and burned alive for the simple fact of being Jews.

And just as in my time, there were those who rushed to justify the slaughter. Intellectuals, activists, politicians explained it away as “resistance.”

“The one great difference between my time and now is this: the Jewish people have a state. The Jewish people have an army. The Jewish people are no longer lambs to the slaughter.”

Why Israel Must Fight

Some ask: Is Israel justified in fighting Hamas in Gaza? To me, the very question is obscene. Did the world ever ask if the Allies were justified in fighting Hitler? Did anyone ask if bombing Dresden or Hamburg or Cologne or Berlin was “proportionate,” when that country housed the machine of extermination?

Hamas hides behind civilians, but the responsibility lies with Hamas, not Israel. Israel’s aim is not conquest. It is survival.

I would say to the critics who scold Israel: you did not save me. You did not save my sister Margot. You did not save the children of Poland, Hungary, Holland, Germany, or Greece. You remained silent then. You have no right to lecture now.

The Sacred Duty of Strength

I once wrote, “In spite of everything I still believe that people are truly good at heart.” And I still believe it. But goodness of heart did not save me. It did not stop the trains. It did not dismantle the gas chambers.

What protects the Jewish people is not faith in others but strength in ourselves. The IDF exists so Jewish children can live. Israel exists so Jews never beg foreign powers for permission to survive.

If there had been an Israel in 1942, then Auschwitz might never have claimed its victims. Indeed, I was born, not in Amsterdam, but in Frankfurt, Germany. My father escaped Germany to Holland, because there was nowhere else to go, and he thought we might be safe. He tried for years to get into America, and even had a very wealthy and powerful financial sponsor. But the antisemitic State department Head of the Visa section, Breckenridge Log, blocked my family’s visas as well as countless other Jews. Had there been a State of Israel just three years before I perished at Bergen-Belsen, I would have survived. My diary might have been not a testament of a murdered girl but the first chapter of a long life.

The Memory of the Children

I was one child among millions. My name is remembered only because of my diary. But there were so many other Anne Franks —bright eyes, soft voices, children who never had the chance to leave their story.

When Israel fights, it fights in their memory. It fights to ensure that no Jewish child again becomes ash.

“Every soldier of Israel, every battle it fights, is the echo of that vow: Never Again.”

The Eternal Lesson

The Holocaust was not only a German crime. It was the crime of indifference, of silence, of complicity. And the lesson is eternal: Jews cannot survive on the mercy of others.

The world may honor my diary, but it did not save my life. The world may weep at Holocaust memorials, but it did not shield my family.

Only Jewish strength can guarantee Jewish survival. Only Israel ensures that the 1.5 million murdered children did not die in vain.

My Final Word

I was denied a future. But through Israel, the Jewish people reclaimed theirs. Through the IDF, every Jewish child has guardians who will stand between them and the abyss.

I did not live to grow old. But I speak now, in this imagining, to say this: Israel must live. Israel must fight. Israel must win. Because only then can the Jewish people endure, and only then can the children who bear my name, my story, my legacy, grow up free.

The world abandoned me once. Israel ensures it will never abandon Jewish children again.

That is justice. That is life. That is Israel.