Parenting & Family Quote by Jerry Costello

Survival is doing heavy lifting here. Costello frames Israel not as a regional power with overwhelming military capacity, but as a besieged project whose existence is perpetually on the brink. That choice of register matters: it primes the audience to treat policy questions as emergency measures, where criticism can be recast as negligence in the face of existential threat.

The sentence is engineered as a timeline of escalating menace: from "conventional military attacks" to "suicide bombers". The move compresses decades of conflict into a simple evolution of tactics, suggesting an enemy that adapts and hardens, while Israel remains the constant target. It also blurs distinctions between state adversaries and non-state actors, creating one continuous narrative of assault. That rhetorical continuity is the point; it discourages nuance about causes, asymmetries, or competing claims by anchoring the story in a single moral axis: defense versus terror.

The phrase "innocent Israeli men, women, and children" is a familiar political cadence, a triple that turns victims into an emblematic cross-section of society. It's emotionally precise and strategically general: it invokes civilian suffering without naming a particular event, letting listeners supply their own mental images. What goes unsaid is just as consequential. There is no mention of Palestinian civilians, occupation, settlement politics, or Israeli military actions. The context, then, is less a history lesson than a positioning statement in a U.S. political environment where affirming Israel's security often operates as a litmus test. Costello's intent reads as solidarity through moral clarity, achieved by narrowing the frame until survival is the only argument left.