Jacob spoke with a few compassionate vets, but also watched a few horrible YouTube videos. Even when euthanasia was clearly a “good” thing—a genuinely suffering animal being given a genuinely peaceful end—it was horrible. He couldn’t do it. He wasn’t ready. Argus wasn’t ready. They weren’t ready. The embassy continued to be unhelpful, and commercial flights to Israel continued to be halted. So they looked into getting press certification, volunteering for Doctors Without Borders, flying to another country and reaching Israel by boat—all nonstarters. What changed their situation, and changed everything, was an internationally televised speech by Israel’s prime minister—a speech that he must have known, when writing it, would either be memorized by future Jewish schoolchildren or be etched into memorial walls. Looking directly into the camera, and directly into the Jewish souls of all Jews watching, he conveyed the unprecedented threat to Israel’s existence, and asked that Jews between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five “come home.”
