Thoughts On Israel, Gaza, etc.

 

I know that once Israel invades GAZA, the destruction and inevitable civilian deaths that will occur, even people who were shocked by Hamas’s atrocities last week will start saying that Israel’s attacks are “revengeful”, “out of proportion”, etc.  I would like to address this.

   In the past, Israel has targeted basically MILITARY Hamas, as opposed to the political wing.  Israel wrongly assumed that the political wing would value the lives of Palestinians, provide services, and maybe even one day reach out to make peace. But we were wrong, terribly wrong.  Hamas has shown itself to be an absolutely sadistic growth- a cancer for both Israel AND Gazans as well.

   Does Hamas protect its citizens? No! The footage coming out of Gaza’s hospital tonight shows civilian casualties.  Since Israel is targeting HAMAS installations (that Hamas purposefully puts in civilian buildings, in order to make the Gazans “human shields”- which-by the way- is a war crime), there should be lots of injured Hamas soldiers also arriving at the hospitals. But THEY are in the concrete tunnels, tunnels built with funds that could have built schools, schools, etc. They are even so brazen and callous as to tell civilians not to heed Israel’s pleas (given in leaflets dropped over Gaza) to evacuate northern Gaza.

    Gaza is often termed by the press as “one giant prison”.  Yes, it is.  But when someone consistently commits murder and mayhem, who is guilty, the jailor or the jailed? In 2005, Israel made a significant concession when they closed 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza, displacing over 8000 Israelis.  The result was not a response towards peace from the Palestinian authority, but, ironically, the rise to power in 2007 of Hamas (largely due also to widescale corruption in the PA) and the shooting of rockets from Gaza into Israel.

 

  Even tonight, the coverage of the news media is wholly on Gaza. There is no mention of the 50 plus  alerts for incoming rockets and a few attempted terrorist infiltrations from just the last few hours that appear on my phone. Each rocket sent could kill many here, but here is ISRAEL, the army is NOT hiding in tunnels under civilians, but tries to protect its citizens with the iron dome system. Also nearly every citizen has access to a safe room or a bomb shelter. We have not been using our concrete to build terror tunnels. It seems that we are only seen as “right” when we manage to allow ourselves to be killed. 

    The reason for the proportionality of higher deaths between Palestinians to Israel and is not just due to Israel striking back harder, but also due to Israel trying very hard to protect their citizens, while Hamas does the opposite, using civilians as human shields. And while sometimes Israel messes up, they DO try to prevent civilian deaths in Gaza- an attitude that Hamas cynically uses against us. As Golda Meir once famously said: “We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us”.   

   I won’t say that the footage of injured children in Gaza does not move me. It does.  But the type of violence visited on us by Hamas on last Saturday, the sheer sadism and evil shown towards Israelis-this shows that any dreams of making peace (which many leftist Israelis campaigned for) is impossible with Hamas. (It is worth noting, that being a leftist, or even an Arab, would not give mercy to any Israeli confronted by the Hamas terrorists.) Hamas must be completely irradicated, like a cancer,  because if you do not kill a cancer, it will kill you.

    Now to the issue of “revenge”. This is not about revenge. This is about irradicating the cancer of Hamas (and by some hope, some dream, of maybe getting our captives back.)  If this was about revenge, we would just bomb Gaza off the map. But no, we are preparing to send in ground troops. We are preparing an assault that will unfortunately undoubtably add to our terrific death toll from last week.  We would not risk our young men and women for revenge. We had more than enough burials last week.

  Now a few cancers have new targeted therapy that will only attack cancer cells.  Now if anyone has a good idea on how to irradicate the cancer of Hamas, or of their extremism, that will not hurt the citizens of Israel or the citizens of Gaza, please let us in on the secret. Meanwhile, it seems that the “treatment” will unfortunately, like chemotherapy and radiation therapy, kill “healthy” cells alongside as well. But just like with cancer, do we really have a choice?  We in Israel are not willing for last week’s atrocities to become a “normal” reoccurrence, every two years or so, like the rocket barrages have become.  Forgive us, but we really have no intention of letting Hamas push us into the sea. We will beat this cancer. We have no choice.