View from Jerusalem #3

Continuation of a series, received in an email, from a friend in Israel:

"As I begin another "View from Jerusalem", the situation here remains the same: muddled. Iranian President Ahmadinejad said recently, "Israel is destined for destruction and it will disappear soon." Former Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is saying repeatedly, "This is 1938 and Iran is Germany." As then-Prime Minister Golda Meir said decades ago, "The Arabs want us dead. We want to live. It is hard to find a compromise between those two positions."
The General Security Services (Shin Bet) people think Israel should undertake a large-scale military operation in Gaza. On Saturday the UN voted to oppose any Israeli military response in Gaza, as if the UN General Assembly runs Israel’s Cabinet and Defense Ministry. Are "innocent civilians" who voluntarily show up to serve as human shields (to prevent the IAF from bombing a legitimate military target in Gaza) actually "innocent civilians" as the western press depicts them, or are they part of the terrorist army? They know when they volunteer that Israel won’t bomb "civilians". When IDF forces are being fired on by snipers hiding in a mosque, is it legitimate for the soldiers under attack to shoot back at the mosque? The terrorists in the mosque know before they shoot that the Israelis won’t shoot back. Israel’s spies on the ground say that Iran has just tested a nuclear fuse, but the CIA’s scientific snooping devices tell us it didn’t happen. Do we trust Israel’s spies or the CIA’s machines? And even if Iran did test a nuclear fuse, what is the world in general (and Israel in particular) willing to do about it? "‘Tis a puzzlement."

According to Arutz 7 (israelnationalnews.com), there were ten Kassam rockets fired from Gaza toward Sderot over the weekend, and Sderot suffered its fourth major casualty in four days. It’s a small town. This situation is not acceptable. No other country would tolerate such a situation. In 2004, 159 Kassam rockets were fired from Gaza toward the Sderot region. In 2005, there were 306 rockets fired. So far in 2006, there have been 1,004 Kassam rockets fired on Sderot, and the year isn’t over yet. Do you see this in the western media? After a Jewish billionaire privately took a thousand Sderot school kids (+ or -) and their families to Eilat where they could be safe and the kids could play outside, then the government suddenly arranged a lot of Sderot school field trips to Tel Aviv so that the remaining kids wouldn’t be in Sderot’s dangerous schools during the school day. But these same kids live in unprotected homes at night. Sderot is inside the original Israeli borders of 1949. It is not a "settlement" in the "disputed territories". Why does this go on and on?

The last speaker to address our tour group was Daniel Taub, Director of the General Law Division of Israel’s Foreign Ministry. Taub is a graduate of Oxford, London, and Harvard. He closed our conference by asking, "Why can’t the Palestinians take all of the incitement against Jews out of their school textbooks? They have nothing to replace it! Their whole identity as Palestinians is based on hating Israel, killing Jews, and being martyrs. They have no positive national identity."

Americans can fondly remember Paul Revere without hating and killing the British today. Canadians can remember the ultimate victory of the British army over the French army, yet French civil law is still observed in Quebec and the French language is one of the official languages of Canada. In contrast, the deep-rooted hatred of Jews so carefully nurtured in the Palestinians’ souls will not disappear with the creation of the nation of Palestine (God forbid). This is a spiritual war, not just an emotional, nationalistic conflict.

The incentive for continued Palestinian terrorism is strong and logical. When there is a terrorist attack, the Israelis close the border and ordinary Palestinians cannot go to their employment within Israel. At this point the Palestinians are suffering and angry. Their anger is toward the Iraelis who closed the border, not toward the terrorists who caused the border closure. This response has been pre-programmed since nursery school. They perceive the terrorists as their soldiers in their fight against the Israelis. Thus the more terrorist attacks there are, the more often the borders are closed, the more grass-roots support there is for the terrorists. The Israelis have no good options, but terrorism must be stopped. How?

When Arafat turned down the best offer ever in 1990, Israel was left with an empty tool box. She had already given over major responsibilities, power, and weapons to the PLO in return for unfulfilled promises. What more could be offered? Nothing. Israel has run out of offers on any grand scale. The only deterrent to terrorism that actually works is a security fence like the one around Gaza, but even that cannot stop the launching of rockets.

Within Israel’s citizenry there are the intellectual, scientific, and engineering resources to stay ahead of the pack militarily. But what is this constant warfare doing to the Israeli people? Brig.-Gen. Nehemia Dagan was eloquent on this point. He served in the IDF for 32 years with experience as a combat-pilot and combat-helicopter-pilot. He was a combat pilot in all the Israeli wars from 1959 through 1995. Now his son is an IAF pilot too, and he’s heartbroken.

Gen. Dagan said (and I was quoting him exactly as fast as I could write), "My concern is what happens to us. My son was my prince when he was ages 15 and 16. Then he was 18 and he became a small soldier. His officers were 19 or 19 ½ years old. He risks his life, and he may kill civilians. What does this do to my son, my prince? We may defeat Hizbullah, but do we lose our sons? What are we doing to our sons and to all of Israeli society?"

His son, his prince, now thinks it’s ok to kill civilians! They talked about this in Sderot. His son said, "They send Kassams on civilians! So why not kill their civilians!" As the General put it, "This comes from sour. We are a unique People of the Book. We have moral values. If we kill civilians, it’s what it does to us!"