Imagine

By Dr. M. Nazarathy


Before you judge us next time you see a bad image on TV, just imagine - vididly - that in your own city, every day there would be a lottery of 20-30 homes to be blown up, selected at random, and if you got selected you’d have 40 seconds to duck for cover. I bet you would not dismiss it, but your whole life would revolve around it, and you would demand from your own government in the strongest possible terms that the madness be stopped, that the government fullfill its elementary duty of protecting the citizens. Well, that's what we are up to.

You have no idea how much we hate war here in Israel. We have had too many of them, way too often, we are traumatized by them. These wars kill our beloved kids – almost everyone has a son or a relative who is a soldier, whose life is on the line. At wartime our civilian population is attacked with more vengeance than in the usual course of daily terrorism. At wartime the world public opinion gets uncomfortable with disturbing pictures of civilian casualties on the other side, and blames us for it, pressuring us to stop and not achieve our objectives. Hence, the decision to go to war is an unbearable burden on our leaders. Just yesterday, our PM, Olmert, justified himself to the mothers of Israel telling them that we tried everything else and were left with no choice but to put their sons lives at risk.

Every decent human being should accept that the only reason to go to war is to REMOVE A PRESENT OR IMMINENT DANGER, TO PREVENT A MUCH WORSE WAR. But isn’t it precisely the case here? We don’t have the hedonistic luxury some European leaders do, to agree to their calls for immediate ceasefire, just for the sake of getting a bit of quiet here and now. Not that haven’t tried it, we have practiced the tenuous art of restraint for three year, ignoring the suffering of our population, acting militarily on a small scale, negotiating temporary lulls to be repeatedly violated by Hamas (I think this restraint was a mistake, costing many more lives on both sides at this point).

Remember the last ceasefire? It lasted for six months, to be violated by Hamas some three weeks ago, which started this war, once they renewed shooting some 50-80 rockets a day – and then we restrained ourselves for another week, giving every chance to Egyptian and Turkish diplomacy before finally exercising our right of self-defense.

Most significantly, before the ceasefire the range of the missiles was just 10Km covering the town of Shderot and nearby Kibutzim, but during the ceasefire they increased their rockets capabilities reaching now to 40Km. To those who recall their geometry, that means that the area coverage increased by a factor of 4 squared = 16, now including new cities, a population of half a million in the range. Our fourth largest city, the biblical BeerSheeba has now joined the ballistic terror club.

They used the ceasefire to smuggle advanced arms and develop their missiles capabilities. Another ceasefire with their capabilities left intact, as your "diplomats" wish to force on us, and Hamas is bound to increase the range of the missiles to reach Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem and the Dimona nuclear reactor. It is strategic for our country to remove the threat now. Gaza is not the Folklands, Gaza is our back yard, which has become a gigantic Iranian base, a launching pad for rockets, the only state in the world directly controlled by a terrorist government. We are now straddled by two Iranian forward bases while Iran is developing its nuclear weapons, and if we did not respond to their aggression now, and we would just have absorbed 40-80 missiles a day, and let them further hone their offensive capabilities, the next aggression would inevitably be against Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, by means of long-range Gaza missiles, an all out-war.
When we pulled out of Gaza three years ago, we told you, we told the Palestinians that if they follow us with fire from the area pulled out from, we shall hit back with all our might. You nodded understandingly, agreed that we have the legitimacy of elementary self-defense, but you now pretend that you forgot. It is easy to be a bleeding heart for civilians on the other side when it is not your own head that is at risk, but what would you do if you were in our place?
In fact what are you doing in Afganistan, which is 5000 Km away, not 5 Km away? Are you not involved in a “disproportionate response” – the dumbest concept I have ever heard from Europeans. I recall well how you felt threatened by the mess in the Balkans, with Nato hitting hard in Kosovo, and inadvertently killing busloads of innocents, so don’t preach to us. In fact, there is no other air-force in the world, working so hard and smart to reduce the collateral damage. You have no idea – I shall tell you about the procedures and technologies another time. Percentage-wise you hit three or four times more innocents in Kosovo than we have in our air campaign. So don’t preach us.