While our warriors are on the battlefield fighting, it’s difficult to express criticism of any kind. But it is of the utmost importance to know and internalize that the present warfare is not only about rockets pounding our southern cities. Of course, any sovereign nation cannot allow its citizens to be attacked day after day, week after week, year after year, without responding.
However, this is just what consecutive governments did not do, beginning not with the Oslo war, otherwise known as the second intifada. Rather in the late 1980s, during the first intifada, when Israelis were stoned, firebombed and shot at, the government’s reactions were lukewarm at best.
With the outbreak of the second intifada on the eve of Rosh Hashana 2000, the government effectively ignored the attacks on its citizens, most particularly those living in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. In Hebron, Arabs shot at Jews from the surrounding Abu Sneineh and Harat a-Shech Hills for more than two years, with the only response being “virtual.”
The IDF was under strict orders not to retake the hills, which would have stopped the shooting.
In Gush Katif, thousands upon thousands of mortars shells were fired into Jewish communities. The response to these attacks was not even lukewarm; it was nil.
So it came as no surprise when the country’s leaders didn’t blink an eye when Hamas terrorists, utilizing the very land given to them by the State of Israel, began shelling Sderot.
Nor were we shocked when rockets started falling on Ashkelon and Ashdod; such attacks had been predicted prior to the abandonment of Gush Katif.
Those of us who envisioned such shellings were at best ignored or called “black prophets”; at worst we were “enemies of peace.”
Source: Jerusalem Post
Filed under: Analysis , Gaza, Gaza strip, Hamas, IAF, IDF, Iran, Israel, Kassam Rockets, Middle East, Operation Cast Lead, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Qassam Rockets, Terror, Terrorism, The Terror Journal, War
