Six months of cease fire did nothing. No, wait. Apparently, it encouraged more attacks.
Shootings, stabbings, rocket and missile fire, and a bulldozer attack by Palestinian and Arab terrorists killed 36 Israelis and tourists in Israel in 2008, compared to 12 in 2007 and 29 in 2006, according to a report by Hatzalah Judea and Samaria released over the weekend.
The organization, which provides rapid response first aid in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza border area, also reported a sharp rise in the number of injuries by Kassam rockets, Grads and mortar fire compared to the past two years.
These attacks on Jewish settlements within firing range of Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, wounded 947 in 2008. A total of 464 were wounded in 2007 and 227 in 2006.
A total of 1,683 Kassam rockets fell in Israel near Gaza and another 108 shot from Gaza fell back into Palestinian areas.
In Israel, eight people were killed in 2008 by rocket attacks, 19 were killed in shootings, one person was stabbed to death, one was killed in a suicide bombing, one in a bulldozer attack, and an additional eight soldiers were killed in battle.
There’s a statistic you’ll never see on the mainstream media sites.
When Israel shows weakness, she is attacked. Let’s see how the Gaza war plays out. If all goes well, there will be a dramatic drop in terror attacks on Israelis. There will certainly be a dramatic drop in rocket attacks from Hamas.
Israeli morale isn’t shaken at all. Listen to the words of one of the soldiers just back from Gaza:
In a smoking area outside the hospital, a Golani private, visibly shaken, said he was a member of the platoon whose men were hit by the mortar shell and that in the aftermath, his mother had revoked her permission for him to go into combat. He was an only son and army protocol required a parent’s signature. His mother, he explained, had had a change of heart.
“But I’m dying to go back in there,” the private said, sucking down the cigarette he had just lit with shaky hands. “I’m not going to tell you that it wasn’t frightening. We went in, it was all quiet, and then boom, the mortar hit and Hamas fighters started coming out. We repelled them, but it was a real balagan.”
Meryl, whether Israel exudes strength or oozes weakness, ———– Israel gets attacked, gets marginalized and Jews get pilloried.
This is way beyond any hope of Israel demonstrating “strength” and “resolve,” and somehow that ameliorates the rage and the insanity of their enemies.
Israel needs to desperately break out of the diplomatic moras, for it’s going nowhere.
The more Israel tries to negotiate, the more Israel tries to be reasonable, the more Israel demonstrates a good faith in their diplomacy, ————— the worse it gets for Jews, the worse it gets for Israel.
Israel needs to break out.
Needs to go rogue.
Dan, you really don’t get Judaism, do you?
Israel will never go “rogue.”
Hamas is actually fighting soldiers for a change? The Age of Miracles is not past.
“These attacks on Jewish settlements within firing range of Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, wounded 947 in 2008. A total of 464 were wounded in 2007 and 227 in 2006.”
So now the cities and towns of Israel within the “Auschwitz Borders” of 1967 are just “settlements”, like the ones destroyed by the IDF in the Gaza Strip to hand the place over to genocidal maniacs? Next week the UN and the rest of the outside world will be labeling Tel Aviv a “settlement”.
I’m not Jewish, and I don’t see any benefit that accrues when Israel plays by rules that no one else seems to observe.
Look at this way though, is there any morality in a process that promises to go on for the next fifty years, as it has for the last fifty?
Where has diplomacy led vis-a-vis the Palestinians?
Has the situation in any way gotten better over the last decade?
Recall Israel’s reasoning when they brought back in Arafat, and ensconced him as ruler of the Palestinians. The idea was “yea he’s a murderous dirtball,” but he’ll have his own interests in cutting a deal with us, because such a deal ensures his continuance as dictator for life of the Palestinians.
So Israel has played hardball in a fashion. Let’s not pretend that the reasoning within Israel’s ruling elite has been altogether vestal like. For it hasn’t.
But for all that, ———— where’s it getting them?
Even in this movement on Gaza, which I’m wholeheartedly behind, at the end of it, 3 months from how, 6 months from now, 16 months from now, ———- in what way will this military operation have advanced Israel’s LONG TERM strategic interest.
The goal of war has to be a more perfect peace. Military measures that are half-measures are not without moral problems.
This type of problem was encountered by Sherman, and Sherman’s staff, who were intensely criticized for what they were proposing to do “down South.”
What was there response?
Did they not advance a moral claim in defense and in justification for their measures?
I was rereading VDH’s “An Autumn of War” the other night, because of the swirling controversy attending Israel’s proposed military actions.
And this is what I came across. He quoted a Sherman staffer:
“Not we but their “leaders” and their own moral and physical cowardice three years ago are responsible. {three years ago being the time of the formation of the Confederacy, and the cowardice he’s referring to is the fact they didn’t stand up and reject the movement for Southern independence}. This Union and it’s Government must be sustained, at and any and every cost; to sustain it, we must war upon and destory the organized rebel forces, ———- must cut off their supplies, destroy their communications, and show [them] …. their utter inability to resist the power of the U.S. TO DO THIS IMPLIES AND REQUIRES these very sufferings, AND HAVING THUS ONLY THE CHOICE OF EVILS ——- war now so terrible and successful that none can dream of rebellion hereafter, OR EVERLASTING WAR WITH ALL THESE EVILS MAGNIFIED A HUNDRED FOLD HEREAFTER ——- we have no other course to take.” {Emphasis added}.
Israel is taking the latter approach, and in her actions, thus ensuring decade after decade, generation after generation, nothing but prolonged misery and protracted conflict.
There aren’t any positive options here. Upon Irael is war, and Israel will either make war in such a manner that it conqueres its peace, or it will wage war in such a manner that guarantees nothing but more war.
At the present, there is NO Palestinian element that IN GOOD FAITH, desires to enter into a two state solution with the national incarnation of the Jewish people.
It isn’t Israel “going rogue,” think of it rather as Israel left with no other option but “going rogue” to avert another half a century, {half a century!} of carnage.
And the people I’m suggesting taking out spiritually and/or financially sustain Palestinian rejectionism/jihadism/annihlationism and their genocidal impulse.
The below comment is from a person not directly involved in the Gaza conflict.
Just a few words on collateral civilian casualties. Every time fighting breaks out in the Middle East, the world starts speaking about civilian suffering. This is naturally a valid and significant issue.
However, instead of merely staring at statistics, one should perhaps look at the true causes behind civilian casualties.
In theory, civilian casualties could be avoided with simple two-step plan:
1. Hamas stops targeting Isreali civilians, and directs its rocket and suicide attacks at Israeli military targets, which is rather normal procedure in normal warfare.
2. Hamas takes moves its fighting positions into unpopulated regions in Gaza. When soldiers fight soldiers away from civilians, there aren’t civilian casualties.
The world’s media actually pays very little attention to the fact that Hamas willingly _chooses_ to position itself in the middle of the civilian population, and fire its rockets from crowded neighborhoods. I mean, it could just as easily choose fight in unpopulated regions, and thus spare innocent civilian lives.
Of course, this probably is no coincidence. Israel can only use limited force against Hamas when it hides amongst civilians, and gains negative publicity from each civilian casualty. But the question is: who is actuallyresponsible for the casualties: Hamas, which deliberately chooses to fire its rockets from highly populated areas, or Isreal who unintentionally hits civilians when repsonding to Hamas?
For Hamas, moving its battle stations to unpopulated areas would probably result in military defeat, so it is in some way understandble that they don’t. However, if the only way that grown men _dare_ to fight a war is by hiding behind and amongst women and children, thus placing these in danger, we must ask the question: are these so-called soldiers “men” at all?
At very least, Hamas should be “man” enough to honestly admit that civilian deaths in the Gaza conflict are exclusively the result of Hamas’s own and deliberate decision to take its fights into civilian neighborhoods, from which Hamas gains some military and political advantages that are “paid for” with the inevitable loss of innocent Palestinian lives.
Thomas V.,
you speak of true causes, then immediately start quoting the misdeeds, many and varied, of Hamas.
Hamas is but the creation du jour of the Palestinian people.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
Let’s take a little trip through history.
In the Second World War, the Palestinian people had a choice to make, of whom they would ally themselves with.
They chose Hitler, the Gestapo and the SS, rejecting Churchill, rejecting FDR, rejecting the allied community.
After the defeat of the 3d Reich, they could have admitted their mistake and allied themselves with the West.
But within a few years, they were tightly attached to the Soviet Union and the NKVD.
Over the ensuing decades, they’ve done business with Castro, with the North Koreans, with the East Germans, and also with every sordid and squalid terror and totalitarian movement on the face of the Earth.
So when we discuss root causes, let us not take as a point of departure Hamas, or even Fatah for that matter.
Let us begin with the choice made by Palestinians, generation after generation, to link themselves in arms, in blood, with the enemy of man, with totalitarianism.
It is the decided choice of the Palestinian people to espouse themselves, body and soul, mind and spirit, to blood.
That’s the root cause. Everything else is peripherial.
It is long past time to bring the national aspirations of the people who terrorized an Olympics games, the people who midwifed terror into the modern world, and who jumped for joy on 9/11, —————- it is long past time to bring their national aspirations to a decided conclusion.
And to end it, once and for all.
Any attempt to usher such a people into the community of nations is itself, a moral grotesquerie.
Israel’s very existence is considered ‘going rogue’ by much of the world.
Balabusta, good point—but you and I both know that the only scenario in which Israel would “go rogue” would be one in which it’s already too late, and it’s time to retaliate. G-d forbid that day should ever come.
Dan, “going rogue” is against the tenets of Judaism. We are not savages. I leave it to my readers to determine what other people that description might fit.
I think you’ve wild expectations of what “going rogue” means.
And Israel has REPEATEDLY gone rogue in the past.
And these examples are just the ones off the top of my head.
When the French held up delivery of missile boats already built for and purchased by Israel, what did Israel do?
Go to the Hague for international aribitration?
Of course not, they slipped some Naval personnel on board and stole them right out of Cherbourg.
When Israel needed their own fighter, built by themselves, what did they do?
They stole the Blueprints of the Dassault Mirage.
Israel’s whole nuclear program was but perhaps the most salient example of Jews going rogue.
And in the fifties, when Syrians and the Egyptians started their own rocket program, ———— how did Israel respond? By a program of stealth assasination of those European scientists involved, who were more often than not, Germans.
That’s rogue behavior.
When you’re whacking foreign nationals in neutral countries, especially when they happen to be European, ———– that’s textbook rogue behavior.
When European nations refused to take action against the killers of Munich, ———– what did Israel do? Moan and groan at the UN?
No, they sent forth hit teams with a list of names, to exact justice.
When they grabbed Eichmann, again, that’s going rogue.
The very notion of Israel was an example of a guy thinking outside the box. Herzl’s idea of a land without a people for a people without a land was in its own way, going rogue at the time.
When Jews refused to let their coreligionists waste away in DP camps after WWII, and organized a method of smuggling them into Palestine, despite the legal prohibitions of Great Britain, ————— again that’s but more evidence of Jews going rogue.
I’m not saying go nuclear.
I’m suggesting get the hell out of that diplomatic cul de sac, and get the hell out of that mental box where most Israelis are presently.
Who are the prime movers behind the scenes?
Israel is at war with far more than just the Hamas dirtballs we all see on the news.
Israel’s true enemies more often walk corridors of power at places like Davos, they’re more often offering cozy sinecures for former State Department personnel, to ensure that the State Department is pursuing the Arab line.