It’s Time to Move From Defense

The Israeli leadership has decided that Operation Protective Edge has accomplished all it needs, and now it is time to rebuild the Gaza strip for humanitarian reasons.  The government also wants the residents of Israel’s southern towns to return home, to feel safe after almost 14 years of being targeted by Gazan missiles, and after the past month’s discovery of tens of tunnels, built for the sole purpose of sending Gazan commandoes into Israeli towns to massacre the residents.

The government promises that all the tunnels have been found and destroyed.  Additionally, they promise that any future missile attacks will be punished severely.

With all due respect, I wouldn’t rush back to a home within tunneling or simple missile distance of Azza.

9 years ago, the Jews of the Gaza strip were removed from their homes, livelihoods and communities.  The reasoning for this move was: in the prior half-decade, Arabs in the Gaza strip were attacking the residents, the soldiers who were there to protect them, and shooting missiles at neighbouring Israeli towns; and that was in desperation for independence. From Israeli occupation   The plan was to give the arabs independence, disengage from them entirely, and then there would be peace.  Or, the claim went, to clarify the border between Israel and the enemy such that if there were any further violence, the world would support Israel going to all-out war.

We have tried everything to win world opinion.  We gave them independence.  We left them 3,000 greenhouses with which to begin their own independent economy.  We treat their sick because they haven to invested in developing  adequate medical care.  Until they elected Hamas in their first independent elections, we left their sea port completely open.

Yet, no matter what we do, no matter how much we give, the “world” sees Israel as the aggressor.

Around the globe, with no photographs or maps for reference, with no factual information, Gaza is described as an open air prison.   No reference is made to the fancy homes and cars of the leadership, to the fact that the overcrowding is but one-eighth of the crowding in many European capitals.  No photographs are shown of the markets overflowing with produce, the restaurants, hotels…   And, again, no questions are asked about the greenhouses they destroyed, or where the billions of dollars in international aid have gone.  No one ask why the UNRWA insists that the newly-independent Gazans maintain refugee status.

And, of course, the world is blissfully unaware of the content of Gazan day camps and school programs, as well as the educational TV , all of which boldly teach Arab children to murder Jews.   Worse than Hitler youth, these programs are aimed at preschoolers as well as older children.   Infants are dressed up with explosive belts, preschool calisthenics include crawling with rifles in hand, preparing for target practice.   Teenagers are sent back to the Israeli hospitals that treated them, abusing Israel’s humanitarian sensitivities, in order to fulfill the most glorious of Islam’s commandments: to kill Jews.

During the current military defensive operation in Gaza, Israeli Arabs joined the call for the destruction of Israel.  Marches in support of Palestine here and around the world repeated the cry, “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.   This is not a call for peace between a Jewish state and an Arab one.  This call says in plain English: “Destroy Israel.”

Israel has been defending herself  since before she was created.  In 1929, 19 years before Israel declared independence, the Arabs of Hevron massacred 67 of their Jewish neighbours, including infants and the elderly.  This was not a one-time incident.  Planned Arab pogroms against the Jewish presence in Israel took place in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936, convincing the British mandatory government to send refugee Jews back to the Nazi gas chambers during the Holocaust.

Shimon Peres, who began the now two-decade-old “peace Process” with his vision of a “New Middle East,” has admitted many times that he does not believe in looking at the past.   He wants to dream that the source of the “Arab-Jewish conflict” in the Middle East is purely about a few million Arabs who want independence within Israel’s post-1967 borders.   No matter that the Arab leaders with whom he met in 1993 initiated their Palestinian Liberation Organization 3 years prior to that war, at a time that those ‘refugees’ were not under any Israeli occupation.

It is time to remove the blinders that Peres and others have put on all our eyes, to must first and foremost recognize the war for what it is – 100 years of arab war against the Jewish return our homeland.  All the violence,  starting well before we had a state or “occupied” any previously Egyptian-or Jordanian-held  land, began  as the first group of Jews came Home after almost 2,000 years of exile.

To keep ourselves safe, we cannot continue to only play defense.  We must use the most recent military operation to return the ball to our own court.  Azza, must be annexed to Israel, with Israeli surveillance over its education, media and construction.  Israeli law must stipulate conditions for residence, as well as citizenship, within her borders.  As is done in any civilized country, one must pledge allegiance to the State, and fly the flag on any public buildings.  It must be illegal, punishable by deportation, to belong to any group that demonizes the state.  Terrorist organizations as well as individual acts against Israelis or Jews , must be punishable by removal of citizenship and deportation.   This is the norm in any democracy.  How much more so in the post-Holocaust sole Jewish state, must there be zero tolerance for anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish violence.

Israel is the one safe haven for Jews, and it must be maintained as such.  Just as Jews who wish to live under Jewish rule are free to make Aliya to our homeland, anyone within Israel’s borders who feels the need for Moslem or other independence, are free to leave.  Recent history shows only too clearly that any other option is but a cover for attacking Israel.