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Stephen J. Kohn is an American businessman who moved to Israel 15 years ago with his wife and son. He frequently writes commentary on political issues. He has always been an independent voter so his views are governed by his analyses not any party line.
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By Stephen J. Kohn
March 2, 2008
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We Israelis have been listening too long to sanctimonious words urging us to be proportionate, measured, and cautious. Whether it was during the intifada when suicide belted homicidal maniacs bombed our restaurants and buses or whether today when the more cowardly homicidal maniacs blindly launch rockets into our cities, the comments of allies and critics alike to "tone it down" have lost their meaning to us. One small and now one larger city, and any field and farm near Gaza, is under incessant attack -- and even one rocket is too many, let alone thousands.
There is always some rationalization about why Israel is at fault or why retaliating is in error or why the necessity to try to defend ourselves is exaggerated. Rockets launched against the southern part of Israel should not have mandated a call for Israel to exercise self-control but for an immediate cessation of hostilities by our enemies. We have been gullible imbeciles to have tolerated these totally unprovoked attacks until now. No nation would have tolerated what we have -- particularly since we voluntarily left Gaza. And, our current (nonexistent) occupation of Gaza is Hamas' supposed justification for firing these unguided missiles.
We have given Gaza to the Palestinians. But electricity, fuel, and food come from Israel. While Israel is the source for Gaza's necessities, Egypt tries hard to seal Gaza's only other land border. But they have been and are incompetent in controlling the flow of weapons to Gaza. Guns yes, butter no. Almost all the weapons fired at us since our departure from Gaza have come over (or under) the Egyptian border.
The Gazans not only randomly target our civilians, but also Israel's closest hospital to the Gaza Strip and the power plant that provides nearly 90% of their electricity. It requires a special type of Palestinian mendacity and Western moral blindness to complain about Israel's supposedly curtailing electric power and supposedly not admitting critically ill Palestinians while Hamas targets the power plant and hospital that serves their needs. (And yet the power plant still supplies electricity and the hospitals accept the critically ill.)
Israelis sit in daily conferences with various echelons of the Palestinian Authority discussing ways to compromise so we can provide more territory to them -- perhaps half of Jerusalem and almost all of the West Bank. Territory for more rocket launches against us? (I live five miles from the nearest launch point.)
We naively believe that there is enough integrity in our "peace partner" to condemn, with sincerity, the attacks on Israel. However, on Thursday, February 28, President Abbas, threatened, in the Jordanian press, to return to military action against us. And, by Saturday, he threatened to pull out of peace talks.
Will there ever be a Palestinian partner for peace? A partner smart, strategic and sincere enough to say that bombs and incitement will never bring the Palestinians the state they long for. We have seen the movie endlessly since 1993 and long before that. The title is "If Only Israel Hadn't...." We're on the umpteenth sequel by now.
But the problem is broader than Palestinian duplicity. For us, it is the anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli propagandizing that now flows from not only Arabs and Moslems, but also from the "sophisticated and liberal" West. The mindless word -- "disproportionate" -- is directed at only one side in this conflict -- Israel.
While our Air Force calculates carefully how each mission can hit only legitimate targets and while our ground forces desperately try to avoid blameless civilians, often used as human shields, Hamas bombards, with intent, innocent Israelis. If you read today's paper carefully, you will find that the infant killed in Gaza yesterday was from a misfired Qassam.
The morally dense who stand on the sidelines urging us to be cautious and who are blind to the total disregard of the terrifying power of our enemies' rockets display not an impartial view of this part of the world, but an outlook that is bigoted and unjust.
When we make mistakes, we admit them. No Israeli, civilian or military, takes pride in the death of innocents. There are no candies being distributed in Tel Aviv when innocent civilians are killed in Gaza (or even guilty ones) -- a quaint custom in Gaza when a Qassam does its deadly work in Sderot. Civilians are their targets and death is their goal.
The blindness of our critics to this dazzling reality is, at best, pathetic and reflects a cynicism and injustice that no other nation in the world would be subjected to, or tolerate. If thousands of rockets, sniper attacks and kidnappings are not a casus belli, it is only because their target is the Jewish state.
So, when representatives of the British foreign office, EU, United Nations and the US State Department add to the calls from the Arab League and 51 Moslem nations for quiet reserve on our part, we can only shrug.
Frankly, we no longer give a damn.
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