Shalom from an Israeli soldier in the war zone. This is the first in a series of emails from israel during the current rain of rockets meant to terrorize Israel and make her supporters lose faith. It is carried out by a terrorist Army; Hamas. Terrorist armies are equipped, trained, organized and financed like armies but their tactics are terror, directed not against Military targets, so much as against civilian populations. That is what ISIS and Hezbollah are. That is what Hamas is as well.
First there are a few myths being propagated by many in the press which need to be cleared up, namely; Hamas are the duly elected rulers of Gaza, resisting Israeli occupation, caught up in a cycle of violence against Israel which unleashed a vicious airborne onslaught against the defenseless people of Gaza in response to ineffectual rockets fired against Israeli occupiers to protest against the brutal torture / murder of a Palestinian teen by the Jews, and the riots that ensued therefrom, as witnessed by the equally brutal beating of and American / Palestinian teen at the hands of the forces of occupation.
Almost 100 Palestinians have died in the bombings, of which some 40 are reputed to be women and children while there has not been one Israeli fatality, thus proving a disproportionate response Mahmud Abbas has called genocide. I think that about sums up the narrative, so let’s take it one by one.
1. There is no Israeli occupation of Gaza and hasn’t been for almost ten years. In 2005 The Israeli army uprooted almost ten thousand people from their farms, businesses and places of worship all of which had been theirs for generations. But those ten thousand people uprooted by the IDF were JEWS not Palestinians. In one of the most painful operations in IDF history neighbor was pitted against neighbor, cousin against cousin and sometimes brother against brother as Israel dismantled every Jewish community in Gaza. Had we done half as much against Palestinians we would have been declaimed as Nazis. We engaged in what almost amounted to fratricide, quite literally in the hopes of giving peace a chance, in the hopes that Gaza would become the Singapore of the middle east. Instead the infrastructure we left behind, in tact, which would have provided jobs for thousands of Palestinians and tens of millions in exports were destroyed and turned into rocket launching sites which began firing rockets at us as we were leaving.
2. Hamas is not the duly elected government of Gaza. They seized power in as blood thirsty coup as has ever been seen, not from Israelis, but from their fellow Palestinians whom they lined up against walls and machine gunned, tied up and blindfolded and pushed off three story buildings and if anyone dared to speak out against them they shot their knee caps off. Gaza is indeed occupied and It’s citizens terrorized but not by Israelis, but by the terrorist army of Hamas. The horrifying videos of their seizure of power are still on the Internet to be seen by anyone with the stomach for it.
3. This war is not the result of a cycle of violence. It is a planned offensive carried out by Hamas. Hamas began firing rocket attacks against Israeli civilian communities long before the three Israeli teen aged boys were kidnapped. Israel didn’t respond. Instead it all but begged for calm which it said would be answered by calm. That’s not opinion , that’s fact. When Israel didn’t respond to that provocation Hamas’ chairman called out to his terrorist cells to kidnap Israeli civilians and one responded by doing just that and then murdering them in cold blood. And still Israel did not respond by attacking Gaza. Then a group of deviant , murderous Israeli thugs kidnapped, mercilessly tortured and killed a Palestinian teen. But there are heartless murderers in every society. Israel immediately denounced the murders and within days caught the murderers and they will be tried and punished to the fullest extent of the law . Hamas on the other hand , dispatched and then celebrated the murderes it sent to kill the three Israeli boys . To see any moral equivalence between the two is to say that Ted Bundy is no different than Usama Bin Laden. We will name no streets after the murderers of the Palestinian boy, no squares or statues will be unveiled in their honor, they will not be called martyrs, we will not pass out candy in celebration of their heinous deeds and we will not raise our children to emulate their murderous acts. That’s the difference.
4. Israelis have not yet been killed in the latest round of rocket attacks against our civilian populations not for lack of trying on Hamas’s part. They have fired hundreds upon hundreds of rockets at us praying to Allah that each one strikes down a score of Zionist infidels. They have not succeeded and that’s primarily due to a merciful God and to the iron dome missile defense system and the best civil defense command in the world. Had those efforts not been in place we would be mourning thousands of dead and wounded.
5. No country in the works foes as much to avoid civilian casualties as Israel. We drop leaflets warning of impending attacks; we literally call the occupants of the house we are about to bomb and tell them to flee and then we drop flares as a final warning before we attack. Hamas on the other hand hides behind their women and children as Human shields.
6. Finally Hamas wants this war. When they murderously conquered Gaza they faced a problem. Now they had to govern. They had to collect garbage and create an economy that would provide jobs. Through incompetence and corruption they have failed at both. There is forty percent unemployment in Gaza. They cannot afford to pay their own terrorist army. For the first time there have been demonstrations against their rule and they feared being toppled from within because they have produced only rockets, suicide bombers, poverty and misery.
On the other hand new more radical groups like Islamic Jihad, ISIS and Al Qaida threatened to topple them because they were not radical enough. So they would rather fight a limited war which they know they’ll lose against Israel than be toppled from within. The economy is in shambles? Of course, the Israelis bombed us. You say we’re not radical enough!? Look how many rockets we launched. We terrorized Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. All they desperately need now is one kidnapped soldier to hold hostage, one direct hit on a score of Israelis, one terrorist operation that kills a dozen civilians and they can declare a divine victory . And the tragic part is we Israelis will not pay the greatest price. The Palestinian people will and their leaders, cynically exploiting them to maintain their own power, will focus the hatred on us, dooming another generation of hapless Palestinians to misery at the hands of their own people. As for us, we are on familiar ground as old as the psalmists.we are once again in the valley of the shadow of death.
And we fear no evil, for Thou art with us .
Dan Gordon
Capt . IDF ( Res)
Rabbi Alicia Magal
www.jcsvv.org
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