By Felix Quigley
June 13, 2008
4international is planning to cover the issue of Gaza. As we showed two days ago Jews in this June month of 2008 are having to endure rockets being fired upon them continually by Fascist and Antisemitic Arabs from the area of Gaza.
To me as an Irish person this situation is simply not acceptable. The Jews have been persecuted for 2000 years, then the Holocaust, now this is taking place.
I find that the discussion on the many Jewish blogs is simply totally inadequate to meet this situation. So treat this as the first posting on this subject.
Somebody has said that Haaretz is really a PLO paper written in Hebrew. They are right. Yet the following article has the merit of honesty. At least this person raises issues and he seems to do so without much over deliberation. That is useful. We begin at the point where the writer muses that as far as the traitor Olmert is concerned defeating Hamas in Gaza would open the door to a Palestine state led by Abbas, who is equally antisemitic:
[begin quote here]
…While putting out the conflagration in the south could perhaps bring relief to Sderot and its environs, it would bring down calamity, pain and tears on tens of thousands of Jews in Judea and Samaria. It is not only the right that finds itself trapped. The left feels, and rightly so, that going back into Gaza would stamp an official seal of failure on the disengagement. And it is clear to them that every additional day of firing in the south and avoidance of a large-scale military operation sharpens this failure, as does the recognition that a similar flight from Judea and Samaria will cause the firing to reach Kfar Sava, Hadera and Afula as well.
The political leaders on the right and on the left do not tend to make the public a partner to this duality, nor to the reasonable possibility that a short-term stay in Gaza would be pointless and followed by return to the prior situation.
The right must take care not to fall automatically into the trap of patriotism and must not “stand at attention” if the Israel Defense Forces enters the Strip. The right must make it clear that a short-term stay in Gaza would add insult to injury, and that another hasty withdrawal not only would not help us to regain our deterrent power but would smash it. The situation in the south is complicated, but there is no point in making it more complicated for a mere short-term gain that would precede another painful fall. It is necessary to rebuild permanent Israeli security control in Gaza both in the field and via intelligence, and also to consider once again setting up settlements in the northern Gaza Strip along our southern border. It is from the ruins of these settlements that the Grads and the Qassams are being fired in the direction of Ashkelon.
The left has to be reminded of the year 1994 – a black hole in their memories: Israel left Gaza. That event took place 11 years before the disengagement. The left contends that mortars and Qassams were fired even before the disengagement, but they do not mention that the firing started only after 1994 – first at Gush Katif, and then at Sderot and after the disengagement, at Ashkelon.
They fire at us from Gaza because we are not there. No one fires at Kfar Sava, which is 700 meters from Qalqilyah, or at the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, which is 500 meters from Bethlehem, because the IDF comes and goes whenever it wants, and thus has corrected the mistake of withdrawing from there during the Oslo Accord years. In Gaza, it is several times harder to correct the mistake. The governments of Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert waited a long time – an excessive number of years – during which they allowed Hamas to gain strength and to turn into an army. A renewed occupation would be costly but the longer we wait, the higher the price will be.
[end quote here]
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/991977.html
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