Conducting Peace

"We will continue to thwart [rocket attacks] and hit those that want to harm us, and we will act against them with great force. Last year, the number of rockets fired from Gaza was the lowest in a decade, but that is not enough. We will continue to act to ensure the security of the citizens of Israel in the south and in the entire country."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhahu

If there is another country anywhere in the world that is constantly under attack by its neighbours, eliciting no universal condemnation from the outside world, let alone the United Nations Security Council, it has yet to come to the notice of those who sympathize with Israel's unique position in the world. A country that has gone out of its way to attempt persuasion leading to peace, prepared to sacrifice issues of vital importance to usher in peace, but finding no accepting response.

Israel, for the past sixty years, has offered to meet all of the conditions that the Palestinians have insisted must be met before they would forgo their intention to destroy the state by any and all means conceivable and some never imagined in the intensity of their violent dementia. The single most vital concession that Israel would not and will not agree to is the surrender of the state's Jewish identity. A condition that is anathema to the Middle East.

Islamic states run by theocracies, kingships, autocrats, oil sheikhs, dictators and bloody tyrants represent the norm in the Middle East and the world nods approvingly. But a Jewish state that insists that within its very Judaic character lies its reason for existence, refuses to disown the reason, and thus cease to exist, to the frustrated condemnation of its neighbours, and the evident acquiescence of the international community.

European countries which pride themselves on their social cohesion and democratic justice, condemn Israel as an apartheid state, an analogy coined by a former president of the United States who represented the single most abysmally failed leader of his country, in sympathy with the downtrodden Palestinians clinging to their miserable fiction of refugee status, hands perpetually out, beggar-fashion for livelihood-enabling financial support.

An embattled Israel, recognizing the venomous danger its enemies pose to its continued existence in a hostile geography that was once their traditional homeland, must be forever on guard, its intelligence informing when maliciously violent acts are taking place, and taking responsive action in deterrence. Such was its raid of a Turkish-manned vessel with advanced rocketry headed for Gaza through a complex ocean route that took it to Sudan from Iran, carrying Syrian-produced weapons.

Two Israeli soldiers stand near an "Iron Dome" battery, designed to intercept and destroy incoming short-range rockets and artillery, near the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon on March 13, 2014 (AFP, David Buimovitch)

Enraged at the loss of their resources, Iran has ordered its proxy militia, Islamic Jihad, to expend up to a hundred less powerful rockets into Israel, to teach it a lesson in Islamist diplomacy. It's the kind of diplomacy seen lately in Syria with the Baathist regime slaughtering its Sunni civilians. The Israeli military characterized the rocket barrage as the largest since 2012 when an eight-day air campaign was launched in Gaza for the express purpose of stopping such rocketry attacks.

Residents in the Beit Hanoun area of Gaza confirmed they witnessed an Israeli strike hit a rocket launcher squad. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians are being forced to flee into bomb shelters to avoid being hit by any of the Gaza-flung rockets. Some of the rockets hit a few targets, one exploding near a gas station, another close by a public library. The residents of Sderot and other border towns are in perpetual trauma.

Israeli onlookers survey the damage caused by a rocket which was fired from the Gaza Strip and landed in the southern Israeli town of Sderot, March 12, 2014. (photo by REUTERS/Ilan Assayag)

Islamic Jihad claimed 20 of the rockets they fired off were to avenge the deaths of three of its members who were killed in an air strike by the Israeli military the previous day. These were terrorists who had fired at Israeli soldiers with mortars. Their deaths were the response from those whom they meant to kill. "Yesterday they attacked our troops and today it is our civilians", said Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner.

Not to be upstaged, another Gaza group, the Popular Resistance Committees, fired rockets as well; quite a few altogether as it happens, numbering close to 90. Over the years the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad has been responsible for the deaths of countless Israelis killed in suicide bombings. Israel's military response was in acknowledgement of having been fired on by the terrorists.

And, as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu warned, the country is prepared to strike Gaza rocket launcher squads as long as they target Israel.