NEUVIÈME JOUR DE GUERRE

The fact is that international pressure on Israel has not yielded peace because Israel is not starting the wars. 1. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are engaged in terrorism, one overtly, the other in a supportive role. Money is being transferred from the PA to the families of suicide bombers and convicted murderers in Israeli jails. The pay is actually based on the number and severity of the murders committed. The more gruesome the murder, the larger the number of Israeli victims, the higher the monthly reward. Can anyone deny it? 2. Palestinian education today is based on violence and incitement against Israelis and Jews. Palestinian textbooks and Palestinian media ceaselessly promote Jew hatred. They praise Jew murderers. Their heroes and celebrities are Jew killers. They name streets and traffic circles after killers of Jewish children. Can anyone deny it? At the same time, the murder of Jerusalem teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir was immediately condemned by all of Israel’s society. As a Knesset Member, I can assure you his murderers, once convicted for their terrible crime, will remain in prison for the rest of their lives. We will certainly not name streets after them. 3. In Israel we protect our citizens from incoming Hamas missiles. Hamas, on the other hand, positions its missile launchers in the midst of civilian enclaves, using women and children as human shields against Israeli raids. Just the other day, the world watched a Hamas spokesman admitting they instructed civilians not to leave their Gaza homes during air strikes, in order to protect those arsenals of weapons. Each Palestinian rocket coming out of Gaza represents two separate war crimes: one for purposely targeting a civilian population in Israel, the other for launching from within their own civilian population. Not many journalists bother to share this information with their readers. It confuses the narrative, messes with the David and Goliath scenario. Our residents in southern Israel have endured these missiles for more than 14 years. Many children and teens have known only life in a war zone. This past week, all our urban centers were targeted. How would you expect our government to react? How would you want your own government to deal with a similar onslaught on your neighborhood? What do you want us to do? Lie down and die? Can anyone deny it? The late Uri Elitzur wrote so eloquently in the article I cited on Facebook: “The laws of war acknowledge that it is impossible to avoid hitting enemy civilians. Those laws did not condemn the British airforce for firebombing and completely destroying the German city of Dresden, or US planes for wrecking the cities of Poland and half of Hungary’s Budapest, whose residents had never done anything against America. Those sites had to be destroyed in order to win the war against evil.” In the words of the British RAF General “Bomber” Harris: “We had to destroy in order to liberate.” Israel’s fight against Hamas terrorism is similar to NATO’s war on Al-Qaeda terrorism. Moreover, Israel is the only state who is notifying civilians to leave their homes before an attack by texting them. Israel has no agenda against Arab civilians in Gaza, just as the US has none against Arabs in any of the countries where it’s conducting its now 13-year war to preserve civilization from violent barbarism. We want a good life, with peace and prosperity for all the eight million plus people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, if the Arab society enjoys prosperity, so will Jewish society, and vice versa. let me be very clear I condemn any kind of assault against innocent civilians, whether they are Jews or Arabs. But in order to get there, they must stop firing rockets at us. The madness of Hamas continued yesterday after Israel embraced an Egyptian call for a ceasefire. Hamas rejected the offer, and as of now has been shooting at all over Israel with renewed vigor. Israelis are so used to the scene where we offer our hand in peace and the other side reacts by trying to cut it off, that we’re not even surprised. What does surprise us, time and again, are the voices in the West, like Resnick’s, which pin the blame for this madness on us. As in that famous quip: “It all started when Israel retaliated.”As an aside, I’ll point out that a week later The Daily Beast finally removed one blatant lie from Resnick’s original article, where he accused me of being the author of statements I never made. About the Author: Ayelet Shaked is a Member of Knesset for the Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) party, and currently the chair person of the faction. From 2006- 2008 Shaked served as office director for Benjamin Netanyahu.