Hamas Speaking
The small Negev town of Sderot just across the border from the Gaza Strip has suffered thousands of hits from Kassam rockets in the past year; 200 in the last two months alone. These are roughly-made devices that don't often hit their mark, but when they do, their shrapnel-filled heads are capable of delivering a lot of damage to soft human tissue. They occasionally kill, they maim, they destroy buildings.And possibly the most telling damage from these constant rockets raining down on the community is the psychological trauma they inflict on the people of Sderot. Enough so that four thousand of the small community of 21,000 souls have left never to return. They've quite simply had more than their fill of living the daily hell of rocket attacks. And most people hesitate to venture too far from their homes, from shelter.
Taking children to school, going out to do the shopping is fraught with difficulties. A red alert, giving people a full fifteen-second heads-up to try to protect themselves from an oncoming rocket keeps nerves on knife's edge. Parents will not leave their children bereft of their presence for an instant even inside their homes, lest that fifteen-second alert come through and they are unable to respond instantly.
Their lives have become a living hell. And this is exactly what Hamas wants. That their rockets can, will and do kill and maim innocent people, including children, is of no moral concern to them, for they don't consider any Israelis to be "innocent". Rather they are all guilty. Guilty of living on Palestinian land, claiming it to be Israeli territory, for to Hamas there is no such reality as Israel.
The IDF has conducted raids into Gaza on an ongoing basis in an attempt to stop the rocket attacks. Israeli soldiers have, time and again, found Palestinians manning rocket sites. Nothing will dissuade Hamas and its members from their holy war of terror against Israel; not the deaths of their members by the IDF, their capture and imprisonment, nor the dire condition redounding to Palestinian civilians within Gaza.
The mayor of Negev, in a last-attempt desperate move to do something positive, has sought a meeting with Hamas. He is quoted in The Guardian as saying "I would say to Hamas, let's have a ceasefire, let's stop the rockets for the next 10 years and we will see what happens." Nothing, nothing will happen in the sense that Eli Moyal, Sderot's mayor indicates for the simple reason that Hamas is disinterested in talking.
The telling thing here is that Mr. Moyal has taken the option of offering to try to talk reason with an implacable enemy, rather than call upon his government to do so because, he has stated, he fears Israel, if pushed further, might risk 'losing the moral high ground', should she mount a massive military operation to make a more determined attempt to eradicate Hamas operations that so dreadfully punish the people of Sderot.
"Maybe one day in the future we will lose our patience and our values and invade", he said. "Imagine 20 kids being killed in a kindergarten by a missile. Then the Israel government would have to act and would lose its morality. If we don't talk we go deeper and deeper into war. If we don't talk we should fight." One supposes that Mr. Moyal speaks here of the opinion of the outside world should a military invasion occur, when he speaks of "losing morality".
There is, in fact, nothing immoral in a country protecting the lives of its citizens. That, in fact, is its moral and existential duty. That "innocent people" would be killed on both sides is a fair statement of fact, but no country can be expected to hold back forever in protecting its own. As expected, the mayor's offer to talk was swiftly rejected.
A Hamas web site responded quite explicitly: "The Zionist colony of Sderot, which steals our occupied land in northern Gaza, will continue to be a legitimate target for the jihad warriors of the Al-Kassam Brigades, as are the other colonies and Zionist positions surrounding Gaza, as a part of the ongoing response of Al-Kassam to the continuing Zionist crimes, which take the form of massacres in Gaza and the West Bank."
Those "Zionist crimes", needless to say, taking the form of hit-backs by the IDF in attempting to root out the Hamas and Fatah-allied militias with their deadly agenda of annihilating any Israeli civilians whom they are able successfully to target. There is the cause, and there the effect. Hamas is clear; it has no intention of negotiation, it will not countenance the potential for peace and the clear demarcation of boundaries through an acceptance of side-by-side nation states.
Simply put, Israel must go. The land occupied by Israel must revert to Palestinian rule, and will become the greater Palestinian state. For Israel there will be no peace, security and stability as long as Hamas remains, to do its duty to itself as it sees its message as a jihad-bent militia assigned by Allah.
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, February 24, 2008
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