By Yoram Getzler What I find most interesting and important is not what happened, but what is going to happen. Obviously the strongest to emerge from these eight days is Egypt’s President Morsi who ultimately could, if he chooses to, control the smuggling of more rockets into Gaza from Egyptian Sinai.
Lets remember during the years after Israel relinquished control of Sinai back to Egypt the serious smuggling began. And even with our army there on the border, it could not be stopped. However during the years of Israeli control of both sides of the border…there appeared to be no serious movement of military goods between Sinai and Gaza.
Often during the eight day war we heard Israelis talking about “Now the IDF can finally put a stop to the rocket fire once and for all!” And with that sentiment Israelis living in the south, under the barrage of spontaneous and random rocket attack pronounced their readiness to persevere over the long term if it meant a final end to the rocket attacks.
“Put an end to the terror, once and for all !!” What an understandable innocent phrase, a fantasy carried for decades if not centuries.
In a kind of indirect response today’s (Wed Nov 28) Jerusalem Post carries an article comparing the current British criticism of Israeli actions and asks if we should pay attention to the current British ideas about confronting Palestinian terror or should we look to their past history with Palestinian terror attacks. The article: How the British responded to Palestinian terrorists; can be found at: http://www.jpost.com/
I can only leave it to the reader to consider the long distance we have traveled in the past seventy years. It would seem that the Palestinians have experienced no discernible learning curve. They seem to have learned absolutely nothing. We, playing the part of the British in being forced to confront terror attacks on our civilian population have also not learned much. Have we finally realized that there is no “Putting an end to terrorism once and for all!”?
How is it that the Palestinians, who actually suffer the most from this behavior have not succeeded in realizing that desperate and angry as they may be, justified or not in their violence it brings them nothing but a moment of satisfaction followed by hours and days, weeks and months, years of frustration and pain. There is no progress, no improvement in their individual or communal lives.
As I have asked over and over again, unless their leaders are certified idiots and profoundly retarded what could they possibly be thinking when they fire rockets into Israel. That there will be no response?
That Israel will disappear if they do it for long enough? What other response would an even half intelligent person expect would happen time after time?
Now there is not much we individuals can do but wait and see what happens. If someone has figured out a way to really put an end to the smuggling, because one way or another the terror will continue. Its how they do things, after all, its the tradition how else to explain it?.
