Gaza conflict COMMENTARY: Hamas forbids civilians to leave their homes, puts them in harms way on the roofs of rocket factories and forces children to remain in combat zones.
Gaza conflict
By Yair Lapid. From the The Telegraph
Gaza conflict.
The main argument presented by Israel’s critics can be summarised in a single sentence: Not enough of your children are dying.
I refuse to apologise for that, but I urge you to remember that while our children may not be dying, it is not for Hamas’s lack of trying.
Since the beginning of the last round of fighting, thousands of rockets have been launched at Israeli cities, armed terrorists have attempted to execute mass attacks in villages by the border and hundreds of mortars have been aimed at kindergartens and schools. The only reason these attempts at mass killing are not making an impression is that Hamas has failed. The Israeli Defence Forces’ land and air operation, along with Iron Dome, the anti-missile defence system developed by Israel, prevented us from gaining the world’s sympathy in return for images of mutilated Jewish children. Given a choice between sympathetic news coverage and the lives of our children, I choose life.
Hamas chooses otherwise.
Western eyes and ears consider it a dubious choice, but Hamas never hid its position on the matter: it has no problem with Palestinian children dying, so long as it serves its political objectives.
I know that sounds cynical, but that’s because it really is. Islamic terror is absolutely cynical, it always was and always will be, and its greatest speciality is taking advantage of every democracy’s main weakness – the fact that we sanctify life.
The average Western viewer sees both sides of the conflict on television. One side is dying and the other side insists on continuing with daily life. One can understand them for taking the side of the injured party, and let’s be absolutely clear – to us, the death of any child, Israeli or Palestinian, is a tragedy. On the other hand, that does not release us from answering the question of who is truly to blame for this tragedy?
The power of these images is the reason that Hamas intentionally builds its missile factories and bunkers underneath civilian homes, stores its ammunition in schools and kindergartens (including United Nations schools), launches its rockets surrounded by civilian families, despite knowing beyond any doubt that it will lead to innocent casualties. Hamas rests its conscience – if it even has one – by announcing that the dead children are “Shahids” who will make it to heaven.
I know it sounds crazy, impossible to understand, but I have no way of helping you with that. I have spent my entire life in the Middle East and I still cannot understand how people can sacrifice their children.
It contradicts everything we know of humanity or parenthood and yet it happens.
The absurd result is that Israel does much more to protect Palestinian children than Hamas and yet many Europeans and many Britons accuse us of being responsible for their deaths.
They ignore the fact that Israel is the only country in the history of wars that calls ahead before we fire. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have received phone calls, text messages and leaflets warning residents to vacate combat zones. Israeli air force sorties were cancelled after the planes were in the air due to reports of civilian presence – all in order to prevent innocent casualties.
But Hamas forbade civilians to leave their homes, put them on rocket factory rooftops, forced the children – its own children – to remain in areas that would clearly become harsh door-to-door combat zones.
For Hamas, it is a win-win situation: either the attack is cancelled and it can go on launching missiles at Israel or the attack succeeds and it can go on launching images of dead children at media outlets around the world.
We also have the option of doing nothing. Some British circles expect that of us. They ask us to accept rocket fire from the skies and terrorist tunnels dug beneath our communities.
We will not do that.
Yair Lapid is the Israeli Minister of Finance and chairman of the Yesh Atid Party
Gaza conflict
