While Britain prattles on about Prince Harry and Andrew Lansley, there is a serious escalation of violence from Gaza into southern Israel. On Wednesday Roni Yehiah, a 47-year-old father of four, was killed by a rocket attack on a college in Sderot and four others injured. Yesterday as the rockets continued to rain down on Sderot,
Grad missiles were fired at Ashkelon — according to Haaretz, having been smuggled through Sinai from Iran. In strikes aimed at killing terrorists, Israel killed 20 Palestinians including five children. Meanwhile the Jerusalem Post reports that in an interview Mahmoud Abbas gave to a Jordanian newspaper, this statesmanlike man of peace (cf George W Bush) said he did not rule out returning to the path of armed ‘resistance’ against Israel. But an unnamed Israel official said these comments were aimed at Abbas's domestic audience and that Abbas should be judged by his deeds - a willingness to negotiate peace - rather than by statements "meant for internal consumption.
So that’s all right then. Once again, Israel hands Abbas his get-out-of-jail-free card and thus perpetuates the grotesque fiction peddled by the western world that Israel's mortal enemy is actually its partner in a 'peace process'.
In an interview with Al-Dustur, Abbas also took pride that he had been the first to fire a bullet on Israel in 1965 and that his organization, Fatah, had trained Hizbullah. ‘At this present juncture, I am opposed to armed struggle because we cannot succeed in it, but maybe in the future things will be different’, he said.
This is the person the world expects Israel to offer territory to so that he can better continue his armed struggle against it if he should so decide -- a decision the world will support because he is a statesman committed to peace.
Meanwhile, a 17-year-old Arab girl from Jerusalem is under arrest for allegedly offering to carry out a suicide bombing in the city.
The would-be bomber, a resident of the east Jerusalem neighborhood of A-Tur who was apprehended three weeks ago in a joint Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency)-police operation, suggested to Islamic Jihad operatives in the West Bank that they use her to carry out a terror attack due to her hatred of Jews and ‘personal family problems,’ Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said.
Who cares? Who outside Israel even notices?
So yet again Israel is between the sharpest of rocks and the most unforgiving of hard places. If it goes into Gaza, it will sustain a loss of its soldiers’ lives that it will find unbearable, and when it comes out again Hamas will merely regroup. The world’s media has so far failed to report the vast majority of the thousands of rocket attacks on the southern Negev, since Jews targeted for murder don’t surface on their radar; doubtless the fate of the five Palestinian children killed unintentionally in Israel’s attempt to defend its people from the rocket bombardment will get the full outraged works. Clearly Israel has to do something to stop the rockets. Ha’aretz is calling for action that is both daring and level-headed. One does hope that the mere soldiery of Israel will match up to the exacting standards of a paper that has done so much to sap the morale and fighting spirit of Israel over the years. But one also has to wonder why in heaven’s name Israel has never provided a missile defence shield for the southern Negev.
Already the ineffable Condoleezza Rice is warning it to exercise restraint. What restraint would America exercise, one wonders, if it were being bombarded by dozens of rockets every day by the proxies of Iran? Rice on one side, Ha’aretz on the other, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in the north, can't go in, can't stay out, the western media sharpening their verbal knives for the bloodsport of Sticking it to the Scapegoat.
And meanwhile, as ever, all roads lead back to Iran.
