JACK ENGELHARD: GAZA- WAR AT LAST****
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/15295#.U70khrGCUtV Above all, God bless the boys going up against Hamas and into Gaza by air, land and sea. Bibi said it’s “time to take off the gloves” so once again Israel is at war. This is not the time to remind Israel’s politicians “we told you so” when you gave up Gaza in 2005. Nor is this the time to blame successive Israeli governments for letting it get this far, far enough to allow this implacable foe to arm itself to the teeth. For the moment Israel must deal with the unbearable barrage of rocket fire coming in ceaselessly from Gaza. Now it’s time to stop the bleeding. Through Operation Protective Edge, the pride of the Jewish State has been mobilized to defuse the bombs and to subdue the enemy. The enemy is Hamas, which has given Israel not a moment’s rest. From the time these violent tribes of Sunni origin took over the Strip in 2007 they have hammered Israel with a million bombs meant to discomfort a million Israelis along the South. For all those years, life along the South has been treacherous, a nightmare, for Israelis living along the border. In Jewish population centers like Ashdod (215,000) Ashkelon (120,000), Beersheva (197,000), Dimona (33,000), Eilat (47,000), Sderot (21,000) sirens wailed every day and parents huddled with their children in bomb shelters. They complained to the government – how can this be happening in a Land we call our own? Please make this stop. My friends in Eilat ask me, “Can you do something from America? Do people know what’s going on? Would any country besides Israel stand for this?” It hurts to tell them that America and the rest of the world would only demand of Israel that it exercise “restraint.” We heard this again, as recently as yesterday, and again we heard that this “cycle of violence” must stop and that “both sides” should proceed with caution. Deaf ears refuse to believe that there is no cycle and that only one side and one side alone has been using terror as a tactic to destroy the Jewish State. It is in their charter. Hamas is under contract to keep firing at Israel until she submits. In fact, from one Israeli government to another, and as the bombs from Hamas kept falling, war was peace. The governments did mostly nothing to stop the terror under the illusion that the enemy would tire – but this enemy never tires. Israelis along the South were being conditioned to believe that rocket fire slamming into their streets, their homes, their schools was like any other day. Relax, get used to it and DON’T MAKE TROUBLE. The world is watching…and that has been Israel’s weakness from the start. Israeli leaders, and this certainly includes Benjamin Netanyahu and his administration, too often have an eye for the grandstand – how Israel will be perceived among the nations, beginning with the press. The question is – how will it play? No doubt, it will not play well, no matter the justice of Israel’s cause as the defender of its Land and its people. The world’s reporters are waiting for the pictures – any picture that will show Israel in a bad light. Rarity of rarities, the BBC today admitted that some of those horrific wartime imagines circulating around the world come not from Israeli actions in Gaza, but from ISIS actions in Iraq. Do not expect such forbearance to continue. Israel will soon be measured. Soon there will be marches throughout Europe and even here in the United States placing Israel at fault, forgetting that Islamic terrorists started this fight, the same fight for Islamic supremacy being waged throughout the region. Soon Hamas and the Fatah will manufacture their own fabricated images meant to sway public opinion. They are good at this. Television will select whatever image suits its anti-Israel bias. This is not the first full-scale operation into Gaza. In the 22-day Gaza war of 2008, Israel found weapons being stored in schools and mosques. The press ignored this in favor of any weeping Palestinian Arab it could find. They will be sure to find their civilian casualties. How do you fight an enemy that cares nothing for your children and nothing for its own children? How do you fight an enemy that has no morals, no heart? So it has come to this. Even for Israel enough is enough. It remains to be seen if Israel will settle for a tie, as it did before. Or this time will Israel realize that sleeping with the enemy is no way to run a country? War is hell…so to hell with CNN, the BBC and The New York Times. Let them show their phony pictures as Israel fights its real war. Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. Engelhard wrote the int’l bestseller Indecent Proposal that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. New from the novelist, the anti-BDS thriller Compulsive. Website: www.jackengelhard.comComments are closed.
