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Photo: Gabi Menashe
Authentic. Orbach
Photo: Gabi Menashe

No need for phony sorrow

Death of Gaza family shocking and regrettable, but this is harsh reality of war

The death of the five members of the Abu Meatak family is very shocking. We can wax poetic and go on about the childhood that was cut off and the blood that was spilled, and how terrible that is. But let’s leave the outburst of emotions to the Palestinians.

 

On our side, we can make do with an internal committee of inquiry. This was an operational mishap, not a moral one.

 

The Palestinian people and its elected officials have been conducting themselves in a reckless and irresponsible manner for 100 years now. They know how to display their dead in public and how to wildly wave their misery, but they have never learned to reconcile themselves to reality.

 

I am talking about the reality that suggests that they make do with little, or otherwise they will be left with even less; the reality that proves to them that the Israelis and the Jews are stronger, more determined, and also more just.

 

The Palestinians scare me not when they are despaired, but rather, when hope awakens within them. When they think that they are pushing us into a corner, when they are taking another step towards a Palestinian state of their own, they tend to lose their cool and return to the fire, blood, and defeat.

 

Regret, but no apologies 

We are not in a contest with the Palestinians: If we are all destined to suffer here, it would be good that they suffer more than we do. And if the Palestinians continue to overestimate their power, we can assume that along with their killed gunmen we are also going to see innocents die.

 

We should regret it when we kill civilians who are not involved in terror and children who have not sinned. Yet we do not have to take up the moralistic mood of the global peace powers, and we do not need to assume a façade of phony sorrow.

 

This is war, where “the sword devours one as well as another,” as it says in the bible. Those who regularly and deliberately fire at our civilians lead to cases where on occasion, unintentionally, some civilians on their side will die too. It isn’t fair and it isn’t aesthetic, but those are the facts of life.

 

We regret it, but we do not apologize.  

 


פרסום ראשון: 04.29.08, 10:46
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