Eitan Haber
Photo: Shalom Bar Tal
Spare your explanations
Nothing we say can counter shocking photographs of dead Gaza children
Let’s assume, for a moment, that the Israeli version of Monday’s incident in Gaza is accurate, real, and honest. Let’s assume, just for a moment, that a gunship hit a group of terrorists, and they happened to be right next to a Gaza mother and her four children, and the gunship hit the terrorists’ explosives, which ended up killing the mother and children.
So what?
What Israeli PR officials have never understood, and apparently will never grasp, is that the world and its media do not seek the true version or justice. The world does not ask and will not be asking how exactly did a mother and her four children happened to find themselves involved in the same incident as a group of terrorists, and what’s going on here.
Fighting Terror
Hanan Greenberg
Southern Command chief warns army's mission in Gaza far from over at evening honoring exemplary servicemen. Field commander who received citation says troops 'were fighting a Hamas organized like a proper army'
There are days (and mostly nights, when the TV is on at hundreds of millions of homes worldwide) where our only way to escape – as Israelis, as Jews, or as non-Jews who support Israel – is to go into bed, slide under the covers, and wait patiently. Pray that in an hour, or a day, another story will make headlines.
Monday was such day; Monday night was such night.
And if that wasn’t enough: On Monday we were also informed of the sentence handed down to Border Guard police officers who abused Palestinian teens and pushed one of them off a speeding jeep. Here, no gunship fired. Here, no group of terrorists was hiding. And what will we say about that?
We will say that the IDF is still the most moral army in the world, and that the Palestinians should be grateful that they do not have an enemy like the Russians in Chechnya or the Americans in Iraq. We are still the best.
We will also say that they deliberately fire in order to kill civilians. Look at Sderot for example. We will say that they blow up buses. We will say that Monday’s casualties were killed unintentionally, and that we will look into it, and investigate.
We have been facing the Palestinian Intifada for 20 years now. Today’s soldiers were not even born when the Gaza masses erupted following a car accident in December 1987 and embarked on what every child today is familiar with – the Intifada.
Just like that first day, 20 years later we must get it into our heads that they are fighting for their state and for their freedom (yes, just like we fought for it in 1948) and that only a diplomatic agreement – only a diplomatic agreement! – will put an end to the horrific photos; all the photos.
Those we saw in Gaza Monday, and those we saw countless times in Sderot, and in charred buses, and the photos of human limbs spread on the street, and of pools of blood at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, and in hundred of other locations.
Oh God almighty, how do we achieve such agreement?
