You can bet that even as Hamas and its sponsors are recovering from the shock of clanging into Israel’s new missile shield, they are contemplating fresh ways to kill us. Those drafting the Pillar of Defense ceasefire terms mustn’t make it easy for them
Remember Amir Peretz? He’s the abundantly
moustached former trade union chief who led the Labor Party into the
2006 elections and found himself, by the peculiar machinations of
Israel’s ridiculous electoral system, installed as defense minister
despite a conspicuous absence of high-level defense expertise. He’s the
man who misguidedly trusted then-chief of General Staff Dan Halutz’s
assurances that Hezbollah could be destroyed from the air in the
mismanaged 2006 Second Lebanon War. He’s the buffoon who was
photographed gravely viewing IDF military maneuvers on the Golan Heights
five years ago through binoculars from which he had neglected to remove
the lens caps.
Actually, I’m not talking about that Amir
Peretz. I’m talking about the other Amir Peretz. Amir Peretz, the Sderot
resident who had the wisdom and guts to defy Israel’s macho military
thinkers and insist, when serving as defense minister, that Israel press ahead with the development of the Iron Dome missile defense system
to protect his hometown and the other Gaza-envelope communities from
Hamas’s relentless rocket attacks. I’m talking about the Amir Peretz
whom people are embracing in the street nowadays because of his
foresight in championing Iron Dome, the armor on high that has largely —
though not totally — defanged the Hamas rocket threat during Operation
Pillar of Defense in the past week.
Iron Dome has proved almost as robust as its
name. Twenty years ago, when Saddam Hussein was launching his Scuds at
Tel Aviv, traumatized residents fled north, south, even to Jerusalem (!)
— packing out hotels in the capital — to escape the danger zone. Six
years ago, when Hezbollah held the north of Israel hostage, a
million-plus Israelis either spent 34 days in bomb shelters or dashed
down toward Jerusalem and safety. This week, when the evil engineers of
Hamas anticipated that they would reduce not just the Gaza-envelope
communities but all places up as far as Tel Aviv to gibbering,
rocket-battered wrecks, and eagerly contemplated Israeli death tolls on a
scale that would emphasize their terrifying superiority over the
loathed Zionist entity, they instead clanged up, most unexpectedly,
against the nearly impermeable shield.
Successive days of rocket attacks on Tel Aviv
and efforts to reach Jerusalem? Well, that’s worrying for sure. Those
alarms are terrifying, no question. Plenty of Israelis from the center
will now join the traumatized ranks of the Kassam-worn south. But
injuries and death on the scale so gleefully contemplated by Hamas?
Sorry. No, actually. We brought protection. We’ve got Iron Dome.
This being the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
however, even in Israel’s defensive victory, even in its staggering
success in keeping its people physically safe, lies the danger of
defeat.
When Israel’s short-sighted critics
insistently refuse to look beyond the numerical asymmetry, the very
effectiveness of Iron Dome becomes the latest weapon with which to
attack Israel for its purported aggression. All those Gazans are
suffering terribly, dozens have been killed, yet hardly any Israelis are
dying? That can’t be right. How can the Israelis claim to be the
victims of unprovoked and indiscriminate aggression? They’re still
alive.
Even the reasonably fair-minded foreign news
teams focus on Gaza. It’s a much better story. When you’ve done the
first article about Israel’s missile defense system intercepting a
rocket that, yes, would have killed dozens in Ashdod, Ashkelon,
Beersheba or Tel Aviv, except that it didn’t, you’ll only be repeating
yourself if you do a second piece along the same lines a day later. But
Gaza? Fresh faces of suffering daily.
And the cumulative impact is to convey a sense
of relentless Israeli assault on the densely populated Gaza Strip that
simply must be unjustified. After all, again, the Israelis aren’t dying.
They must be in the wrong.
So to restate what is blindingly obvious and
yet still so often ignored: The fact that Israeli citizens have not been
dying in large numbers in this conflict to date has nothing to do with
Hamas, which is employing its very mightiest efforts to kill us, and
which is highly skilled and experienced in the endeavor. We live,
rather, because in partnership with our American allies we added Iron
Dome, a remarkable new supplement to the alarm systems, safe rooms,
fortified schools and other measures into which we have poured effort
and resources over the years to defend our civilians from attack.
And Palestinians in Gaza are dying in growing
numbers because they are either directly involved in trying to kill us
or — to our genuine sorrow and Hamas’s cynical delight — they had the
misfortune to be sleeping, walking, talking, studying or praying very
close to a key Hamas terror chief, missile launch site, ammunition store
or other element of the sprawling Hamas kill-the-Jews infrastructure.
To put it succinctly, Hamas is doing its best
to kill any and all of us in Israel, while cynically seeking to protect
itself from attack by emplacing its offensive capacity among Gaza’s
often unwitting civilians. And Israel is doing its best to prevent its
citizens being killed, while trying to thwart the attacks without
harming Gaza’s civilians. There’s the relevant asymmetry.
The fact that Hamas and its Iranian-led
sponsors have been thwarted this time — the shock they must have felt,
and the awe we feel, at the astonishing success of Iron Dome — is no
excuse for underestimating the ongoing danger. We reduced the strategic
terrorist onslaught of the Second Intifada through a combination of
arrests, intelligence work and the West Bank security barrier. So they
switched their focus to rocket fire, devilishly anticipating that no
barrier could stop an airborne assault. Now that we’ve found a means to
reduce that threat, you can be 100 percent certain that our enemies are
even now seeking new means to overcome those fiendish Zionists’ latest
life-saving innovation.
Therefore, whenever and however Operation
Pillar of Defense comes to an end, those brokering the terms owe it to
us — and to those innocents in Gaza who would like to avoid further
rounds of Hamas-initiated conflict — to insist upon arrangements that
will make it more difficult for Hamas to do “better.” More difficult for
Hamas to rearm. More difficult for Hamas to obtain increasingly
sophisticated weaponry that could pinpoint targets in the south, in
Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv and beyond with deadlier rockets. More difficult
for Hamas to build a new offensive capacity that could outsmart our
innovative defensive capacity, characterized by Iron Dome. More
difficult for Hamas terror chiefs to operate freely in Gaza, devising
and perfecting still more nefarious means to try to kill us for the
crime of insisting on living, alongside them, in our historic sovereign
homeland.
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