You may have turned on the TV last week and been shocked to discover a war had broken out between Israel and the Gaza Strip. If you didn’t follow Middle Eastern events closely, you could have been completely unaware of the constant barrage of rockets fired out of this area. What started the war? Here’s the facts.
Since Israel made a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza area in 2005, 8,500 rockets have been fired into Israel. 13,500 rockets have hit Israel since 2001. Since tht date, an average of three rockets per day have struck Israel. Currently, 5,000,000 Israelis now live in rocket range.
Why did Israel take out the Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari as well as targeting Hamas rocket launchers? The question is not unimportant because United Nations members always blame Israel –regardless. Let’s put it like this …
Mexico starts firing rockets on El Paso, Texas at the rate of 3 a day. This goes on for 7 years. Finally, the United States bombs the launching sites in Mexico. Do you think we’d wait 7 years? 7 weeks? 7 days to stop such attacks? Probably we’d respond in less than 7 hours. The issue isn’t hard to understand.
The basic problem Israel faces is not the rockets as much as it is the Palestinian mentality. Here’s another analogy to explain how they think.
We have a Friday night football game between the Israeli Warriors and the Hamas Rockets. The warriors win by a big 50 to nothing score. The games over and the Warriors go out to get in their bus. The Rockets hide in the bushes but start throwing baseballs at the bus. No matter how defeated they have been, they are going to attack the buses until the last one of them is dead.
Make sense? No. But that’s the way it works.
Yasser Arafat could have achieved peace with a capital in East Jerusalem but he walked away when President Clinton tried to broker a deal. Why? Because the Palestinians want nothing less that Israel to be pushed into the Mediterranean Sea.
Rather than striking a deal and rebuilding their society, they continue down a path of destruction and death. From my encounters with these people, I do not believe they will stop. These attacks and responses will continue.
While no one has clarified the facts, it appears that more rockets have been smuggled in through Egypt. Of course, they are Iranian in origin. Having upgraded from liquid fuel to solid state materials, these new Iranian rockets have a much greater range even shooting at Tel Aviv and hitting Jerusalem. The Iron Dome defense system has proven amazingly accurate, knocking out 90% of the Hamas rocket attacks in this war. Unfortunately, the l0% that break through are capable of significant destruction. This fact alone suggests that Israel will not quickly end the conflict until they have cleaned out the launchers and tunnels that bring rockets in from Egypt.
Suddenly everyone from Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi to the American State Department are scrabbling to bring a cease fire. They should have been working to stop the rocket attacks years ago and there would not be a conflict happening today.
Dr. Robert L. Wise 