Daniel Gordis - (American Jewish Committee) Israel is at war - not against "militants," or against those who would seek to "liberate" the Palestinian people. Israel is engaged in a war for its survival, against well-armed and increasingly well-trained, highly disciplined groups of terrorists. Their agenda is not the liberation of the "territories" that were captured in June 1967 in a war that Israel did not want. Their agenda, as Hamas and Hizballah (among others) freely admit, is the eradication of the "Zionist entity" from what should be, in their minds, an exclusively Muslim Middle East. This war began immediately after Ehud Barak offered the Palestinian people the state and the independence they had always said their decades-long terrorist campaign had been designed to bring them. Most Israelis now understand that there will not be peace. Not in our lifetimes, and probably not in the lifetimes of our children. When Palestinian terrorists fled into the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Israeli troops surrounded the church, but didn't storm it. Compare this to the Americans' treatment of mosques in Najaf or Falluja, when their patience with Moqtada Al-Sadr ran out, or what we know would have been the case had Jews been hiding in a church or a synagogue and it had been Palestinians pursuing them. Israel is a country in which a vigorous and open debate about how to balance the needs for security with Jewish humanitarian values continues. Where are the Palestinians arguing in their streets for a cessation to the bombings, to the Kassam rockets, to the shootings, so that their lives can be restored to normal? Where are the graffiti calling for an end to the terror that brought the security fence in the first place? Or the graffiti that note that, if only Arafat had continued to negotiate, none of this would have happened? The world calls Israel racist, but the only population that Sharon is considering moving is the Jewish population in Gaza, not the villages that openly harbor the terrorists who seek to kill our children. As the battle against Islamic terror spreads, and as Westerners experience ever more terror firsthand, the world will come to admire the restraint and fortitude with which Israel has fought for its life.
2004-12-07 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive