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No Easy Solution While Hamas Keeps Warring

[The Age-Australia] Fania Oz-Salzberger - As elated Gazans poured into Egypt amid the ruins of the blown-up border wall, Israelis gazed at their television screen with mixed feelings. We are not blind to the plight of innocent Palestinians, but no one is naive enough to think that militants are not busy shopping too, for the next Kassam rocket and the next suicide bomb. "Israel refuses to rule out retaliatory attack," said a headline of The Age on Jan. 26 - wording that many Israelis find infuriating. The world, it seems, expects Gazans to keep firing their rockets on the Israeli town of Sderot and the surrounding villages. Israel, in return, is expected to stand firm, chin up, and declare that it will not respond. In the words of Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Israel will keep defending its citizens as long as Hamas does not recognize "the right of anyone who is not Muslim" to exist. Would Australia keep its calm if Darwin and vicinity took constant fire? And would it keep providing most of the attackers' electricity and take their seriously ill civilians into their own hospitals? Israel does. The writer is professor and Leon Liberman chairman of modern Israel studies at Monash University, and director of the Posen Research Forum for Political Thought at the University of Haifa.
2008-01-28 01:00:00
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