No Quiet on the Gaza Front

P. David Hornik
FrontPageMagazine.com
2/14/2008

Luck ran out Saturday night for eight-year-old Osher Twito of Sderot as he and his 19-year-old brother Rami were waiting by a cash machine in the town. Rami had forgotten his credit card, and his girlfriend had gone back to the house to get it. It was at this very mundane moment that the Qassam landed from Gaza and suddenly Osher and Rami were both lying on the ground screaming for help. Osher, the younger brother, was more gravely injured and was taken first to a hospital in nearby Ashkelon and then to one in Tel Aviv. One of his legs has been amputated below the knee; the other might also have to be amputated; one hand is fractured; and he’s under total sedation and attached to a respirator to keep him from suffering severe pain.

Osher is a victim of many things besides the genocidal terrorists who want to kill all Israeli Jews and other Jews and regard the maiming of this child as a successful hit. Israel under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni does not protect him; it conducts only low-scale warfare against Gaza terror knowing that this ensures the rockets and mortars will keep flying as they have been now for seven years.

Israel’s failure to treat the situation as the moral and geostrategic emergency that it is stems in part from Israeli concerns: fear of loss of soldiers’ lives in a Gaza invasion, Olmert’s low legitimacy as a wartime leader after his bad performance in the 2006 Lebanon war, fear of reconquering Gaza and what it implies for the “disengagement” philosophy.

But it stems, too, from awareness that an Israeli action in Gaza aimed at crushing the terror and protecting Israeli civilians will mean a head-on confrontation with a world much more concerned about Palestinians and oil than about Osher Twito. The U.S., worried mainly about a charade of “peace” meetings between Israeli and Palestinian Authority leaders, has reportedly “promised [the PA] to pressure Israel to refrain from carrying out a massive attack in the Gaza Strip.”

Even the supposedly favorable international environment in which Israel conducted the anti-Hezbollah campaign in Lebanon meant Israel, apart from its own bungling, was given a few weeks to do something—crush a terror organization—that NATO has not done to Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan in six years.

Still, Israel does not take lightly an event like Osher Twito’s injury and there were signs that things may be reaching a boiling point. On Sunday Sderot residents, joined by a small contingent of non-Sderot Israelis, blocked the entrance to Jerusalem and then went in a convoy to the Prime Minister’s Office in that city where they banged on metal barricades and shouted for Olmert to resign. On Monday a similar group blocked a major highway into nonchalant Tel Aviv and blared from loudspeakers the Color Red alarm that Sderot residents hear day and night to give them scant warning of Qassam attacks.

Also on Monday the left-dovish Haaretz, whose editor David Landau not long ago told Condoleezza Rice that it was his “wet dream” that the U.S. would “rape” Israel into a settlement with the PA, editorialized that

The firing of Qassam rockets against Sderot and the nearby kibbutzim is not stopping and is extracting a heavy price in terms of fear and blood.… If the limited military actions Israel is undertaking in an effort to bring an end to the Qassam rockets will not bring an end to the shooting…Israel will have no option but to embark on a broad military operation…. Even if the success of a military operation is not guaranteed, that concern must not prevent the government from doing what is necessary in order to protect the lives of its citizens…. Israel must prove that the blood of its citizens cannot be forfeited….

It was also reported that Gaza-based Hamas leaders have gone underground for fear of being targeted in a renewed Israeli assassination campaign. Barak was said to be preparing the army for a major ground operation in Gaza while being concerned about a “political exit plan”—ominous since it means he and the other Israeli leaders are still in denial about the need for Israel, and Israel alone, to control Gaza and instead contemplate handing it, south-Lebanon-style, to foreign or, even worse, Fatah forces.

Whether or not they knew it, when Osher Twito and his brother stood there Saturday evening in Sderot they were on the front line of the West’s war against the jihad. Before them were terrorists absolutely convinced of their cause and ready to nullify all human norms to pursue it. Behind them was a democracy that fears the repercussions even of defending its citizens against barbaric assault, and behind that democracy were other democracies almost all of which have even less belief in their right to assert their existence.

Not surprisingly, then, it was a dangerous place for Osher, and he has paid a heavy price for it. May it not be in vain and may it help lead Israel, at least, to regain the truth that the innocent must be defended and those who attack them must be destroyed.

P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.