Skrevet av en venninne fra Raanana, der vi bor: Statusoppdatering Av Alexa Raine As you may have noticed I have been posting many excellent blogs and articles recently, connected to the current situation in which we find ourselves here in Israel. They are written by people of all ages, genders, religious commitment levels etc. They all have one thing in common - the unfair perception of Israel by the world as being evil, genocidal, disproportionate etc etc. Some are more factual, some are more emotional. All put across the point that there is one rule for Israel and one rule for the rest of the world, that terrible things are happening everywhere else and why are we being singled out for the unfair condemnation that we are committing genocide, that anti Israel is being revealed as anti Semitic. And I agree with every single one of these ideas. BUT I feel that there is one point that I have NOT seen made - or made strongly enough. It came to me the other day when the amazing Naftali Bennett was brilliantly (again) defending Israel against the aggressive idiocy of a SKYNews reporter. He was asked why he was standing in Israel in shirt sleeves, while the reporters in Gaza were wearing flak jackets and helmets. His answer, quite correctly, and repeated again and again, is that ISRAEL HAS INVESTED BILLIONS IN PROTECTIVE MISSILE SYSTEMS AND SHELTERS for its people, while the Palestinians under Hamas (and Fatah and PFLP and Islamic Jihad - but we will forget them for the moment) have invested their money in rockets to attack Israel AND NOT IN PROTECTIVE MEASURES ( my emphasis) And this is where the problem lies, because to me, there is something very wrong with this picture. And it is this. Nobody is stressing loudly enough, strongly enough, the fact that since its founding 65 years ago, we have been spending billions of dollars and shekels on DEFENDING our country from attack. We have developed more and more sophisticated systems such as the Iron Dome so that we can be safe walking down the street when a siren goes off. We have ACCEPTED the situation as being part of life in Israel that we have a standing army that EVERY DAY risks its soldiers on EVERY border so that we can live our daily lives. The Palestinians dont need a missile defense system because they are the aggressors. For 65 years we have suffered their hatred, jealousy, antisemitism, inability to live with us side by side. We have suffered their suicide bombers, their blowing up of our buses, their attacks on schools, yeshivot, moshavim, tractor attacks, hijacks. And we have responded - obviously - with better defense systems, better barriers, better weaponry, offers of 97% of the land they want (Camp David - remember those days?) and when necessary, military action. I remember reading some years ago reading an article in which the reporter proudly stated that we had just invested billions in state-of-the-art bulletproof glass booths at crossings from Palestinian Territories into Israel. This was to thwart the men women and children - YES CHILDREN - who were coming into Israel for work and/or medical treatment but who were often strapped with explosives or carrying knives with which to attack us. And I wanted to cry when I read this article because it was such a twisted perspective! We had accepted the inevitable that we will always be under attack and we had better make sure we were protected. This was a cause for celebration? The fact that money that should be spent on education, technology, healthcare, the future of our country - is being spent in such a way??? What sovereign country would accept this? Would England accept as a way of life that Scotland was attacking because it wanted independence? Would it build better defenses - or would it protest to the world the situation as being untenable? And its amazing that despite that financial fact - we are still thriving!! We are STILL on the cutting edge in the fields of medicine, technology, agriculture! Dont get me wrong - I thank G-d EVERY SINGLE DAY that we have successive governments that put the welfare of its citizens as a priority. And you may say that I dont live in the real world and its better to be protected than vulnerable. All true. But I decry the fact that no one in this present and past conflicts have stressed forcefully enough the idea that we should not have to live like this, that we have constantly been under attack on all sides for all our existence as a State. If it isnt Hamas rockets its something else, from Lebanon, Syria, yes even Egypt although at the moment we seem to be on the same side against a common enemy. So next time Naftali Bennett is interviewed I hope he will stress this point. We have an Iron Dome because we HAVE to. The Gaza Strip would not need any defense system if they were not constantly attacking us. We have the strongest army in the world because we HAVE to. We are defending our home. We are NOT fighting wars in other continents, defending our oil rights or defending other democratic nations like the Americans do. We are not even defending some sheep and 100 people in a jingoistic display of nationalistic fervor as the British did in the Falklands War in 1982. WE ARE DEFENDING OURSELVES. Our amazing teenage soldiers are defending their families and their much-loved and hard fought-for homeland. And we will continue to do this for as long as we exist - and that is the point that has to be made, in every forum, blog, newspaper, status update. It should NOT BE THE NORM that a sovereign country, created by the League of Nations, has to invest so much money, ingenuity and the best of its wonderful men and women in just trying to stay alive. So the next time some stupid ignorant person talks about disproportionate responses - you can tell him that it is proportionate to the threat that we have lived under for 65 years. And that it will continue until we dont have to develop any more defense systems against our enemies. I think thats all for the moment....
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 06:23:54 +0000
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