An old picture of damage done at Sha'ar Hanegev by a Qassam rocket
Your humble servant had intended to write this morning about how MADA has demeaned itself, but the events of the last 15 hours are so troubling that they take precedence.
To begin with, no matter how much our Israeli government wants to deceptively dissemble, the ‘ceasefire’ that supposedly went into effect at 1 pm or 1 am yesterday (depending on whom you believe), does not exist. Since that ‘ceasefire’, the men, women, and children of southern Israel have had to suffer through numerous red sirens (sirens that announce impending rocket attacks) and have been assaulted by at least 3 rockets–1 Grad and 2 Qassams.
I say ‘at least’ because I am now convinced that the government is not reporting all rocket attacks. This is a position that was seconded by other residents of the Israeli south that ate dinner with us at our house in Ashdod last night. All of us commented on incidents of hearing loud explosions in the last 24 hours that could only have been the sounds of missiles hitting nearby. And yet no reports of any such strikes were made in the media or by the government. Ironically, as I reported in the israelstreet breaking news last night , four large explosions to the southeast of our position rocked our table and patio as we ate dinner.
It is painful to write this but under the guise of ‘not wanting to create chaos in the south’, your humble servant believes that the current government is wantonly playing with the lives of its citizens here. By announcing this Saturday morning that ‘relative calm’ (an absurd term that I addressed in my Jerusalem Post op-ed last week) has returned and southern residents can return to their routine lives, the government has ensured that citizens of southern Israel will be killed and injured.
But the ramifications of this decision cut far deeper. There is an ongoing effort here by the government and the media to portray the Hamas Palestinian terrorists as the ‘peaceful injured’ party that only wants to control the radical elements in Gaza. And there is an ongoing effort by the government and the IDF to come up with any conceivable reason to do nothing–this morning brings the news that not only does Israel have to wait until the U.N. vote about Palestine to act decisively against the terrorists–now we have to wait until after elections are held in Egypt! Next we will hear that nothing can be done until after the 2012 elections in the United States.
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So we have now returned to the situation before last Thursday. The citizens of southern Israel are at the mercy of international events and opinions–and are under the constant psychological trauma of repeated alarms and missile strikes. The government and the IDF are back to–well actually they never changed–doing nothing and foisting the malicious canard that all is well here in southern Israel.
It isn’t.
In the coming days this blog will return to other subjects, but the israelstreet breaking news in the right hand column will be exclusively devoted to the Hamas terrorist attacks against Israelis in the south.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.