"What the hell?"
"Air raid siren"", Quentin yelled, "missile incoming!"
We rushed out in the kitchen and sat down by the walls, while the sirens kept on wailing. Then the siren stopped and we both watched in amazement as Doron came out of his room, busy getting dressed.
"Sit down!"
Doron looked perplexed. Silence. Silence. Then a thunderous boom that shook the building. From Quentin banging on my door it may have taken some 40 seconds, but it felt more like 5 minutes. Doron looked slightly bewildered at us and then he sat down by the other wall. After the rocket had landed. After a little while we got up and looked through the window. The rocket had landed just 200 meters south of us after flying over our building, and exploded on the street where my synagogue is located. Had it flown 3 more meters it would have hit an apartment building. We saw the smoke billowing up. After a while I went back to sleep and managed to sleep through the second air raid siren a few hours later. This rocket landed farther away in an empty area in the city. It's some 46 kilometers from Gaza to here. The rockets that reach that far are not manufactured in some auto shop. They are made in Iran.
In the afternoon I went over to the Immigrants Office and spent 20 minutes watching as my case officer listlessly clicked away on her computer, every now and then letting away a sigh as if the weight of the world rested on her shoulders. It seems I'm getting unemployment. When I got out of her office everyone was congregating around the TV set in the corridor. A planted bomb had gone off outside the central bus station in Jerusalem, killing - so far - 1 person and wounding around 40. So I bicycled home and managed to get hold of my friends in Jerusalem and BH no one was hurt.
So instead of spending their money on helping their people, Hamas chooses to spend them on weapons. All of it, more or less. Leaving the task of supporting the population in Gaza to Israel and different international aid organizations. And this we do. Israel is supplying Gaza with electricity. Israel is supplying Gaza with gas. Israel is allowing thousands of tons of produce to flow into Gaza. And what do Gaza supply us with? Missiles.
Meanwhile Egypt is supplying Gaza with smuggled weapons and Jihadists and nothing more. And what is the outside worlds take on this? That we are laying siege to the poor Gazans. We have turned it into the greatest open air prison in the world. Right. Well, that took a few years of missile rain over southern Israel, topped off with a coup d'état were Hamas terrorists murdered a whole bunch of PA policemen. And all of this after Israel had pulled out every single soldier from Gaza, and after the Palestinians had destroyed hundreds of millions worth of agricultural equipment and hot houses bought and paid from the settlers by the World Bank. But of course. It's all our fault.
But sooner or later somebody needs to deal with the real culprit of all this mess, the Mullahs Iran. They are the ones exporting missiles and weapons via Iran and Egypt to Hamas and Hizballah. They are the ones supplying them with know-how and money, and who are financing their "social work". They are the ones who are doing their best to co-opt the revolutions that are sweeping the Arab world at the moment, in an effort to steer them clear of liberal democratic development and the chance of becoming democratic nations, and towards as much Islamist and Shiite influence as possible. I hope they will fail utterly, more democratic Arab world would hopefully spell a better future for everyone in the Middle East.
I'm hoping things will calm down on the Gaza front. The intelligence available suggests that Hamas doesn't want a full scale confrontation at the moment. Then again, they keep letting Islamic Jihad and their other cronies run wild, things could quickly escalate out of control. In which case living in the south of Israel might become very interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment