This wasn’t the first time I was in Israel when rockets were falling, but it was the first time that the terrorists fired on a city while I was in it.
I never felt like I was in danger. The idea of a rocket flying out of Gaza and landing in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City just doesn’t seem like something that could possibly happen. But something about being forced to take shelter makes you reflect.
Six days into Operation Pillar of Defense, here are some of those reflections:
War is futile. I don’t doubt for a moment the short-term necessity of inflicting as much damage as possible on Hamas. I’ll get back to that later. But there’s also a depressing futility to the whole exercise. We bombed and bombed and bombed Gaza four years ago, we had relative quiet for about three years, and now we have hundreds of rockets flying into our country again. How do we get peace for the long term?
As Kohelet laments,
To everything is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. […] A time of war, and a time of peace. What benefit to the doer from his toil? (Ecc. 3:1,8–9)
Gaza needs change, and the current cycle of war and ceasefire isn’t going to achieve it.
A more lasting ceasefire agreement is in the works, and I hope it succeeds. The other option is a ground invasion that wipes Hamas clean, but I don’t want to think about the pain that would require.
Iron Dome is awesome. In six days, it’s intercepted more than 350 rockets that would have landed on Israel’s cities. Only a few dozen rockets out of the 1000 or so launched by Hamas have caused damage, and only one succeeded in killing Jews. “Only” is an obviously inappropriate word for describing senseless murder, but imagine the trauma if those 350 rockets hadn’t been stopped.
And the video of Iron Dome in action is surreal, like something out of science fiction. In some videos, you can hear Israelis cheering as the Iron Dome missiles explode.
Thank you to the United States of America for the hundreds of millions of dollars they contributed to the funding.
The enemy is irrational. What do the war crimes of Hamas achieve for Gaza? A lot of death and a lot of wreckage. Maybe they’ll get something favorable out of a ceasefire agreement, but all the destruction they’re bringing on their people is such a senseless way to go about it. And let alone their evil in shooting at innocent Israelis. They’re nuts.
Kill the bastards. The Times of Israel quotes a story from The Sunday Times about the decision to go through with the assassination of Ahmed Jabari, which escalated the violence last Wednesday:
Jabari had long been at the top of Israel’s hit-list for his central role in overseeing terror attacks on Israelis. Paranoid about an attempt on his life, Jabari never carried a mobile phone and constantly switched between vehicles in a fleet he used for transport.
Last week Israel’s Shin Bet security service tracked Jabari down in Gaza and succeeded in fitting one of his cars — a silver Kia — with a tracking device, the paper said. IDF Chief of General Staff Benny Gantz was updated, as was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. With a window of opportunity of scant seconds, it was the Israeli Air Force Commander Amir Eshel himself who gave the order for a drone strike that killed the 52-year-old, the report said.
“On a giant television screen at air force headquarters in Tel Aviv, Amir Eshel, its commander, supervised the operation. He gave the order: ‘Kill the bastard.’ At 3.55pm the drone operators hit the kill button. The Kia burst into flames as two missiles hit the car. Jabari and a son who was with him died on the spot.”
In eliminating Jabari, said the Sunday Times, “the Israeli government had killed the instigator of virtually every attack from Gaza in recent years.”
As I read that order, “Kill the bastard,” my id responds with “HEYYAAAAAH!” It gets the same sick pleasure in watching the UAV footage of Jabari’s car exploding in a fireball. Part of it is revenge, or justice, or whatever you want to call it. There is also the security in knowing that an active coordinator of terror no longer lives.
These are people who work to maximize the civilian casualties on both sides. The more of them dead when the ceasefire finally arrives, the better off we will all be.
Of course, the airstrikes have to be carefully planned and executed to avoid tragedy. On Sunday, a missile intended for senior commander Yihya Abaya killed 11 members of a single family instead.
And also of course, the commanders who make the decisions about when to attack and when to show restraint have to do so with "the head, not the gut," as I've heard a couple Israeli leaders put it in interviews this week.
Thank God. Seems like I should end on a positive note. I would take this coming decade over any other decade in at least the last twenty centuries. We still have some things to sort out with our enemies, but let's appreciate the military dominance of the world’s good guys over the world’s bad guys, which is unlike anything in history.
And we have a STATE OF ISRAEL. What are you waiting for, guys?
