The children of Sderot are the finger in the Gaza dike. They are there to save us all from the great flood. The difference between them and the Dutch Hans Brinker is that they did not volunteer for the job. We have forcibly stuck their fingers in the dike, and returned to our own affairs.
After one (Italian) bomb, the children of pre-state Haifa were evacuated to Hadera. Haifa’s residents were no less patriotic than today’s Israelis. Winston Churchill evacuated London’s children during the Blitz. Churchill was certainly no less a patriot than Ehud Olmert.
So after seven years of missile bombardment, why hasn’t Israel evacuated the children of Sderot? Are we braver than the War of Independence generation?
The answer is simple. If we evacuate the children of Sderot, their parents will follow – and they won’t come back. They won’t come back because the State of Israel is not capable of winning a war that it does not understand, a war that it denies. If we evacuate the children of Sderot, the same scenario will be repeated in Ashkelon and Ashdod – until everything collapses.
At one point or another Olmert’s prime ministerial chair will begin to quake, and he will have to send the IDF into Gaza. Even if we momentarily ignore the outrageous lack of moral standing of those responsible for the Expulsion, it is still clear that it is absolute folly to send the IDF back into Gaza. A military incursion into Gaza that is not for the purpose of conquering it – solving its overpopulation problem in other places in the world, declaring full Israeli sovereignty there and making the entire area flourish with 100 Gush Katifs – will achieve nothing but the pointless deaths of our soldiers.
And then the prime minister (no matter who he is) will ceremoniously give Gaza to Fatah – the “good” terrorists. We will continue to transfer Gaza from one terrorist to the next. And each and every one of them will continue to fire missiles at Sderot.
Do we really think that the world will allow us to rebuild Gush Katif? Of course not! So let’s be serious. Maybe we should just cut off their electricity and water. But if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that the world will not allow us to do that either. And rightfully so! If Gaza is not part of our land, neither is Sderot. And if the Temple Mount is given to the Muslims, there is no justification for Jews to settle in Tel Aviv. The fact that the world claims that every potentially effective action that Israel takes in Gaza is illegitimate does not stem from a sudden outbreak of uncontrollable worldwide humanism. In the eyes of the world, it is illegitimate for Israel to defend Sderot because the world is convinced that Hamas is right.
Just imagine if Churchill had announced that London belongs to Hitler. Or even worse, imagine what would have happened if Churchill himself had destroyed the border towns of England and then, with great ceremony, ceded the area to the Nazi murderer. Would he have enjoyed world support after that for bombing Dresden?
But we have already left Gaza? Very true! And by fleeing from Gaza, we established that Sderot is not ours either. The entire world saw Israel drive the Jews from their homes, Jews who believe in the Jewish claim on the Land of Israel. Everyone saw Israel destroy their towns and abandon their synagogues to the Arab hordes. In full view of the gleeful world media, the State of Israel performed the most amazing moral hara-kiri of all time – obliterating any measure of justification for Jewish sovereignty over even one grain of the Holy Land in the process.
The Hamas terrorists may not be nice, but in the eyes of the world they are just. They bomb civilians? So what? The British and Americans also bombed civilians.
So now what do we do about Sderot? The solution is to rebuild and expand by creating 100 Gush Katifs. If that is impossible to accomplish under our present circumstances, then we must evacuate the children.
But the children of Sderot are the finger in the dike!
We have only two choices. Either we create leadership that will fight, liberate the Temple Mount and Gaza, and restore the justice that we lost in Gush Katif, or we will continue to live with the Oslo denial – at the expense of the blood of Sderot’s children.
The 6th Annual Manhigut Yehudit Dinner will take place on Monday, March 24, 2008 at Terrace on the Park in Queens, New York. For online reservations or to place a journal ad, please visit www.jewishisrael.org.
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