And so it is war...

The Israeli public has rarely been a dutiful amen chorus for its political leaders, to say the least. Israel’s hyper-active democracy involves frequent demonstrations attacking the government of the day from the left and the right. Public opinion led to commissions of inquiry into the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and more recently, the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Twenty-five years ago massive public protests against government policy during the First Lebanon War led to the removal of Defence Minister Ariel Sharon.

All of this makes the overwhelming public support for this campaign against Hamas in Gaza all the more notable. A few days before the attack began, the left-wing Meretz Party – unwaveringly committed to a negotiated two-state deal with the Palestinians – called for military action against Hamas.

Israel has had enough.

We withdrew all settlements and soldiers from Gaza in 2005. Hamas used the very areas that had been vacated by Jewish settlers as launching sites for Qassam rockets against southern Israeli towns. It attacked an Israeli army post on the Gaza border in 2006 and kidnapped 19 year-old Gilad Shalit. The rockets have continued to fall (well over a thousand in 2008 alone) and our young soldier remains in captivity over two years later.

Israel is, of course, being criticized for “excessive” force. But we have exercised extraordinary restraint for the past two and half years. Of those countries currently wagging a finger, which of them would have responded to non-stop rocket attacks on their citizens by taking no military action, and continuing to supply the very regime launching the rockets with electricity. Britain? France? To say nothing of Russia whose ‘concern’ for the lives of innocent Palestinian civilians is frankly laughable. Fighting Chechen rebels operating from within a civilian population, the Russian air force made no attempt to discriminate in its bombing. Neither NATO in its air strikes on Milosevic’s Serbia, nor the US and its allies in Afghanistan after 9/11, took anything like the measures Israel has employed to try to minimize civilian casualties.

Unfortunately, tragically, ordinary Palestinians have been killed and injured. Hamas makes a point of using civilian homes and even schools, as bases and for arms storage. (Such callous disregard for the lives of their own people is hardly a moral deviation for an organisation that indoctrinates children in kindergartens to become suicide bombers.)

Every Israeli politician, official, or spokesman has stated that Israel is not at war with the people of Gaza but with Hamas. Even as the attacks on Hamas targets continue, Israel is allowing aid trucks into Gaza for the ordinary population. The tragedy for the Palestinians – yet again – is their leadership. Just as Yasser Arafat denied his people a viable state in Gaza and 97% of the West Bank, with a capital in East Jerusalem, by rejecting the Clinton Plan in 2000, so the Hamas regime has condemned 1.5 million Gazans to international isolation and now, to be caught up in a military conflict that their leaders could have so easily prevented.

Hamas refused to accept what they claimed were the international community’s “unreasonable” criteria for international acceptance – that the organisation abandon terrorism and recognize Israel’s right to exist. Egypt pleaded with Hamas to end its rocket attacks lest Israel be left with no choice but to declare war on the Gaza regime. Hamas ignored the advice.

Pity the Palestinians for their wretched self-destructive leaders, who would see their own people burn rather than give up the dream of destroying the Jewish State.

Hamas, motivated above all by hatred of Israel and of Jews, has always looked to sow bloody carnage. Now it is reaping the fruits on a grand scale. This is war. Israel has had enough.