Restore the Power of Deterrence

We are still mourning the deaths of IDF soldiers Lt. Hanan Barak and Staff Sgt. Pavel Slutzker, and we are still praying for the safety of Gilad Shalit and his return home. And yet some of us, as if deliberately so, have begun to focus on the most marginal details of the incident. As if deliberately not to focus on the main issue.

We are still mourning the deaths of IDF soldiers Lt. Hanan Barak and Staff Sgt. Pavel Slutzker, and we are still praying for the safety of Gilad Shalit and his return home. And yet some of us, as if deliberately so, have begun to focus on the most marginal details of the incident. As if deliberately not to focus on the main issue.

When a terror attack used to be committed in one of the settlements, a half-day of debates would begin immediately about whether there was a fence or whether there wasn’t a fence. When a suicide bomber terrorist would blow himself up in a bus or a mall they used to debate for an entire day how the suicide bomber got in: through the fence or through the roadblocks that bypass the fence.

When soldiers who were guarding a “settlement” were killed, a knife-in-the-back debate used to begin: why does an entire IDF battalion have to guard a single settlement. And now, when we still have not buried the dead of the Kerem Shalom attack and it is patently evident that the fence did not stop the terrorists, an endless debate has begun over whether there was concrete intelligence or not.

In Chelm [the town of fools in Jewish lore] there was a small river that had a bridge over it. One day the bridge broke and many of the people crossing it tripped and were injured. The wise men of Chelm sat for seven days and seven nights until they decided to build a hospital beside the bridge.

The State of Israel is behaving similarly. We have a war and our attention is focused on budget cuts. Hundreds of rockets slammed into Sderot in the course of this past month and the government experts busy themselves with the question of where we are going to take the money from to finance installing protective armor in the schools in the city.

We have a war on our hands and the government busies itself with defense, fortification, excuses and preparations for the next withdrawal, which is going to turn the lives of everyone in this country into a living hell.

Where today are all those people who gambled with our lives, who promised us that if we would only withdraw from the Gaza Strip back to the Green Line quiet would reign? Where are they today, all those foolish experts who argued passionately that it would be in the terrorist organizations’ best interest to maintain quiet in the Gaza Strip and that they would relocate the bulk of their terrorist activities to Judea and Samaria?

They have names: Shaul Mofaz, Dan Halutz and Amos Gilad. Why is it that they do not admit today to their strategic error? Why are they not doing penance and admitting openly: we were mistaken and we misled you. We fled from Gaza and Gaza is now pursuing us. The rule for Netzarim is the rule for Kerem Shalom.

Fix the Bridge

The people who did not respond to the 5,000 rockets that were fired on Gush Katif are now perplexed by the thousands of rockets that have been fired on the western Negev. And the defense minister, who preached restraint a week ago, bears responsibility for our dead today. If he thought seriously that the warnings that he aired to Hamas would deter that murderous organization, perhaps we need a defense minister who knows how to think better. And if he knew that the warnings would be insufficient, but he needed the Israeli casualties to “justify” assassinating the Hamas leadership, then, in my opinion, he is an out and out criminal.

Either way, he and the prime minister are responsible for the fact that Israel has been unsuccessful at stopping the Kassam rocket fire.

They have sent a message of weakness and hesitation to the terror organizations and incessantly-but truly incessantly-have busied themselves while Sderot was under continuous rocket attack with trips overseas and statements that Israel wants to withdraw and to uproot tens of thousands of settlers and to destroy hundreds of settlements.

As we speak, when the entire army ought to be busy fighting in the Gaza Strip, the defense minister has chosen to busy himself with uprooting outposts in Judea and Samaria. It is no wonder that the army needed “early warning” even when it was deployed opposite an enemy that is engaged in warfare.

And now they will punish Hamas. Now they will carry out one operation or another in Gaza, perhaps they will kill Mohammed Deif, perhaps they will kill Ismail Haniya. But, once again, it will be too little too late, if with the other hand they signal to Hamas-patience, you’re winning, we intend to continue to withdraw. You can dig tunnels from Nabi Samuel all the way until you’re under the Knesset, you can shoot up Ben-Gurion Airport, and then Peretz and Olmert will roll their eyes and threaten the guilty parties. But it is they who are guilty.

It is not a hospital we need, but to fix the bridge itself. To change Israel’s security approach. To restore the power of deterrence.