The ceasefire began the way that the war did; with a flight of rockets falling from the sky over Israel’s battered south where working class families wait to learn if they will have to spend the night in safe rooms and shelters.
There is no ceasefire, despite declarations from the international community to the contrary, just as there has been no peace for the past twenty years despite peace accords being signed.
In the language of diplomacy, ceasefire does not mean that the rockets will stop falling and peace does not mean an end to the violence. They mean only that Israel is not allowed to fight back when the rockets fall and the bombs go off. Peace does not mean an absence of killing; what it means is that the terrorists are the only ones allowed to kill.
The ceasefire means that diplomacy has succeeded and the goal of diplomacy in the Middle East is not to make it possible for Israeli children to sleep safely at night, but to pull back Israel from finishing a war....
◼ In the Shoes of an Israeli; What would it be like to live amid a constant barrage of rockets? I now know. - Charles Bybelezer/Front Page
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s statement to the foreign press at the outset of Pillar of Defense was particularly poignant:◼ The New York Times’ Hamas Romance; Welcome to Roger Cohen's twisted world, where victims are perpetrators, and terrorists are peacemakers. - Joseph Klein/Front Page
“Seven years ago, Israel withdrew from every square inch of Gaza. Now, Hamas took over the areas we vacated. What did it do? Rather than build a better future for the residents of Gaza, the Hamas leadership, backed by Iran, turned Gaza into a terrorist stronghold.
“I’m stressing this because it’s important to understand that there is no moral symmetry; there is no moral equivalence, between Israel and the terrorist organizations in Gaza. The terrorists are committing a double war crime. They fire at Israeli civilians, and they hide behind Palestinian civilians.”
