Yesterday, over 100 funerals were held in the small community of kibbutz Be'eri. Just one community. Hamas rockets were also fired yesterday at the kibbutz. We can't even bury our dead in peace.
At least 133 of the murdered were not Jewish. Yoseph Haddad, an Israeli Muslim Arab, gives his perspective:
This following pic is so on point for way too many people on Tumblr:
For the record, "It's wrong, but..." doesn't count as speaking out against the cold-blooded murder of Jews in their homes.
I'm writing about certain aspects less, but Israeli society has been FULL of beautiful gestures and acts of kindness. One example is a mother who had lost her only son to Hamas terrorists a few years ago, and who opened a free "supermarket" for Israelis running out of food and water, especially from among the evacuees. Another is a Bedouin family, who uploaded a video inviting anyone of the Jews who had been turned homeless to come and stay with them. These gestures from among the Israeli Arabs, Bedouins and Druze are the most beautiful ones to me. They're proof that we want and we CAN live here together, peacefully. Sadly, at least one such gesture was "punished." An Arab shop owner decided to donate 30 bicycles to Jewish kids from the south who had lost their homes. In retaliation, his shop was broken into, robbed, and then set on fire. What moves me the most is that even after that, he said he doesn't regret his decision, and will continue to contribute to Israeli society.
I want to say something about the warning that was given to Palestinians to evacuate the northern part of Gaza.
If Israel had started bombing that area with the intention of destroying Hamas facilities there, but without giving any warning, it would have killed a lot of civilians, and the reaction of the world would have been to decry Israeli actions. When Israel is giving them warning to move out, so that they're not killed in the bombings (and when they CAN return to their land once the fighting is done), Israel is still denounced, and I've seen people calling this by all sorts of horrendous terms (that don't actually apply). If Israel is being portrayed as evil whether we give a warning or not, what that means is that people are just not okay with Israel acting against Hamas in any capacity.
Except Israel doesn't actually have a choice. We tried to have one! That's what the border fence was for. We invested billions of shekels in building it. Money that could have gone to school, to hospitals, to rehabilitation programs, to all sorts of purposes that could have made Israeli society better, and save Israeli lives outside of the context of this conflict. Every Israeli patient whose life could have been saved if out medical system was better, for example, is one of the "invisible victims" of the conflict IMO. We spent so much money on the fence to stop Hamas, so that we wouldn't have to go into Gaza and fight to eliminate that organization. Such fighting would have ended in a loss of life for Israelis and for Gazans, so instead we built that fence. It was technologically the most advanced it could be. It still didn't stop Hamas. They built terror tunnels that brought them to the fence without being spotted on the surface, they had bombs that it seems they planted at the border during their "protests" near the fence, they had suicide drones that took out all of the electronic surveillance along the fence, leaving Israel "blind" as the infiltration of thousands of terrorists into its territory began, and they had intel on where the security forces are, to take them out first and leave the civilians vulnerable to rape, mutilation, kidnappings and murder.
In other words, there is no fence, there is no barrier that can stop Hamas. And without that, it's only a matter of time before carnage like this WILL happen again.
I am scared. For the families of the hostages, the thought of the fighting, where Israeli or Hamas fire might kill there loved ones, must be particularly difficult. Innocents will die on both sides when the ground action will start. That's always terrible, but for a country still counting and trying to identify its dead, that's a particularly gruesome truth. That we're sending some of our 18 year olds to die in order to keep the babies safe. Knowing that every one of these 18 year olds is somebody's baby. Every day, every hour that passes allows Hamas to dig in, to prepare and to lay traps for our soldiers. And yet the ground action has not started yet, because we want to give the Palestinians in the northern part of Gaza a chance to flee.
You can dislike the coming loss of life. We all do. I am shrinking with internal pain just thinking about it. But please stop painting the Israeli military reaction as if it's just a senseless revenge driven by blood lust. It's not. At least understand our perspective. To us, it's a fight for our lives. It's a fight for our lives that, no matter what, we will pay for with the lives of some of our loved ones.
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