Unlike Israelis, we lack guts!

By Kanchan Gupta
 
The ‘city airport’ in Herzliya is off the main road, hidden behind heavy foliage, much of it growing wild, 10 km north of Tel Aviv. On a winter forenoon we take off from this airport in a rather ageing helicopter with a bubbletop. Flying low, we head south of Tel Aviv for Sderot, a frontier town on Israel’s border with Gaza Strip. Sderot has been in the news for more than a year now and has earned for itself a unique distinction: It is the most bombed place in the world yet its residents remain defiant and unshaken.
 
We land in a field, raising a mini dust storm. From there, it is a good 15 minutes’ drive to the border post. The squat watchtower overlooks the barbed wire fence that demarcates Israeli territory. Across the fence is a stretch of barren land. And beyond that lies Gaza Strip — a jumble of houses almost leaning on each other. In a bunker on the Israeli side, soldiers constantly scan the landscape for any movement on the ground while high-resolution cameras mounted on a balloon hovering in the sky keep watch for Qassam rockets. Electronic gadgets and subterranean sensors fill in for human error.
 
The first Qassam rocket — a crude device crafted out of metal pipe and fixed with fins made from bits of scrap, and named after a fanatical preacher – was fired six years ago. Since then, it has been raining rockets on Sderot. Till now, 2,000 Qassam rockets have landed on homes, playgrounds, schools and other public places; this year alone more than 300 rockets have been fired at Sderot. Luckily, in the absence of a guiding mechanism, the rockets cannot be targeted at precise locations. They take off with a thud, zig-zag through the air in a fiery trajectory, and land whenever they run out of fuel. Thankfully there have been no major fatalities, but then, psychological scars do not show.
 
The town wears a somnolent look. There are no people on the streets or children playing in the gardens and parks. The few shops that are open are empty. Nobody takes a chance and everybody prefers to remain indoors. At night, parents sleep in turns lest they miss out on the warning that precedes the landing of a rocket. It’s usually a woman’s voice over loudspeakers that fetches the alarming news: "Tseva Adom! Tseva Adom!" It means, "Code Red". The old and young, parents clutching toddlers, jump for cover.
 
Life is tough in Sderot. But despite living in the constant fear of being blown up by a Qassam rocket or watching your loved ones taking a direct hit, nobody has left Sderot. People have dug in and their spirits are amazingly high. It’s a humbling experience to be among them, and an afternoon in Sderot teaches you an important lesson: Cowards cannot build nations and quislings cannot protect them.
 
If the people of Sderot have displayed remarkable courage in the face of adversity, their leaders in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have been equally determined not to let them down. Israel has retaliated by blockading Gaza Strip, leaving Ismail Haniya and his balaclava-clad "death-to-kafirs" chanting fans to stew in their own fetid juice. Not that this bothers Hamas too much. Its jihadi force recently breached Gaza’s barrier with Egypt, without meeting any resistance, to get hold of ‘provisions’ — including, it is believed, arms and ammunition.
 
But the Israeli blockade remains and there is as yet no sign of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Cabinet yielding to pressure from do-gooders and busybodies, especially in Europe where hearts tend to bleed too much and too easily. Closer home in New Delhi, the CPI(M) has issued a statement denouncing Israel for "punishing" the "innocent people of Gaza". Hamas and the CPI(M) are made for each other: Both use violence to achieve their goals; neither is moved by human sorrow and suffering.
 
Meanwhile, Israel has gone on high alert with Hizbullah screaming murder after wanted terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, who looked after the terror outfit’s ‘military operations’, was killed by a mysterious car bomb in Damascus last Wednesday night. Hizbullah insists Israelis are behind the killing; of course, this has been denied by Israel — actually it has been neither confirmed nor denied — which is celebrating the death of a cold-blooded killer. Many others are celebrating, too, and not all of them are Jews.
 
Not that Israel has shied away from going after its enemies and assassinating them. We know how ‘Black September’ was dealt with after Palestinian terrorists took Israeli athletes hostage at Munich during the 1972 Olympics and killed 11 of them. Legend has it that Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak, in his earlier avatar as a team leader in Sayeret Matkal, infiltrated a PLO hideout in Beirut disguised as a woman and killed three top operatives. In more recent times, the fire-breathing spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and his successor, Abdul al-Aziz Rantissi, were despatched to the other world, their departure separated by a month.
 
Imad Mughniyeh plotted the bombing of the US Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. He was also involved in the hijacking of a TWA airliner in 1985. He had joined Hizbullah in the 1980s along with Hassan Nasrallah, who now heads the organisation. For the past three decades he has been masterminding terrorist strikes across the region, largely in Israel. Intelligence agencies, including those of Arab countries, believe Tehran provided him with more than a diplomatic passport to facilitate unhampered travel between Lebanon, Syria and Iran.
 
As long as he was alive, those looking for him — and the list of such people is very long – didn’t know what he looked like. There were no photographs of the wanted man, just vague details of his features. It’s only after his violent death that a photograph was released by Hizbullah through its television channel, Al-Manar. Stories abound of how Imad Mughniyeh underwent plastic surgery every few years, how he would never sleep in the same house twice, and how he would move from one place to another to avoid detection. In the end he died like his brothers, Fuad and Jihad, did.
 
And so the great game continues in West Asia, with the victim refusing to surrender an inch and the aggressors — Hamas, Hizbullah, Iran — equally determined to wipe Israel from the map of the world. What is admirable is the fight back by Israelis and their Government. In India, a nation of more than a billion people, we cave in even before push comes to shove. All it took was a group of breast-beating women, not one of them even remotely related to the hostages abroad IC 814, for the Government and the nation to chicken out and release three wanted terrorists who have since committed further heinous crimes. We are expected to believe the bunkum about "zero tolerance towards terrorism" that we are hearing all over again!
 
Source:
http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnist1.asp?main_variable=Columnist&file_name=kanchan%2Fkanchan157%2Etxt&writer=kanchan