By Tsvi Sadan, Israel Today—
Israelis learned about the latest Gaza ceasefire following a two-day, 500-rocket barrage from the likes of Hamas and Al Jazeera. Only later did the Israeli media inform the country that our cabinet had agreed to this cessation of hostilities. None of the top national leaders–including the prime minister, defense ministry or any other member of the Security Cabinet–bothered to offer even a rudimentary explanation for the move in order to at least try to sooth the raw emotions of some 800,000 Israelis who just spent a frightful 48-hours huddled in bomb shelters.
What Israelis did hear via a communique from certain government ministers was that the cabinet was divided on accepting the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire, and that at least four cabinet members had voted against it. This contradicted a government leak, most likely from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, that acceptance of the ceasefire had been unanimous.
The lack of unity, the confusion and disinformation, the efforts to blame one another for the pathetic outcome of this latest “round of combat,” as we call it here, was the final straw for the battered residents of southern Israel, who for the past eight months have suffered from flaming kites burning their fields, sporadic rocket fire targeting their towns, and a constant state of alert that means their children often can’t even go to school.
For these and many other Israelis, accepting the ceasefire was an act of cowardice, a clear-cut capitulation to the few thousand Hamas and Islamic Jihad thugs who terrorize Israel whenever they please. Continue Reading…
