Hopefully the last "war blog"

This is my third post for today - could I be getting addicted to this???? Well, the first two don't really count as they were mainly there for the links. If you haven't seen them, please have a look... but open them in the right order...

Well, we haven't really been getting a good press (although it is actually better than I thought it would be), but I guess it won't be good now that we've hit the UN compound and the foreign press building on the same day. I dare say the fact that people in both places had been firing on our soldiers will be considered irrelevant. I can understand that the Hamas people weren't exactly invited in, and, if I were in the building or compound, I certainly wouldn't go up to them in the middle of the action and say "I say - would you mind awfully removing your RPG from our building?", but it all boils down to the "It's them or us" attitude that I talked about in an earlier post. We had no choice. Many people will disagree with me, but I am convinced that our soldiers were protecting themselves.

In a sense, I can understand the world's outrage, but where was the same outrage when rockets were falling on Sderot over the last eight years? I suppose there are "outrages" and there are "outrages" -it just depends on which side of the Arab-Israeli question you stand. Yet, if you think about it, the world is also to blame for what is happening now. All the people who are suffering in Gaza now need not have suffered if the world had stepped in at an early stage and taken the necessary measures to safeguard Israeli lives. The administrative head of our health centre lives in Sderot - I wish you could have seen how she looked when rockets in Sderot were a daily occurrence, and heard her talk about the anguish of having to come to work and leave her children behind. Wouldn't that have made a nice 'item' for foreign reporters? I wonder why no one thought of showing our side of it, while we were just sitting back and taking it. I guess I might know the answer....

Another thing is the number of casualties. While there is no comparing the fire power being used, look at the small number of Israeli casualties. As the bombs fell during Hanukkah people used expressions like "nitzal be'ness" (saved by a miracle) or "another miracle of Hanukkah". There were no miracles here - just a lot of good luck and good sense. The fact that we build houses to protect their inhabitants. Maybe that's our mistake? If human life weren't so important here, and we didn't build proper shelters for ALL of the population, and if we didn't have the moral decency to hide our dead and wounded as much as possible from the public eye and rush them to hospital to get medical treatment, perhaps we would have had pictures to compete with the ones the world is seeing now. The question is: would it have pushed them into doing anything?

Today, a car suffered a direct hit in Be'er Sheva. The people in it got out and lay on the ground -just like we did, and I described in a previous post - however, they weren't so lucky. Two people, including a seven-year-old boy are in a serious condition. The others were moderately injured.
We were lucky - they weren't. Russian roulette a la israelienne....

Hopefully, this war is coming to an end and we will be able to get back to our routine. What will I do then? Well, watch this space....