“The rockets and bombings and shootings of the past five years show that those who believed in the breakthrough of the Oslo Accords in 1993, and the similar agreement offered at the Camp David summit of 2000, who wanted justice for Palestine and peace for Israeli behind secure borders, now appear naive. History has moved on.”
Yes — and in the coming years, it is those who believe that Islam is a religion of peace and that a tiny minority of extremists is responsible for all the trouble who will appear naive. And those who today are marginalized and tarred as propagandists or worse for daring to speak of the roots of violence within the Islamic texts themselves will be seen as having been right all along.
From the Sydney Morning Herald, with thanks to JE:
THE Qassam rocket is a primitive weapon, a steel tube filled with explosives. It has no guidance system, only limited range and poor accuracy. Primitive it may be, but it is a highly effective propaganda tool, as dozens of these rockets have been fired from Gaza into Israel in the past two months.
The rocket attacks were the answer from the Palestinian side to Ariel Sharon’s gamble to unilaterally begin a series of strategic withdrawals from the occupied Palestinian territories. The gamble has failed, and the impact of these Qassam rockets may be closer to home than you think.
It is time to connect the dots. The political death of Sharon is linked to the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004, which is linked to the liquifying of politics and economic growth in the Palestinian territories which, in turn, is linked to the rocket attacks on Israel from Lebanon, and the religious civil war in Iraq, and the nuclear bellicosity and anti-Semitism of Iran. It’s all connected.
In southern Lebanon, now dominated by the Shiite militia Hezbollah, which is committed to holy war with Israel, the Iranian Government has been funnelling thousands of Katyusha rockets to Hezbollah. These rockets present a much higher order magnitude of threat than the home-made Qassams. According to the Middle East Defence Bulletin and Defence News, Hezbollah’s arsenal has grown to an estimated 12,000 Katyushas, and the more recent models have a range of 75 kilometres, which brings the major port city of Haifa within the zone of potential mayhem.
On December 28, 10 Katyushas were fired from Lebanon into a residential neighbourhood of the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona. Credit for the attack was claimed by the terrorist group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which is leading the carnage in Iraq. If true, it would be the first direct attack on Israel by an arm of al-Qaeda. The attack completed a circle. The object of the rocket attacks from Gaza and southern Lebanon was to kill any peace process, maintain the status quo, thus continuing a long war of attrition against Israel that invigorates the jihadists around the Muslim world.
The rockets and bombings and shootings of the past five years show that those who believed in the breakthrough of the Oslo Accords in 1993, and the similar agreement offered at the Camp David summit of 2000, who wanted justice for Palestine and peace for Israeli behind secure borders, now appear naive. History has moved on.
Read it all.