January 26, 2009: ‘If somebody was sending rockets into my house’

By Michael Regenstreif

As this issue of the Bulletin went to press, Israel’s three-week war with Hamas in Gaza seemingly came to an end when Israel said its goals had been met and declared a ceasefire.

Hopefully, the guns, bombs and rockets will remain silent.

As many of the speakers noted at the Ottawa Jewish community’s solidarity rally with Israel on January 8 – one of many rallies held in cities across Canada that evening – the loss of every innocent life in this war, Palestinian and Israeli, was a tragedy.

The Palestinians had such a tremendous opportunity to further their society when Israel withdrew its settlers and military from Gaza in 2005. Their leaders could have seized the opportunity to begin building a prosperous economy that would have lifted their people out of the terrible poverty they’ve known for too many generations. Instead, they fought what amounted to a civil war, resulting in Hamas seizing control from the Palestinian Authority.

Houses and other buildings and farms and greenhouses for growing food – left behind by the departed Israeli settlers – were not put to use by the Palestinians; they were destroyed. Imagine, in a society where too many children don’t get enough to eat, farms and state-of-the-art greenhouses that could have been used to feed their children are destroyed. Instead of building an economy, Hamas built rockets to terrorize nearby Israeli communities like Sderot and sent a terrorist squad into Israel to kidnap Gilad Schalit.

Last March 31, a delegation from Sderot came to Ottawa. They met with politicians on Parliament Hill during the day and with the Jewish community in the evening at the Soloway JCC, where they described what life in their community was like under the constant rocket attacks from Gaza.

In a conversation over dinner that March evening, Eeki Elner, one of the Sderot visitors, told me that, as a child of Holocaust survivors who came to Israel as refugees, he understands the terrible plight of the Palestinian refugees and fully supports the principles of trading land for peace and the two-state solution with the Palestinians.

“But Sderot is not in disputed territory,” he said. “The rocket attacks on Sderot are an attack on the very existence of Israel.”

Clearly, Israel could not allow the rocket attacks to go on forever. As Barbara Farber said at the January 8 rally, “It’s an unconscionable way to live.”

And as then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said on a visit to Sderot last summer, and reiterated this month less than two weeks before his inauguration, “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

By the start of the war, the range of the Hamas rockets reached far beyond Sderot, which lies close to the Gaza border. As Marty Davis tells us in his report on Page1, his community of Ashkelon, about 10 miles from Gaza, became a regular target of Hamas rockets. So, too, did the much further away Beer Sheva.

That is the sad state of affairs that brought Israel into the war with Hamas and to its terrible consequences for so many innocent people.

Obama has now begun his tenure in the Oval Office. As Thomas Friedman wrote January 13 in his typically astute New York Times column, the focus of Israel, and the Obama team, “should be on creating a clear choice for Hamas for the world to see: Are you about destroying Israel or building Gaza?”

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Sid Ryan, the president of CUPE Ontario and long-time anti-Israel activist, wants Israeli academics banned from Ontario universities, unless they explicitly denounce the Gaza policies of the Israeli government (presumably in a way that meets his standards).

Would Ryan apply such a ban to Israeli Arabs or just Israeli Jews? Beyond issues of discrimination, any such ban would mean the utter abandonment of the principles of academic freedom to which our institutions of higher learning are supposed to aspire.

But don’t assume that Ryan speaks for CUPE. Paul Moist, the national president of CUPE, says “such a resolution is wrong and would violate the antidiscrimination standards set out in the CUPE constitution. I will be using my influence in any debates on such a resolution to oppose its adoption.”

I don’t suppose we should hold our collective breaths waiting for Ryan to propose the banning of Palestinian academics from Ontario universities unless they explicitly denounce the Sderot-Ashkelon-Beer Sheva policies of Hamas.