Ashkelon is a beautiful coastal city on the Mediterranean Sea. The original ancient port goes back more than 4000 years and archeological finds show it was ruled over the course of millennia by the Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, Assyrians, Persians, Hasmoneans, Greeks and Romans and was destroyed and left uninhabited by the Muslims. The Biblical story of the Israelite Judge Samson and the Philistine woman Delila took place here. Just a mile from where I live in the modern Israeli city, stands the oldest known stone archway in the world.<\/p>\n
Today, our town of 130,000 residents is probably better known as the city that has been targeted with nearly 1000 GRAD and Qassam rockets from the Gaza Strip by Hamas, the terrorist organization which rules Gaza. Over 4,000 missiles have been launched this week at Israel.<\/p>\n
My wife and I have spent most of our time during the past 12 days living and sleeping on the floor in the shelter room we are lucky enough to have in our apartment. Until one has heard the nearly constant red-alert sirens and felt the impact of explosions as either Iron Dome downs missiles, or as missiles penetrate and hit homes and buildings, one will likely not understand the reality of Ashkelon and Israel.<\/p>\n
As we have watched how this war has been portrayed in the American and other foreign media, we\u2019ve felt increasingly isolated.\u00a0 Israel can do no right. The comedian John Oliver\u2019s recent diatribe against Israel is paradigmatic. It claimed that taking down a building after warning its residents to leave because the building houses terrorist activities, is somehow a war crime. At the same time, Oliver shouts in fury that Israel\u2019s response to Hamas\u2019 rockets is disproportionate because Israel has the Iron Dome defense system and Gaza doesn\u2019t. It isn\u2019t fair, claims Oliver, because Israel\u2019s airstrikes are effective while Hamas\u2019 thousands of rockets often don\u2019t reach their target.<\/p>\n
Why did Israel develop the Iron Dome defense system? The short answer is that Hamas would have destroyed more than half of Israel this week without it. Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both have stockpiled Iranian supplied missiles and explosive drones with one purpose in mind\u2014to kill Israeli civilians. They are the reason Israel had to invest in developing Iron Dome. Arguing that this makes the fight unfair is like saying that a cop when fired upon, uses disproportionate response in shooting back, because he or she is wearing a protective vest.<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s response has in actuality, been disproportionately weak. A proportional response would have been to answer the rocket attacks on civilian populations with the same. Proportional response then, would mean Israel should have rained down 4000 bombs on Gaza indiscriminately, instead of investing in surgical airstrikes to avoid civilian casualties.<\/p>\n
The illogic of the accusation of disproportionate response would be laughable if it weren\u2019t reflective of an inherent prejudice against the Jewish State. Oliver\u2019s claims are shocking in their absurdity, yet they are no different than what we’ve heard in Congress from Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, or on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, as well as at mass anti-Israel demonstrations throughout the world.<\/p>\n
The only way Israel might win favor in the eyes of most of her accusers, would be to be eradicated. That is the major plank in Hamas\u2019 charter\u2014to eradicate Israel and Jews from the world.<\/p>\n
Those who wave Palestinian flags in demonstrations against Israel\u2019s actions in this war, chanting \u201cFrom the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free\u201d, or twist the truth as do Oliver, Tlaib and Omar, give implicit and explicit support to Hamas\u2019 terrorism and thus to its major backer, Iran. \u201cThe river\u201d is the Jordan river. \u201cThe sea\u201d, is the Mediterranean. What is between the Jordan and the Mediterranean? Israel. The chant is for Israel\u2019s destruction.<\/p>\n
John Oliver, pray that Israel succeeds in this fight, because Israel is the canary in the coal mine of ideological Islamic terrorism. Telling the canary to shut up, will lead to disaster in the Western world.<\/p>\n
I pray that someday, people will come visit the ancient and modern Israeli city of Ashkelon in peace, and no-one will be thinking of rockets, bombs and mortars but rather of history, the Bible and the beach.<\/p>\n\n
My wife and I have spent most of our time during the past 12 days living and sleeping on the floor in the shelter room we are lucky enough to have in our apartment. Until one has heard the nearly constant red-alert sirens and felt the impact of explosions as either Iron Dome downs missiles, or as missiles penetrate and hit homes and buildings, one will likely not understand the reality of Ashkelon and Israel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":2745,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[75,93,78,127],"tags":[],"coauthors":[80],"class_list":["post-2744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-israel","category-modern-judaism","category-politics"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2744"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2747,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744\/revisions\/2747"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2744"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}