28/05/2010 ‘Turning Point Four’ has ended in occupied Palestine and the home front’s readiness to tolerate a new type of war in which border fronts are less significant and rockets are a dominating factor has been experienced: The home front is not ready enough to live up to the expected threats.
ISRAEL’S SECURITY IS NOT GOOD
In his Haaretz article, Ari Shavit called on the Israeli community not to delude themselves as drill are nothing like the real thing. “The siren that sounded across the country yesterday did not signal a genuine emergency. No rockets fell in the center of the country, and no skyscrapers collapsed in central Tel Aviv...The roads were not blocked by hundreds of thousands of urbanites pouring out of the cities. Underground parking garages were not swamped with masses of people seeking shelter. And Ben-Gurion International Airport was not overrun by frightened Israelis fleeing their country,” Shavit noted.
The author went on to say that Israel’s national security was ‘not good’ and he attributed this to the unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005, the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006 and the war on Gaza in 2008-09.
The Olmert war in Lebanon a year later strengthened Hezbollah to an unprecedented extent, and the Olmert war in Gaza in 2008-09 led to a dangerous erosion of Israel's legitimacy,” Shavit said.
“As a result of these four lamentable events, as well as the development of rockets and missiles, the Israel of 2010 is under far greater threat than the Israel of 2000.
Its ability to use decisive force against those who threaten it has been greatly restricted. The quiet is deceptive. The ice is thin, and there is no way of knowing when or where it will break,” the Israeli author added.
ISRAEL UNDER MORE THREAT; TIME RUNNIG AGAINST US
Shavit describes the situation in Israel from a melancholic perspective as he sees the slow pull back of the Palestinians from the two-state-solution, the impatience of the international community with Israel, the ‘intolerable’ demographic situation of the Israelis, and the Zionist entity’s ‘disgraceful’ moral situation, as putting Israel under more threat and making time run against it.
The leftist author lashed out at PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s right wing that “is still spreading the word that everything’s just fine.” “It will soon become clear that we can live perfectly well even in an impossible situation. The doomsayers can talk all they want, but everything will be fine. There's nothing to worry about, nowhere to rush off to. If we don't give in, Abu Mazen will give up. If we don't blink, Obama will disappear. Don't worry, promises the right, the State of Israel has time on its side,” Shavit’s sarcastic comments read.
“But that is wrong,” he added. “The illusion has sprung up that military might and economic prosperity are enough to assure our future. A dangerous dissonance has developed between visible reality and its invisible counterpart. The relative quiet that the Israel Defense Forces, the Shin Bet security service and high tech have granted us has become a toxic quiet. It has allowed us to celebrate our lives without seeing the circumstances of our lives. It has allowed us to ignore the threats that are closing in on us.”
Shavit continued to criticize the right’s conduct saying that that the argument of time was an argument about life and death.
“On the eve of the Yom Kippur War (Six Day War), the right thought there was still time. On the eve of the intifada, the right thought there was still time. Today, too, when the threat of rocket fire and the threat of the occupation are tangible and immediate, the right thinks there is still time. But the truth is that there is no time. If we don't act in time, time will beat us. It is only the silent siren that warns us of the genuine emergency,” he concluded.
Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah dealt Israel another blow last Tuesday when he announced a new formula that will be put into effect – along with previously announced formulas - in any future war with Israel; the maritime confrontation. In previous pledges, his eminence vowed to crush Israeli ground forces if they enter Lebanon and also promised to hit Israeli airports. “In any future war that you will wage on Lebanon, if you besiege our coastline and our ports, then every Israel-bound military, civilian, and commercial ship on the Mediterranean will be under the fire of the Islamic resistance,” Sayyed Nasrallah said Tuesday while marking Resistance and Liberation Day in Dahiyeh (Beirut’s southern suburb.)
Palestinian political analyst Nasser Lahham told Al-Manar Website that Sayyed Nasrallah’s discourse has moved the confrontation from psychological war to chess war; the game of the intelligent. “Sayyed Nasrallah’s speech was unprecedented because it introduced – for the first time – the term: sea retaliation, which was absent in every Arab army’s dictionary...Israeli occupation authorities have banned Israeli media from analyzing Sayyed Nasrallah’s speech but I expect that there will be Israeli reactions on the speech in the next few days and they will overshadow the political atmosphere in the Zionist entity,” Lahham said. For his part, the head of the Strategic Studies and Information, Imad Fawzi Al-Shoaibi, told Al-Manar Website that Sayyed Nasrallah’s speech was a declaration of a new balance of terror. “The new equation is that Israel does not have the military and technological supremacy anymore because the resistance has become a match, a counterpart. It was clear from his eminence’s speech that the resistance now possesses the necessary technology to confront this enemy that used to brag about supremacy.” Shoaibi added that the resistance is today engaged in this confrontation with Israel from a broader strategic perspective, “not as a militia or a guerrilla organization, but as a regular army that conceals what it possesses and only reveals it at times of war.”
Wael Karaki contributed to this report
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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