Settlements? No Rockets

Paula R. Stern..
Times of Israel..
09 September '12..

That’s right. None.

This morning, two rockets slammed into Israel – perhaps more will have been fired from Gaza into Israel by the time you read this. A rocket hit a house in Netivot, badly damaging the house as well as a neighboring one. The man inside the house, with the grace of God, was not injured. A rocket hit Beersheva and schools in both that city and Ashdod have been closed for the day.

“We claim responsibility for firing two rockets on Friday against the region of Sdot Negev,” said the terrorist group that fired the rocket. So, they know where they aimed, where they hit. There was no apology that they meant to hit somewhere else.There is no confusion here. It is not that they were aiming at a military target and missed.

By contrast, here in the “settlements,” my children went to school – on time and without fear of where they would need to hide if a siren suddenly went off and they had to go running.

In fact, the idea of a rocket hitting Maale Adumim (or any of the settlements in Judah and Shomron) is so out there that the one time a siren did sound (by mistake) during the Cast Lead war, my daughter and her friends were terrified and traumatized (A Child’s Alarm). Her words at the time, just a child’s words, were very profound, “We had tons of kids that cried. Even Rena cried. It was so scary the siren. I wasn’t ready for it. And Tehilla didn’t know what it was because in America they don’t have this.”

My daughter wasn’t “ready for it” – not then, not now. She does not grow up under attack as do the children in Israel’s south. As for Tehilla, who had recently come to Israel, she too was not prepared. That’s because in America they don’t have rockets slamming into their cities, not in Germany, France, nor in most countries in the world. Only here in Israel does it happen – and only here do some in our country find excuses rather than accept the blatant truth that even our enemies offer us.

The left wing of our country look to blame the right. They blame us – “see where you live – that’s why…that’s why…” That’s why, what? I want to ask them. Arabs have had no problem blowing up buses and shooting rockets from Kiryat Shemona in the north to Eilat in the south. Tel Aviv, Netanya, Jerusalem – and yet very rarely are there attacks in those so-called settlements.

Yes, there are some and they are as deadly and horrible as those in other parts of the country. Enough to prove we are part of Israel; certainly not enough to suggest we are the cause of all the other attacks.

(Read full "Settlements? No Rockets")

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