Excerpts from
"A View from the Target Zone"
by the Israeli physicist Haim Harari
Editorial None: Harari is the former president of the Weizmann Institute
of Science. I received the full article (including Harari's bio) via e-mail
in January 2009 and, because of concerns about copyright issues, I am
posting only parts of it. I will be happy to forward the original article
to anyone who requests it.
T. P.
For eight years, approximately 5000 rockets have been sent deliberately into
Israeli population centers, by the Hamas terrorists. The rockets are extremely
inaccurate. The good news is that they often hit an empty field. The bad news
is that, when they do hit buildings and people, they kill, maim and destroy.
It is a very ugly game of Iranian Roulette.
But the most significant fact is that the undisputed purpose of the rockets
is to kill civilians in a random manner. Since they miss entire towns, they
could not possibly be aimed at military or strategic targets. No claim is made
by the Hamas of anything other than a deliberate attempt to kill civilians within
Israel. The world knows about the rockets but rarely mentions that they are
aimed only at the civilian population and at nothing else.
The favorite hour of launching the daily Hamas rockets during the last eight
years was 7:45 in the morning, but only on weekdays. Why? Because this is the
time in which the streets are full of Israeli children, on their way to school.
No one wants to waste rockets when no children are in the streets, during the
weekend.
Eight year old children in the Israeli town of Sderot, a few miles from the
Gaza border, live, since they were born, with these rockets. They know no other
life. When the alarm sounds, they have exactly 15 seconds to reach an improvised
cover. Eighth grade children, age 13, have never gone to school, since kindergarten,
without the real threat of having a rocket hit them on the way. Their parents
have never felt safe about sending their child to school. It is very difficult
for anyone living in a normal safe place, to imagine what it means to send your
child to school, every single day, for eight years, with the fear that he or
she may never reach school because of a missile attack, aimed at killing the
children. The world seems to accept this.
Israel withdrew from the Gaza strip in 2005. Not one Israeli soldier or civilian
remained there. Everything was ready for the people of Gaza to start a new life
and economic development. There was no blockade, border crossings were open.
Instead came increased shooting of rockets into Israel, a Hamas coup, throwing
Fatah Palestinians from roofs of buildings to their death and torturing their
own people in their prisons. It is regrettable that Israel did not react with
full force to the very first rockets after its withdrawal from Gaza, but there
was always the naïve illusion that perhaps talks, discussions, verbal threats
and temporary closings of the border crossings, might do the job. What Israel
did not take into account was that Iran, directly or through Hizbullah, was
paying the Hamas operatives, per rocket launch.
Larger and better rockets were now stored in mosques, schools, hospitals and
normal apartment buildings. Mortars were added to the menu of shooting at Israeli
civilians. Schools financed by the UN were used in order to launch mortar shells
and missiles. The greenhouses left intact by the withdrawing Israelis were destroyed,
their metal parts were converted to primitive rockets and their locations became
favorite launching areas. Launching rockets at the Israeli population brings
a much better income than growing strawberries and flowers in greenhouses.
The absurd notion that Israel must supply fuel, electricity, food and medication
to an outlaw region controlled by a terror organization, became a permanent
mantra in the western media. Israel was supposed to provide the Hamas with raw
materials for the rockets launched at its citizens, with electricity for the
machinery used to produce these rockets, with food for its designers and manufacturers,
and with building materials in order to construct safe bunkers for the Hamas
leadership under schools and hospitals. On one hand the Hamas was claimed to
have been the legitimate democratically elected government of the majority of
the population and on the other hand the population, that allegedly elected
these thugs, was declared innocent and suffering. The inconsistency was never
pointed out.
Palestinian ambulances are routinely used to move terrorists around. This has
also been the Palestinian practice in the West Bank during the terror wave in
2001-2002. An ambulance is an ideal method of transporting a suicide murderer
across check points. In the unlucky case that the criminal is caught, there
is at least a good press photograph of the ugly Israelis attacking or stopping
an ambulance. It is a win-win situation. If an ambulance full of healthy Hamas
terrorists and explosives is hit from the air, the pictures are even better
for the western media and for Al Jazeera.
When the Hamas terrorists are killed, they are counted by the "UN Sources"
as civilians. That is how the "UN sources" reach the huge numbers
of dead civilians they are reporting. Interestingly, Al Jazeera almost never
shows dead bodies of young males, and the western media, being fed by Palestinian
stringers, follow suit.
The Hamas TV ("Al Aksa TV") and Al Jazeera show, 24 hours a day,
repeated video clips with loud music, showing injured bloody children, including
some body parts. Some injuries are real, some are not, but the videos are shown
nonstop between every two news items. The news items themselves are often lies,
but that really does not matter. What do matter are the video clips, edited
like commercials, brainwashing a worldwide audience and a new generation of
future terror sympathizers.
A video taken several years ago in Gaza, surfaced. The video documents an accidental
explosion of a Hamas truck, carrying a large number of missiles, among celebrating
Palestinians somewhere in Gaza. Many were killed and injured in this accident,
and the pictures were devastating. There is no Israeli involvement whatsoever,
and the event happened a few years ago. European networks, including France
2, are showing it now as evidence for the current "criminal" behavior
of Israel. The French channel apologized later, but the number of people who
heard the apology is significantly fewer than those who saw the horrible pictures
and believed the lies. In this case, at least, the hoax was delivered by the
Hamas and France 2 was apparently the victim, not the perpetrator, as it definitely
was in well known previous cases.
That the Hamas murderers use these tactics, lies and methods, is not at all
surprising. That the international community, with all its investigative reporters,
swallows these lies so eagerly, without exposing them, is something which demands
an explanation. [end of original article]
Excerpts posted Feb. 1, 2009.
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