Nearly a year ago, I was in the southern Israeli city of Sderot, where, on almost any day, you could see the current war coming. "The next Middle East war may start over Sderot," I wrote back then. I came by my prescience the hard way -- in a bomb shelter. That day, three Qassam rockets had hit the city. It took no genius to see the imminence of war. It takes real stupidity to blame it on Israel.
That was just the first paragraph from someone who was there, who witnessed the mindless terror those rocket attacks have caused to civilian populations of Israel.
He goes on though:
I get the impression that Israel is expected to put up with this. The implied message from demonstrators and some opinion columnists is that this is the price Israel is supposed to pay for being, I suppose, Israel. I am informed by a Palestinian journalist in a Post op-ed that Israel is trying to stop "amateur rockets from nagging the residents of some of its southern cities." In Sderot, I saw homes nagged to smithereens.
There is more, read his whole column but a heartfelt thank you to Mr. Cohen for saying what needed to be said and from giving people a firsthand account, not from Israel, not from Hamas, nor the people in Gaza, but from someone who has seen, with his own eyes, the destruction that proceeded the most recent events.
Funny how the world ignores the whole situation for years, when thousands of rockets are falling on Israel from Hamas in Gaza, yet when Israel fights back, all of a sudden everyone wants to focus on it.
Mr. Cohen is tight, "It takes real stupidity to blame it on Israel."
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