Extraordinary Rendition

By: Hakim Hazik

With the support of the brave Israeli population and the help of the international community, we have entered the 17^th day of the Operation Gaza. Over 900 Palestinian terrorists are dead. Only 1.5 million to go. Very soon we will achieve everlasting peace in Gaza.  

We are peace-loving people. The Gazan terrorists have been given an opportunity, time and again by the Israeli Government and the international community to achieve peace for themselves and their children, by dying quickly and quietly. Throughout their tarnished, history, they have chosen to cynically ignore these sincere efforts.  

They were afforded one such opportunity in 1948, when they were removed from their ancestral villages in Ashkelon, Beersheba, Dir Yassin and Haifa, and put into more than 10 refugee camps, along with their goats and camels. They have chosen to live in these camps for all these 60 years, despite heartfelt pleas, sadly ignored, to vacate the land to the march of civilisation, by jumping into the sea, so conveniently located near their camps.  

The IDF persuaded the brave settlers, who had spent a lot of time and money and trying to claim this land for civilisation, to leave Gaza in 2005, their project unfinished. There was a hope that the vicious and aggressive people of this wretched land will see the hopelessness of their situation. But alas this proved to be another illusory hope.  

They have dug tunnels. They have deviously smuggled dual use technology under the guise of humanitarian assistance. They imported bottled water, so that their children can use it in water guns and inflict terror on the innocent and peace loving citizens of Israel. They have committed the unspeakable atrocity of acquiring powdered milk, so that their children are energised to throw stones on the peace loving Israeli tanks, acting only in self-defence.   

Our government has acted with utmost restraint in face of dire provocations. They committed the despicable and vile actions of exercising their right to vote and electing their own government, something that is unheard of in peoples of this background.  We decided to respond only in an incremental and humane fashion. We threw a steel girdle around Gaza, stopping all traffic. We have bombed their power stations, water supply, sewage works and hospitals. Unfortunately to no avail. They have stubbornly and foolishly refused to commit mass suicide, which is only thing, the nations of the world demand of them, including their kith and kin in the governments of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.  

I must state clearly and categorically, that our patience has a limit. Despite repeated warnings and in complete defiance of the world opinion, these people have continued to indulge in their nefarious activities. They are still running ambulances, they are still holding prayer meetings, and most shocking of all, they are still writing poetry and plotting schemes of democracy.  

This is intolerable. This will not stand. Israel is determined.

Refugee Camps