Moshe Feiglin’s Decade-Old Article on Sderot – Still Relevant…

After one (Italian) bomb, the children of pre-State Haifa were evacuated to Hadera. Haifa’s residents were no less patriotic than today’s Israelis. Winston Churchill evacuated London’s children during the Blitz. Churchill was certainly no less a patriot than Ehud Olmert.

So after seven years of missile bombardment, why hasn’t Israel evacuated the children of Sderot? Are we braver than the War of Independence generation?

The answer is simple. If we evacuate the children of Sderot, their parents will follow and they won’t come back. They won’t come back because the State of Israel is not capable of winning a war that it does not understand, a war that it denies. Unlike the War of Independence or London in World War II, we know that we will not win. That is why the children of Sderot will not return and that is why their parents will follow suit. If we evacuate the children of Sderot, the same scenario will quickly take place in Ashkelon and Ashdod, until everything collapses. We have stuck the children of Sderot in the Gaza dike to maintain Shimon Peres’s “peace legacy” – and then we changed the channel.

At one point or another, Olmert’s prime ministerial chair will begin to quake and he will have to send the IDF back into Gaza. Even if we momentarily ignore the outrageous lack of moral standing of those responsible for the Expulsion, it is still clear that it is absolute folly to send the IDF back into Gaza. A military incursion into Gaza that is not for the purpose of conquering it, solving its overpopulation problem in other places in the world, declaring full Israeli sovereignty there and making the entire area flourish with one hundred Gush Katifs will achieve nothing but the pointless deaths of our soldiers.

Our sons will run through the alleys of Jebalya, being sure not to harm “innocent civilians.” And with maximum consideration and concern for our foes, our sons will be murdered as they fight from house to house, until they complete their mission with supreme heroism. (Assuming that the Four Mothers don’t mix in too early.) And then the prime minister (no matter who he is) will ceremoniously give Gaza to Fatah – the good terrorists. Simply put, we are about to sacrifice our sons so that we can transfer the Gaza Strip from arch-murderer A to arch-murderer B.

Since the Oslo Accords, Israel’s political strategy has been compelled exclusively by the Oslo option. Yitzhak Rabin brought Yasser Arafat to Israel so that he would fight the Hamas. Now terrorist B is launching missiles at us. So we will conquer Gaza, this time for terrorist C. Or even worse and more absurd, we will send our sons to be killed to conquer Gaza and return it to terrorist A. After all, Yossi Beilin is sure to sternly warn that if we do not take advantage of the “window of opportunity” and get killed for terrorist A, then we will get terrorist D or – who knows? – maybe even terrorist E. We will continue to transfer Gaza from one terrorist to the next, and each and every one of them will continue to fire missiles at Sderot.

Do we really think that the world will allow us to rebuild Gush Katif? Of course not. So let’s be serious. Maybe we should just cut off their electricity and water. But if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that the world will not allow us to do that either. And rightfully so. Because if Gaza is not part of our land, then Sderot is not part of our land either. And of course, if we gave the Temple Mount to the Muslims, then there is also no justification for the Jews to settle in Tel Aviv. The fact that the world claims that every potentially effective action that Israel takes in Gaza is illegitimate does not stem from a sudden outbreak of uncontrollable world-wide humanism. In the eyes of the world, it is illegitimate for Israel to defend Sderot because the world is convinced that the Hamas is right.

Just imagine if, at the beginning of World War II, Churchill would have announced that London actually does belong to Hitler. Or even worse, just imagine what would have happened if Churchill himself would have destroyed the border towns of England and then ceremoniously bestowed them on the Nazi murderer. Would he have enjoyed world support after that for bombing Dresden?

But we have already left Gaza? Very true. And by fleeing Gaza, we have also proven that Sderot is not ours, either. The entire world has seen how Israel has driven the Jews who believe in the Jewish claim to the Land of Israel from their homes. Everyone saw how Israel destroyed their towns and abandoned their synagogues to the Arab hordes. In full view of the gleeful world media, the State of Israel performed the most amazing moral hara-kiri of all times – obliterating any measure of justification for Jewish sovereignty over even one grain of the Holy Land in the process.

The Hamas terrorists may not be nice, but in the eyes of the world, they are just. They bomb civilians? So what? The British and Americans also bombed civilians. The world is with them because they are convinced that they are right. Israel has already made that clear.

So now what do we do about Sderot? The solution is to re-build one hundred Gush Katifs. That is impossible to accomplish under our present circumstances? Then we must evacuate the children.

But the children of Sderot are the finger in the dike.

We have only two choices. Either we create leadership that will fight, liberate the Temple Mount and Gaza and restore the justice that we lost in Gush Katif, or we will continue to live in Osloidian denial – at the expense of the blood of Sderot’s children.