12-Jul-06: Terror alert status goes to high

It's a hot and tense day here and the police have gotten instructions to immediately go into high alert mode.

A directive to this effect was issued this morning by the Ministry of Internal Security. It's feared that terror groups will seize on the general atmosphere created this morning in Israel's north - where Hezbullah opened a high-intensity shooting war in the early hours - to carry out terror attacks. The illustration on Yediot's website for the past hour (see picture at right) is misleading. This isn't a two-front war, meaning Gaza in the south and the Lebanese border in the north. It's actually a three-front war... at least. Perhaps a multi-front war would state it better. The home front - Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Haifa and all the towns and villages in between - are no less at war than the south and the north. Which is a timely reminder to absorb the meaning of what we wrote earlier this week:

Palestinian Arab support for abductions of Israelis exceeds 77% based on a poll whose results it published today. Less than a third of the Palestinian Arabs polled rejected such actions as being harmful to the Palestinian cause. As to their views on the deliberate, daily firing of Palestinian missiles into civilian areas of Israel, a mere 36% said they reject them and find them harmful to the Palestinian national interests. The majority thought this was just fine. People polled came from all parts of Gaza, Judea and Samaria. 

A commitment to painful compromise and peaceful neighbourly relations is simply not visible among the people living just the other side of the fence. They are remarkably united, according to their own pollsters, to continuing and enlarging their state of war with us. And with data like these staring us in the face, who said abductions have to happen only on the borders and only of soldiers? Terrorism has no self-restraint, no checks and balances. If they can do something, they will. That's why they're called terrorists.

Which leaves us in a somewhat philosphical frame of mind. Israel pulled its forces out of Southern Lebanon in the name of encouraging peaceful relations... and got katyushas. Israel abandoned its villages and communities in Gaza where there was a 2,000 year history of Jewish presence... and got Qassams. Next on the list is tearing up the communities of Judea and Samaria where our connection to the land and to the specific towns is measured in millennia. Whether the program is called realignment, convergence, disconnection, redeployment, disengagement or running to hide under the bed, it's a policy with which the dominant party in the current coalition government and its leader seem totally and curiously smitten (provided we ignore those ministers in the government who are currently thinking out loud for the benefit of the media that it really doesn't seem quite as smart a policy now as it did when the last Knesset elections were in full swing).

We're not advocating one policy or another, at least not here and now. The talking-heads might be right. But is anyone in the political leadership of this great country capable of drawing straight lines between what was done by our side last year or last decade, and what's being done to us here and now? If not, why not? And if they are, have they come to any revised conclusions lately? No one can say we're living in a static situation.