“In a war for our home”

Times of Israel editor David Horovitz writes from Jerusalem this morning that this is his best effort to explain the Israel-Hamas war: “Hushed, determined Israel ‘in a war for our home'” (the internal quote is from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s press conference last night). David writes in the heart of his column:

When Netanyahu said last night that Israel is in “a war for our home,” it sounded anything but demagogic. When he said that Hamas had expected Tel Aviv to be in “ruins” by now, thanks to its rockets, we knew this was true. When he said Hamas had invested “years of work, and immense capital” in the tunnels, aiming to “carry out mega terror attacks and kidnappings,” and that the planned assaults “on kindergartens, dining halls” would have been “catastrophic,” there was no doubting him.

The word from Gaza is that Hamas’s terrorists and their commanders simply haven’t been seen in the past two weeks. They’ve melted away underground, emerging only to try to kill our soldiers when the IDF moves in, their spokesmen telling the world that Gaza civilian casualties are the fault of the Israeli occupation while simultaneously warning those same Gaza civilians not to heed Israel’s entreaties to leave the area for their own safety.

Often, at times of conflict, Israel is preoccupied with how “the world” is reporting and understanding events. We are bitter that we are misrepresented — that the international community doesn’t realize we are defending ourselves against aggressors (rather than being the aggressors), doesn’t internalize the cynical use by Hezbollah (in south Lebanon) and Hamas (in the West Bank 10 years ago and now in Gaza) of local citizens as expendable shields for their terrorist activity.

We’re frustrated about all that now too, but it’s not our preoccupation. For we find ourselves at war with an Islamic extremist group utterly committed to killing us, at whatever cost, delighting in the evil it wreaks upon us, indifferent to the devastation it brings down upon Gaza.

This is not a nasty terror group. This is a terrorist government that devotes its quasi-country’s resources principally toward wiping out the country next door.

Whole thing here.

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