[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 9 (Thursday, January 15, 2009)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E95-E96]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 RECOGNIZING ISRAEL'S RIGHT TO DEFEND ITSELF AGAINST ATTACKS FROM GAZA

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                           HON. JACK KINGSTON

                               of georgia

                    in the house of representatives

                        Friday, January 9, 2009

  Mr. KINGSTON. Madam Speaker, when Israel unilaterally withdrew from 
Gaza in 2005, the Islamic group Hamas--which does not acknowledge 
Israel's right to exist--took control over the small strip of land. 
Since then, relations between Gaza and Israel have steadily 
deteriorated.
  On December 19, Hamas ended the 6-month cease-fire with Israel by 
launching dozens of rocket attacks into southern Israel, randomly 
targeting civilian neighborhoods. Eight days later, Israel began a 
counter defensive of large scale air strikes. Hamas has continually 
used Gaza as a launching pad for rockets against Israeli cities and has 
contributed deeply to a reduction in the quality of daily life and the 
deteriorating humanitarian situation.
  I deeply support Israel's right to defend themselves against Hamas 
attacks. I also hope to see a sustainable crease-fire brokered to save 
the innocent victims of Hamas' continual instigation of Israel's 
defensive power.
  A friend recently sent me this compelling Washington Post article 
which I would like to submit for the Record.

                [From the Washington Post, Jan. 4, 2009]

           As My Son Goes to War, I Am Fully Israeli At Last

                        (By Yossi Klein Halevi)

       Jerusalem.--``I just heard on the news that Gavriel's base 
     has been shelled,'' my wife, Sarah, said to me last Tuesday, 
     referring to our 19-year-old son, a member of an Israeli army 
     tank unit waiting on the Gaza border for the order to enter. 
     And, she added in a deliberately calm tone, ``A soldier was 
     killed.'' We texted Gavriel, and within five minutes he 
     called, safe. How, Sarah asked, did families survive war 
     before cellphones?
       For days we waited for a cabinet decision: Will there be a 
     land invasion or a new cease fire? The politicians began to 
     bicker while our soldiers waited on the border, in the rain 
     and the mud. Anything but this, I said to Sarah. Not another 
     Lebanon War, which, like Gaza, began with an impressive show 
     of Israeli air power but ended with Hezbollah leader Hassan 
     Nasrallah predicting the imminent end of ``the Zionist 
     entity.'' If we don't win this time--deliver an unambiguous 
     blow if not topple Hamas entirely--our deterrence will 
     further erode, inviting more rocket attacks and encouraging 
     the jihadist momentum throughout the Middle East.
       And then I caught myself: How can I be hoping for an 
     outcome that will send my son into battle? This is my first 
     experience as the father of a soldier, and now, after 26 
     years of living in Israel, I finally understand the terrible 
     responsibility of being an Israeli. I had assumed that I'd 
     become initiated into Israeliness when I myself was drafted 
     into the army as a 34-year-old immigrant in 1989. But perhaps 
     only now have I become fully Israeli. Zionism promised to 
     empower the Jews by making them responsible for their fate; 
     the price for that achievement is to be prepared to make the 
     ultimate sacrifice for one's commitments.
       I know Gaza from a previous conflict. During the first 
     intifada of the late 1980s, when Palestinians revolted 
     against the occupation, I was part of a reservist unit that 
     patrolled Gaza's refugee camps. There I learned

[[Page E96]]

     that there is no such thing as a benign occupation, as 
     Israelis had once deceived themselves into believing. Our 
     unit not only arrested terrorist suspects but also dragged 
     people out of their beds in the middle of the night to paint 
     over anti-Israel graffiti and rounded up innocents after a 
     grenade attack just to ``make a presence,'' in army 
     terminology. At night, in our tent, we argued about the 
     wisdom of turning soldiers into policemen of a hostile 
     civilian population that didn't want us there and which we 
     didn't want as part of our society.
       A majority of Israelis emerged from the first intifada 
     convinced that we need to do everything possible to end the 
     occupation and ensure that our children don't serve as 
     enforcers of Gaza's despair. That was why I initially 
     supported the 1993 Oslo peace process that took a terrible 
     gamble on Yasser Arafat's supposed transformation from 
     terrorist to peacemaker. And even after it became clear that 
     Arafat and other Palestinian leaders never intended to accept 
     Israel's legitimacy, I supported the unilateral withdrawal 
     from Gaza in 2005, simply to extricate us from that region, 
     knowing that we would not receive peace in return.
       And now my son is fighting in Gaza. The conflict he and his 
     friends confront is far worse than my generation's experience 
     in Gaza. In our time, we were confronted with mere rocks and 
     Molotov cocktails; my son faces Iranian-supplied anti-tank 
     weapons--one more price we will pay, along with the missile 
     attacks on our towns, for the Gaza withdrawal, just as the 
     Israeli right had warned.
       Still, I don't regret that withdrawal. If Israelis are 
     united today about our right to defend ourselves against 
     Gaza's genocidally minded regime, it is at least partly 
     because we are fighting from our international border. My son 
     and his friends have one crucial advantage over my 
     generation's experience in Gaza: They know, as we did not, 
     that Israel was ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for 
     peace, uprooting thousands of its citizens from their homes 
     and endorsing a Palestinian state. My son confronts Gaza 
     knowing that its misery is now imposed by its leaders. He 
     knows that his country was even prepared to share its most 
     cherished national asset, Jerusalem, with its worst enemy, 
     Arafat, for the sake of preventing this war. That empowers 
     him with the moral self-confidence he will need to get 
     through the coming days. The face of my Gaza enemy was a 
     teenager throwing rocks; the face of Gavriel's Gaza enemy is 
     a suicide bomber.
       But we are hardly free of moral anxiety. Even as I pray for 
     Gavriel's physical safety, I pray too for his spiritual well-
     being: that his tank doesn't accidentally shell civilians, 
     that he isn't caught in some terrible mistake, which can so 
     easily happen in a war zone where terrorists hide behind 
     innocent people.
       For the past eight years, Israel has fought a single war 
     with shifting fronts, moving from suicide bombings in 
     Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to Katyusha attacks on Israeli towns 
     near the Lebanon border to Qassam missiles on Israeli towns 
     near the Gaza border. That war has targeted civilians, 
     turning the home front into the actual front. And it has 
     transformed the nature of the conflict from a nationalist 
     struggle over Palestinian statehood to a holy war against 
     Jewish statehood. Except for a left-wing fringe, most 
     Israelis recognize the conflict in Gaza as part of a larger 
     war that has been declared against our being and that we must 
     fight.
       But how? Even some right-wingers are saying that we should 
     have declared a unilateral cease-fire after the initial 
     airstrike and then dared Hamas to continue shelling our 
     towns, rather than risk another quagmire. And even some left-
     wingers are saying that we should now destroy the Hamas 
     regime and then offer to turn Gaza over to international 
     control or, if possible, an inter-Arab force led by Egypt. 
     Every option is potentially disastrous. Most Israelis agree 
     on two points: that we cannot live with a jihadist statelet 
     on our border, and that we cannot become occupiers of Gaza 
     again.
       The despair of Gaza is contagious. One friend, a Likud 
     supporter, said to me, ``I don't know what to hope for 
     anymore.''
       Meanwhile, I try to reassure myself about Gavriel's safety. 
     Growing up in Jerusalem during the suicide bombings in the 
     early 2000s, he has already known danger, intimacy with 
     death. A 13-year-old acquaintance was stoned to death, and 
     was so mutilated that he could be identified only by his DNA. 
     A friend lost the use of an eye in a bus bombing on his way 
     to school. At least now, Gavriel and his friends can defend 
     themselves. Perhaps one reason most of them volunteered for 
     combat units was because now the generation of the suicide 
     bombings can finally fight back.
       Just before the conflict in Gaza began, I happened to visit 
     Gavriel at his base. His unit's barracks had been turned into 
     what young Israelis call a ``zula''--a hangout. There were 
     muddy couches, chairs without backs, a darbuka drum, a TV 
     (Jay Leno was on). It could have been a teenage scene 
     anywhere in the West, except that hanging on the walls were 
     Hamas banners captured by the unit's veteran members in a 
     previous round of fighting in Gaza. In a corner of the room 
     hung a photograph of a fallen soldier. Across the bottom 
     someone had written, ``What was the rush, Shachar? Why did 
     you have to leave us so soon?''
       Even now, perhaps especially now, I feel that our family is 
     privileged to belong to the Israeli story. Gavriel, grandson 
     of a Holocaust survivor, is part of an army defending the 
     Jewish people in its land. This is one of those moments when 
     our old ideals are tested anew and found to be still vital. 
     That provides some comfort as Sarah and I wait for the next 
     text message.
       Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Adelson 
     Institute for Strategic Studies of the Shalem Center in 
     Jerusalem and the author of ``At the Entrance to the Garden 
     of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims 
     in the Holy Land.''

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