Our crops and fields have been burning for three months now. The western Negev is ablaze. For many long weeks, the people living there have been covered in smoke, breathing it. And the Israeli government is coming to terms with the situation, swallowing the heinous terrorist campaign.
The government has accepted the new equation on the Gaza border. It's okay to burn our fields, and if the IDF "responds" with warning shots near the terrorists – heaven forbid not at the terrorists themselves – they fire rockets at our communities at night.
To grasp the magnitude of the failure, we need to go back to the last "round" of fighting on the Gaza border, on May 29. Dozens of rockets and mortars were fired at our communities, and the IDF retaliated with airstrikes and artillery shelling. The "round" ended in a disgraceful Israeli defeat.
I'm not one of these overzealous types calling to "topple Hamas," "conquer the Gaza Strip," and "eliminate terror once and for all." These are populistic slogans. I don't believe in a "knockout punch" but in long-term deterrence. A low-intensity war doesn't provide a clear, unambiguous "victory image." Victory is measured over time. In this case, the result was immediately obvious – and dire.
The round ended in a cease-fire. In principle, a cease-fire is a positive result in that it means people stop shooting at one another. However, a cease-fire is a sham when dozens of fields and groves are being burned daily along the Gaza border.
The round concluded in a cease-fire that only addressed the rocket fire, not the incendiary kites. This means Israel is legitimizing this terrorist arson campaign so that if Israel responds to these attacks, it will have supposedly violated the cease-fire! This is an intolerable equation. A sovereign country cannot accept the burning of its fields and the scorching of an entire region, and it cannot "swallow" it. Those who launch incendiary kites deserve the same fate as those who launch rockets.
And just as we don't shoot "near" the terrorists firing rockets, we must not shoot near the terror cell launching incendiary kites at Israel. The innocuous word "kites" is irrelevant when it comes to mass-scale vandalism. The difference between kite and "incendiary kite" is analogous to a water gun and real one. An incendiary kite isn't a toy, it's a weapon wielded by terrorists. A kite cell is no different than a rocket cell. It has to be destroyed, ideally before it launches.
The response to an arson attack has to be identical to the response to a rocket barrage. No country can come to terms with such a flagrant violation of its sovereignty and such agricultural devastation.
This isn't a matter of operational failure. It is a moral, ethical failure. This is a government betraying its fundamental pact with its citizens – to assure their safety and security. Were the government to order the IDF to put an end to the arson campaign, and were that to fail – that would be an operational failure. An operational failure is legitimate because lessons can be learned from mistakes; you fix things and improve. The moral failure is unforgivable.
