Jerusalem is convinced that Iran is the key shadow player in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Photo: AP
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We are Like Targets in a Shooting Gallery
// A Kommersant correspondent reports from Israel
Islamic Jihad will not maintain truce with Israel and will be committing suicide attacks in Israel "if necessary", the radical Palestinian group said Monday. The Israelis were not surprised at the statement. Kommersant correspondent Vladimir Solovyev went to Israel and learnt that the Israelis are getting ready for another war – with Iran this time.
Iran and Sderot
The Israel-Gaza Strip frontier is relatively calm and quiet now. Only 15 Qassam rockets have fallen on the city of Sderot since November 26 when the Israelis and Palestinians agreed on a cease-fire. It is not very much in terms of local calculations. Usually the siren goes off here several times a day. Qassams are rather primitive, but this is very chief danger. These homemade rockets have no guidance system. They have their time set, and at a definite moment, usually at night or in the early morning the launcher strikes. No one can guess what the rocket will strike next.
An Israeli military airship is floating above the Palestinian Beit Hanoun to track rocket launches and warn residents of Sderot immediately. A rocket’s flight is about 20 seconds – this is the time to reach a safe place.
“As much as one hundred rockets hit our city every month,” Elena Biryukova, an employee at Sderot’s city administration, tells me. “Calculation is pretty easy. Divide the number and you’ll have some three Qassam strikes every day.” Elena is speaking about rocket attacks from the Gaza strip as if they were the month’s precipitation norm.
Elena takes me to Amanabim Street to show me two houses which has recently been hit by rockets. The houses look almost intact from the outside. But the peaceful picture is distorted as soon as you enter the place. A Qassam has fallen right into the kitchen. Sunlight falls in the room through a huge hole in the roof. You can see a burnt fridge, fragments of tiling, shattered glass and furniture dented with glass splinters. There are red tiny sneakers in the corner. None of the inhabitants has suffered. Fortunately, they had time to hide themselves in a shelter after they had heard a siren.
However, not everyone is so lucky. Shortly before the truce, a Qassam killed Fatima Slutsker who had come from Russia. The woman was virtually torn to pieces by the rocket as she was trying to make her way to a shelter.
“We are like targets in a shooting gallery. You never know who will be killed next from the team,” says the woman from the city administration on the way to the parents of the deceased Fatima.
Fatima’s husband, Mikhail Slutsker greets us at the threshold of his house with a question:
“Just look and say if they let us live. Our troops warn them before striking but they never do! They just annihilate people,” he says. “My wife was not even Jewish. She is Tatar, but she has never belonged to any religion. We have apologized to them for Beit Hanoun [on November 8 an Israeli air strike killed 19 civilians in Palestinian Beit Hanoun], but they don’t apologize for those killed in Sderot.”
Who are those “they” and where they can be found – this is what Mikhail does not know for sure. He is convinced, though, that incumbent Israeli authorities are to blame for the disaster that befell his family.
“Iran is a threat to lives of my children,” Mikhail says. “The man who promises to wipe Israel off the map is a Hitler. Helping Iran with arm supplies Russia will end up with the same problem, because everyone seems unfaithful to the Iranians now. I can understand that arms bring handsome profits, but we’ll be crying the same tears together.”
Iran and Lebanon
“We will never put up with the fact that Hezbollah is quartered at our frontiers,” Ami Dagan, the Israeli army’s colonel, says. We are standing at the inspection gallery two kilometers away from the Israel-Lebanon border. Ahead, you can clearly see the Lebanese village of Aroun Aras on the hill. Israeli’s settlement of Avavim is behind us.
Ami Dagan believes that current peace with Lebanon is just a temporary thing. Hezbollah militants are using this respite to get ready for yet another war. The colonel has no doubts that he will have to fight in the third Israeli-Lebanese campaign.
“Just look what’s happening in Beirut now. They kill everyone who wants peace [the colonel meant the assassination of Lebanese Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel]. A threat from Hezbollah is perfectly evident for us.”
Israeli diplomats are all the more blunt.
“All problems root in the radical Iranian regime,” Israeli Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson Mark Regev says. “All that Hamas and Hezbollah want is not to drive us away from here. When Ahmadinejad says Israel must be destroyed, he means what he says.”
Moscow also has a share in Israel’s worries. Jerusalem does not approve of Russia’s ties with Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine’s radicals Hamas.
Gary Koren of the Israeli Foreign Ministry says: “Mashal’s invitation to Moscow was a futile gift to Hamas [Hamas’s leader Khaled Mashal visited Moscow this spring]. If only it had helped somebody. Otherwise, it was pure political overtures.
Unlike the diplomats, radical Israeli politicians are sure that the war is already going on and say Israel ought to take a more rigid stance. Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman says the world is on the verge of the third world war, and Israel is on the front line of the upcoming war of civilizations.
“It’s very surprising to me that the West and Russia misinterpret the developments,” Lieberman says. “The conflict in the Middle East is a confrontation of civilizations – free democratic society and Islamic extremists.”
Asked who stands in the center of extremists, the deputy prime minister mentioned Iran without hesitation:
“Such radicals as Hezbollah live at the expense of Iran. If you cut them off from Teheran, they won’t last for long,” the deputy prime minister says.
“So, how are you going to overcome them? Do you count on the UN? The United States, perhaps?”
“Israel has no other option, other than settling the Iranian issue on its own,” Avigdor Lieberman replies. “We don’t need new Buchenwald’s and Auschwitz’s.”
“When do you plan to start?”
“I’ll drop you a line to let you know.”
Vladimir Solovyev
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 05, 2006
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