6-Jun-08: "Against all law and nature that Jewish state should exist..."

Far, far from where the world's attention is focused, Israeli Jews are dying at the hands of the agents of Arab jihadism as they have for decades in this ongoing war.

Yesterday's victim (Thursday 5-Jun-08) is Amnon Rosenberg, a man of 51, a kibbutznik (at Kibbutz Nirim), a father of three children and a supervisor in the Nirlat paint factory on the small kibbutz of Nir Oz in southern Israel, just across the way from the barbarian strongholds of Hamas. Hamas, responsible for carrying out thousands of mortar and rocket attacks into civilian areas of Israel in the past several years of war, wasted no time in claiming 'credit' for the attack.

Four other Israelis were injured. One has serious wounds to his back, another suffered moderate shrapnel-induced chest wounds and two men were treated for superficial injuries.

A photo of Amnon Rosenberg is below.

Since 2004, sixteen other Israeli civilians have been murdered at work, or at home, or nearby, in attacks by the the Iranian-funded, Iranian-supported, Iranian-supervised terror organizations that border Israel's south, as UPI pointed out this morning.

These are numbers worth remembering when facile, idiotic news reports playing down the dangers of so-called home-made weapons appear in the media.

Of course, these attacks by lethal weapons are a perfectly understandable response to Israeli occupation and settlement, right? Yes, if you're hopelessly confused. No, if you have any idea of the history of this ongoing war.

Robert F. Kennedy was a journalist in this neighbourhood right after World War II, in the months before the State of Israel was created. That's not widely known or remembered because the paper for whom he was a correspondent at the time - the Boston Post - went out of business in the fifties, along with its database of stories. But this week, in honour of the fortieth anniversary of RFK's murder at the hands of a Palestinian Arab terrorist called Sirhan Sirhan, exactly forty years ago today, some of his published observations at the time of his visit were republished. (Many thanks, Lenny Ben-David.) For people like us, living here and living through the dynamic and the day to day reality, it's compelling reading. For people far from here, ignorant (as most people are) of history, it must seem like science fiction.

A couple of quotations from the Kennedy articles:

• “The Arabs in command believe that eventually victory must be theirs. It is against all law and nature that this Jewish state should exist. They... promise that if it does become a reality it will never have as neighbors anything but hostile countries, which will continue the fight militarily and economically until victory is achieved.”
• “The Jews on the other hand believe that in a few more years, if a Jewish state is formed, it will be the only stabilizing factor remaining in the Near and Middle East. The Arab world is made up of many disgruntled factions which would have been at each other’s throats long ago if it had not been for the common war against Zionism.”
  

Bobby Kennedy's words, written at a time when there was no such thing as a Palestinian state, no such thing as the "occupied" territories, no Palestinian "refugee" camps, no UN Resolution 242, no PLO, no Hamas, are a reminder of why this blog is called "This Ongoing War".

They're also another reminder that when Hamas, Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, Ahmedinajad and the entire jihadist enterprise and their naive and dangerous co-conspirators speak about eliminating the Zionist state, they should be taken literally. Our struggle here is, was and evidently will continue to be a matter of life and death. Ours.

Our deep sympathy goes out to the Rosenberg family of Kibbutz Nirim.