Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: An open letter to Khalil from Gaza

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/an-open-letter-to-khalil-from-gaza/
 
 
Do you know how alike we are, you and I? We’re both 30 years old; we
both have 7-yearold daughters. We’ll both go to sleep tonight with the
women we love, not before tucking our daughters in under down
comforters, because it’s starting to get chilly.
Both of us will kiss our daughters on the forehead, go to bed and hug
our wives, you in Gaza and I in Tel Aviv.
Before we fall asleep, we’ll both think of the next week at work, and
the onerous responsibility of providing for our families, feeding our
children, and, more importantly, making sure our wives know we’re real
men, right, Khalil?
We’ll both probably think about sex and once again fall asleep only
thinking about it.
We’re utterly alike, Khalil, but there is something different.
Your daughter will die tonight.
You won’t find out about it in the morning. You’ll wake up in the
middle of the night to a deafening explosion. Your whole house will
tremble. Parts of the ceiling will fall on you. You’ll run to your
daughter’s bedroom, and find the northern wall gone, your daughter
lying on the broken floor, a charred husk.
But don’t worry, Khalil my man, she wasn’t burned alive. The shock
wave killed her instantly, before she caught fire. Does that make it
any easier for you? No?
Afterward, a guy will show up and introduce himself as Jamil, and
he’ll start photographing her.
***
Now, before you get angry at the Zionist pigs who murdered your child,
let’s talk about Imad, your neighbor.
You remember that he came to ask you for a loan a year ago? Yeah, I
know you’d have given him the money if you had it. But don’t worry, he
managed. Someone offered him 2,000 shekels a month, to rent one of the
rooms in his house. So last year, without your knowledge, one room in
Imad’s apartment was filled with Kassam rockets.
You know, those two-meter-long tubes containing about 10 kilograms of
explosives?
So, in this room were 50 of these rockets. And this room, Khalil,
shared a wall with your daughter’s bedroom. That means that every
night, she laid her head on a pillow next to half a ton of explosives.
How did you sleep quietly at night? Imad didn’t tell you?
But wait, don’t get upset at Imad. He’s experiencing financial
difficulties, and all he can think about is providing food for his
children. He was desperate. Jamil, the guy who pays the rent,
convinced him that the room was just a warehouse, and no one would use
the rockets. So forget Imad. Let’s talk about the rockets for a
second, and understand why they’re bad.
***
What are rockets, Khalil? A rocket is like a bullet. Wherever you aim
it, that’s where it’ll hit. Only, unlike a rifle, it has an engine
that burns all the way and extends its range. The Kassam, for example,
can go for about 20 kilometers.
How do you aim a gun at a target 20 kilometers away? You can’t. You
hit approximately. And to make sure you hit your target, you fire 10
rockets together. We call it a “volley.” Rockets are used when you
don’t care what you hit. Fire a bunch toward a city, and hope that
something will hit a kindergarten. This is known as “terrorism.” And
Israelis don’t like terrorism.
Call us crazy, but we want to keep our civilians safe.
So we spend millions of dollars on missiles, which are kind of like
rockets, only they’re accurate, and they allow us to hit the
warehouses full of rockets and launchers. We could fire rockets and
shells in the general direction of those targets, but then we’d risk
hitting many of your civilians. And we don’t want that. So we fire
very costly and very accurate missiles at your rocket warehouses. And
unfortunately, sometimes little girls sleep with their heads against
those warehouses.
But wait, before you get angry at the missiles the Zionist pigs used
to kill your daughter, let’s talk for a moment about Jamil.
***
Jamil is a Hamas activist. His role is to locate “warehouses” such as
Imad’s, and see to it that rockets are stored in them. That’s it. We
call it a “logistics officer,” but that’s a bit different. Jamil
received some special instructions: First, that warehouses mustn’t be
close to one another.
Second, that they be in residential neighborhoods. Next to
kindergartens. Next to hospitals and the homes of the elderly.
Adjacent to your daughter’s wall.
And you know why? Because Jamil doesn’t really care if your daughter
dies. In fact, he’ll be the first on the scene with his iPhone to film
her burnt body and upload it to YouTube. As they did on the first day
of Operation Pillar of Defense.
Now you can get angry. Yes, at Jamil.
***
But Khalil, my friend, it’s not enough to be angry at Jamil. You need
to get angry at Hamas. It’s your sovereign government, and it decided
on this strategy. Hamas invests most of its resources on
militarization. In warehouses next to your house. In rocket-launchers
next to hospitals. And it’s doing all it can so that civilians will
die. Yours, as well as ours. Hamas must be removed.
But how does one get angry at Hamas? Think Internet. Think friends.
Think demonstrations. Think dissent. Think criticism. Think
organization. Think a blog. Think interviews with the media. Think
that Hamas must fall and that you deserve a government that sees you,
your job, your future —and your daughter — as top priorities.
Think of your daughter. Think peace.
I assure you that when you stop aiming weapons at us and instead
extend to us a hand of cooperation – that’ll be a morning when your
daughter wakes up to a day that will build her future.
And it starts with you, Khalil.
Good night

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/an-open-letter-to-khalil-from-gaza/
 
 
 
Do you know how alike we are, you and I? We’re both 30 years old; we 
both have 7-year-old daughters. We’ll both go to sleep tonight with the 
women we love, not before tucking our daughters in under down 
comforters, because it’s starting to get chilly.
 
Both of us will kiss our daughters on the forehead, go to bed and hug 
our wives, you in Gaza and I in Tel Aviv.
 
Before we fall asleep, we’ll both think of the next week at work, and 
the onerous responsibility of providing for our families, feeding our 
children, and, more importantly, making sure our wives know we’re real 
men, right, Khalil? ;-)

A Kassam rocket at Kibutz of Nir Am, near Israel's border with Gaza 
(photo credit: Edi Israel/Flash90)
 
A Kassam rocket at Kibutz of Nir Am, near Israel’s border with Gaza 
(photo credit: Edi Israel/Flash90)

Good night.
 
___
-- 
“Until the wolf shall lay with lamb, we’d better be the wolves.”
–Ehud Barak