'Sometimes When You Sleep with a Missile, You don't Wake Up'

In Israel National News, Paula R. Stern writes, “Dear Palestinian Civilians:”

What I cannot for the life of me understand is why your civilians are near the rocket launchers. So dear Palestinian civilians – we will do our best to avoid hitting your homes, unless you allow them to be used as rocket launchers. We will do our best to avoid hitting your mosques, unless you hide explosives there. We will do our best, but the wind and the earth, the inconsistencies of war, make it impossible that we can be accurate 100% of the time.

No, I won’t point out the obvious, that your goal is to target our children while our aim is to avoid yours. I won’t quote Golda Meir and her now-famous comment that this endless war will end when you love your children more than you hate us. I won’t speak of your incredible hatred or your culture of martyrdom and death.

I will ask only one thing. It is logical. It is reality. If you live near a place being used as a rocket launcher, please run away. Please move. There is no other option. We cannot allow you to launch rockets at Beersheva. Don’t you realize 185,000 people live there? Ashdod, Ashkelon. No, this is not possible. Sderot has suffered enough. So, Palestinian civilian, if you are truly innocent in this, truly a civilian who loves your family – go the very corners of your neighborhood. Move away from the rockets because they will be stopped.

My oldest son took part in a war to stop the rockets two years ago. We had a partial success. You continued to fire, but at least it wasn’t every day and certainly not a hundred in a month…until now. But now, once again, your people are attacking in numbers we cannot ignore and should not be expected to endure. Even one rocket is wrong and it is not right that we let you get away with even that. But yesterday and today, this morning and now. That we have to close the schools of an entire city to keep our children safe is not acceptable. At midnight in Ashkelon; at 5:30 a.m. in Beersheva. No, not acceptable.

So all that leaves is an endless cycle of your attacking and our responding. We will do our best but you have a responsibility too. During the Second Lebanon War, which began after Hezbollah crossed into Israel and kidnapped two of our soldiers, our ambassador to the United Nations said something so simple and yet so profound. I offer you his words, please take them to heart.

“Sometimes,” Dan Gillermann said, “sometimes when you sleep with a missile, you don’t wake up.”

Read the whole thing.