When a Promise is Broken

This is Ha'aretz's report on the Kassam incident(s) yesterday:

Female soldiers say IDF left them vulnerable to Qassams

Women soldiers serving at an Ashkelon-area army base struck by a Qassam rocket on Tuesday said they have no protection against the shelling, and have asked the army to take immediate steps to see to their safety, Israel Radio reported Wednesday.

The Qassam landed in an open area of the base, which is located south of Ashkelon. There were no injuries.

"It was after dinner," the radio quoted one woman soldier as saying. "Everyone was outside, on a break. I heard 'Red Dawn' [the warning signal for an impending rocket or mortar attack] but I had nowhere to run. I froze. A second later I heard a boom. There were shouts. They took us to the auditorium, to the dining hall, to the armory.

"There was panic. A woman soldier screamed, one of them fainted. Commanders spoke with us, tried to calm us down. But we are not calm. We are in tents. We are all scared."

In all, five Qassams landed in Israel on Tuesday. Apart from the rocket that hit the base, the other four struck open areas near Sderot and the western Negev.

Now, I distinctly remember Ariel Sharon and Shaul Mofaz promising us that Israel's security would be improved because our moral standing in the international diplomatic arena would be morally higher and that in any case, Israel could strike back with impunity due to this and have a better chance to deal with terror.

Bullshit, or as my dear friend Dr. Amiel Unger once wrote on a placard protesting Kissinger many years ago (and I think it even made it into Newsweek), "bovine defecation".

Okay, so now we know that Sharon can't keep a promise and worse, his "solution" is leading us into even more dangerous realms. Maybe someone in academia could support a research poll project and ask now 100 army and policemaen who participated in the disenagement procedure and who defended it, many on the grounds that one must fulfill a democratic decision, whether or not they have second thoughts, whether they would reconsider their actions at the time and whether they will now be more circumpspect, more demanding of answers in any future moves Sharon and the disengagers may propose.

That would really be the democratic thing to do.