War In Gaza: Does Israel Have The Right To Protect Its Citizens? Hamas Says ‘No’

The current war raging in Gaza has entered its 13th day, and doesn’t show any signs of relenting any time soon. Once again, Israel finds herself in direct conflict with Hamas, and other Palestinian terrorist groups.

But this isn’t the first time Israel has been engaged in a war of this type, with militant Palestinian factions which fire rockets of varying sizes on the citizens of Israel, while Israel carries out airstrikes to take down the terror structure in the Gaza strip.

It’s the question of “Israel’s right to defend itself” which is the interesting one, as numerous media sources slam the Jewish state for doing what it can to protect its citizens from over a thousand Hamas rockets fired at Israel since the latest round of violence erupted.

The current violence was sparked after Hamas operatives kidnapped three Jewish teenage students in Judea and Samaria, and killed them in cold blood, In searching for the perpetrators, Israel rounded up over 100 Hamas operatives who had previously been released as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap a few months back.

Hamas was unhappy about its operatives being re-arrested, and unleashed its rocket arsenal on Israel, while simultaneously trying to access Israeli settlements to carry out terror attacks on the ground.

Israel’s response has been to carry out pinpoint airstrikes on Hamas, but the death toll is over 300 on the Palestinian side. This is due to the fact that Hamas cynically uses Palestinian woman and children as human shields in the places from where they fire rockets and store weapons and ammunition.

But media sources, from the BBC to CNN, are raising questions lately about whether or not the Jewish state even has the right to defend itself. Yes, you read correctly; the world is telling a sovereign state of over eight million people that it should sit quietly and take the rocket barrages on its citizens, while not retaliating for fear of killing Palestinian innocents.

Can you imagine if Mexico was sending hundreds of rockets a day over New York and Washington, what the American government’s response would be? Or if the Irish decided to bomb London, would the British exercise restraint and accept rockets fired on its citizens without retaliation?

Of course not, and herein lies the tricky dilemma for Israel. Where does the world, including the UN, get off telling a country not to retaliate against the very people who are trying to destroy it? And why is it only Israel that gets slack for mistakenly killing innocent people who are used as human shields? What about the hundreds of thousands of people killed during the recent Arab springs in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and Syria?

In fact, the extreme leftist organization, Stop the War Coalition, which sides with Free Palestine, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International, has organized rallies around the world, but mainly in Europe, condemning Israel and showing support for the terrorists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Yet, those same organizations didn’t hold a single rally all year for the thousands of Muslims who were killed in Syria, sometimes by chemical weapons, proving that those organizations have an unsavory agenda — and that agenda is anything but peaceful.

Does Israel have the right to defend itself?

If we look at the American response to 9/11, which included thousands of deaths after the United States invaded two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), the Israeli pinpoint airstrikes pale in comparison.

So what’s with the immoral comparison where some countries can do what they like if under attack, without so much as considering the loss of innocent life, while Israel is condemned the world over for doing what any sovereign state would do?

The nations of the world are really telling Israel: “Stop making trouble, stop defending yourself against Hamas rockets, lest you strike a human shield by mistake?”

The anger is ostensibly directed against Israel — or “The Zionist Entity” — as Hamas prefers to call it. But, when all the layers of self righteous bluster are peeled away, what is left?

Why, good old-fashioned antisemitism, of course — just in another guise.