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20 September 2024

Israel Must Protect Its North, but Can It Afford the Price? | Opinion

Yaakov Katz

In 2002, as Hamas launched its first rudimentary rockets at Israel, their range barely stretched a mile, with most of their targets being the Israeli settlements that still existed at the time in the Gaza Strip. It was a primitive, yet ominous beginning to what would eventually evolve into one of Israel's greatest threats.

As the rocket fire intensified, Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister at the time, faced mounting pressure from his right-wing base to respond decisively. "If the rockets were falling on Tel Aviv, Israel would retaliate!" claimed the settlers, who felt abandoned. To them, the government's inaction was proof that it valued Tel Aviv's safety far more than the lives of those living in Gaza's settlements.

A seasoned politician, Sharon pushed back: "The rule for Netzarim is like the rule for Tel Aviv," he said at the time, naming one of Gaza's settlements and emphasizing that an attack on any part of Israel would prompt the same response.

It was a noble sentiment, but nice phrases rarely stand the test of reality. Years passed without a significant Israeli military response to the rocket attacks. In fact, it wasn't until 2008, when Hamas demonstrated the ability to fire rockets that reached closer to Tel Aviv, that Israel finally launched a large-scale military operation aimed at curbing Hamas's capabilities. Meanwhile, the thousands of rockets that had rained down on Gaza's settlements before their evacuation in 2005 did not seem to warrant the same level of urgency.

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