Home Front chief: Settlers are
heroes
Aug. 16, 2004 23:35
By DAN DIKER (Original Post, Jerusalem Post)
Maj.- Gen. Yair Naveh, head of Israel's
Home Front Command, told a New York Synagogue over the weekend that Gaza's settlers are heroes of the bloody three-and-a-half-year-old
Palestinian Intifada.
In contrast to past wars, this has been a war to destroy Israeli society, he said. "And Israel's civilians, its
settlers in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria, are the heroes of this war," Naveh said.
He reserved special praise for the Cohen family of
Gaza's Kfar Darom, whose three badly wounded children he personally helped carry away following a terror attack against their school bus in
2000 during his tenure as commander of the Gaza Strip.
"The Cohens are heroes," said Naveh, because "they insisted on returning to Kfar
Darom and living their daily life there even after their long and painful recovery."
Naveh was in the US along with other IDF commanders
for meetings with US security officials including the US army's northern command. Naveh said the IDF group shared its expertise fighting
radical Islamic terror in Israel with a wide range of local, state, and federal agencies among them the New York City Police and the
Pentagon.
The Home Front Commander said that Israel and the US are both fighting "World War III" against radical Islamic terror.
Naveh and several other senior IDF officers were official guests of the Kehilath Jeshurun synagogue on Manhattan's Upper East Side for
Shabbat services.
Naveh told The Jerusalem Post that some people in Israel and America have mistakenly characterized the Palestinian war
of terror against Israel as motivated primarily by political factors. In truth, he said, "the terror attacks against Israel by Palestinian
groups and those being attempted against the US by al-Qaida are both motivated by the same blind hatred."
As an example, Naveh noted
that the recent terrorist murder of Gaza resident Tali Hatuel and her four children as they drove in their car reflects a Palestinian hatred of
"Jews that is reminiscent of the Holocaust." We might only meet this "high level of hatred in hell" he added.
Naveh doused any
expectations that the conflict with the Palestinians might end soon. "We should not expect any solution in this generation," he said. "We must
prepare ourselves for a long struggle. The best we can do is to execute effective conflict management."
