A national failure

[bemildred]

What is now happening in Sderot - the Qassam rockets the Israel Defense Forces finds it difficult to or is unable to stop, the evacuation of residents as well as the partial reinforcement of buildings and uninhabitable shelters - may be defined as a national failure, linking to the feeling of the abandonment of the home front during the Second Lebanon War. The situation in Sderot might in the near future also appear in Ashkelon, Kiryat Gat and other communities around the Gaza Strip if a reasonable political-military solution is not found soon.

It is not the Olmert government, but that of Ariel Sharon, which is responsible for this, not only since the threat on the home front grew during Sharon's term.

Such a mass evacuation of residents has not occured since the War of Independence, when women and children were brought to safety and the men remained to defend the communities. In some cases the leadership argued that families should stay so the men would fight harder to protect their loved ones, but David Ben-Gurion was against the idea. Sderot has come under occasional fire for many years. The residents have not abandoned it, but they feel there is no solution to their problems, and that they have become Israel's cannon fodder.

The failure to deal with the home front first came to the fore during the Second Lebanon War. It is marked by the fact that many political and military leaders knew already before the war that the home front was exposed and neglected, and still they were "surprised." Nevertheless, Kiryat Shmona, which took the greatest number of Katyusha hits during the war, did not lose even one civilian because its residents sat in the shelters. Sderot, however, is another story; only in recent months has some progress been seen toward reinforcement.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/861195.html