24 hours ago, almost everyone in Cairo, Jerusalem, and Ramallah, thought they had a deal for a long-range truce in Gaza. Just before midnight, Tuesday, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Wiesenthal Center Associate Dean experienced up close and personal what a promise from Hamas means.
Cooper, along with his wife and Ehud Yaari, Israel TV’s leading expert on Arab affairs had just pulled up to an apartment house in Jerusalem where the Coopers are staying. Suddenly the alarm rang out across the city. Rabbi Cooper joined the others in jumping out of the car and hugged a low wall for about four minutes. Just as the sirens went silent a massive boom could be heard, the Iron Dome intercepted a rocket headed towards a neighborhood somewhere in Jerusalem or adjacent Beit Shemesh.
“For nine years Israelis have had to put up with this? No country can survive when an entire section of its population centers has its daily routines upended. While they don’t want to do it, it appears only IDF action, not empty words of a terror group can definitively knock out Hamas’ military/terror capabilities. Then just maybe the people of Gaza can rebuild their civilian infrastructure under complete transparency and outside control and Israelis in the South can get back their lives.
This is very personal as my niece is in the Beit Shemesh area with her three day old infant girl and my daughter, just a few blocks from here, is in her ninth month, expecting her sixth child," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper.
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