By Stan Goodenough
Mar 21, 2008
At least 90,000 people in different parts of the world joined via the Internet Thursday in what was billed as the largest ever online rally in support of those living under fire in Israel.
Beginning at around 11 pm Israel time, where Purim was already being celebrated while Jews further west were still keeping the Fast of Esther, the videoed gathering focused its attention on the Negev town of Sderot that Palestinian Arabs in Gaza have bombarded with thousands of rockets over the past few years.
Hundreds of the used rocket casings stacked in racks behind Sderot's main police station served as a backdrop for the main presentation of the rally.
Among the attendees were a number of terrorism victims, including - on his stretcher - Rami Tuito, who was wounded and whose 10-year-old brother Osher lost his leg in a Kassam rocket attack last month, and David Hatuel, whose pregnant wife and four little children were killed by terrorists in the Gaza Strip.
Pointing to these and other victims of terror, a rally presenter said they were living proof that the Jews would survive and overcome the enemies arrayed against them.
"We have come together," he said, "to tell the people of Israel and to tell the God of Israel that we stand together behind the State of Israel. We are one people."
After children from a Sderot sang "Od yavo shalom aleinu" ("Peace will yet come to us"), Israel's national police spokesman, Chief Inspector Miki Rosenfeld, also addressed the gathering. He reported that a rocket could be heard exploding on a nearby kibbutz while the rally organizers were setting up for the show.
More than 200,000 Israelis were today living under the constant threat of rocket attack, he said.
One of the guest speakers in the town was Harvard University Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who said he and his wife had come to "stand in solidarity with the heroes of Sderot."
They were, Dershowitz told the townspeople, "part of a long line of heroes who have resisted evil and have been on the forefront of the battle against genocidal murderers.
"You are being attacked for only one reason," he said, which is "because Hamas and the Hitlers and the Hamans before them knew that they could take advantage of Israel's higher sense of morality."
Gaza's terrorists fired "their anti-personnel rockets; their murder weapons, from behind human shields; their main goal is to deliberately kill as many Israeli citizens; civilians, men, women, children as they possibly can."
But the Arabs goal was also, he said, "to try to provoke the Israel Defense Forces into killing as many Palestinian civilians as possible because this is their cruel arithmetic of death."
"When they kill a Jewish civilian, they claim victory. When Israel inadvertently kills a Palestinian civilian in an effort to get at the terrorists they [the Arabs] claim victory."
The terrorists win, Dershowitz explained, because Israel does not want to kill civilians.
"These murderers must be stopped before their rockets hit - God forbid, a kindergarten, a school bus, a schoolyard, a hospital. They must not be allowed to continue to play Russian roulette with the lives of Jewish children."
"By firing rockets on Sderot," the law professor continued, "Hamas has declared war on the State of Israel. They have violated Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, they are committing war crimes, and they are trying to commit genocidal crimes against humanity. And yet it is Israel that is condemned by the United Nations."
Those who condemned Israel were "encouraging murder" and were "complicitous in evil."
Dershowitz warned that if the rockets were not stopped from hitting Sderot and Ashkelon, they would move on to strike Ashdod and Tel Aviv.
"The Kassams and Katyushas from Gaza and Lebanon are endangering hundreds of thousands. Tomorrow there may be nuclear weapons from Iran."
Referencing the celebration of Purim once again, Dershowitz said that the stated aims of the enemies of the Jews were "as clear today as they were in Shushan and Berlin: Genocide against the Jewish people."
We understand the moral imperative to use our military power in the cause of justice and peace.
The war on Sderot and against all Israel was a conflict "between good and evil; between those who love life and those who pedal death."
Canadian MP and former Justice Minister Irwin Cutler told the gathering the Palestinians of Hamas were guilty of double war crimes: The crime of aiming their rockets at Jewish civilians, and the crime of launching them from behind a human shield of Arab civilians. They were guilty of committing crimes against humanity through their terrorism, he said.
Their objective was genocidal and antisemitic.
Cutler described Sderot as the only community in the world today "which lives as a standing target of daily and relentless terrorist attacks."
He decried the fact that there has not been "one single condemnation by any agency in the international community of these relentless terrorist attacks in Sderot!"
The online rally then moved from Sderot to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, then to Tel Aviv and to London, where Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wondered why it is "that the people who first taught the world the sanctity of life has had to walk so often in the valley of the shadow of death?
"Why is it, in a world where there are 82 Christian nations and 56 Islamic ones, is it so hard for the world to accept the right of the Jewish people to just one land of its own?"
Directing his words at the terrorists in Gaza, Sacks said they would ultimately face "the fate of Hamman."
This has been, "throughout history, the fate of individuals and nations who try to destroy the Jewish people, their fate is that - in the end - they destroy themselves."
View the powerful, hour-long video here