The Palestinians of Gaza send their rockets non-stop into Israel. Day in, day out. With pretense and without. The fact is that we do not know what percentage of the Gaza population is not rabid. Probably not many. So this war of rockets will go on and on...and on. In Gaza, there is no war between moderates and fanatics.

Israel has displayed remarkable restraint until it doesn't. Like yesterday and today. And then the Palestinians cry foul, and even Mahmoud Abbas screams "massacre." Hamas says the killing of 19 in Gaza, 15 of them Hamas warriors, one of them a son of a Hamas commander, will prevent the return of Gilad Shalit whose life it has been toying with cynically for more than a year and a half.

For more than a thousand years Jewish blood was cheap, very cheap. It is no more. That is one of the meanings of Zionism and of sovereignty. Anyone who sheds Jewish blood will pay and pay dearly. That is also the only possible alternative to a settlement. But Gaza doesn't want a settlement. It has made its choice.

Mark Regev
Foreign Media Spokesman, Office of the Prime Minister
Al Jazeera - 15 January 2007

Q: We just played a story a few minutes ago and there was a clip of you in that story and I can quote you as saying of the Palestinians, "They’re trying to kill our people." With respect, you are killing them. 46 of them in the last 15 days since this year started. Can you justify that?

Regev: Yes, I can. Obviously no one wants to see death or destruction, but the Israeli operations are defensive. We are responding to violence perpetrated against our people and you have to make a clear distinction here. The Palestinian terrorist extreme groups are shooting indiscriminately into Israeli civilian population areas and just today they killed an innocent farmer, they missiled a house in the middle of a civilian area. Those people that you’ve mentioned that are killed on the Palestinian side, they’re all armed militants from the extremist groups - Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the others - these are people that are trying to kill our people. We are defending ourselves.

Q: By killing them in return. I don’t wish to devalue the lives on your part at all, but there have been two Israelis killed in the last year from that rocket fire, and as I mentioned 46 [Palestinians] just in the last 15 days. Surely you can see that and think, that is excessive force, that is collective punishment on the people of Gaza who are not all firing rockets at you.

Regev: The people of Gaza are not our enemies. Our enemies are only those people involved in the shooting of rockets on Israeli civilians, the mortaring of Israeli civilians, the shooting of the farmer today. We are trying to be surgical dealing with that terrorist infrastructure. These people that we’re trying to target are not just enemies of the Israeli people, they are the enemies of peace. It was only yesterday that we sat with the Palestinian negotiators, we started discussions. As you know, Prime Minister Olmert and President Abbas agreed that we’re starting discussions now on all the core issues to try to reach an agreement. These extremists in Gaza oppose reconciliation, oppose the peace talks, they say any Palestinian who negotiates with Israel is a traitor to Islam and a traitor to the Arab cause.

Q: What’s the point in dealing with core issues, the big issues for Palestinians, if you’re not actually dealing with this tit-for-tat fighting? That might seem like a flippant term, but it is, it’s fighting that’s going back and forth from both sides.

Regev: I would argue that our operations are responsive and defensive. If there weren’t missiles being fired from Gaza every day trying to kill our people… We had a missile a few days ago hit the Israeli city of Ashkelon, a city where over one hundred thousand people live and make their homes. If you think any society, any democracy, can sit there and see its civilian population targeted…. Obviously we have to respond.

Q: But how can any nation or democracy sit there and talk peace at the same time? Tzipi Livni was talking with Ahmed Qurei only on Monday about peace talks or so-called peace talks. How can you talk peace and do this at the same time? The two aren’t compatible.

Regev: We are talking peace with the Palestinian leadership, with the Palestinians who want peace, but it’s clear that Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the other extremist groups don’t want peace. They are trying to torpedo the chance of an agreement.

Q: But did they not offer you a ceasefire not six weeks ago?

Regev: On the contrary, they said there’s no chance for peace. Every time a Hamas leader opens his mouth and makes a speech, they say no recognition of Israel, we will continue with what they call the armed struggle. I say today, if Hamas is willing to accept Israel’s benchmarks, the three UN benchmarks outlined by the UN Secretary General - recognize Israel’s right to exist, renounce terrorism and violence, support the peace process - then we’re willing to deal with them.

Q: But with respect to UN resolutions, President Bush, one of your strong allies, has just been saying in the past few days that they haven’t worked and we need to move on from them. How can you expect them to respect UN resolutions when they’re not being respected towards the Palestinians as well?

Regev: If you read the Roadmap, which of course Israel adopted, it’s all based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338. The Roadmap is a UN Resolution. We want to see this process work. We think international legitimacy supports this process. It’s not just Israel that doesn’t talk to Hamas, it’s Europe, it’s India, it’s Japan, it’s Canada, it’s the United States. The United Nations itself will not deal with Hamas because they refuse to accept the most minimum benchmarks that are the ground rules of the international community.

Q: So then how do you move forward if no one is going to talk to Hamas? If everyone views Hamas as this terrorist entity, and Gaza as this hostile entity, surely someone has got to step up at some point and say okay let’s talk. They have offered you a ceasefire in the past and I’m sure that if there were peaceful talks, if both sides actually sat down and spoke to each other and stopped firing rockets at each other, there might be progress.

Regev: I can say unequivocally that Israel wants peace with our Palestinian neighbors. We believe that the Palestinian people are entitled to national self-determination., a state of their own. We are looking forward, we have accepted the idea of two states, Israel the homeland for the Jewish people, Palestine, the homeland for the Palestinian people, two states living side by side in peace. We are negotiating with the Palestinian leadership to bring that goal forward.

What is the problem? Just as Islamic extremists unfortunately killed President Sadat who made peace with us from Egypt. Just as the Islamic extremists opposed peace between Israel and Jordan, the Islamic extremists in Gaza are opposing peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They are ultimately reactionary.

Q: Killing more of them and killing people in Gaza, that’s not the answer either. You surely can see that now.

Regev: Our operations in Gaza are designed purely to defend our civilian population. If we weren’t being attacked, we would not have to respond. I remind you that we pulled out of Gaza two years ago. We took down all the settlements. We took all the Israelis out of the Gaza Strip. We took out the police, we took out the armed forces, we redeployed behind the international line. There’s no reason whatsoever for these rocket launches into Israel. There’s no logical reason whatsoever except for pure nihilism.