•Mihir Sharma: Will you say something about the Gaza strip?

One of the saddest aspects of the fighting in Gaza is that it never should have happened. We should never have been in the situation of a military confrontation in Gaza. That is particularly tragic. From our perspective, Israeli society is a split society in every which way, but on the question of Gaza, I think it was absolutely unanimous. Frankly, we had reached a point where it was impossible to go on like this any longer. The country, the southern part of the country, had been under a barrage of rockets, missiles and mortar shells for over six years. Somewhere in the region of 20,000-30,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilians in southern Israel saw up to 500,000 people permanently within 15 seconds of a bomb shelter. Over a period of time, this is an impossible situation for any country to stomach. If say, Kolkata was bombarded for a period of 6-7 years, by even crude missiles from another country or territory, how would India react?

I do think that the first priority of any serious government is to ensure the security of its citizens. And that military confrontation must always be the last resort. Everything that can be done, must be done, prior to the use of any type of military component. This must include the economic inducements, political machinations, diplomatic or even an economic carrot and stick approach. We had really and truly tried everything and in the past six months, reached a truce. It was brokered by Egypt and stipulated two things: that the missiles be stopped for a six-month period and everything would go back to normal. What actually happened in that six-month period was that the missiles hardly stopped for a day.

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