Yesterday, Israel's former Chief of Staff, General Moshe Yaalon, gave a wide-ranging radio interview on the battle against Hamas, Egypt's responsibility for the smuggling of rockets to Hamas, the failure of Israel's "peace" policies, and what Israel needs to do to deter its enemies from trying to destroy it.

General Yaalon praises the Israel Defense Forces but criticizes the decision to end the operation. He feels that Hamas is the beneficiary of the cease-fire.

He includes in his analysis the mistakes made by Israel's politicians that led Israel into the current dangerous situation:

I think that we need to look at what brought us here. How did it happen, that most of the Israeli public thinks that the problem between Israel and the Palestinians is the occupation of 67? The Palestinians don't think so - they are talking about the occupation of 48! We thought that giving up Judea Samarea and Gaza would give us peace, but when we tried to give land for peace at Oslo we got land for terror - over 1000 casualties. When we tried a one-way disengagement from them, we are here and they are there and all those slogans, we got land for missiles, and unfortunately, we are keeping up with this policy, meaning the present government is a government of disengagement, convergence, concessions, withdrawals. This is a policy that got us where we are, and we cannot overlook that.

General Yaalon continued with his analysis:

The present leadership has misled Israel in recent years, and after the soldiers come back home and everyone is feeling better, we will have time for elections, time to think about what got us here in the first place.

Other points made by General Yaalon are that Egypt is not stopping the smuggling of weapons to Hamas because Egypt wants to weaken Israel; he criticizes Israelis who claim that American pressure is the reason why they have made security concessions to Israel's sworn enemies; he sees some signs that the Israeli public is seeing the mistakes of the past political decisions but he thinks that public opinion can still be manipulated the way it has been in the past.

One Jerusalem translated the Hebrew text of this radio interview.