Israeli Arabs' war experiences
Ynet (Ma'ariv), August 16, 2006
Roee Nahmias
Several Arab families decided to act on Hizbullah Chief Hassan Nasrallah's "recommendation" and leave rocket-stricken Haifa during the war in south Lebanon.
They traveled to Palestinian towns like Bethlehem and Ramallah, and even to East Jerusalem, but soon after decided they had rather return home and face the rocket menace.
The reason: The bad treatment awarded to them in hotels, restaurants and stores, as well as ongoing harassments of their wives and daughters on the part of the local residents.
Ghani Abassi, married and a father of three daughters, decided to go with his family to Bethlehem and flee the Katyusha attacks. Abbasi traveled to the Palestinian town with some 10 other families from Haifa, who all chose to stay at local hotels. Unfortunately, this was when their true nightmare began.
"I waited for three days until I got a room. Then it turned out that the air conditioning wasn't working, and I was told that the reason was the high price of electricity. I decided that this wasn't that bad, because we felt we were among our brothers at the West Bank and were willing to endure the terrible heat, knowing we're safe and that our visit was also of financial help," Abbasi described to the website of the Israeli-Arab newspaper al-Sinara.
"However, the treatment we received was disgraceful and dreadful," he said. "We walked around town for a while, but the attitude we encountered on the part of the locals was horrible. The youngsters on the street started harassing our wives and daughters and used shocking expressions that I cannot even bring myself to pronounce," he said.
Another Haifa resident, who went with his family to Jerusalem to escape from the rocket threat, said that the local merchants blatantly took advantage of the situation and inflated the prices in stores. A bottle of mineral water that usually sells for about NIS 4, for instance, was being sold to the Haifa tourists for NIS 10.
'Even foreigners are respected there'
"They told us, 'you are worse than the Jews.' We heard expressions of joy over the fact we have fled our homes, and some even tried to attack us. We were disgusted and decided to return to Haifa," he said, stressing that he used to be a regular donor to the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza.
According to him, after that day and the humiliation he experienced in Bethlehem, he does not plan on donating even one shekel.
"We thought we are one nation and that what really hurts them, hurts us too. We went to demonstrations for them and we donated a lot of money to them because we thought they are our brothers and that is our obligation. But, what we found was exploitation and undeserving treatment toward someone supposedly from the same nation," he told.
The same resident added that he expected the families from Haifa and Nazareth to be warmly received in the West Bank towns, but what took place was the exact opposite.
Today he speaks with regret about the two days he spent in Bethlehem. "While touring in Ramallah, a few youngsters said to us, 'you are the same as, even worse than, the Jews.'
We tried to understand why they were acting that way toward us, but they attacked us and a fight broke out. We are very sorry for what happened and we couldn't have expected such an unfit welcome from members of our nation whom we had respected and appreciated very much. But they didn't respect us at all, and saw as worse than the Jews. We are very sorry for what happened and that we drove all the way there to see the painful truth that they don't respect us there," said Ghani Abassi.
Abassi added that the restaurants jacked up prices for customers because they thought they were foreign 'tourists.' "Even foreigners are respected there, but we, their own brothers, felt like they don't respect us, and my friends and I asked why? Are we unworthy of the respect due to members of the same nation?"
Following such treatment, Abassi and his friends hurried back to the lap of the Katyushas and air raid sirens of Haifa. "'We will never again make a donation or participate in a demonstration for the West Bank from now on," said one of them.
Friday, August 18, 2006
From mania to depression - Uri Avery
From Mania to Depression
Uri Avnery
Ha'aretz, August 16, 2006
THIRTY THREE days of war. The longest of our wars since 1949.
On the Israeli side: 154 dead - 117 of them soldiers. 3970 rockets launched against us, 37 civilians dead, more than 422 civilians wounded.
On the Lebanese side: about a thousand dead civilians, thousands wounded. An unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead and wounded.
More than a million refugees on both sides.So what has been achieved for this terrible price?
"GLOOMY, HUMBLE, despondent," was how the journalist Yossef Werter described Ehud Olmert, a few hours after the cease-fire had come into effect.
Olmert? Humble? Is this the same Olmert we know? The same Olmert who thumped the table and shouted: "No more!" Who said: "After the war, the situation will be completely different than before!" Who promised a "New Middle East" as a result of the war?
THE RESULTS of the war are obvious:
The prisoners, who served as casus belli (or pretext) for the war, have not been released. They will come back only as a result of an exchange of prisoners, exactly as Hassan Nasrallah proposed before the war.
Hizbullah has remained as it was. It has not been destroyed, nor disarmed, nor even removed from where it was. Its fighters have proved themselves in battle and have even garnered compliments from Israeli soldiers. Its command and communication stucture has continued to function to the end. Its TV station is still broadcasting.
Hassan Nasrallah is alive and kicking. Persistent attempts to kill him failed. His prestige is sky-high. Everywhere in the Arab world, from Morocco to Iraq, songs are being composed in his honor and his picture adorns the walls.
The Lebanese army will be deployed along the border, side by side with a large international force. That is the only material change that has been achieved.
This will not replace Hizbullah. Hizbullah will remain in the area, in every village and town. The Israeli army has not succeeded in removing it from one single village. That was simply impossible without permanently removing the population to which it belongs.
The Lebanese army and the international force cannot and will not confront Hizbullah. Their very presence there depends on Hizbullah's consent. In practice, a kind of co-existence of the three forces will come into being, each one knowing that it has to come to terms with the other two.
Perhaps the international force will be able to prevent incursions by Hizbullah, such as the one that preceded this war. But it will also have to prevent Israeli actions, such as the reconnaissance flights of our Air Force over Lebanon. That's why the Israeli army objected, at the beginning, so strenuously to the introduction of this force.
IN ISRAEL, there is now a general atmosphere of disappointment and despondency. From mania to depression. It's not only that the politicians and the generals are firing accusations at each other, as we foresaw, but the general public is also voicing criticism from every possible angle. The soldiers criticize the conduct of the war, the reserve soldiers gripe about the chaos and the failure of supplies.
In all parties, there are new opposition groupings and threats of splits. In Kadima. In Labor. It seems that in Meretz, too, there is a lot of ferment, because most of its leaders supported the war dragon almost until the last moment, when they caught its tail and pierced it with their little lance.
At the head of the critics are marching - surprise, surprise - the media. The entire horde of interviewers and commentators, correspondents and presstitutes, who (with very few exceptions) enthused about the war, who deceived, misled, falsified, ignored, duped and lied for the fatherland, who stifled all criticism and branded as traitors all who opposed the war - they are now running ahead of the lynch mob. How predictable, how ugly. Suddenly they remember what we have been saying right from the beginning of the war.
This phase is symbolized by Dan Halutz, the Chief-of-Staff. Only yesterday he was the hero of the masses, it was forbidden to utter a word against him. Now he is being described as a war profiteer. A moment before sending his soldiers into battle, he found the time to sell his shares, in expectation of a decline of the stock market. (Let us hope that a moment before the end he found the time to buy them back again.)
Victory, as is well known, has many fathers, and failure in war is an orphan.
FROM THE deluge of accusations and gripes, one slogan stands out , a slogan that must send a cold shiver down the spine of anyone with a good memory: "the politicians did not let the army win."
Exactly as I wrote two weeks ago, we see before our very eyes the resurrection of the old cry "they stabbed the army in the back!"
This is how it goes: At long last, two days before the end, the land offensive started to roll. Thanks to our heroic soldiers, the men of the reserves, it was a dazzling success. And then, when we were on the verge of a great victory, the cease-fire came into effect.
There is not a single word of truth in this. This operation, which was planned and which the army spent years training for, was not carried out earlier, because it was clear that it would not bring any meaningful gains but would be costly in lives. The army would, indeed, have occupied wide areas, but without being able to dislodge the Hizbullah fighters from them.
The town of Bint Jbeil, for example, right next to the border, was taken by the army three times, and the Hizbullah fighters remained there to the end. If we had occupied 20 towns and villages like this one, the soldiers and the tanks would have been exposed in twenty places to the mortal attacks of the guerillas with their highly effective anti-tank weapons.
If so, why was it decided, at the last moment, to carry out this operation after all - well after the UN had already called for an end to hostilities? The horrific answer: it was a cynical - not to say vile - exercise of the failed trio. Olmert, Peretz and Halutz wanted to create "a picture of victory", as was openly stated in the media. On this altar the lives of 33 soldiers (including a young woman) were sacrificed.
The aim was to photograph the victorious soldiers on the bank of the Litani. The operation could only last 48 hours, when the cease-fire would come into force. In spite of the fact that the army used helicopters to land the troops, the aim was not attained. At no point did the army reach the Litani.
For comparison: in the first Lebanon war, that of Sharon in 1982, the army crossed the Litani in the first few hours. (The Litani, by the way, is not a real river anymore, but just a shallow creek. Most of its waters are drawn off far from there, in the north. Its last stretch is about 25 km distant from the border, near Metulla the distance is only 4 km.)
This time, when the cease-fire took effect, all the units taking part had reached villages on the way to the river. There they became sitting ducks, surrounded by Hizbullah fighters, without secure supply lines. From that moment on, the army had only one aim: to get them out of there as quickly as possible, regardless of who might take their place.
If a commission of inquiry is set up - as it must be - and investigates all the moves of this war, starting from the way the decision to start it was made, it will also have to investigate the decision to start this last operation. The death of 33 soldiers (including the son of the writer David Grossman, who had supported the war RM: but called just before the push for an end to it - see earlier in this blog) and the pain this caused their families demand that!
BUT THESE facts are not yet clear to the general public. The brain-washing by the military commentators and the ex-generals, who dominated the media at the time, has turned the foolish - I would almost say "criminal" - operation into a rousing victory parade. The decision of the political leadership to stop it is now being seen by many as an act of defeatist, spineless, corrupt and even treasonous politicians.
And that is exactly the new slogan of the fascist Right that is now raising its ugly head.
After World War I, in similar circumstances, the legend of the "knife in the back of the victorious army" grew up. Adolf Hitler used it to carry him to power - and on to World War II.
Now, even before the last fallen soldier has been buried, the incompetent generals are starting to talk shamelessly about "another round", the next war that will surely come "in a month or in a year", God willing. After all, we cannot end the matter like this, in failure. Where is our pride?
THE ISRAELI public is now in a state of shock and disorientation. Accusations - justified and unjustified - are flung around in all directions, and it cannot be foreseen how things will develop.
Perhaps, in the end, it is logic that will win. Logic says: what has thoroughly been demonstrated is that there is no military solution. That is true in the North. That is also true in the South, where we are confronting a whole people that has nothing to lose anymore. The success of the Lebanese guerilla will encourage the Palestinian guerilla.
For logic to win, we must be honest with ourselves: pinpoint the failures, investigate their deeper causes, draw the proper conclusions.
Some people want to prevent that at any price. President Bush declares vociferously that we have won the war. A glorious victory over the Evil Ones. Like his own victory in Iraq.
When a football team is able to choose the referee, it is no surprise if it is declared the winner.
Uri Avnery
Ha'aretz, August 16, 2006
THIRTY THREE days of war. The longest of our wars since 1949.
On the Israeli side: 154 dead - 117 of them soldiers. 3970 rockets launched against us, 37 civilians dead, more than 422 civilians wounded.
On the Lebanese side: about a thousand dead civilians, thousands wounded. An unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead and wounded.
More than a million refugees on both sides.So what has been achieved for this terrible price?
"GLOOMY, HUMBLE, despondent," was how the journalist Yossef Werter described Ehud Olmert, a few hours after the cease-fire had come into effect.
Olmert? Humble? Is this the same Olmert we know? The same Olmert who thumped the table and shouted: "No more!" Who said: "After the war, the situation will be completely different than before!" Who promised a "New Middle East" as a result of the war?
THE RESULTS of the war are obvious:
The prisoners, who served as casus belli (or pretext) for the war, have not been released. They will come back only as a result of an exchange of prisoners, exactly as Hassan Nasrallah proposed before the war.
Hizbullah has remained as it was. It has not been destroyed, nor disarmed, nor even removed from where it was. Its fighters have proved themselves in battle and have even garnered compliments from Israeli soldiers. Its command and communication stucture has continued to function to the end. Its TV station is still broadcasting.
Hassan Nasrallah is alive and kicking. Persistent attempts to kill him failed. His prestige is sky-high. Everywhere in the Arab world, from Morocco to Iraq, songs are being composed in his honor and his picture adorns the walls.
The Lebanese army will be deployed along the border, side by side with a large international force. That is the only material change that has been achieved.
This will not replace Hizbullah. Hizbullah will remain in the area, in every village and town. The Israeli army has not succeeded in removing it from one single village. That was simply impossible without permanently removing the population to which it belongs.
The Lebanese army and the international force cannot and will not confront Hizbullah. Their very presence there depends on Hizbullah's consent. In practice, a kind of co-existence of the three forces will come into being, each one knowing that it has to come to terms with the other two.
Perhaps the international force will be able to prevent incursions by Hizbullah, such as the one that preceded this war. But it will also have to prevent Israeli actions, such as the reconnaissance flights of our Air Force over Lebanon. That's why the Israeli army objected, at the beginning, so strenuously to the introduction of this force.
IN ISRAEL, there is now a general atmosphere of disappointment and despondency. From mania to depression. It's not only that the politicians and the generals are firing accusations at each other, as we foresaw, but the general public is also voicing criticism from every possible angle. The soldiers criticize the conduct of the war, the reserve soldiers gripe about the chaos and the failure of supplies.
In all parties, there are new opposition groupings and threats of splits. In Kadima. In Labor. It seems that in Meretz, too, there is a lot of ferment, because most of its leaders supported the war dragon almost until the last moment, when they caught its tail and pierced it with their little lance.
At the head of the critics are marching - surprise, surprise - the media. The entire horde of interviewers and commentators, correspondents and presstitutes, who (with very few exceptions) enthused about the war, who deceived, misled, falsified, ignored, duped and lied for the fatherland, who stifled all criticism and branded as traitors all who opposed the war - they are now running ahead of the lynch mob. How predictable, how ugly. Suddenly they remember what we have been saying right from the beginning of the war.
This phase is symbolized by Dan Halutz, the Chief-of-Staff. Only yesterday he was the hero of the masses, it was forbidden to utter a word against him. Now he is being described as a war profiteer. A moment before sending his soldiers into battle, he found the time to sell his shares, in expectation of a decline of the stock market. (Let us hope that a moment before the end he found the time to buy them back again.)
Victory, as is well known, has many fathers, and failure in war is an orphan.
FROM THE deluge of accusations and gripes, one slogan stands out , a slogan that must send a cold shiver down the spine of anyone with a good memory: "the politicians did not let the army win."
Exactly as I wrote two weeks ago, we see before our very eyes the resurrection of the old cry "they stabbed the army in the back!"
This is how it goes: At long last, two days before the end, the land offensive started to roll. Thanks to our heroic soldiers, the men of the reserves, it was a dazzling success. And then, when we were on the verge of a great victory, the cease-fire came into effect.
There is not a single word of truth in this. This operation, which was planned and which the army spent years training for, was not carried out earlier, because it was clear that it would not bring any meaningful gains but would be costly in lives. The army would, indeed, have occupied wide areas, but without being able to dislodge the Hizbullah fighters from them.
The town of Bint Jbeil, for example, right next to the border, was taken by the army three times, and the Hizbullah fighters remained there to the end. If we had occupied 20 towns and villages like this one, the soldiers and the tanks would have been exposed in twenty places to the mortal attacks of the guerillas with their highly effective anti-tank weapons.
If so, why was it decided, at the last moment, to carry out this operation after all - well after the UN had already called for an end to hostilities? The horrific answer: it was a cynical - not to say vile - exercise of the failed trio. Olmert, Peretz and Halutz wanted to create "a picture of victory", as was openly stated in the media. On this altar the lives of 33 soldiers (including a young woman) were sacrificed.
The aim was to photograph the victorious soldiers on the bank of the Litani. The operation could only last 48 hours, when the cease-fire would come into force. In spite of the fact that the army used helicopters to land the troops, the aim was not attained. At no point did the army reach the Litani.
For comparison: in the first Lebanon war, that of Sharon in 1982, the army crossed the Litani in the first few hours. (The Litani, by the way, is not a real river anymore, but just a shallow creek. Most of its waters are drawn off far from there, in the north. Its last stretch is about 25 km distant from the border, near Metulla the distance is only 4 km.)
This time, when the cease-fire took effect, all the units taking part had reached villages on the way to the river. There they became sitting ducks, surrounded by Hizbullah fighters, without secure supply lines. From that moment on, the army had only one aim: to get them out of there as quickly as possible, regardless of who might take their place.
If a commission of inquiry is set up - as it must be - and investigates all the moves of this war, starting from the way the decision to start it was made, it will also have to investigate the decision to start this last operation. The death of 33 soldiers (including the son of the writer David Grossman, who had supported the war RM: but called just before the push for an end to it - see earlier in this blog) and the pain this caused their families demand that!
BUT THESE facts are not yet clear to the general public. The brain-washing by the military commentators and the ex-generals, who dominated the media at the time, has turned the foolish - I would almost say "criminal" - operation into a rousing victory parade. The decision of the political leadership to stop it is now being seen by many as an act of defeatist, spineless, corrupt and even treasonous politicians.
And that is exactly the new slogan of the fascist Right that is now raising its ugly head.
After World War I, in similar circumstances, the legend of the "knife in the back of the victorious army" grew up. Adolf Hitler used it to carry him to power - and on to World War II.
Now, even before the last fallen soldier has been buried, the incompetent generals are starting to talk shamelessly about "another round", the next war that will surely come "in a month or in a year", God willing. After all, we cannot end the matter like this, in failure. Where is our pride?
THE ISRAELI public is now in a state of shock and disorientation. Accusations - justified and unjustified - are flung around in all directions, and it cannot be foreseen how things will develop.
Perhaps, in the end, it is logic that will win. Logic says: what has thoroughly been demonstrated is that there is no military solution. That is true in the North. That is also true in the South, where we are confronting a whole people that has nothing to lose anymore. The success of the Lebanese guerilla will encourage the Palestinian guerilla.
For logic to win, we must be honest with ourselves: pinpoint the failures, investigate their deeper causes, draw the proper conclusions.
Some people want to prevent that at any price. President Bush declares vociferously that we have won the war. A glorious victory over the Evil Ones. Like his own victory in Iraq.
When a football team is able to choose the referee, it is no surprise if it is declared the winner.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Haifa zoo animals stressed out after confinement due to war
By The Associated Press
Ha'aretz, August 15, 2006
A female bear resting at the entrance to a bomb shelter at Haifa Zoo on Tuesday (AP)
After 34 days in indoor shelters, many of the animals at the Haifa Zoo got a breath of outdoor air - if not a taste of freedom - for the first time on Tuesday.
During a month-long barrage of rocket fire from Hezbollah guerillas, the baboons got stressed, the lions got fat and zoo officials worry the antelopes might have heart attacks.
Zoo officials moved all the carnivores, bears and monkeys indoors at the start of the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, both to protect them from rocket strikes and to keep an errant missile on a retaining wall from setting them loose into Israel's third-largest city.
"The lions gained weight, but they look basically OK," said zoo manager Etty Ararat as he released them outdoors on Tuesday. Hours before, the lions roared and flashed their teeth at reporters who visited them at the 3 by 2-meter-(yard) indoor cages where they were confined for more than a month.
"Baboons suffered from stress," Ararat said.Most of all, he worried about the more fragile animals, like the gazelles, who had to stay outside while thousands of explosions went off around them.
"These animals sometimes die instantly from a heart attack several weeks after they were traumatized," he said.
But all the animals seemed pleased when they were allowed to venture out with the declaration of a cease-fire on Monday.
"They're thrilled, very happy. It's like a new place for them," said veterinarian Ayelet Shmueli.
A troop of baboons scrambled to get outside through a little gate before it was even fully opened on the first day they were allowed out. Bears paced nervously, and a tiger blinked hard in the morning sun.
"But we don't know what will be the impact of the fact they were enclosed for so long," Shmueli said.
While indoors, zoo officials were forced to get creative to keep the animals from going crazy.
"We hung sacks of meat on the ceilings of the leopards' and tigers' cages so they had to jump to get them," zookeeper Yoav Ratner said. The handlers stuffed pumpkins full of meat, he added. They filled bamboo poles with jelly "so the monkeys had to do a bit of work to get the jelly," he said.
The war also hurt the zoo itself. July and August, usually the busiest months for visitors, were completely wiped out financially because of the war.
"We had no revenues and I had a lot of extra expenses," Ararat, the manager said. Those expenses included buying meat the zoo usually got for free because markets had shut down, and buying tranquilizers just in case one of the animals got loose in the city, he said.
Photo fraud - or resurrection? - at Qana?
Those for whom the issue of photo fraud is relevant, among all the undoubted death and destruction, might want to consult the following site:
http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx
And you can also cConsult David Frankfurter's site for a clear explanation of what to do to see the two figures in this picture which are considered to be proof of photo fraud:
http://dfrankfurter.livejournal.com/77833.html
David writes:
The front page of the Washington Post of 31 July 2006, had a dramatic photo by Lefteris Pitarakis of AP, captioned "A resident of Qana, in southern Lebanon, weeps as he shows the bodies of some of the 57 victims of an Israeli airstrike on a building being used as a shelter."
Long after the event, with so many questions reverberating in the blogosphere as to whether much of the events in Qana (or at least their journalistic aftermath) were, in fact staged, one would think that a self-respecting editor would very closely scrutinise photos for possible hints of Hezballywood.
Click on the picture on the left and give it a few minutes to load. Courtesy of PressDisplay.com, you will enter a site that lets you enlarge the page using the magnifying glass tool (at the bottom of the screen). Then click and drag your mouse to cruise around reasonably high resolution image of the page. Move up to the the last "body" in the row. Someone forgot to tell him that the photo-op wasn't quite over, and that he really should play dead for just a few more minutes.
And try to make up your own minds.
Remember that the figures of nearly 60 casualties were adjusted down to just under 30 a few days later.
And still, as I wrote at the time, pray for us...
http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx
And you can also cConsult David Frankfurter's site for a clear explanation of what to do to see the two figures in this picture which are considered to be proof of photo fraud:
http://dfrankfurter.livejournal.com/77833.html
David writes:
The front page of the Washington Post of 31 July 2006, had a dramatic photo by Lefteris Pitarakis of AP, captioned "A resident of Qana, in southern Lebanon, weeps as he shows the bodies of some of the 57 victims of an Israeli airstrike on a building being used as a shelter."
Long after the event, with so many questions reverberating in the blogosphere as to whether much of the events in Qana (or at least their journalistic aftermath) were, in fact staged, one would think that a self-respecting editor would very closely scrutinise photos for possible hints of Hezballywood.
Click on the picture on the left and give it a few minutes to load. Courtesy of PressDisplay.com, you will enter a site that lets you enlarge the page using the magnifying glass tool (at the bottom of the screen). Then click and drag your mouse to cruise around reasonably high resolution image of the page. Move up to the the last "body" in the row. Someone forgot to tell him that the photo-op wasn't quite over, and that he really should play dead for just a few more minutes.
And try to make up your own minds.
Remember that the figures of nearly 60 casualties were adjusted down to just under 30 a few days later.
And still, as I wrote at the time, pray for us...
It's official - no such city as Jerusalem. Honest!
On a lighter note, I am pleased to report that, in its wisdom, the Jerusalem Municipality has ruled:
I would like to remind the readers of this blog that its owner and her spouse (aka Daisyabba) are suing the Jerusalem Municipality over its collusion, connivance, and general cooperation in the construction of an illegal and sub-standard structure...
May such lighter notes come to characterize this blog rather than its content of the last month.
And may I catch up with my translation commitments!
PS Those of you who remember me asking weeks ago when the prime minister would be addressing the nation may be interested to know that yesterday, both he and the head of the Opposition spoke in the Knesset.
Unquestionably, Bibi's speech was the better of the two.
Watch this space...
I would like to remind the readers of this blog that its owner and her spouse (aka Daisyabba) are suing the Jerusalem Municipality over its collusion, connivance, and general cooperation in the construction of an illegal and sub-standard structure...
May such lighter notes come to characterize this blog rather than its content of the last month.
And may I catch up with my translation commitments!
PS Those of you who remember me asking weeks ago when the prime minister would be addressing the nation may be interested to know that yesterday, both he and the head of the Opposition spoke in the Knesset.
Unquestionably, Bibi's speech was the better of the two.
Watch this space...
Monday, August 14, 2006
"Bleeding-heart ignoramuses" - British columnist Julie Burchill
Bleeding-heart ignoramuses
By Julie Burchill (non-Jewish British columnist)
Published in Ha'aretz, Monday, August 13, 2006
A few weeks back it was my birthday, and my equally non-Jewish journalist friend Chas Newkey-Burden took his life in his hands and presented me with a cuddly toy. Now, normally I feel that people who bother with cuddly toys over the age of eight are either mad and/or prostitutes, but this little sweetie stole my heart. A honey-brown camel with a heart-melting smile and a jaunty cap, he proudly wore an Israeli Army uniform with a fetching hole cut out for his hump. "I've named him Bibi," Chas told me, obviously in honor of our mutual crush.
Later that night Chas and I were watching a TV news report of the beginnings of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. To say we were amazed when a news presenter solemnly intoned that there had been "two militants wounded" with all the grieving gravitas of Richard Dimbleby reporting on the state funeral of the late Winston Churchill is to employ English understatement to an almost surreal degree. But it's been that way ever since - and more than one night has seen me screaming at the TV/my husband "You don't understand! None of you English bastards understands!" before running into the bedroom, slamming the door and collapsing in a tearful heap with only Bibi to comfort me.
One of the most grotesque examples of the almost brainwashed level of bias can be seen on the official BBC Religions Web site, where that "peace be upon him" eyewash is going on like crazy, while other religions are coolly commented on in a strictly "objective" way.
The conflict has sent this tendency into overdrive, with not just the usual Masochist Hacks For Mohammed such as Robert Fisk (beaten up by Islamists, says they were right to do it) and Yvonne Ridley (kidnapped by Islamists, then became one) getting their chadors in a twist about big swarthy men with tea-towels on their heads treating the West mean and keeping it - in their case at least - keen.
Even the women's magazines have gotten in on the act, with lots of first-person eye-witness accounts of British citizens fleeing the Jewish jackboot. Then turn the page and you'll often find a shocked article about honor-killing or forced marriage, Muslim-style. That Israel is fighting the frontline war, on behalf of the freedom and civilization of all of us, against the very real evils of shari'a law never seems to occur to these bleeding-heart ignoramuses.
Over at Channel 4, Jon Snow interviewed an Israeli diplomat with all the finesse and objectivity of a neo-Nazi spraying a six-foot swastika on a wall. Of the rockets which murdered Israeli civilians in the town of Sderot, he said "Rockets, pretty pathetic things - nobody gets injured." This was gleefully picked up and proclaimed by The Guardian, the newspaper I left some years ago in protest at what I saw as its vile anti-Semitism.
All across the board, Lebanese civilians are referred to as "civilians" where Israeli civilians are referred to as "Israelis" - an eerie and sinister difference pointed out by the non-Jewish stand-up comic genius Natalie Haynes, and one which very few people appear to have noticed - even me, until then.
In fact the tone in papers as diverse as the "liberal" Guardian to the right-wing Daily Mail has been repulsively similar; look, look, the Israelis are as bad as the terrorists! Worse, in fact, because they've got America behind them! Even the normally sensible Matthew Parris in the normally sensible Times wrote: "The past 40 years have been a catastrophe, gradual and incremental, for world Jewry. Seldom in history have the name and reputation of a human grouping lost so vast a store of support and sympathy so fast."
The catastrophe he refers to is the State of Israel itself; you'd really think, reading this, that the years leading up to the creation of the Jewish state were, in fact, a right royal romp in the park. Instead of the Holocaust.
A surprising number of British people - especially the super-creepy British Jews who recently signed a treacherous letter to the press distancing themselves from Israel's actions - seem to think Israel should exist not as a real, imperfect country full of real, imperfect people led by real, imperfect leaders, but as some sort of collective kosher Mater Dolorosa, there to provide a selfless, suffering example to the rest of us.
Fight back, and the outside world reacts with the revulsion of a man seeing his sainted grandmother drunk and offering sailors outside. Even (especially?) anti-Semites and enemies of Israel are shameless in recycling the legends of "brave little Israel" - I'm thinking of David and Goliath here - and basically believe that each IDF member should go into battle against the assembled hordes of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah armed with nothing but a slingshot apiece. Failing that, this tiny country must embark on a suicidal act of self-sacrifice in the face of murderous, genocidal hatred, as Matthew Parris astoundingly suggests:
"The settlement has to be a return to its pre-1967 boundaries. Precisely because Israel is by no means forced to make so generous a move, the international support (even love) this would generate would secure its future permanently. It would bring it back within the pale."
Personally, I'd far prefer the Jews to be angry, aggressive and alive than meek, mild and dead - and that's what makes me and a minority like me feel so much like strangers in our own country, now more than ever. I've always loved being a hack, but now even that feels weird, as though I'm living among a bunch of snatched-body zombies who look like journalists but believe and say the most inhuman, evil things.
When Mel Gibson was picked up for drunk-driving recently, he was reported to have screamed at the police officer, whom he believed to be Jewish, "Fucking Jews! The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." His subsequent excuse was that he has "battled the disease of alcoholism for all my adult life." The British media are notorious for our love of the hard stuff; is that going to be our excuse too, I wonder, when large numbers of us are finally bang to rights for peddling the same loathsome lie?
By Julie Burchill (non-Jewish British columnist)
Published in Ha'aretz, Monday, August 13, 2006
A few weeks back it was my birthday, and my equally non-Jewish journalist friend Chas Newkey-Burden took his life in his hands and presented me with a cuddly toy. Now, normally I feel that people who bother with cuddly toys over the age of eight are either mad and/or prostitutes, but this little sweetie stole my heart. A honey-brown camel with a heart-melting smile and a jaunty cap, he proudly wore an Israeli Army uniform with a fetching hole cut out for his hump. "I've named him Bibi," Chas told me, obviously in honor of our mutual crush.
Later that night Chas and I were watching a TV news report of the beginnings of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. To say we were amazed when a news presenter solemnly intoned that there had been "two militants wounded" with all the grieving gravitas of Richard Dimbleby reporting on the state funeral of the late Winston Churchill is to employ English understatement to an almost surreal degree. But it's been that way ever since - and more than one night has seen me screaming at the TV/my husband "You don't understand! None of you English bastards understands!" before running into the bedroom, slamming the door and collapsing in a tearful heap with only Bibi to comfort me.
One of the most grotesque examples of the almost brainwashed level of bias can be seen on the official BBC Religions Web site, where that "peace be upon him" eyewash is going on like crazy, while other religions are coolly commented on in a strictly "objective" way.
The conflict has sent this tendency into overdrive, with not just the usual Masochist Hacks For Mohammed such as Robert Fisk (beaten up by Islamists, says they were right to do it) and Yvonne Ridley (kidnapped by Islamists, then became one) getting their chadors in a twist about big swarthy men with tea-towels on their heads treating the West mean and keeping it - in their case at least - keen.
Even the women's magazines have gotten in on the act, with lots of first-person eye-witness accounts of British citizens fleeing the Jewish jackboot. Then turn the page and you'll often find a shocked article about honor-killing or forced marriage, Muslim-style. That Israel is fighting the frontline war, on behalf of the freedom and civilization of all of us, against the very real evils of shari'a law never seems to occur to these bleeding-heart ignoramuses.
Over at Channel 4, Jon Snow interviewed an Israeli diplomat with all the finesse and objectivity of a neo-Nazi spraying a six-foot swastika on a wall. Of the rockets which murdered Israeli civilians in the town of Sderot, he said "Rockets, pretty pathetic things - nobody gets injured." This was gleefully picked up and proclaimed by The Guardian, the newspaper I left some years ago in protest at what I saw as its vile anti-Semitism.
All across the board, Lebanese civilians are referred to as "civilians" where Israeli civilians are referred to as "Israelis" - an eerie and sinister difference pointed out by the non-Jewish stand-up comic genius Natalie Haynes, and one which very few people appear to have noticed - even me, until then.
In fact the tone in papers as diverse as the "liberal" Guardian to the right-wing Daily Mail has been repulsively similar; look, look, the Israelis are as bad as the terrorists! Worse, in fact, because they've got America behind them! Even the normally sensible Matthew Parris in the normally sensible Times wrote: "The past 40 years have been a catastrophe, gradual and incremental, for world Jewry. Seldom in history have the name and reputation of a human grouping lost so vast a store of support and sympathy so fast."
The catastrophe he refers to is the State of Israel itself; you'd really think, reading this, that the years leading up to the creation of the Jewish state were, in fact, a right royal romp in the park. Instead of the Holocaust.
A surprising number of British people - especially the super-creepy British Jews who recently signed a treacherous letter to the press distancing themselves from Israel's actions - seem to think Israel should exist not as a real, imperfect country full of real, imperfect people led by real, imperfect leaders, but as some sort of collective kosher Mater Dolorosa, there to provide a selfless, suffering example to the rest of us.
Fight back, and the outside world reacts with the revulsion of a man seeing his sainted grandmother drunk and offering sailors outside. Even (especially?) anti-Semites and enemies of Israel are shameless in recycling the legends of "brave little Israel" - I'm thinking of David and Goliath here - and basically believe that each IDF member should go into battle against the assembled hordes of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah armed with nothing but a slingshot apiece. Failing that, this tiny country must embark on a suicidal act of self-sacrifice in the face of murderous, genocidal hatred, as Matthew Parris astoundingly suggests:
"The settlement has to be a return to its pre-1967 boundaries. Precisely because Israel is by no means forced to make so generous a move, the international support (even love) this would generate would secure its future permanently. It would bring it back within the pale."
Personally, I'd far prefer the Jews to be angry, aggressive and alive than meek, mild and dead - and that's what makes me and a minority like me feel so much like strangers in our own country, now more than ever. I've always loved being a hack, but now even that feels weird, as though I'm living among a bunch of snatched-body zombies who look like journalists but believe and say the most inhuman, evil things.
When Mel Gibson was picked up for drunk-driving recently, he was reported to have screamed at the police officer, whom he believed to be Jewish, "Fucking Jews! The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." His subsequent excuse was that he has "battled the disease of alcoholism for all my adult life." The British media are notorious for our love of the hard stuff; is that going to be our excuse too, I wonder, when large numbers of us are finally bang to rights for peddling the same loathsome lie?
A spirit of absolute folly
A spirit of absolute folly
By Ari Shavit
Ha'aretz, August 13, 2003
In the difficult summer of 2006, the State of Israel is declaring in astonishment: They surprised us. They surprised us in a big way. They surprised us with Katyushas and they surprised us with the Al-Fajr rockets and they surprised us with the Zelzal missiles. They surprised us with anti-tank missiles. And they surprised us with the operational skill of theanti-tank squads. They surprised us with the bunkers and the camouflage. They surprised us with the command and monitoring. They surprised us with strategy, fighting ability and a fighting spirit. They surprised us with the astonishing power that a small death-army with low technology and high religious motivation can have.
However, more than they surprised us in Summer 2006 with the strength of Hezbollah, they surprised us this summer with our own weakness. They surprised us with ourselves. They surprised us with the low level of national leadership. They surprised us with scandalous strategic bumbling. They surprised us with the lack of vision, lack of creativity and lack of determination on the part of the senior military command. They surprised us with faulty intelligence and a delusionary logistical network and improper preparedness for war. They surprised us with the fact that the Israeli warmachine is not what it once was. While we were celebrating it became rusty.
Generally it is not right to conduct an in-depth investigation of a wartime failure during a war. However, at the end of the most embarrassing year of Israeli defense since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Israeli government is not drawing conclusions. It is not reorganizing the system, there is no evidence of a real learning curve and it is not radiating a new ethos. On the contrary: It is adding another layer of folly onto a previous one. Its slowness to react is dangerous. Its caution is a recipe for disaster. Its attempt to prevent bloodshed is costing a greatdeal of bloodshed. So that now of all times, just when the forces are moving toward south Lebanon, there is no escaping the question of where we went wrong. It is so that Israel will be able to achieve a last-minute victory and so that the troops will be able to achieve their goals and so the soldiers will be able to return home safely, that we must ask already now: What happened to us? What the hell happened to us?
A simple thing happened: We were drugged by political correctness. The political correctness that has come to dominate Israeli discourse and Israeli awareness in the past generation was totally divorced from the Israeli situation. It did not have the tools to deal with the reality of an existential conflict. It did not have the tools to deal with a reality of an inter-religious and inter-cultural conflict. That is why it focused entirely on the Palestinian issue. It made the baseless assumption that the occupation is the source of evil. It assumed that it is the occupation that is preventing peace and causing unrest and perpetuating the instability.
At the same time, political correctness assumed that Israeli strength is a given. That Israel is insanely strong. Therefore, political correctness disdained any attempt to build and maintain Israeli strength. The defense budget was cut, the values of volunteerism were mocked, the concepts of heroism and fortitude became despicable. Since the Israel Defense Forces was identified as an army of occupation - rather than as an army defending feminists and homo-lesbians from the fanaticism of the Middle East - they had reservations about it, they shook it off and became alienated from it. After all, in the spiritual world of political correctness, power and army have become dirty words.
Any national idea was rejected because of the sanctity of the private sphere. Every cooperative ethos was dismantled in favor of the individual. Power was identified with fascism. Masculinity was publicly condemned. The pursuit of absolute justice was mixed with the pursuit of absolute pleasure and turned the reigning discourse from a discourse of commitment and enlistment to one of protest and pampering.
Another thing happened: We were poisoned with an illusion of normalcy. The State of Israel is fundamentally an abnormal state. Just because it is a Jewish state in an Arab region, and just because it is a Western country in a Muslim region, and just because it is a democratic state in a region of fanaticism and despotism, Israel is in constant tension with its surroundings. On the one hand, because of the situation in which it finds itself, Israel cannot live a life of European normalcy. On the other hand, because of its values and its structure in terms of identity, economics and culture, Israel cannot avoid being a part of European normalcy.
Therefore Israel is in a constant state of basic contradiction. The way to resolve this contradiction is to create a positive anomaly - both ideological and ethical - that will provide an answer to the negative anomaly in which Israel exists. There is no other way: Israel must prepare a defense envelope that will protect its internal environment from the external environment surrounding it. Life in defiance of the environment is an essential part of Israeli existence.
However, in the past generation this cruel insight has dissipated, the delusion has spread that we have overcome our problems and reached a state of tranquility, and that we can live in this place like any other nation. This illusion led to a situation where the positive Israeli anomaly gradually became blurred, and the energies devoted to maintaining the defensive shield that isolates Israel from the region and protects it from this region were drastically reduced. Weakness prevailed. Our willpower was weakened. The bubble so inebriated the Israelis that they didn't bother to surround it with a fortified wall. Therefore, the pressures of the external environment steadily increased - with the terror of 2002 and the Qassams of 2005 and the Katyushas of 2006 - until they penetrated deep inside the Israeli environment. Thus was created the paradox that those who wanted to believe that Israel could be totally normal were the ones who caused it to decline into a chaotic situation of total anomaly and a loss of balance.
Both political correctness and the illusion-of-normalcy spread first and foremost among the Israeli elites. The Israeli public in general has remained for the most part sober and strong. It did not err with illusions of a new Middle East. It did not turn its back on the existential imperative, the defense ethos and the IDF. Even its core values were not destroyed. Therefore, it impressively withstood both the test of terror of 2001-2003 and the test of "fire-on-the-home front" of 2006. It demonstrated an almost British fortitude and continues to do so.
On the other hand, the Israeli elites of the past 20 years have become totally divorced from reality. The capital, the media and the academic world of the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, have blinded Israel and deprived it of its spirit. Their repeated illusions regarding the historical reality in which the Jewish state finds itself, caused Israel to make a navigational error and to lose its way. Their unending attacks, both direct and indirect, on nationalism, on militarism and on the Zionist narrative have eaten away from the inside at the tree trunk of Israeli existence, and sucked away its life force. While the general public demonstrated sobriety, determination and energy, the elites were a disappointment. Capital brought the illusion-of-normalcy ad absurdum, and established a crushing social-economic regime here that does not suit the historical situation. The academic world promoted political correctness ad absurdum and conducted a somewhat suicidal spirit of criticism here. And the media combined the two and created a hallucinatory state of mind, which combines unbridled consumerism with false righteousness.
Instead of being constructive elites, in the past generation the Israeli elites have become dismantling elites. Each in its own area, each by its own method, dealt with the deconstruction of the Zionism enterprise. Step by step, the top 1000th percentiles abandoned the existential national effort. They stopped doing reserve duty, they stopped sending their sons tothe fighting units. They mocked those officers who warned about unilateral withdrawals. They mocked those officers who warned that the emergency warehouses were emptying out and the enemies were becoming stronger. And they deceived themselves and those around them that Tel Aviv is in fact Manhattan. Money is in fact everything. And thus they bequeathed to young Israelis a legacy of values that makes it very difficult for them to attack even when the attack is fully justified. Because a country that lacks equality, that lacks justice and that lacks faith in the rightness of its path, is a country for which it is very difficult to go on the attack. It is a country for which not many are willing to kill and be killed.
And in the Middle East of the 21st century, a country whose young elites find it difficult to kill and be killed for it is a country on borrowed time. A country that cannot endure. So that what is now beingrevealed before our eyes, as the smoke of the Katyushas continues to rise from the Lebanese thicket, is not a failure of the IDF but a failure of the elites that turned their back on the IDF. What is being revealed now, when Israel cannot properly protect the lives of its citizens, is not problems of command and problems of tactics, but rather deep-seated problems of a society whose elites have abandoned it. It is not Major-General Udi Adam or Brigadier-General Gal Hirsch who are the problem, it is the Israeli spirit. A spirit that for far too long has been a spirit of stupidity. A spirit of absolute folly.
Usually, the accusation of folly is directed at battle-hungry generals and warmongering politicians. However, at the end of this war, the accusation of folly will be directed at an entire cadre of Israeli opinion-makers and social leaders who lived in a bubble and caused Israel to live in a bubble. The army will be required to put its house in order and to rebuild, but the true anger will be directed toward the elites who failed. Elites who betrayed the trust of a wise, impressive and strong nation.
However, now it is wartime. The citizens of the north are still in bomb shelters, the soldiers of the regular and standing armies are risking their lives in a war that was not properly planned or properly defined and is being conducted poorly. Therefore, what is needed now is to operate quickly, to operate while in motion, in order to strengthen the spirit of those participating in the battle. What is needed is to create immediately a new discourse that will suit the new situation. Without a new spirit and without a new language there will be no victory in the fighting. Therefore, while the war is raging we must find the spirit and we must find the language that we lost in the years preceding the war.
Israel tried with all its soul and all its might to be Athens. However in this place, in this era, there is no future for an Athens without a speck of Sparta. There is no hope for a society-of-life that does not know how to organize itself to deal with death. Therefore, after decades during which the right and the left and the center took Israeli power for granted and wastefully exploited it, now there is no escaping the need to place the renewed building of Israeli power at the top of the agenda. We are returningto the encounter with our fate; returning to what is decreed by the reality of our lives.
By Ari Shavit
Ha'aretz, August 13, 2003
In the difficult summer of 2006, the State of Israel is declaring in astonishment: They surprised us. They surprised us in a big way. They surprised us with Katyushas and they surprised us with the Al-Fajr rockets and they surprised us with the Zelzal missiles. They surprised us with anti-tank missiles. And they surprised us with the operational skill of theanti-tank squads. They surprised us with the bunkers and the camouflage. They surprised us with the command and monitoring. They surprised us with strategy, fighting ability and a fighting spirit. They surprised us with the astonishing power that a small death-army with low technology and high religious motivation can have.
However, more than they surprised us in Summer 2006 with the strength of Hezbollah, they surprised us this summer with our own weakness. They surprised us with ourselves. They surprised us with the low level of national leadership. They surprised us with scandalous strategic bumbling. They surprised us with the lack of vision, lack of creativity and lack of determination on the part of the senior military command. They surprised us with faulty intelligence and a delusionary logistical network and improper preparedness for war. They surprised us with the fact that the Israeli warmachine is not what it once was. While we were celebrating it became rusty.
Generally it is not right to conduct an in-depth investigation of a wartime failure during a war. However, at the end of the most embarrassing year of Israeli defense since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Israeli government is not drawing conclusions. It is not reorganizing the system, there is no evidence of a real learning curve and it is not radiating a new ethos. On the contrary: It is adding another layer of folly onto a previous one. Its slowness to react is dangerous. Its caution is a recipe for disaster. Its attempt to prevent bloodshed is costing a greatdeal of bloodshed. So that now of all times, just when the forces are moving toward south Lebanon, there is no escaping the question of where we went wrong. It is so that Israel will be able to achieve a last-minute victory and so that the troops will be able to achieve their goals and so the soldiers will be able to return home safely, that we must ask already now: What happened to us? What the hell happened to us?
A simple thing happened: We were drugged by political correctness. The political correctness that has come to dominate Israeli discourse and Israeli awareness in the past generation was totally divorced from the Israeli situation. It did not have the tools to deal with the reality of an existential conflict. It did not have the tools to deal with a reality of an inter-religious and inter-cultural conflict. That is why it focused entirely on the Palestinian issue. It made the baseless assumption that the occupation is the source of evil. It assumed that it is the occupation that is preventing peace and causing unrest and perpetuating the instability.
At the same time, political correctness assumed that Israeli strength is a given. That Israel is insanely strong. Therefore, political correctness disdained any attempt to build and maintain Israeli strength. The defense budget was cut, the values of volunteerism were mocked, the concepts of heroism and fortitude became despicable. Since the Israel Defense Forces was identified as an army of occupation - rather than as an army defending feminists and homo-lesbians from the fanaticism of the Middle East - they had reservations about it, they shook it off and became alienated from it. After all, in the spiritual world of political correctness, power and army have become dirty words.
Any national idea was rejected because of the sanctity of the private sphere. Every cooperative ethos was dismantled in favor of the individual. Power was identified with fascism. Masculinity was publicly condemned. The pursuit of absolute justice was mixed with the pursuit of absolute pleasure and turned the reigning discourse from a discourse of commitment and enlistment to one of protest and pampering.
Another thing happened: We were poisoned with an illusion of normalcy. The State of Israel is fundamentally an abnormal state. Just because it is a Jewish state in an Arab region, and just because it is a Western country in a Muslim region, and just because it is a democratic state in a region of fanaticism and despotism, Israel is in constant tension with its surroundings. On the one hand, because of the situation in which it finds itself, Israel cannot live a life of European normalcy. On the other hand, because of its values and its structure in terms of identity, economics and culture, Israel cannot avoid being a part of European normalcy.
Therefore Israel is in a constant state of basic contradiction. The way to resolve this contradiction is to create a positive anomaly - both ideological and ethical - that will provide an answer to the negative anomaly in which Israel exists. There is no other way: Israel must prepare a defense envelope that will protect its internal environment from the external environment surrounding it. Life in defiance of the environment is an essential part of Israeli existence.
However, in the past generation this cruel insight has dissipated, the delusion has spread that we have overcome our problems and reached a state of tranquility, and that we can live in this place like any other nation. This illusion led to a situation where the positive Israeli anomaly gradually became blurred, and the energies devoted to maintaining the defensive shield that isolates Israel from the region and protects it from this region were drastically reduced. Weakness prevailed. Our willpower was weakened. The bubble so inebriated the Israelis that they didn't bother to surround it with a fortified wall. Therefore, the pressures of the external environment steadily increased - with the terror of 2002 and the Qassams of 2005 and the Katyushas of 2006 - until they penetrated deep inside the Israeli environment. Thus was created the paradox that those who wanted to believe that Israel could be totally normal were the ones who caused it to decline into a chaotic situation of total anomaly and a loss of balance.
Both political correctness and the illusion-of-normalcy spread first and foremost among the Israeli elites. The Israeli public in general has remained for the most part sober and strong. It did not err with illusions of a new Middle East. It did not turn its back on the existential imperative, the defense ethos and the IDF. Even its core values were not destroyed. Therefore, it impressively withstood both the test of terror of 2001-2003 and the test of "fire-on-the-home front" of 2006. It demonstrated an almost British fortitude and continues to do so.
On the other hand, the Israeli elites of the past 20 years have become totally divorced from reality. The capital, the media and the academic world of the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, have blinded Israel and deprived it of its spirit. Their repeated illusions regarding the historical reality in which the Jewish state finds itself, caused Israel to make a navigational error and to lose its way. Their unending attacks, both direct and indirect, on nationalism, on militarism and on the Zionist narrative have eaten away from the inside at the tree trunk of Israeli existence, and sucked away its life force. While the general public demonstrated sobriety, determination and energy, the elites were a disappointment. Capital brought the illusion-of-normalcy ad absurdum, and established a crushing social-economic regime here that does not suit the historical situation. The academic world promoted political correctness ad absurdum and conducted a somewhat suicidal spirit of criticism here. And the media combined the two and created a hallucinatory state of mind, which combines unbridled consumerism with false righteousness.
Instead of being constructive elites, in the past generation the Israeli elites have become dismantling elites. Each in its own area, each by its own method, dealt with the deconstruction of the Zionism enterprise. Step by step, the top 1000th percentiles abandoned the existential national effort. They stopped doing reserve duty, they stopped sending their sons tothe fighting units. They mocked those officers who warned about unilateral withdrawals. They mocked those officers who warned that the emergency warehouses were emptying out and the enemies were becoming stronger. And they deceived themselves and those around them that Tel Aviv is in fact Manhattan. Money is in fact everything. And thus they bequeathed to young Israelis a legacy of values that makes it very difficult for them to attack even when the attack is fully justified. Because a country that lacks equality, that lacks justice and that lacks faith in the rightness of its path, is a country for which it is very difficult to go on the attack. It is a country for which not many are willing to kill and be killed.
And in the Middle East of the 21st century, a country whose young elites find it difficult to kill and be killed for it is a country on borrowed time. A country that cannot endure. So that what is now beingrevealed before our eyes, as the smoke of the Katyushas continues to rise from the Lebanese thicket, is not a failure of the IDF but a failure of the elites that turned their back on the IDF. What is being revealed now, when Israel cannot properly protect the lives of its citizens, is not problems of command and problems of tactics, but rather deep-seated problems of a society whose elites have abandoned it. It is not Major-General Udi Adam or Brigadier-General Gal Hirsch who are the problem, it is the Israeli spirit. A spirit that for far too long has been a spirit of stupidity. A spirit of absolute folly.
Usually, the accusation of folly is directed at battle-hungry generals and warmongering politicians. However, at the end of this war, the accusation of folly will be directed at an entire cadre of Israeli opinion-makers and social leaders who lived in a bubble and caused Israel to live in a bubble. The army will be required to put its house in order and to rebuild, but the true anger will be directed toward the elites who failed. Elites who betrayed the trust of a wise, impressive and strong nation.
However, now it is wartime. The citizens of the north are still in bomb shelters, the soldiers of the regular and standing armies are risking their lives in a war that was not properly planned or properly defined and is being conducted poorly. Therefore, what is needed now is to operate quickly, to operate while in motion, in order to strengthen the spirit of those participating in the battle. What is needed is to create immediately a new discourse that will suit the new situation. Without a new spirit and without a new language there will be no victory in the fighting. Therefore, while the war is raging we must find the spirit and we must find the language that we lost in the years preceding the war.
Israel tried with all its soul and all its might to be Athens. However in this place, in this era, there is no future for an Athens without a speck of Sparta. There is no hope for a society-of-life that does not know how to organize itself to deal with death. Therefore, after decades during which the right and the left and the center took Israeli power for granted and wastefully exploited it, now there is no escaping the need to place the renewed building of Israeli power at the top of the agenda. We are returningto the encounter with our fate; returning to what is decreed by the reality of our lives.
The Face of a Hero - Roi Klein, of blessed memory
http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?AID=409254The Face of a Hero
By Chana Weisberg
Roi Klein.
It is a name that until a few days ago held no meaning to me. He was a complete stranger, about whom I had never heard and whom I had never met.
Yet an image of the last seconds of his life won't leave my mind.
Roi was a son. He was a brother. He was a husband to Sara and a father to three-year-old Gilad and one-year-old Yoav.
But most of all, Roi was a hero for all of us. He was a face and a name to the many Jewish heroes spanning the generations.
Roi's funeral was last Thursday (July 27), the day that would have been his 31st birthday.
Major Roi Klein was a Golani brigade deputy commander. He was killed last Wednesday, in an ambush among the houses of Bint Jbail, a large village in southern Lebanon. Hezbullah terrorists killed eight soldiers, including Roi, and injured nearly two dozen.
There were two other soldiers next to Roi. A hand grenade was thrown at them and Roi shouted, "Grenade!" He then threw his body over it, sacrificing his life for the sake of his soldiers, who later attributed being alive to his act of selflessness.
In his last seconds of life, Roi mustered the strength to shout "Shema Yisroel" the prayer that Jews have prayed for centuries, declaring our belief in G-d and in a better world; the prayer that so many Jewish martyrs throughout the generations called out as they were being led to their deaths.
My mind can't stop conjuring what it must have been like in those last seconds of his life, when Roi made the split-second decision to jump on the grenade. I imagine Roi seeing his beloved family in his mind's eye--his wife, and their two young children who would now grow up knowing him only from stories that they'd be told or from pictures that they'd be shown.
I imagine Roi thinking about his grieving elderly parents; of his mother, Shoshana whose voice cracked at her son's grave as she cried out, "The pain is unbearable... We will look after the children and raise them according to what you left behind…"
And I imagine Roi seeing the West Bank hilltop settlement of Eli that he and his wife idealistically made their home, despite those who wished to dismantle it.
It was for these loved one that Roi served in the special units of the Paratroop and Golani brigades. It was for them, and for the ideals represented by the Shema Yisroel prayer, that Roi diligently and courageously pursued his army service, advancing to the point where he would have been promoted to battalion commander.
What a colossal contrast between Roi and his enemy.
Roi was there to ensure a peaceful existence of his people in their homeland. He was there to safeguard the innocent lives of his children and his nation. To ensure that people could live in their homes in peace and tranquility. To guarantee that they could continue their ordinary day to day activities. Activities like shopping in a mall without being blown to bits, like eating a family meal together in a pizza shop without worrying about flying shrapnel, like praying in a synagogue without having to run for cover in a bomb shelter, or like sending their children on a school bus without thoughts of bullets penetrating within.
Roi was there to defend his people against those that vowed their destruction. Even in his death, he sacrificed his own life to ensure that two of his comrades could live.
I picture his enemy, too, in my mind. He is there to cause as much death, devastation and destruction as he possibly can. He is eager to send his young, strapped with explosive bombs stuffed with nails on missions of "suicide bombings," as long as in their death they murder as many Jews as possible with them. He is launching rocket after rocket into densely populated Jewish cities so that hospitals healing the sick and homes housing the elderly will be destroyed together with the lives of those inside.
Roi's enemy was willing to die to bring death and mourning to as many as possible; Roi was willing to die to ensure life and liberty for others, to preserve a world in which Jews could pray to G-d in their synagogues, perform G-d's commandments and make our world a better, more moral and more conscientious place.
This is the third time in this last century that the Jewish people have found themselves on the front lines against those who sought their annihilation.
For the Nazis, the Jew was a racial impurity to be exterminated like insects. For the Soviet communists, the Jewish religion was a thorn in their sides to be eradicated. And for the Islamic extremists, the Jew and his state must be eliminated from the face of the earth.
Less than a century has passed since Jews fell in the Soviet gulag with the chant of Shema in their mouths for the mere "crime" of observing kashrut or Shabbat in their private lives. Just over a half a century has passed since the echo of the Shema resonated in the Nazi gas chambers where Jews were asphyxiated and then burnt to ashes in the crematoriums just because they were born as Jews.
And now Roi Klein followed in the path of these martyrs, dying with the cry of Shema on his lips in the act of defending his people from those who, yet again, wish to destroy them.
Roi is no stranger after all. He is each of our husbands, sons and brothers. His face is the face of each of our heroes and martyrs.
Tallest building in Kiryat Shmona hit by Katyusha - August 13
August 13, 2006
Dear Friends,
I wrote a brief note on Friday, to tell everyone that I'm OK, in case they saw my building on television. In fact, only a few minutes later, the building was shown on TV, on the 5:00 p.m. news program; my phone didn't stop ringing for hours.
I was about to get ready to leave the house anyway, when I heard the whoosh of a Katyusha, the loudest crash I'd ever heard, and the building literally bounced. My apartment, on the 13th floor of the "14 storey building" faces east, with one window on the north; I looked down from there, to see if the building had been hit on that side, and it hadn't. When I got out into the hallway, I heard lots of voices on the stairs, or on the floors below. Although the elevators were working, I decided to walk down, and see what was going on. I walked onto each floor from the stairwell.
When I got to the ninth floor, I did the same, and noticed some drops of blood on the floor in front of the south-west apartment. At the same time, someone was hollering from inside the apartment, "Is anybody there?" When I answered, he asked me to try to push open the door from the outside, he couldn't get it open. I pushed and even kicked it, but couldn't get it open. I told him to wait, and I'd get help; he seemed calm enough. I went to the stairwell, and called down for help. Immediately, a policeman appeared, and spoke to the man inside, who answered him. The policeman tried to kick the door open, with no success, and ran and got the firemen who were in the building. No one could figure out how the man was trapped inside, because obviously, whoever had been hurt had left from that door. I surmised that whoever it was had gone in and the door slammed behind them. The firemen started working on cutting the door open. The door is what is known as a multi-bolt door: it's metal, with bolts that go into the frame on all four sides of the door. They kept trying to call to the man inside, but now there was no answer, and faces were looking very worried. Several firemen asked me if I was sure I'd heard someone there, but the policeman interceded and said that, "Yes, there was someone there", and he had spoken to him, we both had. Of course, a crowd of neighbors had collected. One was Ella's husband from the 10th floor, who ran back upstairs. A few moments later, Ella came down with the key - just in time; they were close to breaking in. But there was no one there! He'd been rescued by the fire truck, which reached him through the living room window. I had a glimpse of destruction, with the windows and shutters shattered, and glass all over, before the door was closed and locked again.
I had a passing thought of a funny incident that occurred last summer: I'd been sitting at the computer, which is near the window, and heard voices very close. Now, sound does travel up, and I sometimes hear sounds from the street, but this sounded like someone was talking into a telephone or walkie-talkie, extremely close to the window. I couldn't figure it out. Suddenly, a man loomed up next to my window! I don't know which one of us was more startled upon seeing the other. I chatted with him and offered him a cold drink. Turned out that he was a fireman, and after a minor fire in a 3rd floor apartment, the fire department had decided to practice reaching the upper floors, "just in case". Now, I thought how lucky it was that the firemen had practiced reaching the upper floors of our building, the tallest in Kiryat Shmona, when they did.
At that point, one of the firemen I knew asked about the other residents of the building, in the floors above the ninth. He and I went up again, floor by floor, to make sure no one else was trapped in their apartments. I pointed out which residents had already left, and which apartments still had people living in them, and we knocked on those doors. By that time, all the residents were downstairs, milling around in the lobby.
I went to the 10th floor, to Ella's apartment. It was a shambles. Every day, I had warned them not to close the windows all the way. However, her husband had come home from work, turned on the air conditioner, and closed the windows. Then he sat down in the living room to read the paper, after having just stepped out of the kitchen. All the living room windows were knocked out; I don't understand how he wasn't seriously injured by flying glass. All he had was a small cut on his arm. The kitchen was in worse shape. They'd had a huge window in there, which was completely blown out, frame, glass, even bits of plaster, and all. Here, it wasn't just the force of the shock wave, as it had been in the living room, but shrapnel as well. Pieces of shrapnel and glass were embedded in the wall above the cabinets. Another piece had evidently struck the mechanism of the refrigerator, because it had stopped working. The sink had been dislodged from the surrounding countertop, and was tilting at an angle. All in all, though, they were uninjured. Her father had been lying in bed, in the far bedroom (facing the southern niche) and so hadn't been hurt, either.
I left her and went downstairs. Most of the other neighbors were milling around; one family was in hysterics. I had met them only a few hours earlier, when I came home. The siren had gone off, and they had run to the stairwell, which is very secure. Now, some of their windows had been blasted in, and they were totally in shock. Several people noted how many people had stayed in the building; I would estimate that one-third of the residents were still there, which seems to be typical of the town as a whole.
The building is shaped roughly as below (my artistic abilities are nil Note from Daisyima: the drawing did not come over in the posting); there are four apartments on a floor, each identical. Each apartment has 3-way ventilation. (One of the jokes here is that Nasrallah is trying to improve living conditions by giving everyone cross-ventilation.) Most windows face one direction, one window in the next direction going counter-clockwise, and the third, continuing counter-clockwise, facing into the "niche" . The inner part of the niche is the kitchen window. So, for example, my windows mostly face east, with another window facing north, and the one facing the niche actually facing west, but blocked by the other side of the niche. My kitchen window faces east as well, but is on the inner side of the niche. Hope this isn't too confusing.
What had happened is that the Katyusha hit inside the niche, which amplified the effect. All, or almost all, of the kitchens facing west, i.e. the lower left quadrant of the figure above, were damaged, from at least the 3rd floor to at least the 13th. That is, the kitchen windows were blown in, with glass and possibly shrapnel inside. I don't know about above and below that, because people weren't home, and I couldn't tell from outside. Most of the apartments which have one window facing into the niche, i.e. the north facing ones, were also damaged. Even with the windows open, the force of the blast blew them off their frames, and there's glass everywhere.
People keep asking me about the building itself, the electricity, the elevators, etc. There was no real structural damage: apartments like Ella's, and Riki's below hers, had a lot of glass, wood and plastic damage, even perhaps a cinderblock or two dislodged, and plaster knocked off the concrete. However, despite the jokes, e.g. Nasrallah wants everyone in Kiryat Shmona to have a single-storey house, the Katyusha is not like a bomb dropped from a plane, or even the size and strength of those that have fallen in Haifa, which seriously damage buildings and infrastructure. The Katyusha is actually an anti-personnel weapon. Because it's sent over with tremendous force, and has so much explosives packed into it, it can and does do damage to structures. But that damage is usually a hole where it penetrated, and whatever it wrecks inside. It usually does not do structural damage, and certainly not in modern, strongly-built buildings like mine.
Getting back to what happened that evening, I again started leaving the building, and ran into David T. coming in. David is an engineer, who has been assigned by the municipality to check on physical damage, and authorize evacuation for those people whose homes and apartments have been damaged to the point where they can't stay there. First, he was waylaid by a neighbor downstairs, who said that water was leaking from the 7th floor down, in the southwest quadrant. He then asked me who lived where, what apartments were affected. We ended up coming back up to my apartment, where I printed out a list of the residents I had on my computer, having once been the treasurer of the building committee. We went over the list, and I explained which apartments were damaged and which people needed to be evacuated. Before he was finished, he got a call to run to the next site that had been hit. A little later, when I discovered that two families weren't listed, I called David, and he was already at the third site. Among those whose names I gave him was Ella and her family.
I finally left, about an hour after I originally planned to leave. In all of this going up and down, I was still holding a container of cat food to put out, and eventually I did so - luckily. I was in time for one of the most moving moments of the day. A family from the Eshkol neighborhood, where I volunteer, and with whom I'd been in contact, knew that I lived in the 14 storey building, but didn't have my phone number. So, they hopped in their car to come over and see if they could find me, to make sure I was OK! We met in the parking lot. As I say, I was very touched.
Of course, my phone didn't stop ringing from the moment the building was shown on TV, about 15 minutes after it was hit. All my friends, from near and far, wanted to make sure that I was OK. Every time I completed one phone call, there were 2 or 3 messages waiting. It's wonderful to know that so many people care.
After eating dinner out - far away from town - I returned. Two families were downstairs, waiting to be picked up, and taken to their temporary homes away from Kiryat Shmona, although they didn't know where. But Ella and her family hadn't been picked up. I went upstairs to her apartment, and called David from there. Turns out he'd had the wrong phone number: Ella's brother-in-law, Peter, lives in the building, too. They had gone to relatives for the duration, and David had mistakenly gotten Peter's number from information, and kept calling Peter's empty apartment. By the time I was able to put Ella and David into direct contact, it was too late to do anything. Ella and her husband had already cleaned up most of the broken glass, and they ended up spending the entire weekend in the apartment, with no windows. When I left this morning, they were waiting for a call about their evacuation. They'd received a call from the tax authorities, telling them that the damage in their apartment was too extensive for a regular temporary solution. A longer-term solution, close enough for them to continue going to work even after the war is over, was being sought. In the meantime, all they could do was wait. [By this evening, they were gone, and I'll try to call her tomorrow and get details.]
I had another full and interesting day at the moked today, but details of that will have to wait until tomorrow's update.
Until then, have a quiet and peaceful night,
Marsh
Dear Friends,
I wrote a brief note on Friday, to tell everyone that I'm OK, in case they saw my building on television. In fact, only a few minutes later, the building was shown on TV, on the 5:00 p.m. news program; my phone didn't stop ringing for hours.
I was about to get ready to leave the house anyway, when I heard the whoosh of a Katyusha, the loudest crash I'd ever heard, and the building literally bounced. My apartment, on the 13th floor of the "14 storey building" faces east, with one window on the north; I looked down from there, to see if the building had been hit on that side, and it hadn't. When I got out into the hallway, I heard lots of voices on the stairs, or on the floors below. Although the elevators were working, I decided to walk down, and see what was going on. I walked onto each floor from the stairwell.
When I got to the ninth floor, I did the same, and noticed some drops of blood on the floor in front of the south-west apartment. At the same time, someone was hollering from inside the apartment, "Is anybody there?" When I answered, he asked me to try to push open the door from the outside, he couldn't get it open. I pushed and even kicked it, but couldn't get it open. I told him to wait, and I'd get help; he seemed calm enough. I went to the stairwell, and called down for help. Immediately, a policeman appeared, and spoke to the man inside, who answered him. The policeman tried to kick the door open, with no success, and ran and got the firemen who were in the building. No one could figure out how the man was trapped inside, because obviously, whoever had been hurt had left from that door. I surmised that whoever it was had gone in and the door slammed behind them. The firemen started working on cutting the door open. The door is what is known as a multi-bolt door: it's metal, with bolts that go into the frame on all four sides of the door. They kept trying to call to the man inside, but now there was no answer, and faces were looking very worried. Several firemen asked me if I was sure I'd heard someone there, but the policeman interceded and said that, "Yes, there was someone there", and he had spoken to him, we both had. Of course, a crowd of neighbors had collected. One was Ella's husband from the 10th floor, who ran back upstairs. A few moments later, Ella came down with the key - just in time; they were close to breaking in. But there was no one there! He'd been rescued by the fire truck, which reached him through the living room window. I had a glimpse of destruction, with the windows and shutters shattered, and glass all over, before the door was closed and locked again.
I had a passing thought of a funny incident that occurred last summer: I'd been sitting at the computer, which is near the window, and heard voices very close. Now, sound does travel up, and I sometimes hear sounds from the street, but this sounded like someone was talking into a telephone or walkie-talkie, extremely close to the window. I couldn't figure it out. Suddenly, a man loomed up next to my window! I don't know which one of us was more startled upon seeing the other. I chatted with him and offered him a cold drink. Turned out that he was a fireman, and after a minor fire in a 3rd floor apartment, the fire department had decided to practice reaching the upper floors, "just in case". Now, I thought how lucky it was that the firemen had practiced reaching the upper floors of our building, the tallest in Kiryat Shmona, when they did.
At that point, one of the firemen I knew asked about the other residents of the building, in the floors above the ninth. He and I went up again, floor by floor, to make sure no one else was trapped in their apartments. I pointed out which residents had already left, and which apartments still had people living in them, and we knocked on those doors. By that time, all the residents were downstairs, milling around in the lobby.
I went to the 10th floor, to Ella's apartment. It was a shambles. Every day, I had warned them not to close the windows all the way. However, her husband had come home from work, turned on the air conditioner, and closed the windows. Then he sat down in the living room to read the paper, after having just stepped out of the kitchen. All the living room windows were knocked out; I don't understand how he wasn't seriously injured by flying glass. All he had was a small cut on his arm. The kitchen was in worse shape. They'd had a huge window in there, which was completely blown out, frame, glass, even bits of plaster, and all. Here, it wasn't just the force of the shock wave, as it had been in the living room, but shrapnel as well. Pieces of shrapnel and glass were embedded in the wall above the cabinets. Another piece had evidently struck the mechanism of the refrigerator, because it had stopped working. The sink had been dislodged from the surrounding countertop, and was tilting at an angle. All in all, though, they were uninjured. Her father had been lying in bed, in the far bedroom (facing the southern niche) and so hadn't been hurt, either.
I left her and went downstairs. Most of the other neighbors were milling around; one family was in hysterics. I had met them only a few hours earlier, when I came home. The siren had gone off, and they had run to the stairwell, which is very secure. Now, some of their windows had been blasted in, and they were totally in shock. Several people noted how many people had stayed in the building; I would estimate that one-third of the residents were still there, which seems to be typical of the town as a whole.
The building is shaped roughly as below (my artistic abilities are nil Note from Daisyima: the drawing did not come over in the posting); there are four apartments on a floor, each identical. Each apartment has 3-way ventilation. (One of the jokes here is that Nasrallah is trying to improve living conditions by giving everyone cross-ventilation.) Most windows face one direction, one window in the next direction going counter-clockwise, and the third, continuing counter-clockwise, facing into the "niche" . The inner part of the niche is the kitchen window. So, for example, my windows mostly face east, with another window facing north, and the one facing the niche actually facing west, but blocked by the other side of the niche. My kitchen window faces east as well, but is on the inner side of the niche. Hope this isn't too confusing.
What had happened is that the Katyusha hit inside the niche, which amplified the effect. All, or almost all, of the kitchens facing west, i.e. the lower left quadrant of the figure above, were damaged, from at least the 3rd floor to at least the 13th. That is, the kitchen windows were blown in, with glass and possibly shrapnel inside. I don't know about above and below that, because people weren't home, and I couldn't tell from outside. Most of the apartments which have one window facing into the niche, i.e. the north facing ones, were also damaged. Even with the windows open, the force of the blast blew them off their frames, and there's glass everywhere.
People keep asking me about the building itself, the electricity, the elevators, etc. There was no real structural damage: apartments like Ella's, and Riki's below hers, had a lot of glass, wood and plastic damage, even perhaps a cinderblock or two dislodged, and plaster knocked off the concrete. However, despite the jokes, e.g. Nasrallah wants everyone in Kiryat Shmona to have a single-storey house, the Katyusha is not like a bomb dropped from a plane, or even the size and strength of those that have fallen in Haifa, which seriously damage buildings and infrastructure. The Katyusha is actually an anti-personnel weapon. Because it's sent over with tremendous force, and has so much explosives packed into it, it can and does do damage to structures. But that damage is usually a hole where it penetrated, and whatever it wrecks inside. It usually does not do structural damage, and certainly not in modern, strongly-built buildings like mine.
Getting back to what happened that evening, I again started leaving the building, and ran into David T. coming in. David is an engineer, who has been assigned by the municipality to check on physical damage, and authorize evacuation for those people whose homes and apartments have been damaged to the point where they can't stay there. First, he was waylaid by a neighbor downstairs, who said that water was leaking from the 7th floor down, in the southwest quadrant. He then asked me who lived where, what apartments were affected. We ended up coming back up to my apartment, where I printed out a list of the residents I had on my computer, having once been the treasurer of the building committee. We went over the list, and I explained which apartments were damaged and which people needed to be evacuated. Before he was finished, he got a call to run to the next site that had been hit. A little later, when I discovered that two families weren't listed, I called David, and he was already at the third site. Among those whose names I gave him was Ella and her family.
I finally left, about an hour after I originally planned to leave. In all of this going up and down, I was still holding a container of cat food to put out, and eventually I did so - luckily. I was in time for one of the most moving moments of the day. A family from the Eshkol neighborhood, where I volunteer, and with whom I'd been in contact, knew that I lived in the 14 storey building, but didn't have my phone number. So, they hopped in their car to come over and see if they could find me, to make sure I was OK! We met in the parking lot. As I say, I was very touched.
Of course, my phone didn't stop ringing from the moment the building was shown on TV, about 15 minutes after it was hit. All my friends, from near and far, wanted to make sure that I was OK. Every time I completed one phone call, there were 2 or 3 messages waiting. It's wonderful to know that so many people care.
After eating dinner out - far away from town - I returned. Two families were downstairs, waiting to be picked up, and taken to their temporary homes away from Kiryat Shmona, although they didn't know where. But Ella and her family hadn't been picked up. I went upstairs to her apartment, and called David from there. Turns out he'd had the wrong phone number: Ella's brother-in-law, Peter, lives in the building, too. They had gone to relatives for the duration, and David had mistakenly gotten Peter's number from information, and kept calling Peter's empty apartment. By the time I was able to put Ella and David into direct contact, it was too late to do anything. Ella and her husband had already cleaned up most of the broken glass, and they ended up spending the entire weekend in the apartment, with no windows. When I left this morning, they were waiting for a call about their evacuation. They'd received a call from the tax authorities, telling them that the damage in their apartment was too extensive for a regular temporary solution. A longer-term solution, close enough for them to continue going to work even after the war is over, was being sought. In the meantime, all they could do was wait. [By this evening, they were gone, and I'll try to call her tomorrow and get details.]
I had another full and interesting day at the moked today, but details of that will have to wait until tomorrow's update.
Until then, have a quiet and peaceful night,
Marsh
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Great potential for progress
The night of the long knives is just around the corner
Gershon Baskin
This has been a terrible week for Israel. Although the end of the week brought UN Security Council 1701 which has met most of Israel’s demands, the war has continued and in its (hopefully) final hours it is taking a huge toll in new casualties. With the war in its final hours the “after war” has already begun. Generals, including the Chief of Staff, Ministers, including the Prime Minister, and other officers and politicians are already jockeying for positions to defend themselves or for attacking others in what can be expected to be the very long “night of the long knives” period.
There are a lot of questions that demand answers concerning the preparedness of the army and the home front, the decision-making process in the government, the IDF, the officers on front lines and the linkages between them all. There will be a lot of charges and counter-charges about the level of experience and knowledge of the decision-makers. This past weekend’s newspapers were already filled with stories of “fashles” (screw-ups) on the battle field. For weeks, people have been asking many tactical questions and now they are beginning to ask the main strategic questions: what was achieved and at what price? Should Israel have gone to war now or should we have been better prepared? Why does it appear that the intelligence regarding the ability of Hizbollah to fight was so incorrect? It seems, for example, that the various anti-tank weapons used by Hizbollah were far more effective than thought in taking out the Merkava IV tanks which were believed to be invulnerable. Those same anti-tank weapons were used by Hizbollah on helicopters, buildings and troops. How did Hizbollah manage to shoot an average of almost 200 rockets into Israel everyday? As the IDF captured more territory the amount of successful rocket fire into Israel increased – why? Why were the IDF weapons unable to penetrate the Hizbollah bunkers in Beirut and throughout south Lebanon? Israel had turned down an offer from the US several years ago to purchase the US bunker-busters claiming that Israel had its own more superior version of this bomb.
Just as serious are the questions concerning the home front. Some 1.5 million Israelis were displaced or forced to spend a month underground in shelters. In many cases, the shelters were in terrible condition and could not be used. There were problems of supplies to the home front. There seemed to be no orderly plans for evacuation and now the questions regarding financial compensation for damages and losses will bombard the government with more force than the Katyusha rockets. These questions don’t even touch the important issues concerning the level and extent of damage done by Israel to Lebanon – did this have to happen? Why? What were the alternatives that were not implemented?
Who will pay the price?
The Likud is already on the attack. Voices unheard from in months are beginning to speak out against Olmert, Peretz and everyone else in the government. Netanyahu is back in the media and on full attack. He has, until now, supported the government’s war effort. He has presented himself as taking a loyalist nationalist stance. Now he is on attack because of his opposition to the UN Security Council resolution and because of what seems to be a likely ceasefire to begin tomorrow. Netanyahu and his Likud mates want more blood – more Hizbollah blood, and they fail to realize that the cost of more Hizbollah blood will be more Israeli blood. Those right-wing politicians and the generals, who are calling for more, still believe that Hizbollah can be brought to its knees. They believe that Israel can still dictate the political changes that they want in Lebanon. In the name of the so-called “deterrence” and in the name of Israel's honor, they have no problems sending more young Israelis to their deaths, so that they can capture and hold the next hill and the next village. They want us to stay in the bloody quagmire of Lebanon for years to come. They have learned no lessons from the past or from the current fiasco. But these people will probably not pay the price of the current mess. They will probably inherit the spoils of this war.
Ehud Olmert, Amir Peretz and Dan Halutz are most likely to pay the heaviest political price from this war (aside from the real price of the war paid by those who have lost their lives, their homes, and their livelihoods). This war is considered by most of the public to be a military defeat. Most Israelis think that Israel did not win and that Hizbollah has a much better chance of claiming victory. At this point, most Israelis believe that we will have to face the Hizbollah once again in a few years from now and then they will be even stronger than they are today. Many Israelis believe that already in this war we were essentially facing Iran and Syria on the battlefield and that we should already face both of them directly – and the sooner the better.
Olmert and his Kadima party were elected on a political platform that is today rejected by the Israeli public. The idea of another unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank has lost all of its appeal. Most of the drop in support is from people who think that Israel cannot afford to give up any territory because in a few years from now we will have to go to war to take it back after the Palestinians manage to deploy missiles and rockets that can hit all of Israel. Others oppose the unilateral withdrawals because they believe that we should not do anything outside of negotiations with a Palestinian partner. “No more unilateralism” is their motto (and I am one of them). The Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon brought both the second intifada and this war in Lebanon. The Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza brought us the Hamas victory.
New opportunities
If Olmert and Peretz do not come up with a bold political initiative in the coming months that will take us beyond Lebanon, they will pay the price and we will be heading for yet another round of new elections, and in those elections, once again the political map of Israel will be changed out of all recognition. The best way to fight off the return of the right is to push forward with the agenda of the left. Forging an aggressive peace agenda, negotiations and a comprehensive regional approach is what Olmert (and Israel) needs in order to bring us to safer shores. The best step would be to bring back the Clinton parameters and the Arab League peace initiative. With the Security Council being held in such high regard lately, perhaps a new initiative for a UN Resolution that would include the Clinton parameters and the Arab League Initiative – with international guarantees and support – could help move us along. Some people have suggested reconvening the Madrid conference of 1991 to bring along the entire region and the international community. All of this can be done, but the basis for any progress must be to rebuild the Israeli-Palestinian partnership. President Mahmoud Abbas is the recognized leader of the Palestinian people – democratically elected and now further backed by the empowering prisoners’ document for Palestinian reconciliation. Olmert must now use the new political environment and his political needs to re-launch the bilateral Israeli-Palestinian track. The first issue on the agenda is the release of Gilead Shalit from his captors in Gaza. Serious negotiations and offers have already placed the resolution of this problem on the doorsteps of the decision makers – it is time for them to decide and to move immediately.
Within the framework of resolving this problem are the means for building Abbas’ position in Palestine. Abbas can be the deliverer of Palestinian prisoners. Abbas can be the deliverer of the Israeli soldier. It is possible, Olmert knows it, Abbas know it, the Egyptians know it, and even the Hamas leadership knows it. This problem can be resolved this week. This would be the first step towards renewing the Israeli-Palestinian track. There is great potential for progress mainly because everyone on both sides is fed up with the current stalemate. This last Middle East war has worked on accentuating everyone’s fatigue with war. Perhaps the political needs of Olmert and Kadima for a strategy of political survival will converge with the real needs of the region to find a less violent means of managing and hopefully resolving our conflict.
Gershon Baskin is the Co-CEO of IPCRI – the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information.
http://www.ipcri.org/
Gershon Baskin
This has been a terrible week for Israel. Although the end of the week brought UN Security Council 1701 which has met most of Israel’s demands, the war has continued and in its (hopefully) final hours it is taking a huge toll in new casualties. With the war in its final hours the “after war” has already begun. Generals, including the Chief of Staff, Ministers, including the Prime Minister, and other officers and politicians are already jockeying for positions to defend themselves or for attacking others in what can be expected to be the very long “night of the long knives” period.
There are a lot of questions that demand answers concerning the preparedness of the army and the home front, the decision-making process in the government, the IDF, the officers on front lines and the linkages between them all. There will be a lot of charges and counter-charges about the level of experience and knowledge of the decision-makers. This past weekend’s newspapers were already filled with stories of “fashles” (screw-ups) on the battle field. For weeks, people have been asking many tactical questions and now they are beginning to ask the main strategic questions: what was achieved and at what price? Should Israel have gone to war now or should we have been better prepared? Why does it appear that the intelligence regarding the ability of Hizbollah to fight was so incorrect? It seems, for example, that the various anti-tank weapons used by Hizbollah were far more effective than thought in taking out the Merkava IV tanks which were believed to be invulnerable. Those same anti-tank weapons were used by Hizbollah on helicopters, buildings and troops. How did Hizbollah manage to shoot an average of almost 200 rockets into Israel everyday? As the IDF captured more territory the amount of successful rocket fire into Israel increased – why? Why were the IDF weapons unable to penetrate the Hizbollah bunkers in Beirut and throughout south Lebanon? Israel had turned down an offer from the US several years ago to purchase the US bunker-busters claiming that Israel had its own more superior version of this bomb.
Just as serious are the questions concerning the home front. Some 1.5 million Israelis were displaced or forced to spend a month underground in shelters. In many cases, the shelters were in terrible condition and could not be used. There were problems of supplies to the home front. There seemed to be no orderly plans for evacuation and now the questions regarding financial compensation for damages and losses will bombard the government with more force than the Katyusha rockets. These questions don’t even touch the important issues concerning the level and extent of damage done by Israel to Lebanon – did this have to happen? Why? What were the alternatives that were not implemented?
Who will pay the price?
The Likud is already on the attack. Voices unheard from in months are beginning to speak out against Olmert, Peretz and everyone else in the government. Netanyahu is back in the media and on full attack. He has, until now, supported the government’s war effort. He has presented himself as taking a loyalist nationalist stance. Now he is on attack because of his opposition to the UN Security Council resolution and because of what seems to be a likely ceasefire to begin tomorrow. Netanyahu and his Likud mates want more blood – more Hizbollah blood, and they fail to realize that the cost of more Hizbollah blood will be more Israeli blood. Those right-wing politicians and the generals, who are calling for more, still believe that Hizbollah can be brought to its knees. They believe that Israel can still dictate the political changes that they want in Lebanon. In the name of the so-called “deterrence” and in the name of Israel's honor, they have no problems sending more young Israelis to their deaths, so that they can capture and hold the next hill and the next village. They want us to stay in the bloody quagmire of Lebanon for years to come. They have learned no lessons from the past or from the current fiasco. But these people will probably not pay the price of the current mess. They will probably inherit the spoils of this war.
Ehud Olmert, Amir Peretz and Dan Halutz are most likely to pay the heaviest political price from this war (aside from the real price of the war paid by those who have lost their lives, their homes, and their livelihoods). This war is considered by most of the public to be a military defeat. Most Israelis think that Israel did not win and that Hizbollah has a much better chance of claiming victory. At this point, most Israelis believe that we will have to face the Hizbollah once again in a few years from now and then they will be even stronger than they are today. Many Israelis believe that already in this war we were essentially facing Iran and Syria on the battlefield and that we should already face both of them directly – and the sooner the better.
Olmert and his Kadima party were elected on a political platform that is today rejected by the Israeli public. The idea of another unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank has lost all of its appeal. Most of the drop in support is from people who think that Israel cannot afford to give up any territory because in a few years from now we will have to go to war to take it back after the Palestinians manage to deploy missiles and rockets that can hit all of Israel. Others oppose the unilateral withdrawals because they believe that we should not do anything outside of negotiations with a Palestinian partner. “No more unilateralism” is their motto (and I am one of them). The Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon brought both the second intifada and this war in Lebanon. The Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza brought us the Hamas victory.
New opportunities
If Olmert and Peretz do not come up with a bold political initiative in the coming months that will take us beyond Lebanon, they will pay the price and we will be heading for yet another round of new elections, and in those elections, once again the political map of Israel will be changed out of all recognition. The best way to fight off the return of the right is to push forward with the agenda of the left. Forging an aggressive peace agenda, negotiations and a comprehensive regional approach is what Olmert (and Israel) needs in order to bring us to safer shores. The best step would be to bring back the Clinton parameters and the Arab League peace initiative. With the Security Council being held in such high regard lately, perhaps a new initiative for a UN Resolution that would include the Clinton parameters and the Arab League Initiative – with international guarantees and support – could help move us along. Some people have suggested reconvening the Madrid conference of 1991 to bring along the entire region and the international community. All of this can be done, but the basis for any progress must be to rebuild the Israeli-Palestinian partnership. President Mahmoud Abbas is the recognized leader of the Palestinian people – democratically elected and now further backed by the empowering prisoners’ document for Palestinian reconciliation. Olmert must now use the new political environment and his political needs to re-launch the bilateral Israeli-Palestinian track. The first issue on the agenda is the release of Gilead Shalit from his captors in Gaza. Serious negotiations and offers have already placed the resolution of this problem on the doorsteps of the decision makers – it is time for them to decide and to move immediately.
Within the framework of resolving this problem are the means for building Abbas’ position in Palestine. Abbas can be the deliverer of Palestinian prisoners. Abbas can be the deliverer of the Israeli soldier. It is possible, Olmert knows it, Abbas know it, the Egyptians know it, and even the Hamas leadership knows it. This problem can be resolved this week. This would be the first step towards renewing the Israeli-Palestinian track. There is great potential for progress mainly because everyone on both sides is fed up with the current stalemate. This last Middle East war has worked on accentuating everyone’s fatigue with war. Perhaps the political needs of Olmert and Kadima for a strategy of political survival will converge with the real needs of the region to find a less violent means of managing and hopefully resolving our conflict.
Gershon Baskin is the Co-CEO of IPCRI – the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information.
http://www.ipcri.org/
Uri Avnery: What the hell has happened to the army?
Uri Avnery 12.8.06
SO WHAT has happened to the Israeli army?
This question is now being raised not only around the world, but also in Israel itself. Clearly, there is a huge gap between the army's boastful arrogance, on which generations of Israelis have grown up, and the picture presented by this war.
Before the chorus of generals utter their expected cries of being stabbed in the back - "The government has shackled our hands! The politicians did not allow the army to win! The political leadership is to blame for everything!" - it is worth examining this war from a professional military point of view.
(It is, perhaps, appropriate to interject at this point a personal remark. Who am I to speak about strategic matters? What am I, a general? Well - I was 16 years old when World War II broke out. I decided then to study military theory in order to be able to follow events. I read a few hundred books - from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz to Liddel-Hart and on. Later, in the 1948 war, I saw the other side of the coin, as a soldier and squad-leader. I have written two books on the war. That does not make me a great strategist, but it does allow me to voice an informed opinion.)
The facts speak for themselves:
* On the 32nd day of the war, Hizbullah is still standing and fighting. That by itself is a stunning feat: a small guerilla organization, with a few thousand fighters, is standing up to one of the strongest armies in the world and has not been broken after a month of "pulverization". Since 1948, the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan have repeatedly been beaten in wars that were much shorter.
As I have already said: if a light-weight boxer is fighting a heavy-weight champion and is still standing in the 12th round, the victory is his - whatever the points.
* In the test of results - the only one that counts in war - the strategic and tactical command of Hizbullah is decidedly better than that of our own army. All along, our army's strategy has been primitive, brutal and unsophisticated.
* Clearly, Hizbullah has prepared well for this war - while the Israeli command has prepared for a quite different war.
* On the level of individual fighters, the Hizbullah are not inferior to our soldiers, neither in bravery nor in initiative.
THE MAIN guilt for the failure belongs with General Dan Halutz. I say "guilt" and not merely "responsibility", which comes with the job.
He is living proof of the fact that an inflated ego and a brutal attitude are not enough to create a competent Chief-of-Staff. The opposite may be true.
Halutz gained fame (or notoriety) when he was asked what he feels when he drops a one-ton bomb on a residential quarter and answered: "a slight bang on the wing." He added that afterwards he sleeps well at night. (In the same interview he also called me and my friends "traitors" who should be prosecuted.)
Now it is already clear - again, in the test of results - that Dan Halutz is the worst Chief-of-Staff in the annals of the Israeli army, a completely incompetent officer for his job.
Recently he has changed his blue Air-Force uniform for the green one of the land army. Too late.
Halutz started this war with the bluster of an Air Force officer. He believed that it was possible to crush Hizbullah by aerial bombardment, supplemented by artillery shelling from land and sea. He believed that if he destroyed the towns, neighborhoods, roads and ports of Lebanon, the Lebanese people would rise and compel their government to remove Hizbullah. For a week he killed and devastated, until it became clear to everybody that this method achieves the opposite - strengthens Hizbullah, weakens its opponents within Lebanon and throughout the Arab world, and destroys the world-wide sympathy Israel enjoyed at the beginning of the war.
When he reached this point, Halutz did not know what to do next. For three weeks he sent his soldiers into Lebanon on senseless and hopeless missions, gaining nothing. Even in the battles that were fought in villages right on the border, no significant victories were achieved. After the fourth week, when he was requested to submit a plan to the government, it was unbelievably primitive.
If the "enemy" had been a regular army, it would have been a bad plan. Just pushing the enemy back is hardly a strategy at all. But when the other side is a guerilla force, this is simply foolish. It may cause the death of many soldiers, for no practical result.
Now he is trying to achieve a token victory, occupying empty space as far from the border as possible, after the UN has already called for an end to the hostilities. (As in almost all previous Israeli wars, this call is being ignored, in the hope of snatching some gains at the last moment.) Behind this line, Hizbullah remains intact in their bunkers.
HOWEVER, THE Chief-of-Staff does not act in a vacuum. As Commander-in-Chief he has indeed a huge influence, but he is also merely the top of the military pyramid.
This war casts a dark shadow on the whole upper echelon of our army. I assume that there are some talented officers, but the general picture is of a senior officer corps that is mediocre or worse, grey and unoriginal. Almost all the many officers that have appeared on TV are unimpressive, uninspiring professionals, experts on covering their behinds, repeating empty clichés like parrots.
The ex-generals, who have been crowding out everybody else in the TV and radio studios, have also mostly surprised us with their mediocrity, limited intelligence and general ignorance. One gets the impression that they have not read books on military history, and fill the void with empty phrases.
More than once it has been said in this column that an army that has been acting for many years as a colonial police force against the Palestinian population - "terrorists", women and children - and spending its time running after stone-throwing boys, cannot remain an efficient army. The test of results confirms this.
AS AFTER every failure of our military, the intelligence community is quick to cover its ass. Their chiefs declare that they knew everything, that they provided the troops with full and accurate information, that they are not to blame if the army did not act on it.
That does not sound reasonable. Judging from the reactions of the commanders in the field, they clearly were completely unaware of the defense system built by Hizbullah in South Lebanon. The complex infrastructure of hidden bunkers, stocked with modern equipment and stockpiles of food and weapons was a complete surprise for the army. It was not ready for these bunkers, including those built two or three kilometers from the border. They are reminiscent of the tunnels in Vietnam.
The intelligence community has also been corrupted by the long occupation of the Palestinian territories. They have got used to relying on the thousands of collaborators that have been recruited in the course of 39 years by torture, bribery and extortion (junkies needing drugs, someone begging to be allowed to visit his dying mother, someone desiring a chunk from the cake of corruption, etc.) Clearly, no collaborators were found among the Hizbullah, and without them intelligence is blind.
It is also clear that Intelligence, and the army in general, was not ready for the deadly efficiency of Hizbullah's anti-tank weapons. Hard to believe, but according to official figures, more than 20 tanks were hit.
The Merkava ("carriage") tank is the pride of the army. Its father, General Israel Tal, a victorious tank general, did not want only to build the world's most advanced tank, but also a tank that provided its crew with the best possible protection. Now it appears that an anti-tank weapon from the late 1980s that is available in large quantities, can disable the tank, killing or grievously wounding the soldiers inside.
THE COMMON denominator of all the failures is the disdain for Arabs, a contempt that has dire consequences. It has caused total misunderstanding, a kind of blindness of Hizbullah's motives, attitudes, standing in Lebanese society, etc.
I am convinced that today's soldiers are in no way inferior to their predecessors. Their motivation is high, they have shown great bravery in the evacuation of the wounded under fire. (I very much appreciate that in particular, since my own life was saved by soldiers who risked theirs to get me out under fire when I was wounded.) But the best soldiers cannot succeed when the command is incompetent.
History teaches that defeat can be a great blessing for an army. A victorious army rests on its laurels, it has no motive for self-criticism, it degenerates, its commanders become careless and lose the next war. (see: the Six Day War leading to the Yom Kippur War). A defeated army, on the other hand, knows that it must rehabilitate itself. On one condition: that it admits defeat.
After this war, the Chief-of-Staff must be dismissed and the senior officer corps overhauled. For that, a Minister of Defense is needed who is not a marionette of the Chief-of-Staff. (But that concerns the political leadership, about whose failures and sins we shall speak another time.)
We, as people of peace, have a great interest in changing the military leadership. First, because it has a huge impact on the forming of policy and, as we just saw, irresponsible commanders can easily drag the government into dangerous adventures. And second, because even after achieving peace we shall need an efficient army - at least until the wolf lies down with the lamb, as the prophet Isaiah promised. (And not in the Israeli version: "No problem. One only has to bring a new lamb every day.")
THE MAIN lesson of the war, beyond all military analysis, lies in the five words we inscribed on our banner from the very first day: "There is no military solution!"
Even a strong army cannot defeat a guerilla organization, because the guerilla is a political phenomenon. Perhaps the opposite is true: the stronger the army, the better equipped with advanced technology, the smaller are its chances of winning such a confrontation. Our conflict - in the North, the Center and the South - is a political conflict, and can only be resolved by political means. The army is the instrument worst suited for that.
The war has proved that Hizbullah is a strong opponent, and any political solution in the North must include it. Since Syria is its strong ally, it must also be included. The settlement must be worthwhile for them too, otherwise it will not last.
The price is the return of the Golan Heights.
What is true in the North is also true in the South. The army will not defeat the Palestinians, because such a victory is altogether impossible. For the good of the army, it must be extricated from the quagmire.
If that now enters the consciousness of the Israeli public, something good may yet have come out of this war.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)