Category: Essay

It’s been a while. Wars in the Middle East. Political idiocy and upheaval in the States. A regime change for Thailand, one coming up for Cuba and England. North Korea either blew up a lot of dynamite or has joined the atomic club, which is not a good thing for Planet Earth.

As a global community we are failing the test. I predict that Rammadan, and the ‘Eid Feast that concludes it, will be no different than the months before: innocent die, governments watch and the evil continue to do their work. And we can’t expect better outcomes for Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or even the US Congress if we, as individuals and as nations, don’t stand up and do the right thing. Stop. The. Genocide.

I was in a settlement on the West Bank a couple of weeks ago. One Thursday evening I strolled, watching the sun set. A kid rode past on his bike. On his shirt was the phrase: “No Arabs / No terrorism.” The phrase isn’t true, of course. But it’s symmetrically true that “No Jews / No terrorism.” Both sides believe the other is the root of all evil, and believe it’ll all be fine if the other side would just cease to exist.

In the Cardo, in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, were several upscale shops, catering to all the people who wouldn’t dare walk into the dark, twisted paths of the Arab shuq just a few feet beyond. Some sell jewelry, others T-shirts and other trinkets. Several, near the shuq, have paintings and silk screen pictures. I was admiring the watercolors on several, the pastoral quality, the golden light that surrounded the Old City… until I realized that neither inside the walls, nor off in the distance could one see any trace of Islam. Gone was the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Gone were the minarets – except for the Tower of David. One painting had a small forest where the Golden Dome now rests. Others had the Third Temple standing on a clean slate of Jerusalem stone.

Arab pictures, whether digitally edited or painted similarly ignore the realities of the Jewish Quarter and its inhabitants. These delusional images, joyously created, sold and distributed, merely add to the insanity that is the Middle East conundrum, best summed up in one of J.K. Rowling’s books describing the core prophetic vision: “…for neither can live while the other survives.”

Neither Syria nor Jewish racists nor Hammas, Hizbullah, or any other person or group can change a simple fact: until both sides learn to live in peace, people will die on both sides. And neither side will run out of victims anytime soon. The sooner we all accept, however grudgingly, this fact, the sooner we can get started on realizing a version of our lives that has two nations existing side by side.

I. Am. Boggled.

An Israeli, a politician, the Defence Minister, saying he didn’t know about the Hizbollah missile threat? How stupid is that? It’s not as if terrorists hadn’t fired Katyusha rockets into Israel before. Or paraded them around Lebanon, complete with marching martyrs. Or shown off their longer-range weapons. Even mustered out reservists like me knew about them. What did he expect? That Hizbollah would launch batalions of regular soldiers over the border?

Israel’s relationship with Lebanon goes back over eighty years. It’s a relationship that Israel has continually had to redefine and rejudge.

For Peretz to say he had no idea that the Hizbollah rocket threat was on the map is so absurd as to call into basic question not only his competence to hold office, but to question whether the Kadima party, decapitated with Sharon’s (all but) demise, should be allowed to continue.

I would rather a right wing party of rationalists than the current leadership of visionless, impotent functionaries. And this from an ardent left-winger!

I’d previously posted on what I thought Israel’s military game plan would be. Strike hard, decisively, and continue to drill down until it hurt Hizbollah enough to cough up its captives and retreat.

What I didn’t account for was the Bush Effect, and at this stage, I can’t support the continued Israeli military operation.

When sub-Bush took aim at Iraq, I was all for the war. Not because I thought the President was right, but because taking out Iraq, I reasoned, would save Israel the trouble of doing it next time he decided to transfer his aggression on one country instead onto Israel. I imagined he’d learned from ubber-Bush, who did a half-baked job on an enemy that respected only full measures of action. After the heated rhetoric, the 20,000-pound bombs, and America’s overwhelming might, I expected “shock and awe” to be deafening.

It was more like Babe Ruth needing to hit a grand slam but instead dribbling a bunt that barely made the pitcher’s mound.

Like little Bush’s attempt at war-making, Ehud Olmert has lived down to his roots as a lawyer and political hack. I know the code words that could have been spoken to trigger a callup, a swift and deep attack, and a truly devestating hit. It would have killed more Lebanese civilians, but Israel would have been saved thousands of missile strikes.

Instead, this ‘hit and wait,’ ‘hit and wait’ policy provided the enemy with ammunition for public relations and their allies and non-supporters of the Jewish state with the time and space to push Israel back on the political battlefield.

Now we are left with the impression of thousands of milling reservists, the reality of over one hundred buried soldiers, and my former home in Northern Israel a wreckage-wracked and economically devestated area, from which it will take years to recover.

Prime Minister Olmert, you failed in the kind of mission one gets but one chance to execute: safeguarding the security of the Israeli people and land. Like Bush, you have forfeited the credentials a state leader is given in stewardship, not in perpetuity.: the stewardship to manage the future of the country. The casualties of the next few years, when Hizballah lobs missiles over separation forces to land in Israel, are on your head. And you have given the radical right ammunition, ammunition to which they had no rights to acquire, to be the next weapons of mass political destruction.

Shame on you.

My spouse and I have passionate views, and, like many areas, we’re not on the same page on the future of this latest Lebanese war. (Of course, it’s not against the Lebanese, it’s against whomever’s last taken over the country, but that’s another story.)

Richard Bartholomew has yet again captured the real essence of the war. With every place I’ve ever lived in targeted by rockets, and seeing the damage up close on both sides, it’s clear that, whatever the terrorist or military goals on respective sides, it’s the innocent civilians on both sides of the ridge that are doing the brunt of the suffering.

Israel, unlike its enemy, does not have the luxury of blanket bombings of civilians and this complicates and extends Israel’s attack against Hizballah and, as a result, the casualties inflicted on civilians used as shields by terrorists and their rockets.

The Dresden firestorm in World War Two killed literally tens of thousands of innocent civilians, all because they made the mistake of living in a city that had war machine factories. This was a triumph of Allied air power, and a congruence with my family’s fate at almost the exact same time in Auschwitz.

When Hezballah or Hamas miss and hit a field instead of an Israeli citizen, house, or factory, they readjust their aim and fire again. Muslim fanatics and their sycophants hand out candy to children after a successful strike at the Jewish Homeland. And then turn around and protest when Israel accidentally hits buildings next to missile launchers, which are set up specifically to shield behind civilians.

Israel is not America in World War Two, and we do not revel in the deaths of civilians, the raison d’être of the terrorists at our borders. While the deaths of civilians is deplorable, horrible in the case of children, it is Hizballah—literally “Army of God”—that is to blame for creating the conditions, and then positioning weapons, to maximize their own civilian casualties.

Of course the civilians, beholden to the generous hand of Hizballah, will anticipate the rebuilding and rehabilitation, yet again, of their country, a mea culpa they will not understand from a terror organization that cynically knows how to sow and harvest their next generation of fanatics.

Despair works best
when it has no reason to.

I’ve been covering the war on Israel’s northern border and throughout Lebanon, as well as in Gaza, since the first attack by Hamas resulting in deaths, injuries and one soldier kidnapped. Friends, co-workers, vendors, folks in the neighborhood.

The tools available on the web such as Google’s Earth and map web site have been invaluable — to a point. Zoom in on Israel’s northern border and try to move east from the coast. At a certain point, the vision gets vague: satellite imagery gets blurry around Har Meron and Tsfat, and then totally unplottable. Check out this picture: the clear settlement is a border kibbutz, to the right is a land heading east towards Meron. This obviously helps Israel, but I wonder who makes these rules? Before North Korea’s test-spewing of missiles, I was able to track, in painful detail, all of North Korea in search of missile silos and other military structures. Not all that many vehicles up there, by the way, except for near where South Korea might be able to see.

Here’s another example: Lebanon’s Beirut International Airport versus Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport. Which one do you think makes for better targeting?

So someone has pull with Google. Microsoft’s Live site solves the problem by simply not providing high-resolution shots at all of Israel, but it’s the same story on the Lebanese side.

I’m glad tactical information about Israel isn’t being made available to Iran for targeting. Google is living up to its motto of doing no evil. But I think it’s interesting that that ability is being governed according to what seem to be United States interests.

Check the weather report in Israel according to the radio news broadcasts.