Sunday, November 19, 2006

View from Jerusalem #2

Continuation of a series, received in the email, from a friend in Israel:

"Six days ago, my tour group ate pizza for lunch in Sderot, an Israeli town not far (not far enough!) from Gaza. That was Sunday. A local rabbi spoke to us about his town as we ate. Three days later one woman in Sderot was killed by a Kassam rocket launched from Gaza as she crossed a downtown street. One woman? Lots of people die in the Middle East every day. But my goodness, what a wild emotional storm engulfed Israel for the next two days!

Hers was a particularly gruesome death. Warheads packed with nuts, bolts, screws, and nails make the explosion something like walking into a blender. Her photo was published: she was beautiful! Then we were told how many hours it took the Zaka team to remove all bits of flesh from the sidewalk, street, and surrounding buildings. The devout Jewish volunteers of Zaka respectfully collect and bury all body parts and pieces, even for this Muslim woman. She had crossed the street quickly while her Jewish husband lingered behind. He saw it from across the street. It doesn’t matter that she was Muslim. She was an Israeli citizen living in an Israeli town! When two Arab Members of the Knesset tried to attend her funeral, they were driven away by the outraged citizens of Sderot.

In 1943, the 7,000 Jews of Denmark escaped to neutral Sweden overnight, just hours before the Nazi soldiers tried to round them up and send them to death camps. Writing about that escape, a Danish Jew said this: "Many Jews feel like the winegrowers on the slopes of the Vesuvius (volcano). As long as it only smokes, you can live with the danger. Once the lava is pouring out of the crater, it is often too late to run for safety. The tragedy was that most of those who feared the future and wanted to escape had nowhere to escape to." That was 63 years ago. When Canada was asked at that time how many Jewish refugees it would take, a government official infamously replied, "None is too many."

Today there is one Jewish nation in the world, only one, and it has successfully defended itself for 59 years, since the UN vote in 1947 that created a Jewish state. Under the concept of Partition, the Arabs were also offered a nation of their own within the God-given land of Israel, but they turned it down, expecting they could get more land through war. Thus six decades later a Muslim woman living in Israel is killed by a Muslim rocket. She wasn’t Jewish, but she was Israeli. Then the UN General Assembly voted that Israel must not try to stop the rocket attacks from Gaza! Why not? How long must this go on? Self defense is a basic human right!

When the alert sounds in Sderot, there are usually 15 seconds between the alert and the actual crash of the rocket. That’s how long people have to get to a bomb shelter. On Wed., however, they had only 4 seconds to protect themselves due to poor visibility and fog. Only about three classrooms per school have been reinforced for added protection. The idea is that the children in other classes can run to the protected rooms — in 4 seconds?! So most classes try to cram into the few protected classrooms all day and very little learning is going on. The Education Ministry is sending psychologists to Sderot’s schools while the UN votes that Israel must not go into Gaza to stop the rocket launches.

A Jewish billionaire with a practical mind and a large pocketbook set up tent cities in the south last summer when northern Israelis were fleeing from Hizbullah’s Katyusha rockets in July and August. Now he has rented hotel rooms in Eilat, at the southern tip of Israel on the Red Sea, and has sent chartered buses to take a thousand kids and their families out of Sderot. The tension and fear have simply become too great to bear, especially for kids. The Israeli government is irate at the billionaire’s interference. His private initiative makes the government look totally incompetent. He did not coordinate his move with the government. How could he? The Prime Minister and a lot of cabinet members were in Los Angeles for a major meeting of influential American Jewish leaders. It was suggested publicly that the PM ought to call a cabinet meeting immediately — in California!

So how does the Israel public feel about its government? Last summer’s prelude to a massive international war has not been forgotten. Just hours before the woman died in Sderot, a poll was released. Only 15% support the Defense Minister, while 17% support the military Chief of Staff. The current head of military intelligence is another likely to resign. Also, 53% think the Prime Minister should resign or call new elections. A Maj.-Gen. who was head of the National Security Council says that rank-and-file soldiers have lost respect for their Chief of Staff.

Then the Muslim woman died in Sderot while the PM was in Los Angeles with much of his cabinet. MKs from the governing coalition began noisily attacking their own government: "This is governmental wantonness and abandonment of human life." Another government MK said, "What happened in Sderot this morning is just an additional reminder of what the residents experience every morning and every day. When those metal pieces fly in the air, they kill and maim and they have power." A recently-retired head of military intelligence says that stability is not foreseen in the Palestinian Authority, Al-Qaeda is working hard to rise, and Iran must be stopped. There are increasing threats against Israel from an increasingly radicalized Islamic Middle East, and there is no political solution, says he. Potential wars with the Lebanese Hizbullah and Hamas in Gaza (simultaneously?) are of deep concern throughout the nation.

Dr. Ra’anan Gissin, Ph.D. from Syracuse, was the speaker at our tour group’s opening banquet. He used to be Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s strategic consultant, media advisor, and spokesman. He began by talking about Kruger Park in South Africa. It was established to preserve endangered species. With fences and security, without fear of predators, the endangered species can proliferate. Dr. Gissin says that Israel is the same size as Kruger Park. This is the natural habitat of the Jewish people. Never mind that the world court in The Hague attempted to try Israel for the crime of building a security fence. Israel is the Kruger Park of the Jewish people. This endangered species has a right to live and proliferate. Dr. Gissin added that "western democracies are also endangered species. They just don’t know it yet. Then Ahmadinejad will erase the entire map!"

Should the world be so concerned about the accidental deaths of civilians as Israel defends herself? During World War II, the Allies’ B25s killed 67 innocent civilian scientists when they destroyed the heavy water plant so that Nazis wouldn’t get nukes. And Israel has never done to the Palestinians what the U.S. did to its own Japanese-American citizens during World War II. War is war. To be or not to be is the question. Israel can only lose one war. That’s it.

Today, in a politically-correct world, the peaceniks try to turn each battlefield into a crime scene. Is this a war or a court case? In the midst of this, the media take over all branches of the government: they judge and execute, they spin and influence the executive branch, and they shape legislation. The new era of media warfare has different rules of war and different weapons. Since Vietnam, photos are the main weapons. The single most important photo at the end of the war wins the war.

A week after he spoke to us, Dr. Gissin expressed some related thoughts at the Bar Ilan conference on The Media and the Middle East (edited from Ron Cantrell’s report). As PM Sharon’s strategic advisor, Dr. Gissin recognized that the nature of war changed when journalists and camera teams became embedded with troops in Iraq. When our public has a real-time view of front line battles, so does the enemy. Troop movements and positions are visible. Missile aiming can be corrected by watching on TV where previous missiles landed. Arabic TV crews are everywhere, filming from our side for the benefit of the enemy.

In another change to the realities of warfare, computer programs like Adobe Photoshop can create different "facts" by doubling the smoke from an explosion, for example. This falsifying of images is called "fauxtography". Hundreds of photos and videos were doctored by theoretically-objective journalists in the recent Hizbullah war. Expert photographer-bloggers exposed many of the staged photos and lies, but proof of manipulation always comes too late. It’s the initial few seconds of public viewing that create the emotional response against Israel’s supposed excesses. Hizbullah wins and Israel is demonized no matter what the facts are. (I learned about this after the Kfar Qana "massacre" where children’s dead bodies were imported from a previous TV presentation several days earlier. The same man carries out each little covered body, carefully changing his costume each time before emerging from the rubble with another new "victim". There was a 7-hour time gap between the Israeli bombing at midnight and the "discovery" of the "massacre" when the journalists arrived — by invitation? -- after daylight. Google for Kfar Qana or fauxtography or look it up on LittleGreenFootballs.com and Utube.)

Israel actually won the recent war with Hizbullah militarily but lost it via the media. Watch for the effect when "war" is called "a military operation", suitable for a war crimes trial because it’s not really an all-out war. Notice that "terrorism" may be called "sectarian violence", making it somehow more acceptable, like the Irish "troubles". Was the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center a "trouble" or a "war"?

As Dr. Gissin told us at our opening banquet, Israel needs to prepare its TV tactics and strategy, a real TV blitz, before the next shooting war begins. Hizbullah spent $15 million on TV resources out of a $100 million budget. That’s 15% of the war budget on TV. When Nasrallah spoke quietly on TV, he appeared to be a leader, on the scene, in charge. He spoke firmly and authoritatively from a hidden bunker deep underground, but he did not appear to be a quaking, fearful man in a "snake hole", like Saddam Hussein. TV did that for Nasrallah.

Dr. Gissin said that Israel is like a small surfboard living on top of a tsunami. Here Israel is building a nation on its surfboard: schools, agricultural exports, industry, research and development. In 1922 the League of Nations made the Balfour Declaration ("a Jewish homeland") the basis of the British Mandate to govern "Palestine". Would the UN General Assembly accept the Balfour Declaration today? No, the UN General Assembly just voted 156 - 7 that Israel must not stop the launching of Kassam rockets from Gaza. Yet the UN Charter says explicitly that nations have a right to self-defense. Is Israel something less than "a nation"?

Dr. Gissin is a powerful, passionate speaker. Next time I write, I’ll try to quickly summarize several speakers and comment on some of my favorite things, like the UAVs. We saw a lot of tanks and some helicopters, but the UAVs are the "dream machine".

Shabbat shalom (a peaceful Sabbath) from Jerusalem!
JM"

"Blessed be the LORD my strength, who teaches my hands to war, and my fingers to fight." Psalm 144:1

And just who fights with their fingers? If indeed the pen is mightier than the sword, the finger warriors are those banging them on computer keyboards all over the world in the present war of words. This is not a clash of cultures; it is a religious war to the death. quote from Ron Cantrell

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