The Taliban in the IDF

Without anybody noticing, the Taliban have arrived at the Israeli Defense Forces (click on the title to read the Haaretz article). They masquerade as Rabbis and abuse the public trust into the IDF's rabbinate in order to educate Israeli soldiers to behave like Taliban, Hamas or Hezbollah warriors. "Show no mercy to the cruel" sounds a lot like "show no mercy to the infidels" to me, in my humble opinion.

The only thing that separates us and them now is that common Israeli soldiers subjected to that kind of teachings came forward and reported the intellectual garbage to the press, for all of us to read and get goose bumps. Free minds and a free press are the only thing standing between us and the final abyss.

Still there are islands of reason and common sense left, but where is all of that leading us? If Rabbi Ronzki will still be the Chief Rabbi of the IDF in a couple of months from now, it is time to pack up and move to Afghanistan, I'd say. At least the property prices there are a lot more reasonable.

Israeli Humanity - Does it Exist?

These days a lot is being said and written about the Israeli war machine killing innocent children with Israelis showing no remorse. Israelis have been called the "New Nazis" and the war in Gaza has been marked as the new Holocaust. 

Holocaust? You must be out of your mind to write such bullshit. 6 Million Jews perished in an industrial killing machine. We would need to fight the war in Gaza 6,000 times over in order to reach that kind of magnitude, and even then there is a difference between victims of war and exterminated people because of what they were.

But that is not what I wanted to tell you today. I want to give the human perspective of the war, which is not being reported in the media at all, and I wonder why that is.

A relative of mine came to visit from the US the other day and developed symptoms of a heart attack a day after the flight. She was admitted to Ichilov hospital in Tel Aviv and remained under observation for a couple of days. She shared her room with one other Israeli woman and a woman from Gaza, as quite many patients do these days. We have heard about children being transferred to Israeli hospitals, but this story is different. The woman from Gaza suffers from a head and neck cancer, which had been treated in Gaza for years and finally had reached a stage where the doctors there gave up and send her home to die. That was shortly before the start of the war. A few days later Israeli troops reached her neighbourhood and her husband was brave enough to go out and ask the Israeli medic of the unit operating near his house for help. The medic called the units surgeon, who checked the woman and told the family that without treatment she would die very soon, but that he knows that surgery could be performed at Ichilov hospital. If they agreed he would try to arrange for a transfer. They agreed and the woman was evacuated in an Israeli army ambulance under Hamas fire to the Gaza border, where she was picked up by a civilian ambulance. She was operated on shortly after and was recovering from the surgery when my relative was admitted. 

You see, that is the real face of Israeli humanity. Yes, there is war, and yes, innocent people die in wars, but Israelis don't fight the war in order to exterminate the Palestinians. They fight to defend their country and their way of life from maniac terrorist who have managed to take 1 million Gazans hostage.

As for the Nazis, the only surgery they performed on Jews was either experimental or aimed to sterilize young women, so they would have a longer productive phase in slave labor before going to the gas chamber. 

If you still need to compare modern Jews to Nazis your are either totally ignorant or plain stupid.

A Response to Mr. Bishara (Al Jazeera)

Marwan Bishara is a senior political analyst for the Al Jazeera English network and has published an opinion piece about Israel's motivation to go to war in Gaza in the International Herald Tribune of December 30, 2008. I sent the following reponse, which this time did not get published, so I do it here.

Experiencing democracy and observing it are not the same. Mr. Bishara's writing about Israeli motivation to go to war against the Hamas proves him to be an observer only, like the overwhelming majority of his Middle Eastern compatriots. When Israel's political leaders bow to overwhelming public pressure and come to the help of the Israeli citizens in the south, they finally do what they are supposed to do: Listen to their people first and the international community second, and there is nothing cynical about it. Being a democratic country at the very core, Israel also did not punish the Gazans for electing Hamas, as Mr. Bishra believes. Many Israelis even hoped that the new strongmen would fulfill agreements, once negotiated, more reliably than the chronically defaulting Palestinian Authority. Gazans started to suffer the siege once Israel tried economic sanctions against the continued rocket fire, before finally resorting to an all-out war against the terrorists-turned-rulers-remained-terrorists.

The most serious misunderstanding however is the question why Israel choose to go to war in the end. Just like the second Lebanon war did not start because of two abducted soldiers, the Gaza war did not start because one Israeli prisoner and a few rockets fired since the end of the cease fire, as Arab and most European media consistently claim in order to condemn the disproportionate use of force. Both wars started because the Israeli population living near the borders having been subjected to random rocket fire for years, which turned hundreds of thousands of lives into nightmares and the entire city of Sderot into a ghost town. One week of targeted strikes seem a very proportionate response for years and years of indiscriminate terror when you live in Sderot or Kiriat Shmona.

If Hamas' agenda was to create a state in Gaza and the West Bank, all they had to do was nothing. When Hamas took power in Gaza Israel was already set to withdraw from most of the West Bank as well. But pre-state sponsored terrorism proved the true agenda - the destruction of Israel, never hidden from those who wanted to know. Terror turned Israeli public opinion against concessions and delayed the creation of a Palestinian state once again for indefinite time, like several times before. The truly cynical outcome of the Palestinian's first experiment with democracy is to be left with two governments, one irrational and one incompetent, both being incapable of fulfilling their national dreams alongside Israel.

Why Israel needs to fight Hamas.

Long time, no hear. Have been too busy - yes, really - and maybe a bit lazy, but most of all too depressed about Israeli politics in the last two years to find the muse, sit down and write something beyond the obvious.

However, the war in Gaza does need some explaining, I believe, although in general I find the official reporting a lot better than during the Second Lebanon War - this how our unfortunate encounter with Hezbollah is meanwhile officially being called. Nevertheless, fundamental analysis is rare, and so I'll try to explain what is actually going on around here.

The very basic question underlying the whole mess in Gaza is the following. After the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and the subsequent Hamas election victory, why did Hamas not concentrate on building a better life for the Gazans and show the world that they can be responsible rulers (if inconvenient at times)? The PA was in so bad shape at the time that any reasonable administration would have made a better impression on the world than the corrupt and incompetent competition in the West Bank. Any Hamas member would answer on CNN "Because our brothers in the West Bank are still living under the Zionist occupation, and we need to resist that occupation overall, even if we in Gaza have managed to beat the Zionists out of our territory." We have heard this line a thousand times, and some people actually believe it. Well, I don't, and you'll soon know why.

If that line was the true, then the solution would be very clear cut. Withdraw from the West Bank unilaterally, just like we did it in Gaza, risk a civil war with those demented settler fanatics, and everything will be just fine. In the short period of quiet right after we left Gaza there was a clear consensus that this is the way to go, and Olmert won his election with a promise to do just that - the Israelis suspected Olmert to be a corrupt crook (they knew him well from his years as mayor of Jerusalem), but the majority of them wanted to do the final step and get out of the West Bank as well, most of it anyway, and the faster the better. So they swallowed the frog and voted Olmert back into office, which he had entered initially only by Ariel Sharon falling into coma (see the joke a few posts down). 

And then Hamas did two things. A) They started to get the chaotic Gaza life under control, instilled some law and order, and all-in-all proved to be indeed a better alternative to the Palestinian Authority. Quite good. Okay, they used some unconventional methods along the way, like throwing Fatah members of the highest roofs they could find, leaving their bodies for the families to scrap off the pavement. But then again, this is Gaza, not Tuscany, so let's not be too picky. B) They used every opportunity to attack Israel, with terror attacks against Israeli civilians inside Israel, and countless missiles fired at the Israeli communities around Gaza. Not so good.

For Olmert and all peace loving Israelis this was a very nasty surprise, which eventually forced Olmert to change course and postpone the withdrawal from the West Bank due to rapidly evaporating public support. "Why are those Morons in Gaza not getting it? All they have to do is to behave reasonably for a year or two and it will all be over, they have their state and we can live peacefully ever after." This was the most commonly asked question in the public debate.

The answer to that question is what our Hamas member forgot to mention on CNN. Hamas' national aspiration goes far beyond Gaza and the West Bank. There is no place for Israel alongside Hamas' vision of Palestine. Hamas has consistently refused to recognize Israel - on the contrary, Hamas declares the destruction of the Zionist entity as their primary political goal at every opportunity, in Arabic and even in Hebrew (believe it or not, Hamas spokespeople love to give interviews for Israeli TV, no idea why they even bother).   Everything in this world has to serve this one purpose, the life of every Hamas member and his family, the quality of life in Gaza in general, and yes, also the very life of regular Gaza residents. So indeed, when this is your worldview it doesn't make sense to put too much effort into developing Gaza, other than to make it a launching pad for the next stage on the path to the final solution (pun intended). 

Everything happening around us makes perfect sense when you look at it from that perspective. Of course it is okay to kill Israeli civilians, and really, why not? Hamas is willing to blow up their own people in suicide missions (they are even dying to do so), and to destroy the lives of over a million regular Gazans along the way, to keep them dirt poor, to use them as human shields and to murder them in the most barbaric ways imaginable if they object, so why should Israeli civilians enjoy any special consideration? Muslims go to heaven and the infidels go to hell, so everybody ends up where they belong (I don't really know if there is the concept of hell in Islam, but for sure the infidels are not headed for a 5 star hotel). If that is not a final solution, then what is? Every missile fired from Gaza into Israeli cities is aimed at civilian targets and loaded with a war head designed for maximum damage to soft targets - translated from military lingo that means hundreds of small pieces of shrapnel to kill every unprotected human being in a radius of 30 meters from the point of impact. 

Now, even the most fundamentalist Muslims understand that since the Renaissance the Western World has developed different values, and they use those values daily for their propaganda machine. So while their indifferent targeting is justified by the Divine purpose, Israel's surgical strikes are genocide, even a Holocaust, what have you. And the absolutely shocking truth is that 95% of all Europeans and maybe 80% of Americans actually believe this bullshit. Israel has dropped so far about 200 tons of explosives on well selected targets, with some 400 causalities, among which they are some 100 unfortunate civilians, which by any military standard is a very impressive ratio. (Civilized Britain, today the biggest critic of Israel in Europe, bombed German cities in WWII for maximum impact on the population, killing 20,000 civilians and basically no military personnel in a single bombing raid on Dresden, just to name one example.) But the Hamas propaganda machine declares a Holocaust, and the world is demanding an immediate cease fire. Even the Israeli left wing had enough and is joining the calls to end the war now, while Hamas is firing 80 missiles a day into Israeli cities. 

If Hamas had the possibility to deliver that amount of explosives into Israel, where they want it and how they want it, 90% of the Israeli population would be where they belong by now - in hell, remember? And let there be no doubt, not a single Hamas member would even think for a second that maybe this was disproportional use of force. There would be endless thank you prayers, gigantic feasts and fireworks all over the Middle East. Allah is great! Oh right, I forgot to mention Iran. One more thought experiment before we get there. 

What would happen to the 10% surviving Israelis? Would they get medical care in Hamas hospitals, allowed visits from the Red Cross and communication with their relatives abroad? You bet... Civilian casualties from Gaza are treated in Israeli hospitals, international help organizations are allowed to ship some 100 truck loads of medical supplies and food to Gaza almost every day.  If you want to compare Hamas attitude just watch what is happening to Gilad Shalit - but that is another topic for another time.

Having said all this, Hamas is really our smallest problem. That is as long as they don't have the means to deliver something like 200 tons of explosives. Unfortunately Iran will have those means very soon, and as Ahmadinejad has declared over and over again, it is God's promise that Israel will be wiped off the pages of history (not off the map apparently, this translation is disputed), but who in the West cares, other than the otherwise strangely incompetent Bush administration? The holy warriors of Islam need to fulfill that promise, and therefore, given the means, they will deliver the nuclear strikes on Israel. And kill the Muslims living in Israel in the process, you might ask? Of course! They will go to heaven as martyrs, and what could be better than that? Remember the bus loads of Iranian children that were sent into the Iraqi mine fields to clear those mines by triggering them with their bodies? That was islamist humanity then, and nothing has changed. (Not that modern ideologies like communism or fascism were much better in that aspect, but they did reserve their most most terrible abuses for their enemies, and in any case, they just didn't last that long.)

It does not take a lot of fancy interpretation to predict the future behaviour of a nuclear Iran from Hamas' current behaviour, or Hezbollah's behaviour. Essentially these are all entities driven by the same value system. I suggest you have a look at the link in the headline and hear about Hezbollah and PA in Lebanon first hand from a Lebanese journalist. If you don't take it from me, take it from her!

How will it all end? Well, the only possible scenario I can see is that eventually Israel will make Hamas understand that they can not achieve their ultimate goal by terror, and that a prosperous, well-developed state is necessary to develop the military might to get rid of those Zionists after all. This insight can only be generated by military defeat, again and again, but once Hamas reaches that point, they will agree to a long term cease fire (hudna) and stick to it. Developing that powerful state will take a couple of decades, and we can only hope that they forget along the way what they set out to do from the start. 

This is why Israel has no choice but to fight Hamas back into reality, and isolate them from Iran's military resources, so they can not continue that proxy war for Iran any longer. It doesn't look good on TV, but it has to be done.

Shall we laugh or cry?

..is the title of a sort of funny EMail I got today, which I have to share with you. We have gotten used to the continuous stream of scandals in the political and administrative leadership, but when I read this mail my heart stopped to beat for a few seconds. Is it really that bad? Judge for yourself:

It is a rainy night and we are at the hospital.
Only one assistant is around, named Shmiel. He is on night duty
tonight in the room of "sleeping" former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Everybody, but Sharon himself, knows he is no longer the
Prime Minister of Israel. Shmiel is sitting peeling an apple and G the
Israeli Secret Service ( Shabak) agent is nodding off.

Suddenly, all the machines start to beep. The PM is waking
up!

Sharon says, "I haven't slept like that for a long time! Get
me my strategist, Reuven Adler, I have some ideas for a new
direction."

Shmiel says, "Good morning, sir. How do you feel?"

Sharon answers, "I am dying of hunger. Where am I?"

The Shabak agent continues to sleep while Shmiel explains to
Sharon what had happened to him.

Sharon does not take him seriously and says, "So tonight you
fooled the PM, eh Shmiel?"

Shmiel says, "Sorry sir but you are really no longer the
PM."

After a few minutes Sharon asks, "So who replaced me?"

Shmiel answers, "Ehud Olmert."

Sharon reacts, "Olmert? That Jerusalemite potz? What will
happen if war breaks out, he does not know how to run the army! At least
Shaul [Mofaz] is still there!"

Shmiel answers, "Mofaz is the Minister of Transportation."

"So who is the Defense Minister?" Shmiel says, "Peretz."

"That old man is still alive?!" asks Sharon in wonderment.

Shmiel whispers trembling, "Not Peres, Peretz. Amir Peretz."
"What? Are you crazy? I close my eyes for a minute and you
guys let a Labor leader take over the defense of the country?! Not all
the factories in Dimona are the same. Does he know that? Listen,
get Omri here right away. He will fix everything."

"Sorry sir, Omri is on his way to jail."

"Jail?? For that nonsense? I do not believe it. So get me my
lawyer quickly. Get Klagsbald."

Shmiel responds "Klagsbald is on his way to jail."

Sharon calms down and says, "I knew I could count on
Klagsbald. He will get Omri out of it."

Shmiel corrects him "No, sir. Klagsbald is also on
his way to jail. He was driving and not paying attention and caused an
accident unintentionally killing a young woman and her son."

Sharon said, "So bring me [Avigdor] Yitzchaki. He always
knows how to fix these situations."

"Sorry, sir. Yitzchaki is under his own investigation for
tax fraud. He's fixed a few things too many this time."

"Can't be. I know Yitzchaki. They must be framing him. So
get me the Head of Police."

"Sorry, sir, but Karadi is in an investigation for
corruption."

"Of course he is. He is the head of police. I am sure he is
in the middle of a number of investigations!"

"No, sir. This is an investigation against him!"

Sharon takes a deep breath. "It can't be. The whole justice
system has been ruined! We must get them out of this. Get me the
minister of Internal Security, Tzachi [Hanegbi]."

"Sir, Hanegbi has been indicted for fraud, bribery and job
fixing. He is not a minister anymore."

"So get me the Justice Minister. Who did Olmert appoint?"

"Haim Ramon."

"So get him here!"

"Sorry sir. I can't. He has been indicted and is on trial
for sexual harassment."

"What? So get me the president. That is still Katzav,
right?"

"Yes, sir, for now. But Katzav is under investigation as well, for
sexual harassment AND wiretapping."

"So get me the Chief of Staff, Boogie [Moshe Ayalon]. Ah, wait,
that is Halutz, right?"

"Sir, he got into some trouble in the Lebanon War. Nothing
criminal, really. But he sold some stocks with very odd timing.
He will soon be giving testimony to an investigative committee."

"Halutz?? He was a young Piper pilot during the Lebanon
War!"

"Sir, that would be the second Lebanon War, it happened
while you were sleeping. We... how should I say, kind of lost
the war but the Prime Minister said we should be patient, victory is coming."

Sharon looked around his room. "What is your name and what
is your position?"

"Shmiel, sir. I am a hospital attendant."

"Ok, Shmiel. Do not tell anyone about this conversation."

"You can count on me, sir."

"I'm going back to sleep."

Yes, I guess he would not like what has happened since he fell into coma.... I apologize for not mentioning the author, I just don't know who wrote this cruel summary.

Thank you, Hezbollah!

Why for haven's sake would we have to thank Hezbollah? For almost 200 Israelis killed? For 23 billion NIS damages to the Israeli economy? Well, obviously that is not what I had in mind... We have to thank Hezbollah for a wake-up call, which may have been delivered at the very last moment.

I really don't want to join here the tired old criticism of every decision any government has ever taken. Israelis love to criticize, and they always know everything best. Every cab driver had a better plan for this war, every journalist knew from day one that we are not going to win, bla, bla, bla. Sickening.

Side track: All this bitching in the media reminds me of a totally unrelated story. A few years ago, at the height of the second Intifada, the quality control people of the public water company "Mekorot" discovered a milky pollution in water pipeline connecting the center of Israel with the Sea of Galilee, Israel's only fresh water reservoir. Not being able to identify the chemical fast enough, and not knowing exactly how far the stuff had traveled in the system already, they decided to close the valves near the end of the pipeline and flush the whole line with clean water. This meant thousands and thousands of cubic meters of scarce water literally went down the tube. Shortly afterwards it was discovered that the chemical was a relatively harmless fertilizer, which was sucked into the water system by a defect reflow protection valve on somebody's agricultural watering system. The Mekorot managers were almost lynched for wasting so much water and creating a public panic. Of course, at that time more than ever, there were very good reasons to assume that terrorist could poison the water. Therefore, in the absence of any solid data on the pollutant, the Mekorot managers took the gutsy decision to dump all that water and alert the public. Had it been a terrorist act, they'd come out the saviors of maybe thousands of people. Since it was not, everybody and their grandmother knew better and criticized them for their decision. This is Israel, you can never do anything without somebody claiming in public he or she could have done better. I have to admit, it is tiring at times.

Back to the Hezbollah. Having talked to reserve soldiers returning from Lebanon, I come to the following picture. No, we did not loose this war, Hezbollah has been hit hard and it will take them some time to lick their wounds and recover from the blow. Iran will have to spend a lot of money to replenish Hezbollah's stock piles, money they would need to buy equipment for their dangerous nuclear program, maybe. Na, I guess they'd rather save a little on education....

But we also didn't win this war. Although the threat was known and the IDF trained ever since we left Lebanon for this possibility, when the war broke out nothing worked as planned. Olmert, Halutz and Peretz ignored all the existing planning and reinvented the war as it unfolded. Instead of an immediate massive call-up of well trained and prepared reserves, and an overwhelming blow with boots on the ground and vastly superior fire power all over the South within a couple of days, Halutz went about it with the motto "let the airforce win this war", while Olmert, Peretz and Livni were worried more about European public opinion than our soldiers lifes. We were able to watch on TV bloody battles being fought about a single house in some Lebanese village, when a single artillery shell could have finished the job in a second and with zero casualties on our side. There were quite a few attempts to win a war like this with surgical strikes delivered from the air in the last 20 years or so, and none of them have been engraved as great success stories in military history - it just doesn't work. Only when this approach failed also here in front of a horrified Israeli public, did the leadership finally allow the "green" generals to operate according to established principles of ground war. They got two days to make up for the blunders of one wasted month. And so Hezbollah got away, limping and bleeding, but alive and encouraged, Israel can be beaten! being their message to all our enemies.

A gigantic opportunity to deliver a devastating blow to Hezbollah and friends has been missed. With a rare consensus among the Israelis regarding the justification for this war and it's goals, with extremely high motivation all through the IDF, only a mediocre result has been achieved. No, it is not a devastating loss, there are gains on the ground as well as in the political arena, but altogether everybody understands that one day we will have to go back and do it all over again. Already now the UN resolution regarding the demilitarization south of the Litani as well as the weapons embargo are being broken every single day, with nobody in the UN giving a damn, as usual. So at some point the whole mess will flare up again, no doubt about it.

Nevertheless, imagine the extend of the disaster if all of this had happened a few years later, with Hezbollah having added hundreds of Iranian long range missiles to its arsenal, further improved the fortified infrastructure in the South and maybe even added non-conventional war heads to their missiles. Not only would we have seen many more Israeli casualties, also the chance of this leading to a direct war with Syria and maybe even Iran would have been much higher.

Now, that we narrowly avoided a bigger disaster, we will surely be prepared much better next time, right? Well, maybe. If the self cleaning mechanism of the Israeli democracy finally starts to kick in, if incompetent military and political leaders are finally forced ONCE to take responsibility for their failures and if a minimum level of ethics and professionalism is restored to the ranks of Israeli leadership, in that case we will be prepared.

Israelis, wake up! Incompetence, corruption and other unethical conduct of our leadership must not be tolerated any longer. Has there ever been a country where the prime minister, the president and several ministers are under police investigation for misconduct at the same time? Ever? One?

Hezbollah is our crystal ball to see the future. If things don't change around here, the next time around we won't get away with just a bloody nose.

So, thank you Hezbollah!

What it all boils down to....

Found this one on Flickr. It is too good and too true to be missed, so here is the pic instead of my usual links. Don't know who is the author, so I apologize for the copyright violation right away.