Arise O Lord and let Thy enemies be scattered;
and let those that hate Thee flee before Thy face.
I can still remember the first time I witnessed a Katyusha attack. I was seventeen years old, and I'd been in Israel for two months. I had a job as an English teaching assistant at Beit Sefer Tas Amal, a vocational/technical school for troubled high school boys in the northern Galilee. We heard the first explosion before the sirens sounded; it sounded oddly like distant thunder, only the sky was a clear blue. We hustled the boys down into the bomb shelter and then our head security guard handed me a belt with an HK 9mm and two spare clips. The HK holds 15 rounds; as we waited for the all clear, I worried about what would happen to me and those boys if I needed 46 rounds. I listened to the thunder for another few minutes and then waited for what seemed like ages before we heard the all-clear.
It is a twist of history that the Katyusha, a weapon developed to fight the Nazis, nicknamed the "Stalin Organ", should be the principal threat to Israeli civilians. Undoubtedly, some of you think that is a fitting twist, while others of you are likely to see it as a perverse irony. But that isn't all that is odd about the history of the Katyusha. The man who designed the weapon to fight the Nazis, Georgy Langemak, did not ever see the Third Reich turn on Stalin. He was purged in 1937. Did you know that there is a famous Russian song "Katyusha", and that the rocket was named for it?
Let him think of simple native maiden,
Let him hear Katyusha's clear song
He will guard the land of dear homeland
And their love Katyusha will keep strong.
One of my Mom's best friends from high school made aliyah in 1970. She and her husband live in Haifa, and I can still remember staying with them my first weekend pass out of basic training. My mother is forwarding me emails from them about once every six hours. This is the last one:
Hi all,
I'm happy to tell you we are both still ok.
The one before that:
Thank you for the e-mail.
We are well.
The background to the current Arab-Israeli conflict is simple. Israel is fighting back after years of restraining from military action. We have experienced years of frequent suicide bombers, bus explosions, knifings, murders, and kidnappings by Islamic fanatics. No other country in the world would put up with such attacks on its civilian population.
Our prime minister is doing an excellent job (we voted for him) and our defense minister, after a weak beginning, is also performing well. Neither has much military experience, which is unusual for Israel. Israel's goals for this "military conflict" (actually an undeclared war) are: (1) Make Arab fanatics think twice before going ahead with terror attacks and (2) Weaken and marginalize Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah in Lebanon (I prefer to see him dead).
Our apartment is well-situated for protection against rocket and missile
attacks. We are on the ground floor and none of our outer walls face the
North.
Love,
I don't agree, nor have I ever, that the background is simple. But what they have lived through for longer than I have been alive is something I only saw for a couple of years, in a time of relative quiet. But I also think about this: two days ago, eight people were killed in Haifa, Israel's third-largest city. Haifa has a population of 267,800. The same percentage of people killed would be 84 Chicagoans. How would the United States react to 84 Chicago residents killed by rocket fire from a nation which has never rescinded its declaration of war against the US? And before you think about that, contemplate this: the 3,000 Americans who died on September 11, 2001 represent the same percentage of population as 71 Israelis.
But enough fun with numbers. I want to have some fun with the fuzzy bullshit that's been going on here the last few days. I want to talk about the people who have posted that they will not support Hillary Clinton after her speech at the pro-Israel rally at the UN yesterday. I personally, have never supported Hillary Clinton. I thought so little of her that I voted for Rick Lazio in 2000 for Senator. I continue to think little of her today. But I can hardly speak to the sort of idiocy that leads Americans to not support anyone because of their support or lack thereof for the actions of another nation, and I particularly find it to be absurd when the government of the United States, the government where she is a representative, and the government that represents the vast majority of you, is in Iraq and Afghanistan making Israel look cuddly by comparison, on the flimsiest of rationales. I've never had a lot of sympathy for the arguments of some `defenders' of Israel who claim that our wrongs are not as bad as the wrongs of the terrorists we are fighting. But that is nothing compared to the disgust that I feel for those who would judge our wrongs more harshly than they would judge their own. Sure, there is a smattering of Kossacks who still harbor the fantasy that they will see Pres. Bush or Sec. Rumsfeld at the Hague. But nowhere here is there an appetite for zero tolerance of any representative who supported the war in Iraq. No one is refusing and garnering approval for their refusal to support any Democrat who is not advocating immediate withdrawal. Hell, two weeks ago, the very notion that the Iraqi government was going to achieve peace by pardoning insurgents who killed American soldiers had this site up in arms and disgusted with the Bush administration.
If I thought hypocrisy was a serious charge, I'd level it at you.
This is what we always hear is what turns off so many Americans to the left; they share your values but not your attitudes. That it is your arrogance that frustrates them and drives them to vote against their interests. And I've never felt the full bore of that until now. Diarist after diarist proclaims Israel is a terrorist state, and demands that military aid to Israel be discontinued. Welcome aboard, I'm tempted to say, although none of those posters have recognized that it was the United States who eagerly provided that aid, and for its own reasons. We were another proxy in the Cold War, another place where we were armed by the United States and our enemies by the Soviets, so that you both could gain information on the merits of the F-16 when confronted by an SA-11 SAM without having to bother fighting one another. Yet now the Israeli economy is "hooked" on that aid, which is to say that we restructured our armed forces to fly F-15s and Apache helicopters, because you asked us to, and we cannot afford to do so without your help.
But that's the disconnect. Many people will talk about how Israel is a colonial protectorate of the United States, while pretending that this somehow doesn't victimize Israel, even though you know because you aren't stupid that it did victimize every other culture you colonized. You'll call Israel an apartheid state because the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories do not have votes or full citizenship, yet you can barely be bothered to get behind DC statehood, much less fair treatment for Puerto Rico or American Samoa. And in your arrogance you presume to despise us for what you will not change about yourselves.
If there is one thing I feel I have been told somewhat often, it is that I have approached this matter "reasonably" in my time here. That is over. There is a part of me that never left that high school bomb shelter, a part of me which still stands between those boys and those who would do them harm, even if I'm ill-equipped to do much or to do it well.