What? Me Worry???
As I write this while sitting in my safe room (which is probably not too safe as it is on the top floor of my apartment building, but my computer is here) the news comes across the radio that there is a “Tzeva Adom” “Red Color” alert in the area of central Israel around Tel Aviv. There are suburbs around the city that are also under missile fire at this time and I pray, that most of the citizens in those towns are in their safe rooms or shelters. If anything, this current flareup of hostilities has brought Israelis closer together in more ways than one. There was even a very cute photo posted on Facebook of an elderly gentleman holding a towel around his waist, standing next to a very pretty young woman, also accoutred in the same fashion, although her towel was a bit longer. The caption read that they were both caught in their respective showers at the same time when the alert sounded. Hmmmm, maybe 9 months from now there will be a higher birthrate in local hospitals.
In any event, I have to tell all my readers outside of Israel that there is really nothing for you to worry about and you can stop spending enormous sums to call all your friends and relatives here to beg them to return to the Exile. Probably if you call when they are in the shelter, they won’t get your call anyway. Besides, there is more to be afraid of outside of Israel than in this country. Has anyone read the statistics of murder in Chicago and New York?
Oh, sure, I can hear the cries of Israeli false bravado and how can you not be scared with Hamas gunning for your cities. Well, I’ll tell you-did you ever see movies of World War Two about London during the infamous blitz? Night and day German bombers appeared over the cities of England, dropping lethal loads of fire bombs and fragmentation munitions, all over London, Coventry, Sussex and Liverpool. Even after the blitz of 1940, in 1944 when the English were suddenly under missile attack by V2s, V1s and “buzz bombs” they persevered. They slept in the tube stations, got out when the all clear sounded and went about their daily lives. Why? Because to do otherwise would give the enemy the psychological victory that they wanted-to see a scared, petrified and morally weakened England. The British kept up their spirits and they stiffened their upper lips and defied the Germans to make them into defeatists and cowards.
No one should expect anything less than from us Israelis. We have been through all this, and worse, before. Sometimes I think what keeps us going is our sense of humor, which is really quite atypical from other countries. A dear friend of mine works in a high rise office building in Tel Aviv. He has been fighting an expanding waistline for years. I can’t recall how many times I’ve tried to tell him to drop some weight for his own good. Anyway, he writes me the other day that he has to thank Hamas for his recent spate of exercise because every time the alert goes off, he has to walk down many flights of stairs and up the stairs again to get to the shelter and back to his office.
The terrorist rockets have no guidance systems, they just send them off in the general direction of their intended target. The other day the rockets were headed for Jerusalem and instead of hitting our capital city, they hit the majority Arab towns of Bethlehem and Hevron. Wonder what would happen if one of their M75 or J 80 Iranian supplied rockets hit the Al-aksa mosque or Dome of the Rock? And do I have enough champagne in the fridge to celebrate?
You see, we have the Iron Dome system that reacts immediately to a rocket threat by firing towards the trajectory of the enemy missile and blasting it to bits. We also have a very adequate, though small, Navy that has done a yeoman’s job of keeping our beaches free from Hamas infiltrators. In fact, at a kibbutz called Zikim, it was a female soldier who spotted 5 terrorists headed from the beach to the kibbutz, and the Navy quickly responded by turning the terrorists into compost.
The Israel Air Force has carried out over a thousand sorties over Gaza using precision guided munitions to take out weapons factories, underground tunnels and rocket launchers, and had blown up over 500 homes belonging to the terrorist leadership, while giving ADVANCE NOTICE to people in the area, by leaflet, telephone calls, radio and television messages and, as a last resort, dropping small explosive charges minutes before the bombs hit. What other air force has ever done that in a time of war? Basically telling the enemy, “Ready or not, here we come!”
Civilian casualties on either side, are a tragedy. But we use our missiles to protect our people, while Hamas used their women and children to protect their rockets. With all the billions of dollars and euros that have been sunk into Gaza, the only bomb shelters that were built were put under Shifa Hospital in Gaza so the terrorist leaders have a place to hide while their people get killed. Just a few days ago, the leader of the Hamas savages, Ismail Haniyeh, gave a rousing speech of defiance for israel that lasted 2 hours…in Qatar. I guess for rapists and people who celebrate “honor killings” hiding under women’s skirts and behind children is something we should expect.
So, to get back, am I worried? NO! Am I scared? NO! I have faith in my government, faith in the Israel Defense Forces and faith in our largest “Iron Dome”, the G-d of Israel.
Actually, after Auschwitz, do you really think that the enemies of Israel have anything they can frighten us with?