F-16s, solidarity and popcorn on the Gaza-Israel ‘border’
Jerusalem Watchman
I’m writing this (or at least starting to write it) on Israel’s “border” with the Gaza Strip.
Everybody calls it a border as if, like Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, Gaza is one of the sovereign states adjacent to Israel. Probably it’s because people know the power of words – how you can make fiction into reality simply by repeating a non-truth over and over again.
Like Sky News Sunrise host Eamonn Holmes, who in a television interview with Israeli President Shimon Peres last Wednesday spoke repeatedly and quite matter-of-factly about Israel’s military operation in “this country of Palestine”
I would have thought a news anchor for an award-winning organization with a global reach like Sky would have a handle on something as basic as the names of the recognized nations of the world.
Of course, Holmes is not ignorant of the truth. He is a wishful thinker who also knows full well the power of propaganda. He wants to see a country of Palestine created in the historic homeland of the Jewish people, and intends to speak out its existence until it comes into being.
It works the other way too. Like if you don’t call something what it is then people will quickly come to accept that it isn’t that thing.
Take “terrorist” – a term used quite comfortably by British broadcasters and print journalists to describe IRA bombers, but eschewed by those same reporters when it comes to Islamic killers in Mumbai and Rafah.
But I digress. Or do I?
Swirling mist wreathed Jerusalem as my companions and I left the capital early in the morning, and headed towards the coastal plain. We needed just 90 minutes to reach Sderot – the small town that for eight years has been the favorite target of the terrorists in nearby Gaza.
Hamas – and the other Arab groups in the Strip – have fired thousands of rockets at this town of 20,000 and, more recently, at other Israeli population centers further and further away from Gaza, massively increasing its attacks after Israel abandoned the area in compliance with international insistence that it give the Palestinian Arabs a homeland here.
As they slammed into and around these cities day after day, most of the people on the planet were oblivious to the untiring effort to kill more Jews. Why? Because it wasn’t news. And if it’s not reported, as far as we’re all concerned, it isn’t happening.
By contrast, most everyone everywhere knows that Israel has been fighting against those Arab rocket and mortar launchers for the last two weeks – first from the air, and since last Saturday evening, also on the ground.
Those same reporters who grew tired of – or just didn’t care about – the suffering and terror deliberately inflicted on Israel’s civilians, have been falling over themselves to highlight and communicate to the world the suffering that Gaza’s civilians have unavoidably, and against the wishes of the Israelis, been caught up in.
Early as we were to leave Jerusalem, the day’s dose of rockets from Gaza had already begun to fly. Beer Sheva, Ashkelon, and four other towns in southern Israel had been hit. Stopping to greet a friend on duty at a Border Police unit near the Erez Crossing, we watched an unmanned IDF drone and two attack helicopters prowling the cloudy skies.
A few minutes later we were in Sderot where, less than an hour after we arrived, a “Color Red” alert sent us ducking for shelter together with a dozen or so teenagers who were part of a group set to leave for the resort town of Eilat on a sponsored three-day break from the tension and danger pervading their lives.
“The girls all look anorexic,” an associate said to me, quietly. I had already noticed the spindly legs and arms of virtually all the young women in the group. The boys were goofing off, appearing to behave much like teenage boys everywhere. But we’ve heard numerous reports of the damaged emotions and post-traumatic stress disorders suffered by so many of Sderot’s youth.
I’m not crazy about driving into war zones, or even into close proximity to such places. A father of five – momentarily to be six – children, I long ago relinquished the thrill of racing into dangerous areas the way I sometimes did as a cub reporter in my old homeland. How these children and their parents can still even be sane after living this Russian Roulette routine day after day for years is beyond me.
There’s another good friend here I’ve come to meet.
Karel Sedlacek, a Czech Christian Zionist, just flew to Israel from Prague and headed almost immediately for this besieged town. Moving into a small bedroom, he plans to spend two weeks here, visiting with the Israelis and getting to know and encourage some of them as he lives in solidarity with a people who are hated so much in this world. He is “settling in,” this grandfather who could so easily be enjoying the peaceful existence of a Czech Winter, tells me with a smile. His wife gave him her blessing to come. They are living out their faith in Israel’s God. In the coming days I hope to interview Karel about his experiences and insights here.
Hillocks dot the outskirts of Sderot. On one of them, a tree stands over the carved steel statue of a horse. Clusters of media vehicles are drawn up on the side: Foreign journalists – angered by the “nerve” of the IDF that has denied them entry into the closed military zone of Gaza – stand with their backs to Gaza City and rely on their long lenses and ingrained prejudices to deliver their “coverage” of the war to the world.
I am on a different hilltop, looking out across no-man’s land at the distant high rise buildings and listening to the deep and drawn-out brrrack-brrrack-brrrack of the 70 mm machine guns on the Apache helicopters firing from high overhead at – to me – invisible terrorists in the streets over there.
Without warning, three F-16 fighter jets come crashing through the air low and to our right, releasing white-hot counter-measures against possible surface-to-air missiles as they drop down over Gaza City. We wonder what they are doing – no bombs are let go or missiles fired, and within seconds they are north of Gaza – again over Israel proper.
A plastic chair stands perched on the hillside. Next to it is a packet of popcorn, still fresh. A local tells me some of the town’s young people come up at night to watch the “show” – as the night sky is lit up by the explosions that shake the ground even here.
Black smoke billows from two targets in Gaza City as we drive away, heading back up the Judean lowlands towards Jerusalem. The ‘Cup o’Joes’ we stop at is still within range, though less so. The plasma-screens tell us it’s been a busy morning. A number of rockets have been fired from Lebanon, one crashing through the roof of a care home, and penetrating a bedroom vacated by its elderly resident just minutes before. A gas station right outside the Jerusalem-satellite community of Maaleh Adummim has been targeted by a would-be bomber – the police shot him dead.
In some ways we’re out of reach in Jerusalem – at least from the rockets, I think.
Then I see the latest map showing how the capital is not really out of range of the longer-range rockets the “Palestinians” have been smuggling into Gaza.
Just a few months ago we heard they would be targeting Beer Sheva, and we didn’t want to believe it.
How long before our feeling of relative security here in Jerusalem is ruptured too?
And what will Israel do then?
[source: Stan Goodenough, the Jerusalem Watchman-http://www.stangoodenough.com/]
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