Category Archives: The War

Graffiti in the jungle

Posted on April 25, 2011 | Comments Off on Graffiti in the jungle

I can’t say I like Israeli writer Etgar Keret’s short-short stories much. At least not the ones in The Girl On The Fridge collection. Most of them end too abruptly, just about the time I’m getting interested in the tale. Suppose to be the latest thing, these quickies, but most of them read like the writer ran out of imagination.

One of the few I do like is one that echoes something my Israeli pal Snoopy-the-Goon told me about young people coming off of their obligatory IDF active duty. Many of them leave Israel and light out for the Himalayas or somewhere else tough and adventurous, preferably somewhere no one else has been.

So, in The Journey, the hero does just that, winding up in the jungles of South America, satisfied that he’s finally found a place no other human has trod. Until he sees some secondary growth at the base of a large tree. It barely conceals something carved there. Something old. This: “Nir Dekel, August 5, Paratroopers Kick Ass.”

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Posted in Israel, South of the Border, The War, Troops

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The famous basketball player and the rabbi

Posted on April 20, 2011 | Comments Off on The famous basketball player and the rabbi

This is a very cool story, from Ynet, about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Lew Alcindor) whose father helped liberate the Buchenwald extermination camp in World War II and personally saved a future prominent rabbi of Israel.

Now, the famous son, a Muslim convert no less, is going to make a movie about his dad and his 761st Tank Battalion’s help at Buchenwald. That should shake up the Holocaust-denying mullahs and jihadis.

Watch your back, Kareem.

Via Elder of Ziyon.

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Posted in Israel, Library, Scribbles, The War

A Plea to Hashem

Posted on April 20, 2011 | Comments Off on A Plea to Hashem

 

Putting a prayer paper in the Western Wall, the Kotel, in Jerusalem.

It was for Russ Wheat, an old Army buddy in Texas, who wanted to memorialize the men of his platoon who were killed in action in Vietnam.

His request for me to do this while on my trip to Israel is interesting.

It underscores the fact that even non-Jews (Russ, who lives in Canyon Lake near San Antonio, is a church-going Methodist) still see religious significance in the Temple Mount.

Because of, at the least, the destroyed Herod’s Temple of the Jews.

(The photo is lopsided because the photographer was trying to be surreptitious about it. It was the sabbath and the Kotel-controlling Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) forbid photographs on the sabbath.)

And where do all these pieces of paper eventually wind up? See here.

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Posted in Israel, The War, Troops, Viet Nam

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Whose side is Obamalot on?

Posted on April 19, 2011 | Comments Off on Whose side is Obamalot on?

“Can anyone detect a pattern here?  Mubarak must go.  Qadaffi must go.  But no diplomatic pressure on Assad, nor, aside from the occasional Obama video, any tough talk to the Iranians.”

Can anyone in Obamalot play this game?

Read it all.

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Posted in Obamalot, Scribbles, The War

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The problem with Iron Dome

Posted on April 18, 2011 | Comments Off on The problem with Iron Dome

It seems to me that Israel’s new “Iron Dome” short-range rocket interceptor will have the same problem that the American Patriot system does.

It nails the approaching rocket, true, and that’s impressive. But the explosion scatters fragments of the interceptor and the incoming rocket all over the place, some big enough to cause serious damage to people and other living things.

If they scatter on  Gaza, from whence the rockets come, that’s one thing. If they scatter on the Israeli town that’s the target, or points in between, well…

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Posted in Israel, Science/Engineering, The War, Troops

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Totin’ an auto rifle in the grocery

Posted on April 10, 2011 | Comments Off on Totin’ an auto rifle in the grocery

One of the curious features of Israeli life is the way her young conscript soldiers carry their loaded M-4s, M-16s, and other automatic weapons everywhere they go. In uniform and out. It’s required.

You see them in the grocery, the mall, the bus stop, the street, heck, even in the elevator. Snoop and I were riding an elevator in a mall near his home in Rehovot when it stopped to let on two young black men, apparently Ethiopian Jews. Both were in uniform, and both were fully armed.

If you didn’t know better (or you were a Hamas groupie) you might call it an example of Israel’s menace. In fact it’s to help these warriors become intimately familiar with their weapons and to be ready in case the Arabs attack without warning. As they have before, and Hamas still does.

Instead of having to find an armory, they can go directly to their unit’s assembly point announced on Army radio. Like in 1973 when, on the last day of Yom Kippur, the Syrians threw more than a thousand Russian battle tanks into the Golan Heights. The IDF outposts held them, at great cost to themselves, as the reserves and conscripts raced to help.

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Posted in Israel, The War, Troops

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The Gaza War

Posted on April 9, 2011 | Comments Off on The Gaza War

Hamas wanted it. Now they’ve got it. And, now, of course, they’re whining for a ceasefire, and their buddies in the European Union and the United Nations are condemning Israel for a “disproportionate response.” As if “you-kill-two-of-mine and I’ll-kill-two-of-yours” is the way real wars are fought.

Like Treppenwitz I find it increasingly hard to sympathize with the average Gaza Palestinian who allows Hamas to fire its mortars, rockets and, now, an anti-tank missile at an Israeli school bus without so much as a street protest. Have they learned nothing from the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria? Or are they just on Hamas’s side? Their willing partners in war crimes.

I am concerned for the young man with a critical head injury caused by the Hamas anti-tank missile, and the young conscript warriors of the IDF who must risk their lives fighting the barbaric arabs to defend Israelis. In the words of the song and the prayer: O Hashem, protect our men in arms. As they defend our land, shield them from harm. Hu yivarech et chayalei tzava hagana li Yisroel, Hu Yivarech.

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Posted in Israel, The War, Troops

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