War Now - War in 1967 - Israel - Arabs
Israelis are not Jews. I'll explain in a moment. I have to give you the back-story first: I came to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study mathematics-physics in 1965. I was 20 years old and it was the first time, other than coming to America in 1949, that I traveled so far. I was not brought up at all religious by my once-Orthodox Jew father. I never went to schul nor did I speak or read one word of Hebrew. Indeed, I even went to Mount Carmel Catholic School in Bayonne New Jersey in the fourth grade before I was thrown out for heresy (that's a story for another day).
So I had very, very little identification with Judaism when I arrived. I spent the first few days getting settled in with some very, very distant cousins who were courteous enough to offer me room and board.
On the fourth night I was brave enough to venture out to the mount overlooking the campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. What I saw at sunset that night filled me with 5,000 years of Jewish History in an instant.
It was not much different than this photo (Click on photo for larger view)
Once the sun set it very quickly became dark. When I looked up I saw stars for the first time in my life. Sure we had stars in the sky in New Jersey, but they were hazy blurs of light. These were sparklers covering the entire sky without taking away any of the blackness of the night. That both could be perceived simultaneously was a bit confusing then. I learned later that Jerusalem barely had any smog or industrial soot to speak of, so there was nothing to fog the view of the sky. I suppose farm boys in Iowa get treated to such views of the stars all the time.
Two years later, on June 6th 1967 I was riding in a taxi to my girlfriend's house when I heard explosions. I lived in Moshav Germanit, a part of Jerusalem near the Jordanian border filled with Jews from Morocco and she, a nice Jewish girl from Montreal, lived in the center of town.
There were some reports about Egypt's saber-rattling weeks earlier but things were quiet in Israel the entire time I was there, so I had no clue war had already started in Egypt and the Golan Heights the day before. Even when I heard the explosions it was not clear what was happening. Suddenly a piece of hot shrapnel went through the taxi window and squished itself into the seat next to me. The taxi driver pulled to a stop and yelled for me to get out as well. We began running to a shelter as mortars pounded the area around us. Jordan, which had tried to stay out of the war, got pushed by Egypt into attacking Jerusalem.
The shelter turned out to be nothing more than the hallway of a tall building. It had no door and so every time a mortar round exploded nearby a blast of debris, pebbles, and gray soot would thunder into the hallway. There were about a dozen of us there with perhaps 5 or 6 children. At every boom one middle-aged woman would cry out with a start as if someone poked her in the eye. Amazingly, the children seemed unafraid about it all.
I mentioned to my driver that the kids were taking this shelling quite well. He nodded in the direction of the quaking woman and said, "she's a Jew and the children are Israeli." I told him that this explanation did not clarify anything for me.
So he told me the story about the Israeli child and his grandfather.
A grandfather from the old country was telling his Israeli-born grandchild about the holocaust. He said that one night, the Nazis came for a neighbor across the street and took him away.
The child then asked, "So then you got a group of your friends and you went to rescue him, right?"
"No, no. We shut the lights and prayed for his soul, hoping the Nazis would not come back."
"Why didn't you attack?"
"We had no weapons. We were not soldiers. We didn't know how to fight."
"But, Grandpa, didn't you have any money?"
"Oh, yes I suppose."
"Then you could have bought weapons. You could have paid someone to train you how to fight. You could have killed them every time they came for one of you."
"No, my child, if we did that we would all have been killed."
"But isn't that what happened when you did nothing?"
I understood then that Israelis are not Jews like the Jews of old. There would never again be another holocaust as long as Israel exists. Liberal Jews in America meanwhile will still happily skip into gas chambers and climb into ovens, the blind fools that they are.
While we were in the shelter a few Israelis had their radios on and were trying to get the news. On the Arabic stations you could hear the threats, "Israeli women, lift your skirts, prepare for the Arabic warriors. We are killing your men now."
(Click on map for larger view)
On Kol Israel, the Israeli radio station there were pastoral songs. No news about Egypt or Syria or Jordan or that the entire Arab world armies were amassed to obliterate Israel from the map. Back to the Arab radio stations and all we heard was the Arab successes against the Israeli forces. When they weren't threatening to kill all the Jews they were playing military marching songs.
After a few hours the mortars stopped. We got back in the cab and I got dropped off at my girlfirend's apartment. It was now the afternoon. I could see tiny planes in the air but could hear nothing. I spent the night sleeping under the bed with her, waking up every few hours checking the radio.
Kol Israel continued playing the type of music you normally hear in an elevator. What the hell was going on? Obviously the Army did not want anyone to know anything at all, but this la-dee-dah music was infuriating. Where is the New York Times when you need some secret information blurted out? Then about 1:30 am the next morning, Kol Israel broke radio silence by announcing the capture of a list of cities so long and numerous it was exhilarating. When I turned back to the Arab stations: Humiliating Silence.
A few days later we found out that the Israel Defense Forces decimated the Grand Egyptian Army, captured the entire Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.
Which brings us to the present. It has been pointed out in numerous blogs and in a previous blog of mine that wars today are being fought too daintily, that we are overly concerned about civilian casualties.
If during World War Two, the media had come in to make a photo-op of every military operation with a discussion and analysis of how many innocent babies were killed, with photos held aloft of refrigerated children sprayed with cement dust we would still be fighting the Nazis today.
Israel has to stop beating around the bush. The leftist whining about the price we're paying in lost lives in Iraq has carried over to Israel. Olmert's fear of having too many Israeli soldiers killed has done the very opposite.
Israel vanquished a greater force of men in 1967 in less than a week. It ignored the world press, it said nothing to its own population and it kicked ass.
These press conferences and videos and its attempt to fight a humanitarian war with warning leaflets and care about whom it bombs has not gained Israel any brownie points in Europe, the UN or the Arab World. Israel is still denounced for its barbarity and its "disproportionate response".We need Israel of 1967 back. No news, no journalists, no conferences, no investigations into alleged brutality or staged massacres like Qana. Just kick ass. You can kill them all, Israel. No one really cares. The MSM could not care less about a few million dead Muslims. Non-Muslim Europeans don't care. In their hearts the Saudis and other Sunnis would love for you to destroy Hezbollah. So kill them all. What, you are worried that Iran might threaten to wipe Israel off the map?
Here are two incontrovertible truths:
If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence.
If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.
For the sake of the world, for the sake of peace, kill them all.
Related Blogs: Atlas Shrugs warns us: "And we here are 40 years later and the holocaust may very well be upon us."
QT Monster's Place has More on the Israeli/Hezbollah War from the blogosphere.
As for Palestinian claims that Israel treats them cruelly, they are all lies. This video explains it all, Pallywood: