Gettysburg in Gaza
As we all undoubtedly know, President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is one of the formative oratorical pieces in our history; with 272 words he was able to frame the nation’s condition, re-interpret the Constitution, and define his vision for America which has lasted (at least…) to the present day. And he did all this in during a brief memorial service, in a military cemetery. Israel had a similar event in its history, and we are coming up on its sixty-fifth anniversary:
Nahal Oz (“Stream of Strength”), originally a military outpost immediately outside of the Gaza Strip, became a civilian Kibbutz (farming cooperative) in 1953. As was the reality of those tumultuous days of young Israel, these agricultural settlements protected inland Israel (which was pretty tiny to begin with) from Fedayeen guerillas trying to enter the country and commit acts of terror. Nahal Oz was right next to the Egyptian border and played an important part in preventing these incursions.
On April 29, 1956, Roi Rotberg, the 21-year old security officer of the kibbutz, rode out to inspect disturbance at Nahal Oz’s wheat fields. He was shot off his horse and murdered by several Arab attackers who lay in hiding, including a Palestinian farmer and an Egyptian policeman. They dragged his body to Gaza, and only after several hours the UN was able to arrange its return.
The Commander of the Israeli Military is the Army Chief of Staff, at the time the world-renown eye-patched war hero General Moshe Dayan. The day before the ambush he happened to visit Nahal Oz, and met Rotberg. When he was informed of his death he sat down and in thirty minutes wrote brief, stirring eulogy with several biblical allusions from the story of Samson, which he delivered the following day, at Roi Rotberg’s funeral. Only 285 words long (in the original Hebrew), the eulogy has become a poignant “establishing document” for modern-day Israel. In beautiful prose (which few expected from this hardened warrior) Dayan set forth the basic terms under which Israel must exists. The following translation is from Mitch Ginsburg, a “Times of Israel” correspondent:
“Yesterday with daybreak, Roi was murdered. The quiet of a spring morning blinded him, and he did not see the stalkers of his soul on the furrow. Let us not hurl blame at the murderers. Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt.
Not from the Arabs of Gaza must we demand the blood of Roi, but from ourselves. How our eyes are closed to the reality of our fate, unwilling to see the destiny of our generation in its full cruelty. Have we forgotten that this small band of youths, settled in Nahal Oz, carries on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, beyond which hundreds of thousands of eyes and arms huddle together and pray for the onset of our weakness so that they may tear us to pieces — has this been forgotten? For we know that if the hope of our destruction is to perish, we must be, morning and evening, armed and ready.
A generation of settlement are we, and without the steel helmet and the maw of the cannon we shall not plant a tree, nor build a house. Our children shall not have lives to live if we do not dig shelters; and without the barbed wire fence and the machine gun, we shall not pave a path nor drill for water. The millions of Jews, annihilated without a land, peer out at us from the ashes of Israeli history and command us to settle and rebuild a land for our people. But beyond the furrow that marks the border, lies a surging sea of hatred and vengeance, yearning for the day that the tranquility blunts our alertness, for the day that we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call for us to lay down our arms.
It is to us that the blood of Roi calls from his shredded body. Although we have vowed a thousand vows that our blood will never again be shed in vain — yesterday we were once again seduced, brought to listen, to believe. Our reckoning with ourselves, we shall make today. We mustn’t flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may claim our blood. We mustn’t avert our eyes, lest our hands be weakened. That is the decree of our generation. That is the choice of our lives — to be willing and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword be knocked from our fists, and our lives severed.
Roi Rotberg, the thin blond lad who left Tel Aviv in order to build his home alongside the gates of Gaza, to serve as our wall. Roi — the light in his heart blinded his eyes and he saw not the flash of the blade. The longing for peace deafened his ears and he heard not the sound of the coiled murderers. The gates of Gaza were too heavy for his shoulders, and they crushed him.”
The Ayin of the Hurricane
Word has just come out of the World Meteorological Organization, which is the United Nations agency responsible for such matters, of yet another “reorganization” of the naming conventions of tropical cyclones, that terrifying weather phenomena known as a “Typhoon” in the Pacific Ocean, a “Cyclone” in the Indian Ocean, and a “Hurricane” closer to home. Seems that they’ve now done away with the use of Greek letters to name storms which occur after the season’s predetermined list of 21 names has been exhausted. During the 2020 season Greek letters were employed to identify a record-shattering nine of the thirty storms on record, from “Arthur” to Iota”. Apparently (according to the WMO) people were “confused” by the similarity of some of the sounds (think beta, zeta, eta, iota). Personally, I think it’s also attributable to the utter demise of Classical studies in US high schools, with few graduates from the past three decades able to recognize either the Greek alphabet or, more importantly in this context, its sequence. Instead, the WMO has published a “supplemental” list of names which may be used in case the initial 21-Name list is fully utilized which, in these climate-changing times, seems to me a foregone conclusion.
From the time storms started to be named (and that wasn’t always the case; they often were referred to by their month of striking, or the location of greatest impact) until 1979 Tropical Cyclones carried female names, exclusively. I’m a bit fuzzy about the change, whether it originated from women’s organizations who felt that it was a sexist practice, or male groups who wanted an equal shot at the ensuing destruction and devastation. Regardless, since then we’ve accepted the alternating-name method which, in this writer’s opinion, has reduced the pool of names by effectively eliminating all unisex names from this assignment. I’ve peeked ahead at the list which runs to 2026, and nary an Avery, Dana, or Jesse grace the list. Worse, members of the WMO may request names of particularly destructive storms to be pulled from circulation, undoubtedly also reducing the odds of those names being used for newborns. How many Katrina’s who are under the age of fifteen have you met?
The auxiliary list includes fairly uncommon names, such as Adria, Braylen, and Caridad, which may be unique, but don’t resonate with the dramatic impact of “Hurricane Sigma has formed in the Caribbean”. By giving-up on these unexpected Greek storm names, we are doing away with the sense of alarm we must all feel when the twenty-fifth (or thirty-fifth…) storm of the season strikes, but also with the appreciation of the impending relief as we realize that the end of this year’s accursed hurricane season is nigh.
My proposal? Ditch the supplemental list and replace it with the Hebrew alphabet. It has only two letters with a similar sound (we can thank the Phoenicians for that), and I think FEMA will be grateful: What could drive people faster to complete preparations and rush to safety than the Old Testament shock and awe vibe of “Hurricane Samech Projected to Make Landfall Tonight”?
Purging Time
Once in a while certain phrases become so overused in both our media and popular culture that it behooves us to collectively declare a moratorium on future use. Here’s my current top three:
“Double Down”: Originally a term describing a gambler’s move playing blackjack, it is now used to define any political utterance whatsoever in which the speaker simply insists on his point. It doesn’t matter if it’s President Trump’s wall, the Democrats’ demands for reform, or Kanye West’s latest outrage, everybody’s “doubling down”. Since so very few of these stubborn actors are actually playing with their own money, let’s relegate the phrase back to the smoke-filled Vegas casinos. “Maintained his opinion” works just as fine, without the theatrics.
“Weaponize”: What used to be reserved for plutonium, various bacteria, and United Nations Security Council gatherings, has now permeated every conversation describing the employing of any idea, concept, or cultural artifact as an attack device. We need to take the foot off the pedal on this one, otherwise how will we be sufficiently terrorized when a rogue regime is caught milling anthrax or placing satellite-killing lasers in space?
“Flip the Script”: This one’s everywhere. From a US Senator rushing to support an unlikely political ally, a celebrity chef substituting ingredients in a beloved recipe, to forward Lionel Messi dropping back to play as a “False Nine” (don’t ask), it seems that every unexpected change is now flip-worthy. Time to send the scripts back to those Commie Hollywood writers, and restore that wonderful Middle-French noun “Surprise”.
As Winston Churchill said: “Short words are best, and old words when short are best of all.”
Stories from the Suez
After many years of quietly flowing in the background, the Suez Canal finds itself once again atop global newsfeeds, this time courtesy of the Taiwanese “Ever Given” cargo container mega-ship that got mired in the southern part of the canal, effectively shutting down its operation and causing billions of dollars in economic damage to shippers.
In its first incarnation the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II started construction of a canal which was going to connect the ancient city of Pithom, traditionally considered to be constructed by the Israelite slaves of yore, with the Red Sea. It was never completed. This was followed by other large-scale canal projects initiated by rulers such as King Darius of Persia, who actually successfully connected the Nile with the Red Sea. When Napoleon conquered Egypt in 1799 his archeologists discovered these ancient canals, inspiring the General to contemplate a Mediterranean to Red Sea canal, which was ultimately built by the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps. It took ten years, and 1.5 million laborers, and was inaugurated in late 1869. It remains one of the grandest engineering feats of the modern age, greatly assisted by the fact that no locks are needed to operate it, as the sea-level is constant between the two bodies of water.
The canal remained under joint British-French control until 1956, when President Nasser, in an act that to this day is considered the death-knell blow to Colonialism, nationalized it; one of the last Colonial wars ensued. French and British forces paratroopers were sent in, Israel joined forces with them and conquered significant Egyptian territory, and traffic in the canal ceased. My father, a young infantry lieutenant in the Israel Defense Force, fought in that war, leading a team of scouts on circa-WWII Jeeps through central Sinai all the way to Sharm-el-Sheikh. I grew up on stories (and, surprisingly enough, many photographs) of this campaign. Later came the 1967 Six-Day War, followed by the largely unknown Egyptian-Israeli “War of Attrition”, in which the two countries shelled each other’s forces from opposite sides of the Suez for several years, and culminating in the October 1973 Yom-Kippur war (more about that later), all of which combined to effectively shut down ship traffic in the canal for eight years.
During my military service in the IDF I was assigned to the now defunct “Engineering Maritime Unit”, which was formed in the Fifties with the sole objective of crossing (and carrying forces) across the Suez. This was to be accomplished in two possible ways: Either through motorized floating piers built by a Belgian company named UNIFLOAT, or by tank-carrying French amphibious vehicles. Neither one was particularly effective (or safe, for that matter) but we pretty much figured out that our unit was not long for this world. Once the crown jewel of the IDF Corps of Engineers, by the mid-Eighties it had become mostly obsolete, on two counts: First, in 1978 Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Muhammad Anwar el-Sadat signed the historic peace treaty between the nations, ending the continual thirty-year state of war which had existed until then. Under the agreement Israel was to withdraw from the entire Sinai desert, effectively ending its presence on the banks of the canal. And second, and of greater significance to the Corps, was the fact that following the wars Egypt had embarked on large-scale projects of mine removal, dredging silt, and widening the canal considerable, to a point where the IDF was no longer able to provide effective solutions for a rapid crossing, not that one was needed anymore (an interesting and unplanned side effect of the expansion work was the inadvertent introduction of over 800 non-native marine species from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea).
After the 1982 war in Lebanon (in which my unit actually constructed a Bailey Bridge) I was assigned to the Corps legendary Research & Development unit, YIFTACH, with its even more legendary commanding officer General David Laskov, who was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest serving officer on active duty (he was 79 at the time and continued to serve well into his eighties). Back to the Yom-Kippur war, to this day the single most traumatic event in the State of Israel’s history: Our R & D unit, back in 1973, was responsible for both the greatest engineering failure of the war, as well as its noblest triumph. “Between the Wars” (an Israeli euphemism for the time between 1967 and 1973, during which Israeli hubris peaked and empire-building was underway) Israel constructed a Maginot-like line of fortifications along the east bank of the canal, known as the Bar-Lev line (Haim Bar-Lev was the then Commander of the IDF). The YIFTACH R & D unit devised a series of pipes and pumps which would spray and ignite fuel on the ramparts of the fortifications, repelling any would-be invaders. However, when the 1973 war commenced, Egyptian commando forces used simple fire hoses to splatter earth from the embankments straight at the shower heads that were spraying the fuel, clogging them with mud and rendering them harmless. With the exception of one outpost, the entire line was overrun by the Egyptians, with some of our specialists taken as POW’s.
A couple of weeks later, when the Israeli forces righted themselves, a division commanded by Gen. Ariel “Arik” Sharon was in position to cross the Suez and take the battle into Egypt proper. Our unit provided the perfect solution: an ingenious rolling cylinder bridge, 220 meters long, pushed by tanks through the desert, under heavy artillery fire and through minefields, and on October 19, 1973, this well-engineered bridge was deployed over the canal, facilitating the flow of troops and materiel into the west bank of Suez, nicknamed by the IDF soldiers “Africa”. At some point during my service, I was “punished” for some infraction and was ordered to arrange our unit’s library. Needless to say, I spent several days gorging myself on these amazing historical reports about our unit’s heroic performances.
I have never been to the Suez myself, but I can only imagine the excitement of the local villagers who first observed the towering behemoth “Ever Given” blocking the channel, followed by a massive earthmoving effort to liberate it from the canal’s embankment, and lastly the combined forces of the tugboats and the water itself, at the highest of possible tides, courtesy of the Spring Supermoon, which of course occurred exactly (as it always did and will) on the 14th of the month of Nissan, just as millions of us sat down to conduct the Passover Seder, celebrating another amazing liberation which happened a few thousand years before, not too far from the west bank of the Suez canal.
I Swear I Heard It
Two twelve-year old boys, riding their bicycles near my neighborhood. First boy: “I thought you were grounded.” Second boy replies: “Nah, I’m only grounded at my dad’s house. At my mom’s I’m OK.”
To Insure Promptness
A couple of years ago I traveled to Israel, via way of Toronto. On the return trip I found myself at 4 AM seeking cash for a gratuity for the hotel airport shuttle driver who schlepped our overloaded suitcases from the back of the van to the curb, a distance of approximately ten feet (or, since this was in Canada, about three meters). I had no Canadian currency and wasn’t about to use the few Israeli Shekels I had left over in my wallet, when I discovered a US twenty Dollar bill (Andrew Jackson; I doubt we’ll see Harriet Tubman’s anytime soon…) that was tucked away, never to be pulled-out in Israel, where merchants have stopped accepting American cash decades ago. As I certainly wasn’t going to request the driver to perform a foreign currency exchange at this ungodly hour, I simply handed over the engraved picture of Old Hickory, to the utter surprise of my wife (it really was no more than ten feet to the curb…) The driver thanked me profusely, and I went on to board my economy seat to Raleigh feeling like a billionaire on safari.
And then it hit me: I did not board the plane significantly poorer than I was an hour before, and the shuttle driver certainly wasn’t going to retire on my double sawbuck, but we had just conducted a transaction that made both of us feel great; I was provided a service and showed my sincere appreciation. For many of the service providers we interact with the gratuity is actually considered, by both their employers and the tax authorities, part of their anticipated earnings. For us customers, the tip is often viewed as a “tax” of sorts, which we use as an imaginary “reward” in return for how we feel at the moment, not considering it to be an integral part of the provider’s livelihood. No more!
From that predawn Toronto encounter onwards, I have become a big tipper: A beer at the bar? Three dollars. A ten-spot lunch tab? I leave a fiver. Dinner? Twenty to twenty-five percent gratuity. I have calculated the difference in my monthly expenses to be around $50, which in my book is the cheapest way ever to feel like a million bucks.