How much is a human life worth? According to a Washington D.C. federal judge, $12.9 million. That’s the amount that Judge Royce Lamberth awarded to the parents of our cousin Marla Bennett who was killed in the July 31, 2002 bombing attack on the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria at Hebrew University.

Lamberth found that Hamas, which claimed credit soon after the attack, “is an organization supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran, dedicated to the waging of Jihad, or a holy war employing terrorism” and was responsible for the “willful and deliberate killing of Marla Bennett.” Lamberth ordered Iran to pay the $12.9 million to Marla’s mother, father and sister for their suffering and Marla’s lost income.

Specifically, the judge calculated the loss of income to be generated by Marla’s estate as $404,548.00. The judge also awarded Marla’s parents $5 million each and Marla’s sister Lisa $2.5 million. The amounts awarded took into account a fact that was previously unknown to me – that Marla’s death was not instantaneous. A resuscitation tube was found on her body at the scene, which indicates there was some sign of life when the emergency medical team arrived.

The court ruling provided further details on Marla’s assailant, Mohammed Uda, a maintenance worker at Hebrew University, who was a member of the Silwan Gang, a Hamas sub-group named after the Jerusalem suburb where Uda lived, and who meticulously planned the attack using a bomb hidden in a backpack placed on a table adjacent to Marla in the cafeteria. The Silwan Gang also planned a previous attack at the Moment Café in Jerusalem earlier that year.

Judge Lamberth acknowledged that money will never bring Marla back. Lamberth's opinion states that “though it is impossible for this court to make the plaintiffs completely whole again, the court hopes that this award helps begin the healing process and that one day the plaintiffs’ hearts and minds will be mended by the fact that some measure of justice, no matter how incalculable, was done on their behalf.”

Collecting the damages from Iran won’t be easy. Previous victims of terror attacks who have successfully sued Iran have sought money from frozen Iranian assets in America, but those resources are limited.

Marla’s family will also be competing to a certain extent with another award granted by Lamberth last week which stipulates some $2.65 billion to be paid by Iran to the families of the 241 U.S. service members killed in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. Hezballah, which carried out that attack, is trained, supported by and ideologically aligned with Iran.

Nevertheless, plaintiffs in such cases have been encouraged lately by Libya’s eventual decision to accept responsibility for its role in the bombing of a Pan Am flight over Scotland.

Iranian government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham told reporters in Washington that Iran considers Lamberths’ rulings “baseless. Some U.S. court issued a verdict without any investigation or listening to opinions from the other sides. The verdict is not legally defensible and we can see the political pressure from the decision to grab Iranian assets in America.” Nevertheless, no one from Iran or its intelligence ministry which were co-defendants in the 2003 case, appeared in court to defend the lawsuit.

Freelance journalist Karmel Melamed wrote on his blog last week that Lamberth’s decision deserves “high praise” and “gives hope to victims of Iran's reign of international terror that while justice may not be immediate it does arrive in due time.” Melamed also points out that Iranian Jewish victims of Iran's terror have followed a similar path. Last September the families of 12 Iranian Jewish victims imprisoned in Iran filed a federal suit seeking to collect damages from former Iranian President Mohhamad Khatami. The suit holds Khatami responsible for the kidnapping, imprisonment and disappearance of Jews imprisoned by Iran between 1994 and 1997.

Shurat HaDin, an Israeli organization that gives legal aid to terror victims and that has been at the forefront of bringing more than two dozen lawsuits over the past several years against terrorist organizations and states sponsoring terrorism, has successfully collected on judgments from suits brought against U.S. banks holding funds used by Palestinian terror groups.

In March of this year, B’nai Brith Canada filed suit against Iran’s current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejhad for incitement of genocide against the Jewish people in a federal Canadian court. The suit also calls on the Canadian government to ban Ahmadinejhad's entry into Canada.

Marla’s mother Linda said she did not intend to use the money, if she’s able to collect, for the family’s own personal gain “If only it would bring her back, that would be ideal,” said Bennett who still lives in the San Diego home where Marla grew up. “But we know that’s not going to happen.” Linda who traveled with her husband to Washington in March to testify in the case said she was “gratified by the ruling” and expressed the hope that she could “do some good for other people with this judgement. That’s what Marla would have wanted.”

The Bennetts set up several programs after Marla’s death. One is a charity run by the local San Diego Jewish Federation that helps Jews and non-Jews in distress; the other is a fund to help young people who want to study in Israel. Marla was a student at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies and had been studying in a Hebrew ulpan at Hebrew University when she was killed along with eight others.

The Bennett’s family lawyer Edward Carnot stressed that he would “make every effort to collect upon the judgement. It’s not going to be an easy task, but we have some avenues we want to pursue.”

Following Lamberth’s ruling, the Hebrew University issued a statement saying that it “pays tribute to the memory of Marla Bennett and all of the other victims of the terrorist attack and expresses satisfaction at the decision of the court, which perhaps will ease, if only slightly, the sorrow of the family.”

Lamberth praised the Bennett family for “their courage and steadfast pursuit of justice through legal means. This noble effort is made even more so when contrasted with the heinous and brutishly unlawful acts undertaken by the defendants and the individuals they support.” Lamberth called Marla “a shining light in the lives of so many.”

The full court judgment can be found here.

The audio version of this post can be found here.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since our cousin Marla was killed in the July 31, 2002 suicide bombing at Hebrew University. Marla Bennett had just sat down to lunch at the university’s Frank Sinatra cafeteria when a terrorist detonated the bomb he had planted in a backpack at an adjoining table. 7 people were killed, including Marla’s classmate at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, Ben Blutstein.

After Marla died, I wanted to do something to honor her memory. One action was to start this blog, which began immediately following and was in large part a reaction to her death. Since my craft is my words, I also proposed to Marla’s parents that I write a book or a long magazine-length article on Marla’s life. Marla’s parents gave me access to the hundreds of articles, letters, and eulogies they had received in the days and weeks following her death.

I never wrote that book, but I still have much of the source material that I photocopied during visits to Marla’s home in San Diego. I wanted to share some of that with you on this anniversary.

The front page of the August 9 edition of the San Diego Jewish Press Heritage summarized the enormity of Marla’s loss for her friends and extended family. The headline read “Community mourns a martyr for peace: 1500 attend funeral for Marla Bennett.” The coverage continued for 13 difficult pages, quoting Marla’s oft-repeated article where she proudly declares there was nowhere else she’d rather be in the world than Israel. Her words “I have a front row seat for the history of the Jewish people” are as poignant today as they were when she wrote them, months before her death. The publication culminated with two pages of news that sounds like it could be taken from today’s papers; one article was titled “Hamas intensifies bombing campaign.” Sound familiar?

Beyond the headlines, perhaps the most poignant memories of Marla I collected for my book project were a series of letters between Marla and her father written during Marla’s 1998 trip to Israel as an overseas student at Hebrew University. The letters themselves are nothing extraordinary – more recanting of daily activities than sharing of deep personal insights. “Yesterday we had a night hike and picnic with cheese, wine and olives,” Marla wrote in one. “I got a B+ on my Hebrew midterm…I plan to kick ass and ace every test from now on,” she wrote in another. Upon hearing that her parents were planning a trip to visit her in Israel, Marla wrote “if you have extra room in your bags, could you bring lots of gum, a bottle of honey (it is expensive here), and Kraft macaroni and cheese.”

Yet it’s the very ordinariness of these letters that is perhaps the most heartbreaking: Marla was just a regular girl, a young adult filled with promise and typical post-teenage concerns. Marla wasn’t a superwoman who wrote deep Kafka-esque manifestos. She was just like any of us except she found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Then there were the letters written to the Bennett family from Marla’s scores of friends who reflected on what Marla meant to them.

Dipti Barot remembered Marla’s “chameleon camouflage eyes, which looked brown or gray or green or any color in the sea depending on what shirt or blouse she put on that day.” Dipti, whose family came from India, marveled at how Marla introduced her to “the beauty of the Jewish faith and the strength of the Jewish people. She made me sign up for Jewish folk singing at Hillel. And so I went, and I loved it. I was this Hindu, sitting up in Hillel, singing Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu with the best of them. I was officially an honorary Jew now.” After Marla visited Israel, Dipti says she knew she “felt happiest and whole there.”

Marla’s childhood friend Emma agreed. “She really felt at home in Israel…her life was more fulfilled than ever before,” Emma wrote in a eulogy delivered before a gathering of the American Friends of Hebrew University. Marla was what Emma called “a professional friend. She never missed an opportunity to send a card, not just on the holidays but on the half birthdays too.” Emma shared details that might seem slight but make all the difference in understanding who Marla was. “Marla really liked elbows. She would come up from behind you and take hold of the extra skin and just play with it for a second while she greeted you. She loved that she could squeeze that little part of your body and you couldn’t even feel it.”

Marla influenced and affected so many people. Michelle met Marla while they worked together at Camp JCA Shalom in Malibu, CA. When Marla learned that Michelle had never had a bat mitzvah, wrote Michelle, “Marla began meeting with me to discuss Jewish identity and to help me to study my Torah portion. She was completely committed to the idea of my becoming a bat mitzvah and she arranged for me to read from the Torah on the last Shabbat of the summer at camp. Completing my Torah portion was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. As I danced in celebration afterwards with Marla, I realized how lucky I was to be part of a community in which someone as special and dedicated as Marla could make something I’d dreamed about a reality.

Michelle added: “Marla knew that every trivial decision she made on a daily basis could be the difference between life and death. But her resolve to stay in Jerusalem, to not leave out of fear, to stand in solidarity with Israel, demonstrates to us all that Marla did not die in vain.”

Marla herself reflected on what it meant to stay in Israel at a time when many others were leaving. In a letter to her friend Ricki, she admitted that “Israel is really scary right now. But I still feel so strongly about being here, I am happy here, even now, despite everything that is going on. I still feel I can remain (mostly) safe by making smart choices about where to go and what to do. I do not live in Ramallah. No one is invading my home. Don’t worry too much.”

Marla left behind a devastated community. Her boyfriend Michael shared the following story:

“Six months after our first date, Marla was brushing her teeth and I was standing nearby. Suddenly she put down her toothbrush and said, ‘There’s something I think you should know.’ ‘OK….’ I said, wondering whether this was going to be a good ‘something’ or a bad ‘something.’ ‘You should know that when I get engaged, it’s going to be with Grammee’s wedding ring.’ (this was definitely a good ‘something.’) I said ‘And I should just know this because…?’ ‘It’s just something you should now,” she said, flashing a cute little grin. So in August, during my visit to San Diego, I had planned to ask Grammee for that ring. And I had planned to ask Michael and Linda (Marla's parents) for their blessing and permission to marry their daughter. Instead, in August I flew from Israel to Southern California accompanying Marla’s body and I met Grammee on the day of Marla’s funeral. As I hugged her, I told her what Marla had told me about the ring and Grammee held up her hand. ‘It’s this ring, kid.’ She was wearing it for Marla.”

To nearly everyone she met, Marla was an inspiration: Her friend Lesley was debating whether to get involved with Hillel when she started school at UC Berkeley. “Though I had been informally Jewishly involved, I hadn’t been inspired by my synagogue’s youth group in high school, and was unconvinced that Hillel would be different,” Lesley wrote. “Marla repeatedly coaxed me into going to Hillel at the start of freshman year and soon I was hooked. I currently work for Berkeley Hillel as the organization’s programming coordinator. Without Marla, I never would have been drawn to this field that I so enjoy. I now it sounds trite, but Marla genuinely changed the path of my life.”

Marla’s friend Ari wanted to “grow old living next door” to Marla. “I wanted our kids to play in little league and soccer and go to camp together. Marla was the person I turned to when something was not right. She cared, not because some law, some rule, some God told her to, but because she genuinely cared.”

In August 2002, after Marla died, I tried to cope with Marla’s death in my own way. “A tragedy such as this puts into perspective our relationship as individuals vs. the national history of the Jewish people,” I wrote at the time. “Too often, in the face of difficult times such as those we are experiencing now in Israel, we tend to bury our heads, hoping it will pass over us and our immediate family will get through this on the way to ‘better’ times. But when someone in your family is targeted because she is a Jew, you are instantly thrust into part of the collective Jewish narrative. Your story of tragedy – and also in entirely different circumstances a story of joy or success – becomes part and parcel of the Jewish totality. You can no longer see yourself as just individuals. In this way, Marla is not alone, none of us are alone. Our struggle is collective.”

Marla knew that intrinsically, I think. In her widely reprinted essay, written originally for the Avi Chai Foundation, she wrote “I’ve been living in Israel for over a year and a half now and my favorite thing to do here is go to the grocery store. I know, not the most exciting response…but going grocery shopping, as well as picking up my dry cleaning, standing in long lines at the bank, and waiting in the hungry mob at the bakery, means that I live here. I am not a tourist. I deal with Israel and all of its complexities, confusion, joy and pain every single day. And I love it.”

We love you Marla. We miss you daily. We will never forget you.

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Listen to this story by clicking here.

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Before getting involved in hotel deals, one should investigate if they really are luxury hotels that are being offered in the hotel deals or not. Same goes for airlines when browsing through various flight tracker sites. Comfirmation is required as to whether the seats are being offered on standard Paris flights or some run down air bus.

It’s traditional to learn Torah on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot which began this past Tuesday night. Nine-year-old Aviv’s class had a pre-Shavuot student-parent study session at school earlier in the week and my wife Jody and I went. But by the time we walked out, I found myself drawing political rather than religious conclusions.

We assembled in the school library to review several texts from the Midrash that concerned the custom of pilgrimage to Jerusalem. According to tradition, Jews in Biblical times were commanded to ascend to Jerusalem three times a year – for the holidays of Sukkot in the fall, and Pesach and Shavuot in the spring. But wouldn’t all the Jews going on holiday at the same time cause their homes to be left empty and unguarded, open to burglary and pilferage, the ever practical Midrash wondered?

The Midrsah describes several potentially unfortunate cases. In one, the homeowner forgets to lock the door before leaving. In another, nasty non-Jewish neighbors can barely bide the time until the Jewish family’s departure in order to proceed with plans to rob the home.

In both cases, a miracle occurs and the homes are spared. In the first, a snake magically wraps itself around the doorknob preventing entry by those who don’t belong. In the second, God sends angels to Ashkelon who take on the guise of family members to give the home the appearance of being occupied while its owners are actually away.

The stories are simple, charming and on the surface unassuming, seeming to do nothing more than support the Midrash’s main theme: that those who are going out to do a mitzvah cannot be harmed.

Except that they don’t ring entirely true. That is to say if you leave your house unlocked for an extended period, you most likely are going to get robbed. And if you’ve got overtly thieving neighbors, leaving town without any precautions in place and hanging a sign up essentially saying “here are the keys, come on in,” might not be the smartest thing to do. Why is the Midrash, I wondered, teaching what seem to be outright falsehoods?

Don’t be such a grump, you might say. These are kid-friendly stories designed to teach a lesson with a nice pat moral even if the plot isn’t particularly plausible. If so, then why is it that when it comes to contemporary politics, our leaders seem to be struck by the same kind of magical thinking – and this time there are no miracle snakes or angels coming to protect us.

This was the week that rockets returned to Sderot and the western Negev communities that border the Gaza Strip (not far from where we went biking back in February). True, the Kassam attacks have been going on pretty much non-stop since last summer’s escalation which ran in parallel with the Second Lebanon War, but the level of the violence in the past week (140 rockets, one dead, many more injured) was enough to send Israeli troops and tanks back into Gaza in what looks to be a protracted operation.

What struck me as unforgivable, though, was not the inevitable return of the rockets but the utter lack of preparedness that our government showed all along the Gaza border. It’s almost as if the “kids” in our government have been waiting for the kind of magic and miracles the Midrash promised to the Jews making the Shavuot pilgrimage to Jerusalem rather than making concrete plans to take matters into our own hands.  

Since the disengagement from Gaza two years ago, we’ve turned a blind eye as terrorists in the Gaza Strip have smuggled in mortars and guns and Kassams and anti-tank weapons. We’ve watched as Hamas has built, armed and trained a not insignificant army of more than 10,000. That army hasn’t yet mobilized (against Israel at least), though the fighting between Hamas and Fatah forces in Gaza shows that it is certainly ready to roll in a Palestinian civil war. Nevertheless, over the past six years (including before the disengagement), the southern area round the Gaza border has absorbed some 4,500 rockets.

The most high profile destination for those rockets has been the beleaguered border town of Sderot which this week was proposed to be granted the emergency status of a “front line” community (which carries with it various tax breaks) for the first time ever. Along with that change came shocking revelations about the city’s readiness for the next major Kassam salvo.

Of the 58 public bomb shelters in Sderot, only 23 are considered actually usable. The rest lack electricity, ventilation, even running water. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews pledged $1.5 million to rehabilitate this poor state of affairs. Then along came Arcadi Gaydamak, the Russian billionaire who is the closest Sderot has seen to a contemporary angel.

Last week, Gaydamak poured millions into busing out traumatized residents to hotel rooms in safer places. He then pledged to refurbish the shelters and build the safe rooms that the government has waffled over for so long – critical because many residents, particularly the elderly, can’t make it to the public shelters in the 20 seconds warning they’re given before a missile lands. Last Friday afternoon, Gaydamak offered to fund the cost to the tune of about $50 million. Gaydamak says that there are some 3,500 apartments that need to be reinforced or need security rooms built in them.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz, not wanting to be out trumped by an angel (who just so also happens to be planning a run for mayor of Jerusalem), on Sunday finally committed to building 200 safeguarded rooms a month with construction supposed to begin immediately. Other rules were proposed as well, including cutting the usual red tape involved for individuals wanting to reinforce rooms and approving requests when only 50 percent of the residents in a building agree (today, it’s three-fourths).

But where has the government been for all this time? It’s been a year since a “ceasefire” went into place that stopped the bulk of the bombs from flying over the border. Why has Israel lifted nary a finger to protect the population in Sderot which this week was catapulted back into the front pages?

Perhaps the lesson my nine-year-old son learned this year for Shavuot needs to be recast in a modern context where the “thieving neighbors” were literally given the keys to our old homes (those evacuated during the Gaza disengagement) and, while not robbing us of our possessions per se, have stripped too many Israeli citizens of their freedom to live lives without fear.

Once upon a time maybe God sent snakes and angels. But today, we can’t wait for Russian billionaires with their own political agendas to swoop in and solve our problems. The lesson of modern day Israel is that we are in control of our own destiny despite the sometimes seemingly insurmountable odds and problems. We need to take the basic steps of locking the doors to the homes we have left using modern, practical and thoroughly non-magical means. Only then can we claim to have learned something useful from such a simple, charming and unassuming Midrash.

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The podcast (audio) version of this article can be found here.

I was interviewed this week by Michele Chabin, a reporter from the New York Jewish Week, and asked to give an “average Israeli’s” opinion on the threat from Iran. How did it make us feel? Were we afraid? Did we have thoughts of leaving? Was the world community’s response comforting or confounding? The interview came up suddenly and I hadn’t had time to think about my answer much in advance. My words shocked even me.

No, we weren’t thinking of going anywhere, I found myself saying. We were staying put, albeit with a newly morbid, much more fatalistic approach to life. Iran might very well make good on its threat to attack Israel, I said. Who knows if the Jewish state will be here in another 5 or 10 years? So we’re trying our hardest to live our life today as fully and joyfully as possible, in the moment and not too obsessed with the future.

Iran as a source of positive psychotherapy? Who would have thunk it?

All kidding aside, what’s going on in Iran is profoundly disturbing. I don’t think there’s any reason not to believe Iranian President Ahmadinejad when he says that he is planning to wipe the “evil Zionist regime” off the face of the planet. His fundamentalist messianic beliefs of the coming of the Iman Mahdi don’t operate according to the same sort of logic we in the West assume must apply. That kind of thinking has already got us into trouble, when we were surprised by the phenomena of suicide bombs, none of which made logical sense to non-believers’ eyes.

Those who hope that Ahmadinejad doesn’t really mean it when he denies the Holocaust and that simply uttering stern words of diplomatic admonition will delay his country’s pursuit of a nuclear option, or that the receipt of such weapons by the world’s leading exporter of terror will not change the planet as we know it, are trading in foolish delusion. He means it, just like Hitler meant it some 70 years ago. And although it’s the entire world that’s at risk if Iran goes nuclear, Israel is first on the shopping list. The question is: how should we respond today? And at this point, can we?

Let’s examine the question from both the national and personal perspectives. On the national level, I think something clearly needs to be done. Severe sanctions could have the intended effect, but they would have to be truly strong and enforced across the board; sadly, there is little unanimity amongst the world’s leaders on how this should be accomplished, let alone that it should.

A military strike seems equally unlikely – the U.S. in the wake of the Baker-Hamilton report and Democratic control of Congress is looking for ways out of the Middle East, not how to add more partners on its dance card. Europe remains its usual impotent self. The job – if it needs to be done – increasingly looks like it will fall on Israel alone.

Could Israel even do anything, though? It’s been pointed out that Iran began preparing for a potential Israeli attack as soon at it saw how Iraq lost its Osirak reactor in 1981 at the hands of Israeli warplanes. Iran’s nuclear production facilities are better protected and more dispersed, making Israel’s job that much more difficult, many would say impossible. What about protecting the country from incoming missiles. Could the Patriots and Arrows in our arsenal do the job?

This is where Israelis who support a military option begin acting messianically themselves. We want to believe that Israel must have some super secret plan up its sleeve that defies the laws of nature. That we can sneak into Iran and destroy every one of their facilities in one go without a single screw up, without a single casualty, and with no counter-response, in the same way that the War of Independence and the Six Day War seemed impossible to win and yet we did. If we are fired upon, our defenses will protect us flawlessly, hitting every target. If we must go up against Iran, the thinking goes, it can only be with God’s help and perhaps His direct intervention.

But we’ve already used messianic language in our last regional conflict, this past summer’s war with Hezbollah. With supernatural faith, our leaders proclaimed that the entire threat from Lebanon would be wiped out in a matter of days by our natural logic-defying Air Force. Even if there are some who still can debate who “won” and who “lost” the war, the fact is that Hezbollah was only dented not destroyed and has already rearmed, ready to launch another 1,000 missiles into Israel at a time of its choosing.

Our family and friends reading this now are probably hitting their heads against the wall. If your analysis is right, what the heck are you still doing there, they will be screaming into a hundred telephones and email messages in the hours to come. You admit you’re potential sitting ducks. Get out while you still can. Forget about the Jewish people, the state, all the values you’re trying to instill in your children. Zionism has failed…you’re courting disaster not defending against it. After all, if Jews had fled Germany when they could have, they would still be alive and that’s the most important goal, right?

But what if everyone had the same thoughts and got up and left? What would be left of Israel? To what extent would a mass exodus from the country only accelerate its destruction by spurring on its enemies to attack what would be correctly perceived as a weak and hopeless enterprise? No, Israel was founded to provide not only a safe haven for the Jewish people in a world hell bent on its destruction, but a place where Jews could fight back.

So how do you cope with such a threat – realized or otherwise, potentially stoppable or not – hanging over your head? On the personal level, you do the only thing left: you go on living as “normal” a life as you can, with even more gusto than ever. The good news: we already know how to do that.

In 2000, when the Palestinian violence in Israel first broke out, we were scared, let’s make no bones about it. And at first, we did alter our lifestyles considerably. We stopped going out to cafes, we refused to ride on public transportation, we pretty much stayed at home, afraid to tempt the suicide bombers who were waiting at the door to every mall, school and restaurant.

Over time, though, we developed the resilience that now seems part and parcel of the Israeli character. “We won’t stop living our lives in the face of terror,” we declared. That was, indeed, the impetus for this column, which I began writing after the horrific bombing at Hebrew University that took our cousin Marla in its wake.

That line of thinking is back now with a vengeance, it seems, when it comes to Iran. We won’t let the threat looming over us stop us from our daily activities. We’ll keep going to “Boogie,” the twice-monthly free-form dance evenings my wife Jody and I have come to cherish. We’ll make our nightly “family dinner” a sacred space. We’ll go on more family vacations to exotic places like the one we recently took to Egypt to see the pyramids despite the warnings against Israelis (or Westerners in general) traveling to the heart of the Islamic Arab world.

I would be delighted if, like on the old Bullwinkle and Rocky show, there really was something surprising up our collective sleeves and we miraculously prevailed against the Iranian threat either militarily or diplomatically. In the meantime, it’s our job to work on our personal battles, to confront our inner Iran, to help us live fuller, better and, yes, ultimately more miraculous lives.

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Here’s the link to the article in the New York Jewish Week.

“Don’t go,” “You’re crazy,” “Its just not safe.” These were a few of the choice admonitions we received when we told friends and family we had planned a vacation in Egypt.

Our friends weren’t crazy. They were clearly acting out of love and from what they've read in the media: Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula is indeed a hotbed of terrorist activity and the Israeli Foreign Ministry has urged Israelis to hightail it out of there on concrete evidence that Palestinian groups are gearing up for another imminent attack.

But Egypt proper – Cairo and its environs – have been relatively safe. That’s not to say nothing’s happened – there was a bomb in the city’s heavily touristed bazaar last year, and who can forget the horrific attack in 1997 when terrorists gunned down 65 mostly Swiss tourists in Luxor.  But Egypt is doing its utmost to keep visitors safe – after all, tourism is Egypt’s number one money maker. Police now accompany travelers everywhere; van trips into the desert must go in convoys.

And then there are the pyramids.  For as long as I can remember, certainly since I was a little boy, I have wanted to see the pyramids, the Sphinx, the sites where King Tut’s lavish tomb was found (I remember excitedly going to the King Tut traveling exhibition back in the late 1970s). A trip to see the last remaining wonder of the ancient world would be profoundly memorable. I wanted my children to have that mind-blowing experience.

And let's not forget the Jewish element - we talk about Mitzraim (Egypt) daily in the prayer service. As recently as the 1950s, there were over 80,000 Jews in Cairo. How could we be so close - a quick hour long flight - and not visit.

And so began our journey against the astonishment and proferred common sense of a chorus of well meaning naysayers.

In the middle of planning our vacation, El Al even tried to trip us up by announcing it was canceling its route to Egypt as of December 1, despite the political sensitivity to ensuring there was an Israeli carrier flying between two countries with a delicate peace treaty. “No one’s flying to Cairo from Tel Aviv anymore,” my travel agent said apologetically. “I haven’t booked anyone to Egypt in years.”

El Al then reinstated the flight, but for one month only and then only one day a week; fortunately the times worked with our plans, so the trip was back on.

Now, I have one friend in Egypt, a work colleague named Amgad who I was looking forward to meeting for the first time. When we started to get negative pushback from friends, I asked Amgad his opinion. Was Egypt really safe?

“Absolutely,” he replied, Just don’t go around with a big sign reading “Hi I’m an Israeli, shoot me.” OK, he didn’t say that in so many words, but the gist was the same.

We decided the best way to travel would be to hide our identity. We would be the Blum family from Sherman Oaks, California, not Jerusalem Israel. We’d travel on American passports and list our U.S. phone number. We’d even change our names.

Over Friday night dinner, we resolved that for one week, Imma and Abba would become Mom and Dad. Eight-year-old Aviv would be known as Alex, Merav would be Molly, and Amir…well, that’s already an Arabic sounding name. It means “tree tops” in Hebrew, but spelled with the letter ayin at the beginning instead of aleph, the word means prince. Hmm…a Prince in Egypt. Has a nice ring to it.

We tried practicing our new names. “Alex, could you please pass the salt?” I said to Aviv.

“Sure, Abba…I mean, Dad…” he giggled.

This was going to take some practice…

As the day of our flight approached, though, apprehension returned. Maybe we were taking too much of a risk. I mean, why go to a country where you have to pretend you’re someone you’re not? Where the people really don’t like you?

I wrote to Amgad again. “Think about it, Brian,” he wrote back. “Over the past six years, how many terror attacks have there been in Israel? How many people have died? Now ask how many attacks there have been in Egypt (not including Sinai) during the same time. One.”

He was right of course. Thousands of Israelis have been killed or injured in suicide bombs and other atrocities in Israel where you’re targeted whether you’re a tourist a not. Just the act of just going to a café can be a matter of life or death. Last summer’s war between Israel and Hezbollah in the north certainly added to the death toll.

Going to Cairo, by contrast, might be one of the safest places in the region to be. The devil you don’t know is always scarier than the devil you do. From what I’ve heard, in fact, there’s a bigger chance of injury in Egypt crossing the street dodging crazy Egyptian drivers than a terror attack.

Indeed, the U.S. State Department’s website lists a travel advisory for Israel and Jerusalem (two separate places on the list, but that’s another story…) but none for Egypt.

As my friend Michael wrote when I asked him about his own visits to Egypt in the past, “there’s always some chance of random violence just as there are always chances for random accidents. Gili (his daughter) fell down the stairs and thank God she was fine, but if she fell the wrong way she wouldn’t be. Planes and cars crash, but you still fly and drive.”

And if there's anything we've learned over the past few years living in Israel, it's not let fear dictate what you do with your life. You go on and do your best at living a "normal" life which includes seeing the pyramids and visiting Cairo.
 
So, what all this means is that, unless some unforeseen event knocks us off our itinerary (there’s rumors of another airport strike looming), we’re heading to Egypt next week. Assuming we get back OK, I’ll write more about how the trip went, what we saw and heard, and how safe (or not) Egypt really feels.

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The podcast version of this article is available here.

New Season Evokes Holocaust, Iraq as Allegory Shifts to Occupation Theme


A few weeks ago I published an article reviewing the hit Sci Fi Channel series Battlestar Galactica. In it, I compared the theme of nuclear jihad in the fictional program with the realpolitick of contemporary fundamentalism vs. the West. My review covered the series through its second season finale.

Since then, a number of people have written to ask my opinion of the new season which kicked off on October 5. At the risk of making this blog overly Sci Fi-centric, indulge me one more time.

While I think that Battlestar Galactica remains what Rolling Stone Magazine called “the smartest and toughest show on TV,” it has taken a dramatic turn this season away from extolling the dangers of the future and has been spending most of its first five episodes this season looking back: at the Holocaust in particular, but also the past six years of sustained suicide bombing in the Middle East - in Israel and more recently Iraq. That makes Battlestar Galactica perhaps the most un-Sci Fi show about space ever aired.

In Seasons One and Two of the show, the fanatical, monotheistic robot believers in the One True God, the Cylons, have nearly exterminated humanity, killing an estimated 20 billion in a sneak nuclear attack against the BSG human universe’s 12 home worlds. The remaining 45,000 men, women and children are on the run in a “ragtag fleet” of spacecraft. But as the second season ends, a habitable planet has been found which is sufficiently shrouded in interstellar interference that the human government deems it acceptable to settle on firm ground.

A year after most of the survivors of the genocide have disembarked to “New Caprica,” as the planet is named, the Cylons – as naysayers correctly predicted – track down the humans. But instead of once and for all obliterating the remnants of humanity, the Cylons decide to occupy them and serve as their benign rulers. That occupation quickly evolves to include detentions without charge, torture, and outright disappearance of some of the show’s main characters.

The humans, clearly, don’t find this new arrangement acceptable and immediately form a resistance that blows up strategic Cylon installations, sabotages the power grid and other needed facilities, and ultimately, engages in a campaign of suicide bombing against the occupiers. In the process, a human police force is formed to “collaborate” with the occupiers to ostensibly keep law and order.

The show reaches back to employ unmistakeable images from the Holocaust: the new police force is clearly modeled on the Kapos who worked with the Nazis and were loathed by their fellow Jewish ghetto inhabitants. Or perhaps the parallel is more recent: Iraqis who are recruited to work with American soldiers in that war torn nation.

As the insurgency grows, the Cylons decide to get even tougher on their captives. Leaders of the rebellion are rounded up in the middle of the night, trucked out to an empty field where Cylon soldiers, clearly patterned after Nazi storm troopers, arrive to gun them down into a ditch.

While a last minute tip off prevents a massacre, the show’s creators are clearly tapping into history much more this season than continuing the proscriptive political line that dominated the first two seasons and focused, as I wrote previously, on the dangers of letting nuclear weapons fall into the hands of rogue states.

The emphasis on history and politics is not surprising when you know a little about the background of the show's creators. Both executive producers Ronald Moore and David Eick were political science majors in college. "If you go through our libraries, you wouldn't guess we were in show business," Eick said in an interview with Rolling Stone.

The most disturbing aspect of the new season, however, has to do with the use of suicide bombers by the human resistance leaders, not by the evil Cylons as happened in Season One. The leader of the insurgency is someone we have known through the show and grown to respect, if not always trust.

Despite an admonition from another character that “there are something you just don’t do, even in war,” the message seems at times to be that the suicide bombers are justified in their actions because they have lost everything and have nothing left to lose. As the former president of the Colonies states, “desperate people use desperate measures.”

This premise sounds an awful lot like the language used by supporters of suicide bombers today. Those of us who live here in the Middle East with this reality know that suicide bombers are not men (and women) who have lost all hope, but are cynically recruited by a well-oiled death machine.

Battlestar Galactica ultimately backs away from support for the bombers, but even the transient implication, however obliquely, that it is possible to understand and even sympathize with the bombers is unfair, and a departure from what had been the program’s mostly moral clarity to date. Executive producer Eick reflected that ambuguity when he said, during a conference call, “It’s that old adage: one person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist.”

By the end of the fourth episode of the new season, the human population is rescued from the Cylon occupation and returned to the “ragtag fleet.” But rather than get back to the business of winning the war, the first order of business seems to be a chilling settling of scores.

A secretive tribunal is set up with quasi-government approval to mete out quick justice. Defendants have no access to any representation for their own defense. There is only one penalty for treason.

The former leader of the resistance sets the tone by murdering his own wife, who transferred sensitive documents to the Cylons. 13 other “collaborators” are dispensed with this way. This time, however, the message is unambiguous: we are clearly meant to feel horror and revulsion, and the parallels with the fates met by alleged Palestinian and Iraqi collaborators cannot be overlooked.

Executive Producer Moore said on his weekly audio podcast that accompanies each program that the parallel was meant to be with the lawless weeks, months and years that followed the end of World War II when survivors, particularly in Vichy France, were searching for ways to exact revenge and lacked confidence that official channels would wholly serve their needs.

The third season of Battlestar Galactica is the darkest and most disturbing to date. The program is riveting exactly because it pushes us harder than we expect from Friday night entertainment. Despite some missteps, it was, nevertheless, a bold move to insert an occupation/collaboration/liberation storyline into an already politically challenging plot, and the writing and acting consistently step up the challenge.

A recent article in the New York Times by Virginia Heffernan compares Battlestar Galactica with allegories in popular fiction by the likes of George Orwell, H.G. Wells, and Ayn Rand. As with all good allegories, the characters eventually outgrow pigeonholed roles such as “terrorist,” “diplomat” or “freedom fighter.”

Battlestar Galactica has redefined the cheesy good guys vs. bad definition of classic space opera. But then spaceships were never more than a prop in Battlestar Galactica, an incidental necessity to storytelling on such a grand and ambitious scale.

I have long been a big fan of science fiction literature. My favorite first authors were Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Ira Levin, and Isaac Asimov, and despite the fact my reading routine has expanded somewhat in the intervening years, my interest in alien societies and their interaction with human beings has not waned.

On TV and the big screen, I’m just as much a sci-fi fan. From Star Trek to Star Wars, The X-Files, Planet of the Apes, three Matrix movies, several versions of Dune, plus all of the Terminators (and a few too many of now Governor Schwarzenegger’s less notable action flicks), I’ve seen more than my share.

But I wasn’t prepared for what I think is clearly the most compelling sci-fi series made yet: Battlestar Galactica.

Because Battlestar Galactica is not just about pointy-headed humanoids who somehow speak English fluently while wreaking havoc on the space-time continuum (no offense intended, Gene). Rather, BSG is about the world we live in today, and how bad it could get if fundamentalist terror is not stopped.

Battlestar Galactica, you see, is a not so loosely drawn metaphor for a universe torn apart by jihad. The show returns for its third season on the Sci Fi Channel Friday night, October 6.

Keep in mind that the Battlestar Galactica I’m talking about is not the cheesy series of the late 1970s that featured cute kids and a robot dog named Muffit.

The new Battlestar Galactica was launched as a mini-series by the Sci Fi Channel in 2003 featuring high-end production and superb acting, writing and direction. It quickly rose to become the top rated program on the network. Episodes are also available online for $1.99 each on iTunes.
 
Battlestar Galactica’s protagonists are human, but they’re not from Earth, rather the “12 Colonies of Kobol” that seem to share with us a common Homeric legacy (the planets have Greek-sounding names like Gemenon and Virgon).

In this parallel universe, human beings have created a race of artificially intelligent robots known as Cylons to serve man. In standard sci-fi style, the robots rebel and war breaks out. An armistice is drawn and the two sides separate for 40 years until a surprise nuclear attack by the Cylons kills billions, leaving less than 50,000 humans alive in the galaxy.

The humans who survived the genocide were those who had been “off planet” during the attack, most onboard what the show describes as a “ragtag fleet” of spacecraft defended by a single aging warship – the Battlestar Galactica.

Over the course of the next 33 episodes, there are battles between humans and Cylons, inter-species intrigue, and plenty of mythology and back-story to keep even the most die-hard sci fi fans fully engaged.

But Battlestar Galactica – which has been described by critics as “the best show on TV today” – is not really about space at all. It’s more a drama that happens to be set in space. The show is about human relationships and what happens to survivors after a holocaust of such immense proportions.

Now, here’s where the parallels with our own universe become sinister. The Cylons – the genocidal bad guys – are monotheistic believers in what they call the “one true God” while the humans are a bunch of polytheistic pagans who pray to little idols they keep in their storage lockers.

The Cylons believe God speaks directly to them and their actions – however morally and ethically reprehensible – are according to a carefully laid out (and slowly revealed) “Big Plan.” The Cylons have somehow internalized a belief that they are the new inheritors of the mantle of Moses (or Zeus in this case) with humans as the infidels who must be eliminated at all cost.

Sound at all familiar?

The Cylons have also developed – in their 40-year absence – 12 “new models” which are indistinguishable from humans. They have become so intermingled with “regular” people that it’s no surprise when one of them becomes the sci-fi world’s first post 9/11-suicide bomber.

In one particularly politically challenging episode, a group of survivors decides that it’s human beings who are really at fault, that the reason Cylons hate their creators and have murdered most of humanity is that humans simply treated the Cylons poorly. All humanity has to do, this groups argues, is admit its wrongdoing, appease the Cylons and they will willingly lay down their arms and stop trying to kill the survivors. The military responds that giving in to terror is not an option, but it is another suicide bombing (this one by the humans themselves) that ultimately derails the debate.

Such parallels for our own Middle East reality – and the global war on terror in general – are what make Battlestar Galactica at once riveting and deeply disturbing.

Despite the BSG’s overall depiction of good guys vs. bad robots, the show consistently confounds the ability for viewers to easily take sides. The Cylons are for the most part beautiful and sexy. They are wirelessly networked to each other in ways to which our own bio-silicon designs can only breathlessly aspire. And when a Cylon dies, a unique system of guaranteed digital reincarnation makes the human concept of heaven seem a much dicier proposition.

The humans, on the other hand, engage in petty squabbles, descend to fisticuffs on regular occasions, swear, sleep around, drink and use drugs. There is inter-human gang warfare and a brutal black market replete with corruption that extends to the highest echelons of the political leadership. When a captured Cylon tells the human commander of the Battlestar Galactica something along the lines of “maybe you don’t deserve to continue on as a race, maybe we are the new chosen ones” the words do not ring as patently ridiculous.

Battlestar’s second season ends on a compelling cliffhanger (spoiler alert: if you’re still catching up in preparation for season three’s launch this week, skip the next paragraph). Over the course of the show, we learn that, despite their strong monotheism, the Cylons are no more uniform in their beliefs than humans. Two influential Cylons convince their fellow evil-doers to declare a truce – what would be called in the Middle East a hudna of sorts.

The Cylons can’t exactly “convert” the humans (after all, even though they bleed, the Cylons still are robots). But there will be no more killing…as long as humans agree to live as second-class citizens, lacking equal rights, under the benign, “loving” occupation of their robot masters. It’s a twisted space age dhimmi. How this plot line will be resolved is the focus of the first several episodes of season three.

The show – while clearly fictional and intended for entertainment – asks tough questions that are particularly relevant and “in your face” to someone such as myself, living here in the gritty reality of the Middle East.

What if terrorists, or states that sponsor terror, get their hands on weapons of mass destruction?

What if the “normal” assumptions about the power of détente to constrain both sides don’t apply? We’ve already received a taste of that in the past summer’s war between Israel and Hezbollah. What if that had been a nuclear conflict?

What if our standard, soothing Western logic about the sanctity of life is irrelevant to our enemies, such that they would be willing to launch a nuclear attack to annihilate anyone with whom they disagreed because they believed it was part of God’s plan? Is surrender or cooperation ever possible with such a jihadi mentality?

When you live in a tiny country that is the subject of daily threats of total annihilation from a near-nuclear neighbor, and have lived through a punishing barrage of more than 4,000 missiles in 32 days, the questions posed by Battlestar Galactica can sometimes feel too close for comfort.

Battlestar Galactica is a dark depressing show. It is not surprising the new envisioning of the show caught on after 9/11. Could it happen in real life? Is there anything we can do to prevent it? These are the kind of decisions that need to be made…in the halls of diplomacy and/or on the battlefield.

I would posit that, as unseemly as it sounds, perhaps watching Battlestar Galactica ought to be required viewing for the leaders of the free world in our own decidedly non-alternative universe.

This article was posted on Jewish.com on Thursday, August 17, 2006. The link is here.

Ceasefire brings temporary calm as Israel, U.S. prepare for next conflict.


With a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah still holding, however tentatively, and Israelis returning to their homes in the north, the politicians and historians are already hard at work putting their spin on the war that was. Did Israel win? Did Hezbollah?

The Israeli public has already voted, though. According to a Globes-Smith poll earlier this week, 58 percent of Israelis think Israel achieved "only a small part" or "none of its goals" in the war. That's up considerably from just two weeks ago when only 16 percent thought similarly. And the results don't look much better for the ruling Kadima or Labor parties - some 60 percent of the two parties' supporters say they would defect and become floating voters were elections held tomorrow.

Defense Minister Amir Peretz has already decided to set up a commission of inquiry into how the war was handled (which could presumably lead to his own downfall), and there have been calls for IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz to step down due to ethical improprieties - he apparently authorized a personal stock transaction three hours after hearing of the kidnap of the two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, the event that ostensibly sparked the entire war.

Beyond the post-conflict political wrangling, it's not hard to see why Israelis are disillusioned: a million residents across the north spent 32 days either in bomb shelters or in temporary lodgings in other parts of the country while over 4,000 missiles rained down, devastating the economy of one third of the nation.

And so now, Israelis are asking: At the end of the day, what have we got to show for our effort?

There is no provision or timetable in the ceasefire agreement to return the two kidnapped soldiers. Most countries have balked at sending troops to join a beefed up UNIFIL. And while the Lebanese Army is moving into the south of that country, a side agreement - in clear violation of the ceasefire - will allow Hezbollah to keep its arms as long as they're not "publicly displayed."

The bottom line: It looks depressingly like the region is rapidly heading back to square one.

That unflattering assessment, however, depends entirely on what was really going on in the last month of fighting. If the Israel-Hezbollah war is perceived as simply a regional conflict - an enhanced border skirmish, if you will - then Israel clearly came out on the sharp end of the stick. But if seen as an integral part of the global war against terrorism, then the past 32 days could, ironically, prove to be extremely valuable…for the next war.

The Next War?

Certainly, if you listen to Seymour Hersh, the controversial reporter for the New Yorker magazine who wrote that the attack on Hezbollah had been planned by Israel for some time, long before July 12 when the fighting began in earnest, and that the Bush Administration was closely involved in the planning of Israel's retaliatory operations. The U.S., Hersh claims, wanted to take out the Hezbollah threat prior to an American pre-emptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installation, which some have speculated is scheduled for as early as this fall.

Israel's bombing campaign against Hezbollah's heavily-fortified underground missile and command and control complexes, moreover, was to have provided the U.S. with invaluable data on how similarly fortified installations in Iran would withstand U.S. bombing.

Both Israeli and U.S. spokespeople have strongly denied Hersh's claims. But it's hard to deny the global terror connection, especially after last week's uncovering by British authorities of a plot to blow up airliners traveling from the U.K. to North America.

Am I implying that there is a direct connection between the 21 men arrested in London who were working on a plan to smuggle liquid explosives onto planes in sports drink bottles, and the Hezbollah organization in Lebanon? Not exactly.

But the money comes from the same patron: Iran. And it underscores that what has been going on in Israel during the difficult days of July and August cannot be viewed as isolated events, but rather as part of the proverbial big picture. While I don't mean to denigrate the success or failures of the just-concluded operation, whether Israel wins or loses today is ultimately less important than whether the western powers prevail in the long term. Israel, clearly, is playing its role with great intention, whether that's overt or circumstantial.

And how is the west doing in the overall war against terror? Not too well, says Saul Singer of the Jerusalem Post. In an article published over the weekend, Singer writes that a premature ceasefire that doesn't sufficiently degrade Hezbollah "will embolden Iran… Just as Hezbollah's survival will be widely seen as a defeat for Israel, it is also a defeat for the United States by Iran."

Singer goes on to quote historian Bernard Lewis who, in the Wall Street Journal last week, referred to an 11th-grade Iranian school textbook that cites the goals of jihad. In it, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeni says that "either we shake one another's hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours."

In other words, all casualties - including those on the Iranian home front - are to be welcomed as this will bring about the ultimate triumph of good (Islam) over evil (everything else).

John Podhoretz, writing in the New York Post, takes the issue one step further, questioning whether the West is up to confronting this kind of enemy.

"What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point," he asks, "where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests? Can it be that the moral greatness of our civilization - its astonishing focus on the value of the individual above all - is endangering the future of our civilization as well?"

The same thought occurred to me as well as I read about 15-year-old girls from middle America being forced to pour out their hand lotion and toss their lipstick in the trash before boarding a plane last week. This kind of even-handed approach might be appropriate when dealing with a domestic matter or even a civil disobedience, but not with world war. And make no mistake: After London, Madrid, Bali, Istanbul and New York, we are in the midst of a world war, even if it hasn't yet been labeled as such. The West needs new tools and new approaches if it is to prevail.

Who Won?

Which leads us back to the original question. Who won in the war between Israel-Hezbollah? Militarily in the short term, Israel bested Hezbollah. The "state within a state" Hezbollah created is gone for now. Hezbollah has been pushed into a corner and much of the billions of dollars its backers in Tehran spent on fortified command centers now lies in ruins. Hezbollah may brag about success, but it has clearly been crippled.

In the mid- to long-term, will Hezbollah return to southern Lebanon? Undoubtedly. Will Israel get its kidnapped soldiers back? Unknown. Will missiles once again rain on the country's north? Unfortunately, probably.

But in the meantime, we now know a whole lot more about what Hezbollah had in store for Israel, what its technical capabilities were and, by proxy, what Iran has in store for the U.S., when and if it comes calling.

The London plot, in addition to bringing to public attention yet another way terrorists can attack civilian transportation, solidifies the need to not turn a blind eye to the key player in the what President Bush once mockingly called the "axis of evil."

The IDF and the western powers, we can only hope, are now aggressively using the data they've amassed to begin building new strategies and new tactics.

For the next war.

This article was posted on Jewish.com on Sunday, August 13, 2006. The link is here.

Parenting is never easy...even more so when you're dealing with comforting your child during a missile attack.


It was supposed to be the highlight of camp: "Survivor Day." Inspired by the TV show of the same name, the campers arose at 5 a.m. and prepared for a full day of managing outdoors on their wits. There were a variety of water challenges planned - a critical concession given the 90-degree plus heat - ranging from jumping on and off rafts to wet and wild tug of wars.

Everything was going swimmingly, so to speak, until - in the middle of all the fun - four long-range Hezbollah missiles from Lebanon landed about a kilometer from where the campers were frolicking in the local water hole, giving Survivor Day an unexpected and entirely unwanted twist.

For the past 12 days, our 12-year-old daughter, Merav, has been having the time of her life at her first overnight camping experience. The setting was Kibbutz Shluchot just south of Bet Shean in the northern Jordan Valley. "Everyday there's something different," Merav told us one night by phone. "You never know what to expect."

The ever-changing activities included swimming, arts and crafts, badminton, inline skating, nature hikes, a "Color War," tiyulim to nearby attractions (such as the impressive Bet Shean archeological dig with its ancient Roman amphitheater), a stroll through the kibbutz carrot factory, more swimming, basketball, Shabbat "walks" with a camper of the opposite sex, and, did I say swimming yet?

The kibbutz, Merav said was beautiful; the campers all received their own bicycles and they rode everywhere, from their bunks to the synagogue and then to the dining hall. Even the meals were pretty tasty, high praise from my newly vegetarian daughter.

Disrupted Routine

Survivor Day was set in a man-made swimming hole about a 15-minute walk from the kibbutz itself. After its early start in the wee hours of the morning, the action-packed day wasn't scheduled to conclude until near sunset. Then, at approximately 11 a.m. Hezbollah fired five long-range, Khaibar-1 missiles from deep inside Lebanon.

Unlike the shorter range Katyushas, which fall on beleaguered closer-to-the-border communities like Kyriat Shemona, Karmiel and Safed, the long-range missiles can travel 100 km or more and pack a much more powerful warhead.

The Khaibars landed in the Mount Gilboa forests between Bet Shean and Afula. As soon as I heard the news (since the war started over a month ago, I have been obsessively monitoring the Internet, checking in no less than once every five minutes), I pulled out a map. Whereas the previous round of missiles fired into the Bet Shean area sailed mostly over the town and nearby Kibbutz Shluchot - setting off alarms, but touching ground a good deal away near the West Bank city of Jenin - this time, they were daringly close to a camp full of kids outdoors, who not coincidentally, were also miles from the nearest bomb shelter.

The phone soon rang. It was Merav. She was clearly in tears; I could feel her shoulders heaving up and down in the tremble of her voice. "They're canceling camp," she said. "We're coming home tonight. They said it's not safe here anymore."

I didn't know exactly how to respond. It's hard enough parenting a teenage daughter in ordinary times and Merav's emotions are already volatile; I never know if she's going to take a comment in stride or launch into a sequence of ceremonial door slamming.

Taking Stock

Should I try to comfort her, ask her how she was feeling and if she was scared? Or should I act all nonchalant and normal and say what a shame it was that camp was ending early, letting her initiate any heavy-duty discussion?

I looked for clues in Merav's words.

"And today was supposed to be the best day of camp, too," she said. I sensed less shaking now and more of a pout. That seemed to call for a laid-back direction.

"That's such a bummer," I said, picking my words carefully. "I know you were really looking forward to it."

"But I'm scared, Abba."

"You are?" I said, confused now by the rapid change of course. "Well, what was it like?"

"We heard this whistling sound, it was more like a 'whoosh,' then we thought we saw a light in the sky - I'm not sure - it was almost like a shooting star in the middle of the day - and then there were these big 'booms' and we saw all this smoke going up from the other side of the mountain. We had to duck under these picnic tables for, like 15 minutes, and we were all wet and it was muddy."

"That must have been awful," I intoned caringly. "No wonder you were scared!"

"And now you're going to have a big load of clothes to wash!" Merav barked, a sprig of sarcasm back in her voice.

My parenting instinct was being ping-ponged all over the table. I needed to pick a strategy: casual or concern. But Merav had decided for me.

"I have to go now," Merav interrupted my game of mental table tennis. "We need to pack. We're coming home tonight. Bye."

A few minutes later, Devorah, one of the camp co-directors, was on the line giving us pick up instructions for the bus.

"Did the home front command tell you to cancel camp?" I wondered out loud.

"No, but one of the missiles landed in Nir David," Devorah said, referring to the next village over, a scant two kilometers from Shluchot. "We don't need to wait until it lands in our own garden. We wanted to be prudent," she said.

And that's how it ended. The weeks-long debate chronicled in these posts about whether to send our child to camp closer to the front lines, whether it was irresponsible not to take her out when the first missiles landed; the whole discussion was now moot. Camp was closing.

Later that night, Merav was home. After a five-hour bus ride, she looked less frightened than exhausted as she made her way around the campers and their parents, handing out hugs like chocolates at a bar mitzvah boy's Torah reading.

We thanked Kenny, the other co-director, who joked that "usually at the annual camp convention, the big conversation is what to do on a rainy day. I think I can top that this year."

Which got me thinking: maybe we can make a little hay out of the hell we've been going through, too. I'm half thinking of calling up CBS and pitching them on an idea for an upcoming season of that veteran reality show "Survivor." Forget the Australian Outback, Thailand or Panama. Just send the next crop of contestants to camp at Kibbutz Shluchot and tell them to prepare for "Survivor Day."

That should be enough to test the mettle of even the most TV-hardened competitor. We'll provide the missiles, free of charge.

This article was posted on Jewish.com on Thursday, August 10, 2006. The link is here.

Where are the miracles of Entebbe and the Six Day War in the current conflict with Hezbollah?


After 29 days of fighting, Israel is slowly winning the war against Hezbollah. There's still a lot of work to be done and the fighting is nowhere near over. Still, the overall outlook is surprisingly good. So why do Israelis feel so bad?

The destruction of Hezbollah and the Iranian-backed terror regime it has carved out of south Lebanon over the past six years hasn't proceeded the way anyone had expected. This war has been slow going to a fault.

After nearly a month of Hezbollah missiles, a million Israelis either displaced to points south or living in bomb shelters, and with no acceptable ceasefire looking to be finalized at any point soon, it's no wonder that many Israelis are beginning to question their government's handling of the war effort.

With our massive firepower and superior technology, why hasn't the Israel Defense Forces been able to secure a truly decisive win already, a growing clamor of voices is asking? How can it be that, despite Israel's occupation of nearly the entire former security zone (the area Israel held for 18 years from 1982-2000), more - not fewer -missiles are landing in the north? Why did the security cabinet feel it necessary to authorize an expanded ground operation on Wednesday to push up as far as the Litani River in an operation cabinet minister Eli Yishai said could last up to 30 days…and probably more?

And the question perhaps most prominent but rarely spoken: where are the miracles we've come to expect from the Israeli army?

Slow In Coming

Yes, miracles - that's the key to the despair that's taking over from the euphoria of during the initial weeks of the war. Israel demands miracles and it's just not seeing any in this protracted battle.

Where is the daring of a covert operation like the one in Entebbe that freed a hijacked plane of Israeli and Jewish hostages in 1976? Or a war against implacable odds and the combined armies of three Arab countries that ended miraculously in just six days, as in 1967? How about an unexpected and audacious attack on the very heart of the enemy, such as what Israel undertook when it shocked the world and removed the threat of Iraq's nuclear reactor in Osirak in 1981?

And let's not forget the stunning turnaround that represented the War of Independence - an outcome so miraculous that not only was the fledgling Jewish state not destroyed as its enemies predicted, but it ended up with a geography far larger than what was granted it under the initial U.N.-sanctioned partition plan.

Where are those quick, unexpected and outrageous miracles this time? Israel and its supporters have been deprived of the one-two knockout punch that would have ended the misery in a matter of days or hours, not weeks, now going into months. The Israeli air force tried, but has been unable to take out -let alone find - Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah from whatever super-secret bunker he's squirreled away in today. Where is the massive display of Israeli airpower we all believe - but have not seen - that can vaporize every single missile launcher deployed against the Jewish state with a single dramatic flourish?

Why, Israelis are wondering, can't the Israeli army deliver this time?

It's not just Israelis who are looking for miracles. The Americans too have been disappointed. Hoping that Israel would "show those Iranians who's the boss" by quickly defeating its front line proxy army - the Hezbollah; Washington analysts are starting to question America's over-reliance on Israel, "the little strategic ally that couldn't" as Jerusalem Post Editor David Horowitz put it this week.

As if the U.S. was able to do any better in Iraq. But that's not point. We expect more from Israel. We expect nothing short of miracles.

Amotz Asa-El, also writing in the Post this week, says Israel has made a number of strategic errors to date, most importantly by lacking "swiftness and imagination. Massive aerial bombardments on mountainous guerrilla enclaves, followed by ground forces frontally approaching villages just beyond the border fence, could hardly have been more banal," Asa-El commented.

Why such seeming incompetence? Ironically, it's Israel's Jewish moral and ethical values that have gotten in the way of the miracles so desperately needed, the Post's Horowitz says. Israel needs either a much greater use of the airpower it surely has, or a larger ground offensive.

But "either of those avenues would necessarily involve death on a far larger scale than we have seen thus far," Horowitz wrote. "Pulverizing airpower would likely create Lebanese civilian casualties of a number that would dwarf the toll to date. Wider use of ground forces, on Hezbollah's home territory, would likely dwarf the IDF toll hitherto sustained in the close-quarters fighting."

And so the current conflict justifies "the degree and scale of airpower and ground troops to date," Horowitz concludes, "and no more." Israel has "not chosen different answers to its ethical dilemmas."

Winning Pace

And yet, the war is being won, despite the loss of 15 soldiers yesterday in the Lebanese villages of Marjaryon, Khjam and Kila.. Let's look at some facts:

· Over 10,000 Israeli troops are currently on the ground in Lebanon and Israel now has in its hands large swaths of former Hezbollah-controlled land.

· Hezbollah has been on the run, and rumors are that Nasrallah had fled to Syria and is conducting operations from there.

· The rocket launchers in Tyre that have plagued Haifa have mostly been taken out, as has the area near Sidon where a long range Khaibar-1 missile was fired at Hadera - the deepest point south a missile has penetrated Israel - last Friday night.

More tellingly, wherever Hezbollah and Israeli forces have fought, Hezbollah has been defeated. That's not been without IDF casualties, to be sure, and the toughest battlefields, including Maroun er Ras and Bint Jbail, are still claiming Israeli soldiers' lives nearly daily. But Hezbollah has lost its grip on the Israeli-Lebanese border and the fortified bunkers that it used to taunt - and eventually kidnap - Israeli soldiers now lay abandoned to Israeli military might.

Even Hezbollah's main weapon - its extensive missile supply - has not had doomsday effect many feared. Over 3,300 missiles have been fired to date but "only" 51 Israeli civilians have died. While I don't mean to sound cavalier - tearful newsreaders regularly announce the times and locations of each and every funeral during Israel Radio's calm but sadly mesmerizing top-of-the-hour briefs - from a geo-strategic point of view, at least, that's not a very good return on investment. Israel eventually managed to deal with the last "new" weapon introduced into the region - the suicide bomb; now it is learning how to live with and neutralize Hezbollah's missile threat as well.

The fighting is not over, and as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in a decidedly Churchillian speech before the nation last week, there may still be more days of "pain and tears and blood" ahead, but Israel is surely - albeit very slowly - gaining the upper hand.

All this brings us back to miracles. Perhaps we have been looking for miracles in the wrong places. Instead of hoping for a miracle from beyond - a Moses-like defeat of Israel's enemies in the desert or the parting of the Red Sea - maybe we need to look within. It may sound like a cliché, but the steadfastness of the Israeli people is truly its own miracle.

For nearly a month, Israel has been battered but not defeated. The north is on the run, but it has not given up. Israelis may question whether the government is handling the war in the best way possible (can you imagine Israelis not kvetching about something), but support for the war effort remains high.

And the stories of families in the center of the country opening their homes to complete strangers, or donating money to buy toys and supplies for those still stuck in the bomb shelters of the north are heartwarming.

Friends of ours are hosting a family from Karmiel who have been camping in tents along the beach for weeks. Museums and attractions all over the country have been offering deep discounts to families from "confrontation line communities." Tel Aviv is taking in 3,000 residents of the north who've been hardest hit, housing them in a municipal convention center. There is a sense of unity and consensus that this country has not felt for many years.

This past week, a delegation of Jerusalem municipal authorities headed by Mayor Uri Lupolianski drove up in a convoy of vehicles to Kyriat Shemona to provide help (the picture above shows the delegation under a banner in Hebrew reading "From Jerusalem to the North with Love"). The luggage compartments were filled with sandwiches and soft drinks; a petting zoo was in tow, as was a mobile children's library and a van filled with wheelchairs donated by the Yad Sarah organization.

One of the 13 vehicles heading north was from the city's veterinary department. Headed by Jerusalem's chief vet, Dr. Zohar Dvorkin, they were bringing massive amounts of cat and dog food to soothe the thousands of abandoned pets who are now roaming the streets (officials estimate there are some 8,000 abandoned pets across the north).

"You came all the way from Jerusalem to Kyriat Shemona to feed the cats?" asked a man emerging from his shelter, at once incredulous and grateful.

A small gesture, but one that speaks volumes for why Israel is winning this war. "We embrace life while the enemy embraces death." Another cliché, but in a war where one might reasonably expect blood-curdling calls for revenge, those very Jewish ethical and moral concerns for life (even animals) are what will sustain the country at the end of the day.

And that, unquestionably, is the real miracle.

Interest has been so high in my "Blogging the War" posts that I've put together an eBook that I'm making available at no cost. Simply right click on the file you see below under "Attachments" called "This Normal Life - Blogging the War" and choose "Save Link As..." (in Firefox) or "Save Target As..." (in Internet Explorer) from the menu that pops up. You'll then have the complete collection of "Blogging the War" articles in a convenient PDF format. You may send this to others via email or - better yet - suggest that they visit  the This Normal Life website to read more and download their own copy.

Please let me know if this experiment in a different format of online publishing is of interest to you by posting a comment below or dropping me a line at brian@ThisNormalLife.com.

Thanks!
-- Brian

This article was posted on Jewish.com on Sunday, August 6, 2006. The link is here.

Missile lands ten minutes from my daughter's camp.


Last week I wrote that my 12-year-old daughter, Merav, was scheduled to depart for two weeks of camp at Kibbutz Shluchot, just south of the town of Bet Shean in the northern Jordan Valley. In my post, I questioned whether it was irresponsible to send Merav that much closer to the front, despite the fact that nothing had happened at Bet Shean nor was anything expected to at the time. In the end, we decided to continue with our "normal life" and Merav climbed happily onto the camp bus that Friday morning.

Imagine, then, my concern last week, less than a week after camp had started, when I received a frantic call on my cell phone from the father of Merav's friend Shayna who was at the camp with her. "Did you hear?" the father asked breathlessly. "Sirens just went off in Bet Shean."

A minute later, the phone rang again. It was another parent who had just spoken with his daughter. "She said she heard a big boom," he said and asked if I had any more information. I didn't - there was nothing on any of the Internet sites I've been monitoring constantly since the conflict began.

After several tense minutes where I incessantly pushed the "refresh" button on my browser, a headline finally appeared: a long-range missile had penetrated into Israel the farthest of any to date, landing in Bet Shean proper, while another hit an open field somewhere between Bet Shean and the West Bank city of Jenin.

Bet Shean is 10 minutes north of Kibbutz Shluchot - a veritable gulf in this war of missiles. Still, that didn't particularly put my mind at ease, considering that at the very moment the missile was striking ground, my daughter Merav was not at the kibbutz at all. She had been come down with a nasty stomach ache that morning, and the camp nurse sent her to the closest HMO doctor…yes, where else, but in Bet Shean.

Now, I know the chance of the one missile Hezbollah has fired at Bet Shean actually hitting the exact spot where Merav was traveling at that moment was very low. But yesterday's strike in Kfar Giladi that killed a crowd of 10 people who were standing in a wide-open field shows that sometimes one's worst fears of being in the wrong place at the wrong time really do come true.

Until we located Merav, I was shaking.

After a very long 20 minutes, my wife, Jody, got a hold of Kenny, one of the camp directors, on his cell phone and he told us that Merav had just returned and was heading to the infirmary to take the pills the doctor had prescribed. We learned further that the camp had taken to the kibbutz bomb shelter for a drill that morning (Merav later told us she had done the real thing at the doctor's office, spending 15 minutes in the shelter there).

They were taking all precautions, Kenny reassured us, and were in touch with the home front command for any further instructions. We were not to worry.

The missile that landed near Merav is, fortunately, one of only a few long-range rockets Hezbollah has left. The IDF has been particularly effective at knocking out these weapons. It's the thousands of short-range missiles that pose a more constant threat to Israel's north. It was one of those that caused the deaths at Kfar Giladi.

At about the same time as the missile was landing on Bet Shean, I received an e-mail from an irate reader who took exception with my post on sending Merav to camp in the first place. In his particularly ill-tempered message, he called me a variety of names I will not stoop to print here, but his message was clear: Either I am "in denial" or am "unbelievably cavalier" he wrote. "You think sending your kid closer to the border war is OK, because that means you are not taking a defeatist attitude? That's a bunch of s--t if I ever heard it."

After the missile that landed near Bet Shean, I was momentarily inclined to agree with him, despite his foul language. But then my unpleasant correspondent continued on to shoot himself in the foot (not an easy task given that his pedestrian appendage was inserted firmly in mouth).

"Imagine if the U.S. was in a border skirmish with Mexican terrorists," he wrote, "and I decided to let my kid go to summer camp in San Diego or La Jolla, Calif., a stone's throw from the border? How stupid would I have to be to do that?"

Other than the fact that I have family living in both the aforementioned southern California cities who would be equally offended at his accusation, I have to ask: what would my tormentor do instead? If everyone took his approach, all terrorists would have to do is hit a few well-situated locations in the U.S. and, eventually, the entire population would wind up confined to a tiny corner of Wisconsin. Guess who'd win the global war on terror then?

We didn't send Merav to camp in order to fight. But we're not pulling her out either, despite our concerns and the Katyusha that landed too close for comfort. The big bully who wrote might call me cavalier. If so, then bring on the cavalry.

This article was posted on Jewish.com on Thursday, August 3, 2006. The link is here.

Will the now "official" name of the war stick?

Last week, I suggested several possible names for the war in which Israel is currently embroiled with Hezbollah in the north. Those included the ironic "War of Disillusionment" and "The War When Reality Finally Sunk In" as well as the official working titles: "Operation Just Reward" and "Operation Change of Direction." Even before that, though, I raised the possibility in an earlier column that, were the war to be concluded by today (Aug. 3) - which happens to be the fast of Tisha B'Av according to the Jewish calendar - the significance would be too much to avoid in deciding the war's name.

Jewish scholars will already have taken notice that the war started at the beginning of the "three weeks" prior to Tisha B'Av (literally, the ninth day of the month of Av on the Hebrew calendar) on a date that is also a fast day known as the 17th of Tammuz (Tammuz is the month in the Hebrew calendar preceding Av).

The three weeks between the 17th of Tammuz and the ninth of Av have traditionally been a mourning period. Jewish weddings are not conducted; observant Jews eschew live music and entertainment, and avoid eating meat except on Shabbat.

The three weeks commemorate a whole host of disasters in Jewish history, including the Jewish people's defeat at the hands of the Babylonians (resulting in the destruction of the first Jewish temple in Jerusalem) and Jerusalem's defeat 600 years later by the Romans (resulting in the destruction of Herod the Great's rebuilt Second Temple). Both these conquests, according to Jewish tradition, took place on the ninth of Av.

Other tragedies have subsequently been ascribed to Tisha B'Av - the date of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 during the Inquisition and even dates during the Nazi Holocaust.

If the war that began on the 17th of Tammuz and actually ended on the date of the ninth of Av, we would have no choice but to call it the "Three Weeks War." Even if it were to end a bit later, we might still have a bit of a "fudge factor" to play with.

Well, apparently, the folks in the naming wars department had the same idea. Isr