Iron Dome interceptions over Ashkelon and where the rocket hit the building (Reuters)
"Shield and Arrow" was a successful operation that achieved its goals. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant managed it wisely and judiciously. The Shin Bet provided remarkably accurate information. The IDF eliminated 6 senior Islamic Jihad operatives and hit hundreds of other targets. Iron Dome has succeeded in protecting us to a great extent, allowing terrorism to hit us minimally, despite the 1,139 rockets it managed to fire into our territory. Seemingly, all good. So it's not. Not at all. On the contrary. Something here is fundamentally screwed up.
We are facing a difficult cognitive problem that has accompanied us for too many years and too many governments. Something in our healthy instincts has been screwed up. We got used to it. We've gotten used to being shot at once in a while. We got used to the fact that once in a while we were doomed to run to the safe rooms. We have become accustomed to the fact that as long as we manage to intercept almost everything that the terrorists from Gaza fire at us, we can sit in the studios and explain that the enemy has been hit hard.
Iron Dome – that impressive and inspiring development that provides a good solution against the enemy that arose from the south, and against its ability to harm growing parts of the State of Israel – has become a strategic cognitive problem of the highest order. Iron Dome allows us to be the only country in the world that lives in peace with terrorist organizations, which once every few months fire hundreds or thousands of missiles at its city centers – and not feel that something is wrong here.
Over the years, Iron Dome has turned out to be a strategic cognitive problem of the highest order (Photo: official website, IDF Spokesperson)
Take last week, as an example. According to IDF figures, 1,469 rockets and mortar shells were fired at us from the Gaza Strip, 1,139 of which crossed into Israeli territory and flew over our heads, and somehow, none of it stopped us from feeling satisfied. The country's leaders issued victory announcements, the IDF expressed satisfaction and published wonderful interception statistics, the Israeli government announced: "We have changed the equation." If we go to the world of football, we can say that the State of Israel stopped running on the attack long ago in an attempt to score. Instead, she plays "triangles" on defense, hoping to pass the time and finish in a respectable draw.
And you have to be sharp and focused and very alert, to remind yourself that in a normal world this can't happen. That a normal country is not willing to accept such massive fire on its city centers, even if it has a tool that can capture the missiles while they are still in the air. I've written here before that we've become Iron Dome junkies, and as the years go by, it turns out that our addiction is getting worse. We no longer need to defeat the enemy. It is enough for us that He shoots at us and fails to hurt us to tell ourselves that we have defeated Him.
Let's close our eyes for a moment and try to imagine what would happen here if we didn't have this defense system. What would have happened here on the day Hamas or Jihad or what we playfully call a "rogue organization" would have fired at us – not 1,469 rockets, but only 30, and only half of them would have hit? One rocket would land on a runway at Ben Gurion Airport, two would fall inside houses in Rehovot, another 5 would hit residential buildings in Ashdod's Tu Quarter and another 7 in Ashkelon's Agamim neighborhood. Flights to and from Israel would be suspended for two days. 23 Israeli citizens were laid to rest. And what would have happened 5 minutes later? I think it's pretty obvious.
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We no longer need to defeat the enemy. It is enough for us that he shoots at us and fails to hurt us to tell ourselves that we have defeated him (Photo: Reuters)
The prime minister and defense minister would instruct the chief of staff to raise the air force in full composition to the sky, and to hit Gaza in a way that Gazans will not forget 50 years from now. Not because they wanted to do it, because they just didn't have any other option. Reality, having no choice, would have forced them to strike terror a decisive blow. Letting the enemy understand that this is not a game of two equal teams with the same familiar ritual in which he fires, we respond, and then representatives of both sides rush to call the Egyptian mediator and offer "paid."
In the absence of proper defensive capabilities, we would then explain to the Americans, a moment after they sent the State Department spokesman to make comments to us, that what Barack Obama was allowed to do far from home was allowed when it came to the heart of our country. Along the way, we would also suggest that they find a way to make it clear to Hamas and Jihad and the rogue and everyone responsible for the lightning, thunder and various technical malfunctions that we have no intention of putting our civilians in danger, and that our response to any missile will be lethal and destructive.
Not dunes, not empty watchtowers, not "infrastructure" with no one in them. And if civilians are harmed along the way, then yes, that too will happen. Not because it makes us happy, but because we have no other way. Because when we have a dilemma between the life of a Jewish child from Sderot and the life of the child of the Hamas commander in Khan Yunis, who is next to his father when we shoot at him, then we have no hesitation. In such a reality, when we understand that at any moment a missile can fall on Israeli civilians and there is no system to protect them, we would charge at the enemy without the learned opinions of legal advisers sitting in air-conditioned rooms far from the range of rockets, and without "knocking on the roof."
Rocket fire into Israeli territory, Operation Shield and Arrow (Photo: Reuters)
Why isn't any of this happening today? Because we've gotten used to being able to absorb fire and keep going. They spit on us and we hide under an umbrella. The country with one of the strongest armies in the world behaves like a weak and incompetent organization. Go to our last hundred bombings of Gaza and see how many of them have taken a real toll on the enemy. In some of them we killed terrorists. Almost nothing.
We have the most advanced offensive technology in the world, and are afraid to use it. Instead of informing the other side in advance of the price tag it will have to pay for every missile fired at us, we allow it to spray us without reacting seriously. After all, if no one was hurt, why bother ourselves? And when we don't attack forcefully just because we have Iron Dome in defense, it goes without saying that more than this dome protects us, it protects the lives of the residents of the Gaza Strip.
This is not an argument that Iron Dome is unnecessary. Not at all. It is a system that saves lives and protects our souls. A system that was supposed to give us the opportunity to think two or three days before we react. To catch our breath, to plan, not to be dragged into war when it is uncomfortable for us and when we are not ready. But we have become so addicted to this defensive game that if a prime minister comes now, whatever his name, and announces that for every missile hijacked a quarter of the Gaza Strip is dismantled, the citizens of Israel themselves will look at him like crazy. What has already happened, we will tell him, after all, no one has been killed here. So what if a thousand rockets were fired at us in three days? What's wrong with that?
More than this dome protects us, it protects the lives of the residents of the Gaza Strip. The scene of the rocket landing in Rehovot, Operation Shield and Arrow (Photo: Reuven Castro)
There is a basic issue here that has almost been forgotten. It is true that thanks to Iron Dome we have very few fatalities, but the goal of terrorism is not to kill people. Its purpose is to disrupt good order. And when a terrorist organization that is not as big as Islamic Jihad stops our lives for a few days, and families run to the safe rooms, and civilians don't go to work, and children don't go to school, and the residents of the envelope flee north, terrorism wins even if it didn't kill anyone.
And what's worst is that we've raised a generation here that doesn't know it's possible otherwise. You don't have to get hit by thousands of missiles. That it is possible to fight back. An aerial pursuit of any Gazan who approaches a rocket launcher, even if it is accompanied by an amazing video distributed by the IDF Spokesperson, is like trying to dry the sea with a spoon. The enemy, much weaker than us, is not afraid of us. A group of Gazans with launchers look down at one of the most wonderful air forces in the world, and are not impressed by what they see. We don't move them. We don't scare them. We don't deter them.
We didn't start behaving like that today. It's a long story. Too long. The time has come for the Israeli government to announce to the entire world that if the Gaza leadership wants to lay down its arms and turn the Gaza Strip into a flourishing garden, we will be happy to help. But if it wants to keep fighting, it will get war. In the meantime, with us, we need to create a new formula. Defending ourselves with Iron Dome. Attack as if it doesn't exist.
The time has come for the Israeli government to announce to the entire world that if the Gaza leadership wants to continue fighting, it will accept war (Photo: official website, IDF Spokesperson)
In the small town of Mauthausen
Mauthausen. For many years I wanted to go to this place, where my mother was released at the end of the war in May 1945, 78 years ago. Now we decided to do it. The road curves uphill. All around everything is green. At the foot of the hill flows the Danube. Amazing view. Perfect nature. The furthest thing you can draw from the human ugliness that was here. On the way to the camp you cross the small town of Mauthausen. Yes, yes, there is a town by that name.
It is home to people who, when asked where they live, reply: "In Mauthausen." Not far from the entrance to the camp we came across a local B&B. Upstairs, near the parking lot, someone with sports clothes is doing fitness. Running from somewhere to Mauthausen and back. Somehow, without any prior planning, we get to a place in a week where two dates come together – the anniversary of the liberation of the camp, and the anniversary of my mother's death.
Mauthausen concentration camp, Austria (Photo: Reuters)
I've told here before about Mom. She grew up in Slovakia, and in October 1944 was taken with her parents and younger sister to Birkenau, where she was separated from them in front of Mengele's ramp. They rose in the smoke of heaven. She, who had been advised by someone to lie and present herself as older than she really was, was sent to work with several hundred other women at an aircraft manufacturing plant in Germany. For about six months she worked 12-hour shifts. In freezing cold. Snow. With the same pants and the same shirt that she didn't take off during the whole period.
Once every three days she would receive, like everyone else, "a piece of bread, an atrocious soup and a disgusting sausage," as she described it to us. "I had terrible wounds from lack of nutrition," she said. As the fighting front with the Allies approached, the Nazis put all the women in the factory on trains and tried to smuggle them out. They wandered the roads for 17 days, until they reached Mauthausen. "Here and there," she described the journey, "there were good people who threw us loaves of bread, but there were maybe 70 of us in the car. It wasn't enough."
Death march from Mauthausen to Gunskirchen, April 1945 (Photo: official website, Yad Vashem)
Mother told little at all, and little about Mauthausen in particular. "When we got there, we didn't know where we were. We certainly didn't know that these were the last days of the war." "Atrocious," she defined this place. "Food was almost none. We felt hungry, the situation was very bad," she elaborated, mentioning chasing potato peels. "We were lucky that shortly after we got there, the war was over, otherwise I don't know if we would have held out there," she explained.
Mauthausen had many subcamps, but the main camp was small in size. Everything is close to everything. Here are the barracks where the prisoners were crammed, in front of them the parade ground where those who did not survive fell and died, and here is the place where the women's quarters were. You can't help but close your eyes and feel my mother, then 14, walking around here, a few dozen meters from the crematorium, the loneliest girl in the world.
"One day," she told us, "American tanks came in with a flag, and then we knew they had come to liberate us. The joy was great, and the chaos was great too. The American soldiers were stunned. They have never seen anything like this in their lives. People who looked like us, thin, dressed in rags."
In front of Mengele's ramp - separated from them, they went up in smoke to heaven. Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp (Photo: Reuters)
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After liberation, she wandered around the surrounding villages looking for food. "I went into a town near Mauthausen with another friend and we asked for food. Now they were ready to give," she remarked sarcastically. "I think if we had come to them before that, they would have thrown us out. They gave us bread and some potatoes. We were warned not to eat much at once, as our stomachs were shriveling. There were those who pounced on the food and died from it."
My mother described to us how she sat with an American soldier and shared her stories with him. "I already spoke some English at the time, and I told him what I went through. He was shocked." At the end of the conversation, the soldier gave my mother a bar of chocolate. "It was a huge possessions," she explained to us time and time again, "you'll never understand what a chocolate cube is." Last Wednesday, on the way to Mauthausen, we stocked up on a chocolate package. When we finished the difficult tour of the camp, we sat down to eat it. Close a circle. Connect with mom.
"My mother, Aviva Libeskind, Magda Rakowsky as she was then called," I wrote in the Mauthausen guestbook, "was born in Bratislava in 1931. After her family perished in Birkenau, and she herself was taken from there to work in Freiberg, Germany, she was brought here towards the end of the war, where she was liberated. This week, 5 years ago, she passed away, leaving behind a Jewish tribe she had founded. The people of Israel are alive."
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