Israel treating Syrian wounded

From my cousin, a senior British doctor currently visiting Israel:

"Just had a wonderful afternoon with faculty members of new medical school in Northern Israel. Heard all about the Syrian casualties they've been treating - so far >450, only 5 have died despite often terrible injuries. 17% children. Has cost $10million so far which hospital has borne. Patients left at border for IDF to pick up and transport to Ziv hospital in the Israeli town of Tzfat. Patients often leave with equipment (mostly orthopaedic braces etc) that would usually be returned by Israeli patients but just lost in Syria. All go back. All have grown up thinking Israel evil and Jews drink babies' blood. They find compassion and world class care. Anyone reporting this?"

"The Syrian patients don't talk about it as they get punished for going into enemy territory. Most of them are young men - no one asks if they're fighters and which side. And of course no one reporting in the international press. It's an amazing humanitarian effort - saving limbs, skin etc but also delivering babies (that's generated big debates - the women appear knowing they get good care, the babies have birth certificates saying Syrian born in Israel...), and the children come on their own. All extraordinary. Remember the Syrian border is just 19km from Ziv. Damascus just up the road. This is true heroic good stuff."

Illusion of normal

Many Jerusalem residents complained about the road closures and the waste of resources, but enthusiasts were positively buzzing with excitement at the prospect of race cars once again zooming through the Holy City's historic streets.

After the success of last year's event Formula One was due to return to Jerusalem this summer, only to be cancelled, like so many other summer events, due to the war and the threat of rockets from Gaza.

So perhaps it wasn't just the joy of seeing high powered vehicles close to home that pulled in the punters when the event was rescheduled for the post-war autumn but also the feeling of returning to normality, just another city hosting a sports event, rather than a potential powder keg in a region awash in conflict.



The streets along the route  of the Formula One drive past were lined with a diverse crowd of locals and tourists. For many Muslim families this was a free holiday outing with the whole family off school and work for Eid al Adha, while for many Jewish yeshiva students it was a fun way to spend their High Holidays vacation.

Despite the summer's tension the atmosphere was festive and excited, people united by the thrilling roar of powerful engines and curiosity at seeing something so foreignly exotic along the streets of Jerusalem.



We couldn't entirely escape this summer's war though. My older boy, so excited to see his beloved Formula One again, had changed. Last time around he relished the sound of the engines, so loud you could feel it thrumming through your body as the cars whizzed by. I remember how he glowed with the rush, the exhilaration from feeling the power of those cars that seemed to fly past us.

This time though we were in for a nasty surprise. Arriving early he was so happy that we found a spot right by the railing, on a stretch of the route from where we could clearly see the vehicles come around a bend followed by a nice long stretch down toward the walls of the Old City.

All was fine until the first car came speeding along, throttle open, engine roaring. My boy started to whimper, hands over his ears, tears springing to his eyes, tugging on my arm, trying to disappear within the folds of my dress. "Ima the noise, that loud noise, it's scary! Ima, it's like a rocket siren, Ima, I'm scared."

PTSD. My kindergartner has PTSD from a war we thank God were only on the very margins of. He saw no destruction, experienced "only" a few sirens, but it was enough to traumatise him so much that even what was one of his greatest pleasures is now a reminder of war.

My other child was fine, happy and curious, eyes bright with the thrill of it all. We clearly couldn't stay here though, so off we went, eventually finding a vantage point higher up, affording us a clear view of the cars but much further away from the noise. My frightened child was still nervous of what was still a pretty loud noise, but now that we were no longer right on top of the engines he was able to relax enough to enjoy watching his favourite cars.

The pure innocent joy of it all though was gone for him, even if in the end he liked having the chance to see "his" Formula One vehicles up close. The fear of the noise was still there, niggling, preventing him from just relaxing and melting in to the moment the way he had last time. Right there and then I felt my heart shattering in to a million pieces.

Welcome to the New Middle East

Snapshot of the insanity of our region: Someone on the radio talking about their summer holiday in north-east Israel on the Golan Heights. The surrealism of eating a Friday lunch in the artists' village of Ani'Am, at the next table a group of UNDOF "peacekeeper" soldiers ordering masses of pasta and pizza. Touring the village of Ein Zivan, choosing between the boutique winery and the boutique chocolate factory, standing in line shoulder to shoulder with offduty West European UN soldiers.

In the distance the sounds of the savage fighting in Syria, right next to Israel's border just a couple of kilometres away.

Just over that border in the chaos of Syria dozens of Fijian UNDOF soldiers have been kidnapped by Jihadi rebels as their colleagues on the Israeli side enjoy the attractions of the pastoral Israeli Golan.

Welcome to the New Middle East.

All in one summer (with apologies to Tennyson)

Rockets to the south of them,

Rockets to the north of them,

Volley'd and thunder'd,

Storm'd at with shot and shell,

Boldly they carried on

And well

Sheltered from the jaws of death

Hunted down the mouths of hell

And all in one summer


Flashed the rockets from their lair

Flashed the Iron Dome in air

Intercepting the missiles there

Charging the Hamas army, while

All the world wonder'd:

Plunged in the battery-smoke

Right thro' the line they broke;

Terrorist and Jihadi

Reel'd from the sabre stroke

Shatter'd and sunder'd.

Mortars to the right of them

Mortars to the left of them

As the reservists came home

To all that was left

Left of one summer

(with apologies to Tennyson and many other people)

The oldest hatred

I was asked this week whether the wave of anti-Semitism in Western Europe and the UK in particular is just a phase whipped up by the summer's hostilities in Gaza. I cannot predict the future, but I do notice that over the last two decades there does seem to be a gradual creep of anti-Semitism throughout the Western world, a frenzied and fashionable hatred of all things Israeli which utilises age old libels and stereotypes used for centuries to demonise European Jewry.

The last twenty years have seen increasing demonisation of all things Israeli and Jewish, an ever widening campaign of delegitimisation of both Israel and any Jewish right to self-determination, growing calls for a one state solution (meaning the eradication of Israel) and the rise of the infamous BDS movement with its false accusations of apartheid.

I note that twenty years ago was the beginning of the Oslo peace process which led to a string of drastic Israeli concessions, including the creation of the Palestinian Authority, the ceding to Palestinian control of most Palestinian population centres, a huge surge in Israeli popular support for drastic concessions for peace and the entrenchment in the Israeli political centre mainstream of what had until then been left wing views on Palestinian statehood, final status borders and acceptance of the PLO as face to face negotiating partners. Never before had the Israeli public been prepared for such far ranging concessions on matters of principle and territory.

This huge surge in anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli sentiment didn't happen under the "hardline" governments of Begin or Shamir, but during the far more conciliatory governments of Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and most recently Binyamin Netanyahu, who though from the same party as Begin and Shamir, now espouses the sort of positions on Palestinian statehood that in their time would have been considered left wing.

Anyone with eyes in their head just needs to look at the worsening of attitudes towards Israel and the Jewish people in the years since the Oslo peace accords and wonder how it is that the more Israel has conceded, given up, restreated and agreed to Palestinian demands, the more Israel is hated, attacked and reviled by the other nations, and the more the Jewish people are demonised and bullied around the world as the source of all our planet's troubles.

As a friend recently said to me, looking around at the attitude of many in supposedly "polite society and among the intellectual classes to Jews today one has an inkling of the atmosphere in 1930s Europe.

Ceasefire: That means you too Mr Hamas guy with a stash of rockets

Maybe the powers that be should just quit using the word ceasefire already? Or at least qualify it with something like "ceasefire - that means you too Mr Hamas guy with a stash of rockets" or "rocket launchers must be switched off and stowed for the duration of the ceasefire", you know, just to clarify what the whole ceasefirey thing is supposed to mean.

Or as my friend Elli put it, Hamas seems to understand the term this way: (in)c(r)easefire.

Nineveh

This week my oldest child and I were learning about the battle of Lakhish in around 700 BCE. The Assyrian forces of Sanheirib swept through the northern kingdom of Israel, moving on to the southern kingdom of Judah, laying siege to the heavily fortified town of Lakhish. Judean forces were defeated by the Assyrian army and Sanheirib was so taken by his victory that he decorated the walls of his palace in Ninveh with an ornate frieze telling the story of the battle in all its gory detail, including the impaling on stakes of the captured Judean commanding officers and the flaying alive of regional officials who dared rise up against Assyrian hegemony. 

In recent months Ninveh province has come under the rule of new tyrants, the so called "Islamic State" and its Jihadi fighters, with some reports from the region claiming ISIS has gone so far to destroy the ancient ruins at the site which predate Islam by centuries. How ironic that Sanheirib who laid waste to neighbouring kingdoms should himself find his great city destroyed by marauding invaders.

The view from Israel at the moment is certainly unsettling. Quite aside from our troubles with Hamas and Hamas' rockets and tunnels, it is horrifying watching the new Jihadis of ISIS sweep through Syria and Iraq, venture into Lebanon, reaching all the way to the Iraqi border with our neighbour Jordan. An already difficult neighbourhood seems to be getting more savage by the minute.

In all of the turmoil and terror that has swept the Middle East in recent years though there has been one beacon of hope - the Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Iraq. Alone among the various local groups they used US/UN intervention to create a stable, fair free, economically viable state in waiting. They too are mostly Sunni Muslims, just as the Jihadis purport to be. What a different vision for their homeland the Kurds have though. 

Watching the Peshmerga strive to defend their region from ISIS I am convinced more than ever that they should be rewarded for their responsible approach by receiving international support to help them resist the expansion of ISIS and to assist them in aiding refugees from the "Islamic State".

I should clarify that I am wary when it comes to Western involvement in the Middle East. I didn't think the US intervention in Iraq was a good idea in the first place, I thought the US leadership lacked (and still lack) a decent understanding of the complexities of the region and of how Western actions would be perceived. 

That said I had strong reservations about the arrangements for the US withdrawal and the ability of the new Iraq to achieve stable government. In a country so lacking in national cohesion and with a government setting itself up along sectarian lines it seemed highly likely that a withdrawal of the US and their allies would lead to a resumption or even escalation in the Sunni-Shia civil war, and quite likely also provide fertile ground for al-Qaeda like movements and militias, possibly even an Islamist takeover of the failing Iraqi state.

Sadly both concerns have been realised, further fuelled by the war in Syria. 

I can understand people in the West arguing that the US and allies gave Iraq their best shot, did what they could to free her people from a brutal dictator and now the rest is up to them, if they want to use that new freedom to ravage their own country, then so be it.

The thing is this is not simply a regional problem that the West, especially the US and its allies who went in to Iraq in the first place, can was their hands of and say it's all some regional conflict that doesn't concern them. The Western powers have been directly involved in creating 21st century Iraq from the time Saddam Hussein set this whole chain of events in motion with his invasion of Kuwait and the West stepped in to save the day.

The creation of the Kurdish autonomous region and no-fly zone have been a positive result of that intervention, creating an island of relative freedom and stability in northern Iraq.

The supplying of so much US weaponry and aid to the corrupt and sectarian government of a deeply divided Iraq, weaponry that has fallen into the hands of the butchers of ISIS, and thus threatens the pro-Western Kurds, that already makes it an issue the Western powers are in part responsible for. The potential global threat of ISIS makes fighting them a Western interest, but the West also has a moral obligation to help the Kurds who are now being attacked with those same weapons the US supplied to the floundering Iraqi military.

There are those in the West, quite possibly some in the Obama administration among them who believe that ISIS and its ilk are the shape of things to come in the Middle East, and therefore it is in their interest to stay "on the right side" of the nascent "Islamic State". My understanding of this latest and most brutal Jihadi movement is that there is no accommodation to be reached with them, their level of savagery is off the scale even by the standards of the blood-soaked Middle East. To use an old fashioned term, I believe that the unimaginable cruelty and the cult of death worshipped by the so called Jihadis of ISIS makes them evil, I can think of no other word for what they are perpetrating.

The West must find a way to support the Kurds, not just with words but with materials to both alleviate the suffering of the Yazaidi, Christian and other refugees and to help the Kurds defend themselves from the savagery of the "Islamic State".