Older and Weiser

This is a very interesting group of people with whom Julie and I are traveling in Israel. It includes a sitting governor (Rick Perry of Texas), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida), a leading Democrat in the Texas state legislature, the CEOs of two NYSE-listed companies, the chancellor of the University of Texas system and a former US diplomat.

Most notably, perhaps, several venture capitalists also are part of the group, including the elected chair of the National Venture Capital Association. Sitting with Terry and his daughter at dinner last evening not only was a chance to renew his acquaintance (The Weiser Group represented NVCA for nine years), it wound up illuminating what we were to see today.

Venture capitalists, as you may know, are in the business of backing entrepreneurs and their technologies. Terry, who has made many trips to Israel, has invested in two companies here and has acquired a perspective about Israelis that is worth hearing. “The Israelis,” he says, “are very creative but also highly practical.”

From the perspective of business investment, that makes Israelis good partners, a fact to which Warren Buffet also attests. From the perspective of their own national security, that makes Israelis deeply skeptical of the willingness of Hamas and Fatah to be partners in peace.

The view from Black Arrow, a heritage site that marks the site of a 1955 terrorist attack carried out by Arabs called fedayeen, yields a better understanding of the challenge that Israel faces in 2009. From Black Arrow you can see Gaza, in one direction, and Sderot (the Israeli village that Hamas continues to shell) in the other. It’s easy to see why Hamas uses the rocket as its principal instrument of terror: the territory between Black Arrow and Gaza is completely controlled by Israeli forces and Hamas’s only choice is to go over their heads.

And, so, they do; 10,000 times since 2000 (most in the last three years) and 268 since January, including one yesterday. There is a makeshift museum in Sderot of Ketushya and Kassam rockets that have landed there and we took turns taking pictures of one-another holding the rockets. (Pictures from Julie “at 11”) Most cause little damage but steel-and-concrete-reinforced bus shelters, schools and an indoor playground built last year by the Jewish National Fund attest to the fact that they kill, maim and disrupt lives.

Why they do it is a simpler question to answer than the BBC, New York Times and the Obama Administration would have you believe, according to military analyst Elliot Chodoff, a major in the IDF reserves, who joined us for the day. Elliot is a native New Yorker and a graduate of the University of Chicago, who made aliyah 25 years ago. He fought in three of Israel’s wars and played an important role in Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza four years ago. He knows a lot more than he could tell us today. The answer, Elliot says, is all about hot houses.

When the Israelis pulled out of Gaza, they did so largely because a third of IDF infantry was protecting 8,000 settlers. Except for a few settlements, the PA (then Fatah, now Hamas) had administrative control over Gaza since the mid-1990s. The largest of these settlements, Gush Gateef, was an agricultural community along the Mediterranean where literally hundreds of hot houses had been built to accommodate year-round production. When they pulled out, Israeli officials purposefully left the hot houses behind so that the Palestinians might use them to their own economic advantage. According to Elliot, it took Hamas but a week to destroy all of them.

With an estimated 60% of Gazans unemployed, Hamas is the sole source of social services, medical care, education and security. Hot houses and other expressions of free enterprise challenge the hegemony on which Hamas thrives in Gaza. A constant state of war with Israel perpetuates Hamas in a way that peace might well not. Peace – and only peace – raises the specter of building an economy and a real government, thereby creating challenges that Hamas is not designed to meet.

The Israelis thought leaving Gaza was an elegant solution that would allow Israel to redeploy its forces and give the Palestinian Authority a clear shot at statehood. By leaving Gaza entirely, there was nothing standing in the way of the Palestinians from declaring an independent state; no occupying army, no settlers, no nothing.

Why, then, doesn’t Hamas declare a state in Gaza? Ben Gurion rushed to do it before the Sabbath fell on the day before the Balfour Declaration ended; before the US delegate to the United Nations could propose an alternative to statehood, which was an American protectorate. The obvious answer is: they don’t want one. They prefer a state of siege.

As practical people, Israelis manage this fact of terrorism the way they manage water, road construction and housing development: by doing what they can. As Elliot Chodoff explains, Israel has gone from trying to prevent terrorism to defeating terrorism. Most of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, the West Bank and in the Negev (against Hamas) never reach the newspaper. These operations are surgical, purposeful and effective. The drones being used by the US in Pakistan and Afghanistan are manufactured in Israel. Here, they are used for surveillance only, given the close quarters and the need to minimize civilian casualties. Manned helicopter gun ships verify targets and do the actual shooting. Make no mistake, they shoot to kill.

Like a chronic disease, terrorism is managed but never ended. Each day, very creative techniques are developed to meet this challenge and they are put into practice by highly practical people. Imagine what those same people could build, could cure, could develop if they weren’t fighting to stay alive.

Tomorrow we meet Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu. Now, to bed.

Michael Weiser

Filed under: Israel by Michael Weiser