Posted on 08/07/2006 5:28:10 AM PDT by Mercat
Dear Everybody,
Yesterday was a terrible day for Israel. Losing 12 soldiers to one katyusha attack is a national tragedy for this country. For the U.S., our loss of 2,500+ soldiers is hardly noted except as a statistic. It’s not even allowable to photograph the coffins coming home. Our soldiers die almost anonymously. The average American didn’t know any of the dead, and Americans’ lives are not essentially changed by the Iraq war.
But Israel is more like one big neighborhood than a country. School kids go all through school together (no constant moving around like in the U.S.), and high school graduating classes often go into the same regiment/brigade/whatever together. So one soldier is usually known by, connected somehow to, hundreds of people. Photographs and biographies of slain soldiers are often run on the front pages of newspapers. Each funeral is attended by hundreds of people.
One-third of the IDF is female, but women mostly do office and administrative work, and medical and technical jobs. For six years now women have been allowed to join combat units, but only a very small number do so.
Last night the first siren and blasts of rockets came during my ballet class in the recroom. I felt anger and determination that those bastards weren’t going to run my life, and I finished the class. Then I felt the fear and got home as quickly as I could. Then the second siren and the second deluge of rockets, which landed about a mile from me as the crow flies. For those of you who have served at the BWC here, the rockets hit across the street from the family library, next to a big institutional building. (Sorry, but I cannot give explicit locations, for security reasons.) They also hit in the wadi, on the block with the Arab restaurant a lot of us used to go to.
It’s surreal to watch the network news stations and see parts of the war happening in my city, or just a few miles away.
Well, it took something like six years for Britain (4-1/2 of them with the U.S.), to defeat Hitler, and three years into the war, 1942, the situation was very bleak. But the rest is history; Hitler and Nazism were defeated.
Today’s reading:
Tony Blair’s speech. He mentions Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech of 1946, given after he was voted out of office. Blair may well be best remembered in history for this speech. He may be out of office in a few months. A very excellent article from yesterday’s New York Times Magazine. It was written two weeks ago, but is still timely. Mentions Haifa. An article I got from the Debka Files Web site (just google up “debka”)
Am trying to think of something cheerful to say. Let’s see, the sun rose this morning right on schedule!
Love,
Eileen
P.S. The two blurbs below are also from debka.
Hizballah’s blitz against Israel peaked Sunday, Day 26 of the war, killing 15 Israelis, injuring more than 200 – men and women, Jews and Arabs
August 7, 2006, 12:04 AM (GMT+02:00)
They fired at least 250 rockets across northern Israel, four times as many as the Germans ever dropped on Britain in one day during World War II. An estimated 13 heavy 220 mm rockets from Syria hit seven buildings in Haifa.
Israel struck back fast and took out the launchers at at Burj Rahal northeast of the Lebanese port of Tyre which fired at Haifa. DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Hizballah no longer bothers to conceal the launch sites of its heavy missiles. Their crews are under orders to execute “suicide launchings,” accepting that the moment they let their rockets fly they will be exposed to reprisal. Hizballah is now bent on maximizing the number of Israeli casualties.
Eight hours earlier, Hizballah launchers in four separate command posts coordinated their rocket fire on an Israeli reservist unit unloading trucks outside Kibutz Kfar Gileadi near Kiryat Shemona, killing 12 soldiers and injuring 13.
Our sources also disclose that Hassan Nasrallah has ordered all members of his senior command, military and political alike, to go underground, disconnect their phones and refuse media interviews in the present period which he sees as marking the decisive stage of the war.
Iran supplies Hizballah with a battery of upgraded Zelzal missiles that can reach Israel’s nuclear reactor in Dimona
August 4, 2006, 11:09 PM (GMT+02:00)
This disclosure by DEBKA-Net-Weekly 264 was confirmed Friday, August 4, by Ali-Akbar Mohtashami-Pour, former Iranian ambassador to Damascus and Tehran’s senior liaison with Hizballah. The acquisition of an improved Zelzal through Syria with a range of 350-400 km was behind Hassan Nasrallah’s threat to bomb Tel Aviv if Beirut came under another Israel air attack.
Tel Aviv is 150 km north of Dimona and therefore well within range of the improved Zelzal missile.
The DEBKA-Net-Weekly report added: The battery consists of 16 missiles which, fired from northern or central Lebanon, can hit the Negev town of Beersheba which is some 34 km west of the nuclear center. Iran knows that a missile attack on the Dimona reactor, even if it is a direct hit, will not do much harm because the nuclear installations are buried deep underground and guarded by anti-missile defenses. But both Tehran and Hizballah are after the psychological impact on Islamic and world opinion of aiming the first Muslim missile against Israel’s atomic center.
Earlier, Hizballah said there would be no ceasefire until the last Israeli soldier leaves Lebanon. France submitted draft UN resolution on Lebanon
Let me know if you want to be pinged
There is a new younger eration in israel that is getting its first tasteof all out war and they are being acclimated in fully understanding where they live and who they live near. Out of this conflict will arise their new leaders twenty years from now they will remember these days and weeks and it will make them stronger. As you have said my jewish friends, never again.
Ping me.
God bless you, Eileen. It is critical that Israel and the US NOT lose our will to vanquish the enemy completely.
You've been added to the ping list.
pls put me on ping list. thks
Well... if they had uniforms on before... they're gone now. No matter with not giving interviews to the MSM... they got what they wanted already... and the MSM will continue to work for them.
They'll just have to be more... 'creative'.
I hope and pray so if it is necessary. But I have my doubts that our leaders have the strength of morals and convictions to carry out such a task.
Yesterday we called our daughter; she said she was down in her safe room and a raid was going on. She said something blew up big nearby and she was hearing emergency vehicle sirens outside.
Today we're wanting to hear the "rest of the story". I was thinking back about the Panama invasion for taking out Torrijos, that when our neighborhood got shelled with mortars it sounded like they were exploding over my roof. Later we found out that the hits were several blocks away and they were just minor damage.
We'll see.
| Six killed as 400 rockets pound North | ||
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| By Eli Ashkenazi, Jack Khoury and Amos Harel | ||
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Nearly 400 rockets were fired at the north over the weekend, killing six people. This brings to 33 the number of Israeli civilians killed since the fighting in the north began on July 12. |
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Is that the best these maggots can do? They are running out of ammo. That's why they push for cease fire. So they can get new rockets and missiles from Iran and Syria
You mean Noriega and what's your daughter doing there?
You're right, I did mean ol' pineapple face.
What she was doing here was growing up.
What she's doing in Israel she said she didn't want me to say because of OPSEC being job #1. My guess is that she's just not familiar with the freerepublic but whatever it is I'm willing to defer.
Thanks much. Daughter knows right I guess.
"Earlier, Hizballah said there would be no ceasefire until the last Israeli soldier leaves Lebanon."
fine...let's start by returning the two that you kidnapped.
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