When will it be ?

I haven't written much about politics here for quite a while. I probably was just too depressed about it or something like that, but something really changed with last summer's war. By then I was more hearing questions about how to make peace happen, last, or at least manage to live a reasonably safe life.

Last year there were still people believing that Israel disengaging from Gaza was one step towards peace with Palestine, Israel's foreign ennemy were not very vocal and the only obstacle towards peace in here was finger pointed as the Hamas by most of the western world. So what happened?
I still remember showing lots of hope when the "prisoners plan" (full text here) was getting signed by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah (representing most of the parties then). You know that plan that everybody forgot about, that was prepared by Palestinians from various factions in Israeli prisons, and where most factions were agreeing among things to cease arm struggles outside of the 1967 green line (point 3), forming a unity government (point 6), and that was speaking of Israel as a state and not as "Zionist entity" as usual, and finally talking about negotiations and diplomacy to solve the problems.

So what about this? It ages back to may 2006 and in the past week (9 months later then) Fatah and Hamas agreed in Mecca to form a unity government to try to stop the civilian war that is raging between them in Gaza for almost 2 months. Well, when this plan was getting agreed upon by political wings, Hamas military wing abducted an Israeli soldier within Israel which triggered a (unfortunately usual) large military operation by Israel in Gaza. The plan was dropped and forgotten almost immediately as peace was not an immediate objective anymore. Some blame the Hamas military wing to have done this because they do not want to cease armed struggle versus Israel inside Israel, some say that Israel made sure the answer was big enough so the plan would be dropped and they could stay the ones imposing unilateral moves. Anyways, it was just the start.

Two weeks later the Hezbollah abducted 2 more soldiers in Israel and triggered the second Lebanon war between Israel and Lebanon. Many believe it was in an attempt to divert Israel’s focus on Gaza, many other believe it was taken as an opportunity by Israel to start a long planned war against Hezbollah, but now the reason why it happened don’t really matter anymore. The war happened (and you can find a few entries of this blog about it), civilians were murdered, soldiers died, and it ended under a very strong international pressure.

It ended up in a state that Israel disliked badly, and despite having tactically won the war, it ended up being considered as a defeat (and claimed as a victory by Hezbollah which anyways doesn't know the word for defeat :). Why a defeat ? Because Israel didn't succeed in protecting its civilians from rocket fire despite saying it should take only a few weeks, defeat because a few well trained Hezbollah fighters resisted them for weeks while in previous wars Israel was winning within days, defeat because the abducted soldiers were not returned despite all the UN resolutions signed, and defeat because most of the people stopped believing in peace.

This year was also the one where Iran grew as the number 1 bad guy (western world perspective), and their president started to be more vocal than usual, promising destruction to Israel, promoting holocaust denial and developping nuclear technology. This was one more year of civilian war in a US occupied Iraq without any sign of progress towards peace.

I could continue to point at the multiple political assassinations and bombings that keep going on in an unstable Lebanon, the civil war in Gaza for the past 2 months and in general the various signs of a rising tension between the western (christian) world and the middle eastern (muslim) world.

Israel is at the confluent of all these tensions, and the question in most minds is "When will it be ?", the next war...

Why ?

am I staying in Haifa ? Many of you have been pressing me in the past days to leave the country for a safer place, so I'll try to explain you why I am still here and am not planning to leave unless the situation worsens significantly.
The geographical position of my house combined with my current lifestyle makes it very safe for me to stay here for now. I am in a non targetted area, a pretty hard to target area, spending most of my time in a safe room so I just cannot reasonably get hurt.
Still, life isn't fantastic in these conditions with the sirens the explosions, the deads in the news, the situation getting worse hourly on the other side of the border :(...
But I am solidar with all my friends and collegues that live here, I believe that me staying there is doing something to comfort and strengthen them. Add to that the fact that I would hate fleeing under Hezbollah fire, it would just give me the feeling that they are winning something while they are actually just unable to harm me.
I am not suicidal, and I do not want to have people concerned about my security, that is why I seriously thought about it before taking this decision and balancing various options like going to work abroad for some time. Believe me if the situation were to worsen and put my life at risk, I would leave the area by the minute. I do not intend to risk my health for Israel, and noone around me would expect me to do that to support them.

Maybe I am just behaving to proud, but I would have serious self confidence issues if I weren't doing that.

I had planned a trip to France for vacations somewhere by the beginning of August and I still intend to do it around that period and visit my family in the alps and the Narbonne-Plage little monkey.