Beaufort

Yesterday I joined Omer and Amir and Tel Aviv for the night. The drive was longer than expected, I spent almost one hour stopped on the highway. It seems that two palestinians managed to infiltrate Israel from Gaza and the Police had set blockades on all roads and were filtering traffic all over Israel.

For once I wasn't driving too fast :/.

After chatting and grabbing beers we picked up a movie, under Omer recommendation we picked Beaufort: an Israeli war movie that got a silver bear in Berlin festival.

"Perched atop a mountain in southern Lebanon, the Beaufort Castle has passed from army to army for hundreds of years. In the year 2000, Liraz Liberti, a young Israeli commander, is in charge of defending the last outpost.
It has become his reason to live, filling him with power, fueling him with self-importance, driving him to allow perilous - and ultimately meaningless - operations... Bomb specialist Ziv loses his life when the bomb he is about to defuse explodes. 19-year-old Zitlawi dies in a missile attack. And Oshri, who can´t wait to see his girlfriend in New Jersey, is severely injured in a bombing that leaves the swaggering Liraz frozen with terror... This is their story not of war, but of retreat, a story of no enemy, but an amorphous entity that drops bombs from the skies."

I do recommand watching it, well at least not on a depressed day.

PS: the building where I took the Front 5 picture 2 weeks ago has been destroyed, It looked kind of out of place, but no more interresting grafitis guesses.

What was it this time ?

It seems that minutes ago a few Katyushas landed in the northern israel town of Kiriat Shmona. So what was it this time that decided them (it seems it's not Hezbollah this time) to launch rockets towards an Israeli town. Press coverage here: Haaretz, Jerusalem Post (funny how the newspapers from the right report more rockets;), the news hasn't reached non Israeli media yet it seems.

So the war everybody was forcasting for this summer is restarting ? Well I start to re-hear every loud noise my neighbours make despite the AC, I had gotten rid of that habit only 6 months ago.

Civil war in Gaza

Well everything is in the title. Hamas is trying to take over Gaza and has been taking over Fatah positions. They are attempting a truce, but in the past month as many truces got broken that people killed.
In Lebanon yet another "anti-Syrian" lawmaker has been killed in a bombing. It seems the region is diving into the chaos everybody has been talking about for the past 6 months.
Next step is how Israel is gonna get involved in this, but last summer it degenerated in the war we all know about.
Only optimistic news about politics were the videos on youtube showing the French president drunk at the G8. He seems to enjoy himself a lot...

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...

Peace now ?

So the few questions going around me are : is this peace now? and who did win that war ?
To the first one, it is a cease fire, not peace. Countries like Lebanon consider themselves at war with Israel despite an armistice in 1949 and various cease fires since. Now the question is how long will this cease fire last ? The previous one lasted around 6 years with monthly violations mostly located arount the Sheba farms. I can only hope that this one will last longer but the first days of cease fire are not very promising.

France which is supposed to lead the UN interposition force in south Lebanon already said it would not participate to the implementation of some parts of the cease fire, by not working on disarming Hezbollah. The Lebanese government agreed with Hezbollah that they would keep their weapons, just not show them in public (which itself is a violation of the cease fire conditions which say that the only weaponry in south Lebanon has to be the army's). On the other side Israeli army is still in south Lebanon, with less soldiers but still there.
Annan is supposed to start a taskforce to figure out according UN who do belong the Sheba farms to (currently it's supposed to be Syrian territory occupied by Israel, but Lebanese say it's theirs). This is a very good initiative, but there has already been words by the US that whatever the decision would be, Israel would not have to remove their troops from there. So we can assume that whatever the answer is Hezbollah will also stand on their positions. My personal opinion on this issue is that neither Hezbollah nor Israel really care who it does belong to, it is just a convenient excuse.

So is it all that bad ? Well, the only change compared to last month is that now the Lebanese army is in south Lebanon, and will assume responsability over the border with Israel. In the long term this could lead to more responsible behaviour in the area.

Now the question who did win ? Each time there is a war there has to be a winner right ? Reading the medias it seems to be the case... I find it sad that this is even a matter of discussion but well it is. Modern wars seem to have mostly loosers and no winners. Some say that Israel by weakening Hezbollah, destroying all Lebanese infrastructure, killing a larger number of ennemies than their loss won (US claim it 's a victory in the "war over terror"). Some say Israel lost because a small organisation caused it more harm than anyone ever did before, negated their high tech weaponry, sent rockets farther in Israel than anyone ever did in the past 50 years. I am leaning towards the second option.

Now does that make Hezbollah a winner like they and Iran have been claiming everywhere ? Definitely not, they resisted well, but killing 2 dozen of civillians by sending over 3000 rockets towards them looks pretty sad to me. A good exemple of katyusha accuracy:


Their role is to protect Lebanon, have I heard. What did they protect that is still standing undamaged ? If it wasn't for the international community pressure, what would be the state of Lebanon 1 month from now ?

Finaly everybody is in such a hurry to claim victory that it really is obvious that everybody did loose.

Cease fire

Sirens woke me up this morning minutes before the cease fire took place. There were no alerts since, and activities are resuming. Let's hope it lasts and the conditions for a lasting peace with Lebanon settle.

Rockets season not over

So I am back in Israel, Haggai gets me at the airport, I drop him at home and make my way to Haifa on the highway. 10Km before Haifa the police is diverting all traffic to smaller roads, I guess that some rocket hit the highway and am not very far. The rocket hit near one of my company buildings and shattered a few windows without casualties.

The building I usually work is the closest one on the left, a closer look to the glass building (the one along the highway), some collegue windows got hit but hopefully noone was working during the weekend:

The damages are light, let's hope it stays this way.
In the past 24h I heard a few serious hits to the Matam side of Haifa. It seems they are targetting the high-tech industrial zone now. I am going to keep working from home and hope things calm down soon.

Images of war

Here are a few pictures of Haifa under the katyushas. I didn't take them myself as I do not go much out, they are just among the large number I recieve in my mailbox.

As you can see schrapnel is not enough, Hezbollah adds metal balls to make their rockets more efficient at injuring a maximum of people.

This one shoked me when I saw it, I am not sure this is the way to educate your kids, but well it's there and I still prefer bad words to metal balls.

Haifa under the rockets

Things haven't really changed here, after 24 hours of no shooting on Haifa, the fire restarted, sunday was by far the worse day since the rocket fire started. The day opened in the beginning of the afternoon if I remember well, with 10 impacts in 20 seconds (I counted 12 but might have gotten echo echo). The rest of the day was on the same tempo.

The good thing about this situation is the people that stayed go to each other's houses to have company. So thursday I was in Atlit, saturday in Akko and Sunday night in Atlit. No pictures as I don't want to compromise the drunks I shared the evening with :).

A good tip, when you are at home bored as hell, unable to work because of lack of concentration, buy lots of fresh vegetables, meat, etc... and cook ! Cook difficult, complicated and long stuff. And in the evening share with your friends. Is has the double effect of keeping you busy and focused for hours and makes your friends happy.

PS: for those that might wonder Atlit is 10km south of Haifa and has remained unreached for now.

The dictionary of war clichés

While reading Haaretz journalist Shmuel Rosner's blog I found this interresting dictionnary. Cynical, realist, unfair, bad joke ? I'll let you make your own opinion, anyway it's worth reading: part 1 and part 2.
Sirens are still sounding today on Haifa, but I haven't heard any explosion and there is no report of rockets. It might be quieting down on this side of the border.

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.

Stayin' alive

Hey, I am still here. The past 2 days have been regularly cut by sirens and explosions. I am currently discussing with my boss the various options for the coming days and weeks, and will decide pretty soon on what to do exactly. In the mean time I stay either in my shelter room or by friends. The Matam area (where I usually work) has been targetted for the first time. Here is a picture taken from there.

Hezbollah - Israel

Well, as some you might have noticed the northern border of Israel has been subject to violent military operation from both the Hezbollah and Israeli army. As usual each party is claiming that they are just answering to the other's actions, and obviously they try to make the answer big so it frightens the other.

From here it looked like Lebanese milicia came into Israel, killed a few soldiers and captured 2 others at a time where "Israel deterrence power" was already being question after a similar problem near Gaza. The answer has been extremly violent, basically Israel has set an air-sea blocus on whole Lebanon, mass-bombed Hezbollah areas, roads and other civilian service providing facilities (I suppose power plants...).
Hezbollah has been sending rockets towards northern israeli cities for the past 24h and has sent one as far as Haifa (where I live). There are civilians death and injuries on both sides, as usual in this area there are significantly less israelis.
The northern Israeli population is living in their shelters, and currently there are not many (even the most moderate) that are ready to keep taking hits without answering very strongly. Outside of strong external pressure either on Lebanon so they put their army at the border instead of Hezbollah or on Israel so they stop the fire (I don't see them recieving rockets and not shoot back though), I seriously doubt that the situation is not going to worsen fast.

Where I am I don't risk much, and the security services of my company are taking care of me so I'll be fine. I'll let you know how things evolve.