Howard Epstein – A LESS COSMETIC USE FOR THE LASER
Masks are back! Yet the most doubly–vaccinated country (excluding places like The Falklands and Gibraltar) is not expecting another Covid wave. Israeli health experts consider two Pfizer shots to be almost 90% effective against the Indian variant, held responsible for outbreaks in two schools of coronavirus among children. They are said to have been infected by adults returning from overseas trips and to account for 90% of the new cases. Just 40% of the adults contracting it had been vaccinated. (This total is still just 0.03% of the numbers tested.) Some 56,000 Israelis aged 12–15 went to vaccination centres last week. There is no mention anywhere of ventilators or material numbers of deaths. Despite this recent setback, Israeli remains on the threshold of herd immunity. Cor blimey!
From the cor blimey to the sublime. Israeli hi–tec continues to amaze on a daily basis, but every now and then something really stands out. Iron Beam, a laser beam version of the now famed Iron Dome missile interceptor system, has been in development for some time. It is expected to become fully operational within a couple of years, reducing the cost of interception – some $75,000 a time – to that of an electrical charge. Last week, however, came news that the Israeli Star Wars programme has made another Mao–beating great leap forward. The trial of a laser weapon successfully downed several drones over a kilometre distant. On what was this device mounted? A Cessna light aircraft, no larger! The achievement of miniaturisation is breathtaking. Rapid progress and much scaling up will follow, to the point where kinetic contact with incoming projectiles, from cannon shells to ICBM rockets, will be by laser, having graduated from multiple uses in civil society to the military arena.
The Israeli public stifles a smirk at the now almost weekly reports of unexplained damage to Iranian assets connected to its nuclear (reportedly spelled for US presidents on their teleprompters as “new clear”) programme. Exploding floors in secret underground facilities, the largest Iranian naval vessel evacuated and destroyed by fire, quadcopters the size of a man’s fist wreaking wide–scale damage in nuclear development facilities – don’t these guys have a way to translate the Hebrew bitachon (security) into Farsee?
When succeeding Israeli prime ministers (just roll than phrase around your tongue and savour it like a Chateau Lafite ’43) warn that Iran will never achieve The Bomb, they may regard an aerial strike as merely the last resort. Constant degradation could have the same effect.
Israel has long been at war with Iran. We constantly attack their emerging nuclear assets; they seek to open bases in Syria, which we destroy as soon as they go operational. This is a new iteration of the War of Attrition that followed the Six Day War.
In that conflict, Arab losses were around ten times those of Israel, and amongst Egypt’s war dead was Army Chief of Staff, Abdul Munim Riad. In the present struggle, shuffled off the Iranian mortal coil, by assassination, have been atomic scientists Masoud Alimohammadi, Majid Shahriari and Fereydoon Abbasi (all in 2010), Darioush Rezaeinejad (2011), Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan (2012) and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh (2020). Plainly the Mossad programme is on–going.
Well, something has to be done to dilute the damage intended by the third Obama administration, led by Biden, who seeks the Neville Chamberlain Award for Gross Appeasement. Israeli Foreign Secretary Lapid’s upcoming meeting in Rome this week with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was about the Iranian threat, and how the Americans plan to augment it.
Another visit that should be planned is that of PM Bennett to Moscow. If Netanyahu had a USP, it was not his (and Israel’s) survival of Obama, or the extracting of benefits from Trump, but the chemistry he had with the Russian premier, which has afforded the IAF freedom of the skies over Syria. Extending that into the new government is Israel’s second (after Iran) most pressing foreign/military challenge, and PM Bennett had better be up for developing good chemistry with Putin.
This column’s last appearance reviewed points of contiguity enjoyed by Israel and Britain. Now let us note the dissonance between Israel and Iran. Last week, the latter (s)elected as its new president a monster, a man widely regarded as the butcher who sent to the gallows thousands, some say 30,000, of his own people. Many were gay, or convicted of the crime of being about whilst gay. (A noose dangling from a crane jib of a Friday lunchtime was the preferred method of despatch of those benighted children of the 1979 Revolution.)
In Tel Aviv, last Friday, 100,000 people gathered for the Gay Pride Parade. Whatever one’s personal tastes, it must surely be a source of pride, indeed, to be more closely associated with Israel’s paradigm of inclusivity than with the Iranian paradigm, for which it is hard to find words sufficiently harsh.
Finally then, a message for those crowds on the streets of London protesting whenever a Jewish finger is perceived on the trigger – but never against vile horrors inflicted daily against Muslim girls in Kabul. Judge us, if you must. But judge us by the quality of our enemies.
© July 2021 – Howard Epstein.
