From left: Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez © FT montage
Howard Epstein – LETTER FROM ISRAEL Oct. 2021
As we, in Israel, gladly received evidence last weekend that we are (so far as the presently known variants of Covid are concerned) almost certainly over the worst, we now have a new worry: the Squad.
As you will know, the President of the United States is well into his senescence, as seen in the disasters of the mad scramble from Afghanistan – to the detriment of more people that we care to contemplate – and in the horrors unleashed on benighted Haitians on Mexico’s border with Texas. Apart from POTUS, a true American trauma, there is the Squad, a motley collection of anti-Zionist members of the US Senate, bent on causing pain to Palestinians – if only they had the intelligence to work that out.
The Squad, so-called – Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) – are dedicated Israel bashers. So far so prosaic, in terms of today’s US Democrats; but the Squad’s latest wheeze was to delay the approval of replacement interceptors for Iron Dome. Israel’s and America’s mobile, brilliantly effective, all-weather air defence system was devised and manufactured in Israel, at the expense of the USA, because the latter knew Israel would get the job done, and at a third of the cost had it been left to the US military-industrial complex. The Squad thinks that it enures for Israel’s sole advantage. This is what happens when blind hatred obscures the facts.
Iron Dome is designed to intercept and destroy rockets and artillery shells fired from distances of four to 70 kilometers, whose trajectory would take them to an Israeli populated area. It became operational in March 2011. Over the past decade, thousands of missiles have been launched from schools, community centres and residential areas in Gaza generally at Israel, and that is without counting wars and quasi-wars. As random as the attacks are, Iron Dome is utterly discriminatory about its reaction to each launch: if the point of impact will be open ground, the system declines to waste an interceptor. But that is just a gloss on the genius of Iron Dome, for the reality is that it saves far more Palestinian lives than those of Israelis. How so?
Imagine that there was no Iron Dome. Bereft of their comprehensive digital and kinetic protector, Israelis would have been dying in 2010 and 2011 in large numbers. I refer to the first two years of the decade only for good reason. Israel would not have tolerated multiple salvos of rockets killing Jewish (and other) Israeli citizens for more than a very short time. After perhaps one or at most two years of the barrages, the army would have been ordered into Gaza, and there would have been a full-scale war in which many Gazan civilians would have died. (Arab losses are always disproportionately higher than Israeli fatalities.) Then the world would have called a premature halt, a year or two would have passed, and, absent the pure genius of Iron Dome, the process would have repeated itself several times more by now.
Iron Dome fails to protect only occasionally; perhaps half a dozen Israeli lives have been lost in the past ten years because of technology glitches but, without it, many hundreds – perhaps thousands – of Palestinian lives would have been lost through inevitable Israeli military incursions into Gaza.
The Squad, ignorant of anything that does not suit their agenda, will never own up to these truths; but we must be aware of them, for resentment of Jews is not restricted to any particular demographic. For example, those who were living in the wartime ghettos of Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States, to which they had been banished, en route to the gas chambers, by Hitler and Himmler and their sadistic and diabolical enforcers of the “Final Solution”, were regarded as living proof – although not for much longer – that they were lower than vermin, the role cast upon them. Yet, less unfortunate, much wealthier, Jews were equally resented – for being both the Yid Capitalists of Wall Street and the Judeo-Bolsheviks of the Kremlin, who between them supposedly manipulated world events to their sole advantage.
Yet that is not how Jews operate. They seek to bestow beneficence on all mankind. Regard, for example, the life-enhancing developments issuing from Israel on almost a daily basis.
And not only from Israel. Albert Burla, the CEO of Pfizer, that brought the world a vaccine to subdue Covid-19 several years earlier than we had any right to expect it, is a Jew. Of Greek extraction, his family’s community in Thessaloniki was most cruelly destroyed by the Germans at the end of WWII. And how was he repaid in Greece, which stood to benefit from his devotion to mankind’s betterment? He was likened in a Greek newspaper to Dr Josef Mengele, perhaps the most sadistic of all Nazis. (I know. It’s hard to get your head around that one.)
Where the hatred of Jews and Israel is concerned, even the Mariana Trench is unlikely to be able to contain the depths to which our detractors will sink.
As for the Squad recognising the truth about Iron Dome, don’t hold your breath.
© Howard Epstein – October 2021
