Subs in the Suez

Is Israel’s decision to send a Dolphin submarine through the Suez Canal — overtly — a message to Iran, as this Jerusalem Post report suggests?

Well, duh.

Let’s review why. As I wrote back in 2006:

Israel’s long-range Dolphin-class submarines are reportedly able to launch nuclear-tipped Popeye Turbo cruise missiles…

Since the distance from Israel to Iran is far greater by sea than it is by air, Israel would need submarine bases at the end of the Red Sea and in the Indian Ocean in order for the Dolphins to pull within range of their targets.

As luck would have it, Israel has just such bases – according to foreign reports – in the Dahlak Archipelago, off the coast of Eritrea; and off the coast of either India, with which Israel has a flowering military alliance, or Sri Lanka, whose ties with Israel have grown quietly over the past several years. It was off the coast of Sri Lanka that Israel successfully tested – again, according to foreign reports – a submarine-launched cruise missile in 2000.

Remember, also, how the Israel Navy famously intercepted the Karine A arms smuggling ship deep in the Red Sea back in 2002.

For the past several years, Israel has placed significant emphasis on its naval warfare capabilities in general, and on control of the Red Sea in particular. The Dolphin is, actually, a formidable predator, and parading it through the Suez Canal is a not-so-subtle warning.

The good fight

Thank God for Johnny Ray Haskins.

Haskins was a towering man, a hardcore criminal who had spent years in a state penitentiary for violent crimes. But on that night in the lawless, rundown housing projects of the American Deep South, old Johnny Ray was the only thing standing between Jeff Hochman and death.

Hochman was staring down a loaded handgun being pointed at him by a furious drug dealer certain that Hochman, his client in a sizable drug purchase, was an undercover cop. He was right – but just before he carried out a death sentence on the unarmed pseudo-junkie for that betrayal, Haskins intervened, claiming the dealer had it wrong and that Hochman was a “legit” dude from the area.

“I asked him later why he had saved my life,” Hochman says from his rented Ramat Gan apartment, recalling that long-ago incident. “He said, ‘Man, I’ve done a lot of shitty things in my life. I’ve hurt a lot of people. But you were trying to help people you didn’t even know… so I figured you didn’t need to die.’”

No, Hochman didn’t need to die. He would come close on many other occasions, though, in the course of a career that saw him take on drug gangs, weapons dealers, armed robbers, murderers, mob goons and even Iraqi terrorists and insurgents – and nearly drown in his own attic during Hurricane Katrina.

“Many times, people have asked me to write a book about my life,” he says. “After all, not many Jewish guys have been with the Marines, the cops, the FBI, and hunted IED (improvised explosive device) cells in Iraq – and made aliya.”

Still, Hochman dismisses the notion of penning a memoir, saying simply and somewhat gravely, “Some things are better left unsaid.”

Not that Hochman is anything but outgoing and cheerful. Shortly after having left Iraq, the 43-year-old talked with The Jerusalem Post about settling down to the relative serenity of a new life here in Israel – a life, he says, that he has dreamed of ever since he was a kid growing up in Mobile, Alabama.

AS A CHILD, Hochman was keenly interested in police work; throughout school he was part of the local law enforcement explorers, “a sort of Boy Scouts for police,” as he says. But after graduating high school, Hochman joined the Marines. He would serve just over two years in the corps. It’s an affiliation that means a lot to him.

“The Marines’ Eagle, Globe and Anchor insignia is dear to me and, like a lot of guys, I contemplated having it tattooed. In fact, I almost did it one night when I was out drinking with the guys,” Hochman recalls. “But then I remembered my mother telling me that if I ever got a tattoo, she’d never forgive me.”

Growing up, he says, “the only time I saw tattoos on Jews was the numbers on Holocaust survivors’ forearms.”

Immediately after leaving the Marines, the tattoo-less Hochman sought out a police job. Just then, he says, a narcotics squad was being put together for an undercover federal task force in western Alabama. Hochman jumped at the chance. It was not, however, a glamorous – or an easy – job.

“In order to look the part, I had to lived in the projects, drive a shitty car, live a shitty life,” he explains. “I had a cover job as an assistant to a veterinarian, who was a former cop and who knew about my undercover role. But at night, after work, I would buy drugs, set up buys, whatever was necessary” to arrest drug dealers and weapons dealers.

He did this for close to three years, sometimes driving hundreds of kilometers to consummate a drug deal.

“I had to look like a junkie,” Hochman says, “so I’d mix beer and coffee and drink a whole bunch of that, to make me jittery and kind of out of it. I would walk into crackhouses – this white guy, in the South, in a house full of black drug dealers and junkies. I couldn’t look like a cop, so I couldn’t go around with a weapon, or a wire, or anything like that. There was no support waiting right outside for me, the way they do it nowadays. It was crazy.”

It was during this period that Haskins saved Hochman from ending up dead in a housing project. But there were other dangers as well, unbeknownst to Hochman.

“When I came out from undercover, one of my bosses was immediately arrested for drug distribution. Another was suspected of doing the same, though the suspicions were never proven. He later went to jail on corruption and extortion charges. When a third died; some said it was suicide.

“It was a big part of my career and taught me how important it is to be an honorable police officer, even when it’s the hardest to be. As an undercover cop there were a lot of things you could have done and gotten away with. It’s easy to do… My bosses were dirty when it was easy, and it put my life in danger.”

These gritty experiences opened doors for Hochman with the New Orleans Police Department, and allowed him to flourish there. From 1991 through the end of 2007 he tackled robbery, homicide, drugs and local mafia, rising through the ranks to become a detective sergeant and the head of a combined FBI/New Orleans Police Department task force on gang violence.

“All told,” he says, “I’ve worked about 1,000 murders in my career. I can’t even count how many shootings and armed robberies… It’s safe to say I’ve worked more violent crime than most Israeli police.”

YET AFTER all that, after facing all those bullets and blades and needles, it was water that nearly brought Hochman down. Lots and lots of water.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Hochman had been sick at home with a stomach virus. Rather than evacuate, he stayed home with his German Shepard, Thor, thinking he could weather the storm. And at first, he later recalled in a written account, he had – his home had suffered only minor damage, and flooding in the neighborhood had been minimal.

When the levees keeping the Mississippi River at bay burst, however, Hochman’s – and New Orleans’ – situation quickly took a turn for the worse.

“I had been lying in bed asleep and gotten up for something, going to the front bay windows of my house,” Hochman wrote. “Water was up about 15 centimeters, up to about the beginning of the hubcaps of the tires on the cars.”

Fifteen minutes later, water was pouring through his home.

“I quickly ran to the front bay windows again. The water was already over the tires and going up over the hood of the cars and was coming up underneath my house. I watched the current of the water, watching stuff flow down the street. I watched the water continue to rise and rise and rise, and I pretty much knew I was in trouble.”

Hochman had trouble communicating with colleagues on his radio, “but I could hear other officers screaming for help as the water was coming up into their attics. They were already up in the attic and they were having trouble and couldn’t get out.”

Hochman brought Thor up to his own attic, but still wasn’t panicking. He had sealed rations, water, a sledgehammer and crowbar, and a flotation vest for himself and the dog.

“I pretty much determined that I was going to tie the rope to a joist in the attic, hook it to me and Thor, bust out the ceiling and go sit on the roof with the dog. That was my plan.”

Downstairs, Hochman was amazed as the water level continued to rise.

“The water was finally around my chest, and I knew I was in serious trouble. I was going back and forth through the water to the attic to check on Thor, and I kept coming down to see if the water would go away, but it didn’t. It just kept coming up. I started hearing the refrigerators and washers and dryers and everything floating around and banging each other… The house was filled with water.

“I had thought the plan I had was good, but then I realized it wasn’t and I pretty much knew me and the dog were dead. I was going to die. I told [my colleagues] to go to other areas and get people that had a chance. There were already dead people floating around me, so I figured the jig was up for me.”

For more than 1,800 people in the area affected by Katrina, the jig was indeed up. But in the moments went hope seemed lost, Hochman wrote, “I thought about everything I had been through – with law enforcement, the military – and I thought, ‘[Screw] this, I’m not dying. Not letting some water kill me.’”

Within a few hours a fellow officer who had found a boat made his way to Hochman’s house. Together they broke through a small window and the wall around it. Hochman swam through his house and back into the attic, where Thor was waiting.

“I went to the attic and cut the rope I had Thor secured with, but he wouldn’t swim. That dog was crawling on my back trying to make nice when I was dragging him under water and through the house; I was his raft. I finally had to push him through the window… and onto the roof.”

The policemen made their way to a highway overpass where dozens of citizens were waiting for rescue. Once they were taken care of, Hochman joined up with the rest of his police unit and went to work “patrolling and pulling people from houses and stopping looters.”

In the aftermath of the storm, with most of the city underwater and paralyzed, Hochman kept the peace as much as he could by day, and slept in a Wal-Mart parking lot by night. For several days, he didn’t even have shoes.

“Some New York policemen came down to help out,” he says, “and after taking a look around, they told us that what we were dealing with was much worse than 9/11.”

TWO YEARS later, Hochman had put in enough time with the police and the military to retire. But he wasn’t done working, and the Department of Defense was looking for people with his kind of background to join counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. So he took an offer to hunt down IED cells and suicide bomb units with the National Information and Intelligence Agency (“kind of a combination of the FBI and the CIA in Iraq,” Hochman says). He was embedded with their operators every day for a year.

“We used the same mentality and approach that I used in my police work,” he says, “because they used the same approach as gangs and organized crime. IED cells operate according to the same principles as the mafia – they smuggle, they lie and they cheat. The only difference is that, in the States, you have large organizations fighting in a large system. In Iraq, you could be looking for a lone operator riding a motorcycle through a wadi, dumping bombs in the sand for $100 apiece.”

What was different, Hochman adds, was the weather.

“There were what we called ‘black days,’ when it was too damn hot to work,” he says, enjoying the air conditioning in a Ramat Gan café. “It was so hot that it was like putting your face into an oven.”

Then there were the sandstorms.

“I was trapped in one so bad, and so fast, I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “A red wall hundreds of feet high just engulfed me. I had a strong flashlight with me, but I couldn’t see its light, even when I held it right in front of my face.”

Sometimes, when a sandstorm struck, it stranded Hochman and his team members at the homes of their Iraqi investigators. One kept them pinned down for 40 hours straight. Iraq’s fine sand – “we called it moondust” – would penetrate weapons, gear and clothes.

When not facing unbearable heat or unstoppable sand, Hochman and his crew still had the harrowing task of shaking up insurgents. They fought back, with bombs and mortar fire. “I lost some friends,” Hochman says matter-of-factly, without elaboration.

Working in small teams deep inside a hostile population, Hochman and his men often entered homes of suspects, knowing they could be boobytrapped. “You always go into a house hoping your first step in won’t be your last,” as he says.

The team that Hochman led dismantled numerous bombing networks and won praise from commanders for its efficiency and professionalism.

“I’ve always wanted to be the guy who did some good out there… catching bad guys and teaching others how to catch bad guys,” Hochman says. “I love doing that. It gives you a real rubber-meets-the-road perspective.”

Now removed from that, he says, “I don’t miss Iraq. But I do miss the work. I miss catching bad guys – the kind of people who use kids and women to do their dirty work… and I miss the professionalism of the guys. That’s what keeps the world safe.”

After finishing his contract in Iraq, Hochman was offered the opportunity to do the same kinds of things in Afghanistan, but declined. It was time, he says, to come to Israel.

“I HAVEN’T been the best Jew as far as going to synagogue, but I have always been very Jewish and very pro-Israel. I have always been interested in making aliya and living here – and here I am.”

Hochman’s connection to Israel has been professional, with visits here with law enforcement and counterterrorism delegations in the ’90s through 2007.

“Actually,” he says, “after one trip here in the mid-90s, I wanted to make aliya and be a cop here – but Israel can not recruit foreign government workers for government positions here, so I’d have to start over. There was no ‘support basket’ for new [Western] immigrants then like there is now, so it didn’t make sense to come then.”

Long before that, in the late ’70s, Hochman had spent a few months in Israel, together with his family. His father, an engineer, built a wire harnessing factory here for an Israeli company that made battery cables and jumper cables.

His connection goes even further back, though. Hochman still recalls the awe with which, as a young boy, he greeted Israeli helicopter pilots who had come to Alabama’s Fort Rucker for training, and who would spend weekends at the Hochman home.

“Those guys are all retired colonels now,” he says. “They’re something of a friends network for me.”

The pilots can’t help with Hochman with ulpan, or with the annoying bureaucratic errands that all immigrants must complete, or with the wait for his few belongings from New Orleans to arrive. But now, as he searches for an apartment to call home and looks back on an action-packed career, Hochman has no regrets about where he’s been, or where he’s come.

“I had many goals at 17,” Hochman says. “I wanted to be an infantryman in the Marines, a law enforcement officer, a tactical (SWAT) operator, a detective, a supervisor, a part of the federal government. An I wanted, one day, to move to Israel. So of every dream I’ve ever had, almost every one has been fulfilled. The only thing I’ve ever wanted that I haven’t had yet,” he says, “is a wife and a child… and who knows?”

Hochman knows that, of all the challenges he has faced, learning Hebrew might prove to be the toughest. And he is concerned about not finding employment matching his experience and qualifications.

“I’m hoping that someone in Israel recognizes that I could be of service,” he says modestly. “I mean, I’m sure I can learn something. You can always learn. Maybe I can adapt some of the things that I’ve done to things here, and eventually teach a synthesis of those methods to some people in the States.”

No matter what, Hochman promises, you won’t catch him lounging endlessly on the beach or packing up and heading back to the bayou.

“I am determined,” he says, “to make it here.”

Explaining war

“Let the general in,” she says with a smile.

The Armored Corps brigade commander is tall and broad-shouldered, radiating experience and machismo with a trim grey beard covering a strong jaw. He’s the third general to come to this office this week seeking guidance.

The woman sitting behind the desk is several years his junior and a few ranks below him, too – yet when the brigade commander sits down, it is Avital Leibovich who is giving the orders. Fox News wants an interview with a senior officer who can explain what happened in the alleyways of Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, and it is Leibovich’s job to make sure the journalists hear what the IDF Spokesman wants them to hear.

“Every question they ask you, answer with an example from the field. Describe what you have seen with your own eyes, what you and your soldiers have experienced. Be as descriptive as possible,” she says.

“It bothers me that they’re talking about soldiers abusing Palestinians (during the operation), wrecking homes and whatnot,” the general says. “For every ugly story like that, I can give two stories that are the total opposite. I’m talking about reservists sending letters of apology to the families whose homes they commandeered, sending them money and leaving them food, that sort of thing.”

Leibovich looks the commander in the eye. “That’s exactly what they need to hear,” she says.

And now he’s ready to go.

This is today’s IDF: coordinated, rehearsed, media savvy. Perhaps even more significantly, it is an army in which its spokesmen play a larger role than ever before – for better and for worse.

THE MEDIUM is the message, as communications theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said. Just in case, though, the IDF Spokesman’s Office now controls both. The foreign press liaison unit, as the face and voice of Israel’s army to the entire world, is the gateway through which information flows (or, often, does not flow), and it has transformed from something of an afterthought into a major part of the military’s arsenal. As wars are increasingly fought on the virtual battlegrounds of television and the Internet, the soldiers of the IDF Spokesman’s foreign media liaison unit are a new breed of pressed-uniform commandos.

Leibovich’s highly motivated crew includes recent immigrants like Lee Hiromoto, a 26-year-old Yale graduate from Hawaii, Harvard graduate Arie Hasit, 25, and Aliza Landes, 26, a McGill grad.

“The North American desk must be one of the best educated units in the IDF,” Landes says only half-jokingly.

It was Landes and Hiromoto who came up with the idea, a day into the fighting of Operation Cast Lead at the end of December, to launch a youtube channel with material from the IDF Spokesman’s Office. It quickly became the most viewed channel in the world.

Here, initiative is the name of the game. Another recent immigrant on Leibovich’s staff of 20, Devora, called up one of the top military journalists in her native Belgium and offered to introduce him to Belgian Jews serving in combat units. He’s due in Israel soon to produce a lengthy feature for television that will be distributed across Europe.

“We’re proactive. We no longer wait for someone to come to us with a request, we are now the initiators. We suggest stories to journalists, instead of the other way around,” says Leibovich, who was just promoted to lieutenant-colonel. “Since each area has its own unique characteristics, and its specific areas of interest, we provide each ‘audience’ with what it needs,” she adds. “We tailor information and stories for North America, for Europe, for Russian-language media, for Arabic media, and for Latin America and the Far East.”

Whereas interaction with the Spokesman’s Office once meant long delays and garbled armyspeak, there is now a greater focus on productivity and efficiency, of providing what journalists need.

“I send out SMS messages to 400 reporters each day,” Leibovich says. “If someone wants to know how many Kassams fell in 2008, they can call me and get an answer within five minutes.”

And if the phone is busy, journalists can simply pop in. After several years based in Tel Aviv, the foreign press liaison unit returned to Jerusalem a few months ago – setting up shop in the Jerusalem Capital Studios building that houses the offices of some of the most important foreign media companies.

“The fact that we’re here at JCS is significant,” Leibovich says. “As soon as something happens, we can respond and brief them immediately. So they don’t have to start running around, calling up people in Gaza, asking, ‘What’s going on? What are you hearing? What can you report?’ We tell them, ‘We’re attacking here and here, because Hamas did this and this.’ They get all the information they need from us. So there’s much less spin.”

“The IDF is very adept at ensuring that its message gets out there, and gets out there quickly – and I don’t say that as a smart-ass remark,” says ABC Australia correspondent Ben Knight.

“During the war, it didn’t take much effort to get people into the office at short notice and hear their side of things. We never wanted for comment from the IDF, and we never had to wait too long. So they are obviously very well aware of the importance of doing it and very well practiced at getting their point of view out there. The Australian army does things quite differently, I can tell you that.”

WHERE THE unit once was distant, today it seeks out contact with foreign correspondents.

“I have learned that if you don’t take a journalist out to see things with his own eyes, you just won’t get through to him,” Leibovich says. “But once you do…!”

One example of the positive effects of taking journalists into the field has been in coverage of the West Bank security barrier. In its early days, inefficiency at the roadblocks and transfer points meant lengthy waits, exposed to the weather, for Palestinians. More recently, improvements in procedures and infrastructure have significantly eased the situation, and showing that to the world helps reduce pressure on Israel.

“Back in 2003, all you saw were stories about the unbearable wait at roadblocks and all that. But things are so much better now, so much more efficient,” she says. “I take journalists out there all the time to inspect roadblocks. I tell them, ‘However long you want to wait here, I’ll wait with you.’ So they stay there for two and three hours, and they can’t believe what they see – that it only takes a few seconds to check a car and let it through. One Scandinavian group waited hours in the sun, turning red, expecting to see trouble that never came.”

(Some journalists respond, however, that while the army is eager to show them these improvements, it is loath to let journalists review the multitude of roadblocks and barriers throughout the West Bank that restrict the movement of Palestinians.)

Whereas visiting journalists may have once been treated with some disdain, the IDF now sees them as vehicles for getting its message abroad.

“We’re dealing, in many cases, with foreign correspondents who are flying in from Washington, or from Zimbabwe, or from Finland. They’ve had so little time to digest what’s happening here – they’ve heard a little, they’ve read a little – so that any chance we have to show them what is really going on, and help them put it in context, we have to take it.”

Leibovich has plenty of stories to offer: articles on technological advances in the army, which portray the IDF as a professional organization; on krav maga; on the ongoing development of the Merkava IV tank; on the increase in women serving in combat roles; on new immigrants in uniform, etc. – any chance to present the IDF as something other than just a fighting machine.

“We believe that the IDF has nothing to hide,” Leibovich says. “I’m not taking journalists on secret missions or anything like that, but I have no reason to hide a squadron of fighter jets. So, just the other day I brought the staff of 30 media outlets to an air force base to see the technology used in our F-15Is, our attack helicopters, and more.”

The army has invested in improving the quality of photos it sends out, and it sends out many more of them now than before. During the Gaza war, it made colorful, readable maps available to its reservists who escorted foreign journalists, so they could appreciate the seriousness of the rocket threat to the western Negev. And every morning, Leibovich sends out a report on the amount of humanitarian aid the army allows into Gaza. In the information war, then, the IDF is holding its own.

“We showed Palestinians setting up rocket launchers next to schools, or using civilian buildings as weapons storage facilities,” Leibovich says. “What did the other side show, except for people with their faces covered, making statements?”

The unit doesn’t take its work for granted, though, monitoring the foreign press to measure the tone of coverage on the IDF and to see whether the army’s perspective is reflected in that coverage. Soldiers even scan blogs, twitter, and all manner of new media to gauge the effectiveness of their work.

“I want to know whether our message got through,” Leibovich says. “If we’re trying to get across that we’re not targeting innocent civilians, for example, I want to see that that message comes through in the media.”

During the war, Leibovich enlisted the help of those outside the Spokesman’s Office who could make Israel’s case credibly.

“It’s very important for us to have commanders tell the stories of what they experienced personally,” she says. “Also, we had briefings almost every day, with an artillery expert, or an expert on weapons and international law. It wasn’t me speaking, it was outside experts. After that, when you read the wires, you read the quotes of those experts.”

Despite the experts, and the photos, and the SMS messages and the maps, however, there were still plenty of media outlets that chose not to present those materials.

“You know,” Leibovich says with a sigh, “sometimes there are correspondents here who ‘get it’ and file fair stories, but their editors back home change the stories. I can only send out the information, I can’t make them use it,” she says. “But I’m not going to just throw up my hands and give up. We’re not defeatists.”

NO, THERE are no defeatists in Leibovich’s office. But, for all the improvements in the functioning of the IDF Spokesman’s Office, there remain certain elements that are self-defeating. Take IDF Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Avi Benayahu, for example. At a toast with foreign journalists shortly before Pessah, celebrating the liaison unit’s move to the JCS building, Benayahu gave a speech that was more a lecture on the evils of Hamas than a welcome speech to professional journalists. He talked at the journalists, not to them, and his tone suggested he sees himself not as the “national explainer” that the popular former IDF spokesman Nachman Shai was, but as the army’s chief propagandist.

The journalists largely ignored Benayahu anyway, instead sharing with each other their frustrations about his unit’s apologetics, denials, and stonewalling on sensitive issues. It was just one sign of how, despite doing many other things right, the army still doesn’t completely “get it,” either.

While the world saw images of deprivation in Gaza, Benayahu and others insisted that there was no humanitarian crisis there.

“Of course there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza!” Leibovich says, incredulously. “Look, there’s a difference between having only pita to eat but at least having something to eat, and having nothing at all. Now, lots of trucks are going into Gaza every day – every day – with humanitarian aid…”

For European viewers sympathetic to the Palestinians, though, answering the cry, “It’s terrible there!” with the angry retort, “No, it’s not terrible, it’s only very bad” does not help Israel’s case.

What would help is more photos of terrorists operating in civilian areas – photos that the IDF had in spades both before and during Operation Cast Lead, but failed to release in time.

“I can tell you that our response time this time around, in comparison to the Second Lebanon War, was vastly improved,” Leibovich counters. “During the Gaza war, we distributed video four times a day.”

As the death toll in Gaza climbed, and Palestinians claimed most of the dead had been innocent civilians, the IDF countered that the vast majority had indeed been involved in the fighting or members of armed groups. Yet, even when it later produced a report claiming the final death toll was lower than the Palestinian figure by several hundred people, it refused to release the names on its list so journalists could investigate the differences between Israel’s claims and the Palestinians’.

The army’s response was essentially that identifying bodies was not its job. Its insistence on refuting Palestinian claims, but not substantiating its own, turned the death toll issue into a he said-she said argument that, ultimately, Israel lost.

Leibovich’s response – “The asymmetrical warfare that Hamas wages is not limited to the streets of Gaza. It extends to the press as well. In the end, the Palestinian narrative comes from unreliable sources” – typifies a “they’re wrong, and that’s the end of it” approach that makes many correspondents bristle.

Leibovich adds: “Our list of names went through a very lengthy verification process that included extensive intelligence gathering. We won’t release the names because we do not wish to harm our intelligence sources.”

Be that as it may, without the names, no journalist could take the IDF’s numbers at face value – although that’s exactly what the army expected of them. Of course, foreign journalists could have investigated on their own, had they been allowed into Gaza. But they weren’t. Despite the painful lessons from the spurious reports of a “massacre” in Jenin in 2002, Israel did not allow foreign journalists into the Gaza Strip during the fighting.

The ban was part of a general restriction on information, that came in response to the army’s much more open approach during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, and it damaged Israel in two ways: it deeply frustrated many foreign correspondents who might have been made to see the war from Israel’s perspective, and it left the reporting to Palestinian and Arab media stationed in Gaza. This, in turn, allowed those reporters to allege various Israeli war crimes that no Western media could later disprove.

As one correspondent, speaking to The Jerusalem Post on condition of anonymity, notes, “When the IDF keeps quiet, it gives the other side an advantage.”

CLEARLY, NOT all foreign journalists share the enthusiasm of ABC’s Knight. The IDF Spokesman’s Office, says the anonymous correspondent, “is terrible about getting us information.”

“Oh, sure,” he says, “they’ll call us up and offer us the chance to talk with the first female officer in the canine unit, or something like that. But when it comes to the army’s use of white phosphorous or war crimes [allegations] – nothing.”

Investigating claims, and sharing the results of those investigations openly and quickly, is another sore spot.

“I don’t say that the IDF is all pure and white, that we never do things that aren’t right. But when something happens, we admit it. We learn from it, and we make sure things get better,” Leibovich says. “Well,” answers a correspondent, “it’s a problem that they’re the ones investigating themselves. It seems like they never find themselves guilty of anything.”

That perception is inaccurate – but since perception is reality, the IDF needs to combat it better.

The controversy over war crimes allegations leveled at the IDF from within its own ranks illustrates the point. A few weeks after the fighting, two veterans of the conflict told others gathered at the Rabin Pre-Military Academy that their comrades had shot and killed unarmed women inside Gaza. It took the army several days to investigate the claims – and while they were ultimately exposed as false, they did tremendous damage in that time to the IDF’s mantra that it is the most moral army in the world.

Another complaint, says a journalist, is that access to senior officers is often highly restricted, “and when we can meet with them, they either don’t say anything of substance because the lawyer sitting next to them tells them not to, or they tell us things that become worthless as soon as they forbid us from revealing their identity.”

Another correspondent complains that the IDF is “very amateurish about important things,” such as providing findings of official investigations but forbidding all reference to them as such. “They just don’t seem to know about, or care about, our rules of attribution.”

Additionally, both note with frustration, stories about which they have inquired without receiving a response often turn up in the Hebrew press – and then, when they call for a comment on the Israeli reports, the IDF refuses to even acknowledge that the story has already been published.

“We understand that the army has to limit information based on security concerns,” says the first correspondent. “But so much of this has nothing to do with security. Too often, they’re hostile to us, or they act like they just don’t care about us.”

“Ultimately,” Leibovich answers, “the IDF is my client, not the media.”

That, of course, is absolutely true. The IDF Spokesman’s Office is tasked with furthering the interests of the army, and those interests are bound to conflict with the interests of journalists sometimes.

“We have to explain why we’re right, why we’re fighting,” Leibovich says with genuine conviction. “And we have to contend with the image of the Palestinian underdog versus us as the larger, stronger force. It isn’t easy, but we’re doing our best. And I promise, we’ll continue to get better.”

A lesson in Sri Lanka

For a few months already, government troops have been on the verge of ridding Sri Lanka of the island nation’s terrorist scourge, the Tamil Tigers. Now, it seems, they have done so.

Most of the world has ignored this 25-year-long conflict, and Israel is no exception. But now that this struggling island state has defeated one of the most accomplished terrorist and guerilla forces in modern history, it is imperative that every Western nation — and especially Israel — take great pains to study this development well.

The Tigers’ extinction is a resounding reality check for all those who have said that such a movement could not be defeated. Indeed, it was only after the rebels broke a truce that the Sri Lankan government decided to abandon its plan of managing the conflict and go for total victory that success became possible.

There is a profound lesson in this for Israel and its ill-fated strategy vis-a-vis Hamas: Pursue victory, and you shall get it. Pursue calm, and you shall never have it.

Like the notion of bringing Hamas to surrender is ridiculed as impossible, so too was the idea of defeating the Tigers of Tameel Elam once considered impossible. But no more. Today it is not folly to declare, “terrorism can be defeated!” It is folly to ignore such a declaration.

Mr. Smith challenges the pope

He’s enjoying lunch in the lobby of the Ramada Renaissance Hotel in Jerusalem, speaking casually but knowledgably about Jewish suffering. He’s wearing a “Shema Israel” pendant and recalling the “awe-inspiring” experience of visiting the “Kotel” (Western Wall) during a family to visit to Israel when he was 13. But Stephen D. Smith is not the typical Jewish tourist.

Smith, the son of a Methodist minister and a religious education teacher from Nottinghamshire, England, is the founder and director of the United Kingdom’s Holocaust Centre and a passionate advocate for Christian-Jewish relations. He is here to promote his latest project, No Going Back, a collection of essays directed at Pope Benedict XVI that Smith collected and co-edited for the occasion of the pope’s visit to the Holy Land.

The essays come from some three dozen Christians, Jews and Muslims from all over the world who answered the simple question, “If you had five minutes with Pope Benedict XVI, what would you say to him?” They reflect, Smith says, a great sense of concern that this papacy is much more hardline than that of John Paul II, and that the current pontiff’s conservative views on internal church matters are harming relations with the Jews.

In addition to the threat of Islamic extremism, the book focuses on concerns about three recent developments and what they mean for Christian-Jewish relations:

* The recent restoration of four excommunicated priests – especially Bishop Richard Williamson, whose anti-Semitic comments and Holocaust denial embarrassed the church and strained Vatican-Jewish relations.

* The Good Friday prayer, a rather negatively worded prayer for the conversion of the Jews that had been diluted in recent years, which Benedict XVI decreed may be restored to its earlier language.

* The advancement of the beatification process of World War II-era Pope Pius XII, whom Jewish groups claim did too little to combat or condemn the Holocaust.

“If a priest were excommunicated for consecrating gay marriage, he would not be accepted back into the fold. Yet a bishop who espouses anti-Semitism has been welcomed back into the fold,” Smith says, referring to Williamson. “So what message is the church trying to send? That gay marriage is not okay, but that anti-Semitism is okay?”

In light of all these events, Smith continues, “Views of this pope are forming as someone for whom fostering and enhancing Jewish-Christian relations are of less importance than in decades past. Our book… seeks to address these growing and legitimate concerns on His Holiness’s visit.”

“Many of our authors are people who sit between the communities; that is, they may be Catholics who are working positively on Jewish-Christian relations, or Jews working on engaging with Catholics. And when they see that kind of internal change going on, it sends all the wrong signals,” Smith says. “Because nothing that the church does internally is ever a purely internal matter.”

Smith, 42, has been delving into Christian-Jewish relations for two decades now. He studied Christian theology with an emphasis on Jewish studies and that, he says, is where he began to confront the issue of Christian anti-Semitism.

“I became extremely troubled by it,” he says, “especially because it didn’t seem like it was really being dealt with.”

So in 1995, Smith and his brother James built the Holocaust Center “to challenge Christians.”

Later, in response to the Rwandan genocide, he founded the Aegis trust. The organization educates about genocide, commemorates such atrocities and supports the victims of genocide.

He was also introduced to Carol Rittner, a Roman Catholic nun who is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, editor of various Holocaust journals and author of several books about the Holocaust.

“She focuses a lot on the nexus between Christian ethics and conflict resolution, and she’s quite demanding in her thinking on that,” Smith says.

The two teamed up with Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer in 2000 on the book The Holocaust and the Christian World.

Since then, and in particular since the passing of John Paul II, who guided the church to an unprecedented rapprochement with the Jewish world, Smith and Rittner have grown increasingly wary of the church’s conservative bent. That’s why they collaborated again on No Going Back.

“Just as Jews try to ‘build a fence around the Torah,’” Smith says, “Pope Benedict XVI appears to be trying to build a fence around the church. The church is saying, ‘This is who we are, and we’re going to wear it on our sleeves, and whatever anybody thinks about that, we don’t really care.’

“That’s the wrong signal to be giving – particularly in the Middle East,” Smith feels. “That doesn’t give Jewish partners any confidence. It certainly gives no right to be able to come and say, ‘Let’s all make peace and Israelis and Palestinians reconcile with each other.’”

If Benedict XVI does not make bold statements on anti-Semitism, Smith says, what remains will be merely “vacuous statements that will make people wonder what, if anything, the church has to offer.”

The pope did address the issue of Holocaust commemoration upon his arrival in Israel on Monday, saying, “It is right and fitting that, during my stay in Israel, I will have the opportunity to honor the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Shoah, and to pray that humanity will never again witness a crime of such magnitude.

“Sadly, anti-Semitism continues to rear its ugly head in many parts of the world. This is totally unacceptable,” he continued. “Every effort must be made to combat anti-Semitism wherever it is found.”

Those comments should go a long way toward soothing worries about the pope’s position in light of Williamson’s Holocaust denial. But the rest of the Christian world, Smith says, will still have to prove its resolve in the face of Islamist groups whose aims include the destruction of millions of Jews. As a man who has spent so much of his life raising awareness about the Holocaust, he is very worried that that danger is being overlooked.

“The big threat [of Jewish mass murder] is not past!” Smith says with great gravity. “I don’t think the Jewish people are past the threat of genocide at all. And the issue goes way beyond whether Iran obtains nuclear weapons that it can drop on Tel Aviv. The problem is the ideology of the Islamist groups around the world, for whom hatred of the Jews is a central tenet.

“People often say, ‘Well, this is a conflict between the state of Israel and other states, and Israel is strong, etc. But what people don’t appreciate is that the threat is not really against Israel, per se. It is against Jews, many of whom live in Israel. People conflate statehood and military conflict with a threat against people because of their ethnic background…”

“What were the four main elements in the Holocaust? A racial ideology; a target; the stated intent to harm that target, and the means to carry out that threat. The same pieces were in place in Rwanda. And they are in place with the Islamists, too – all, that is, except the means. And that is only so because they are not coordinated.”

In World War II Europe, Smith says, “churches protected their own institutional survival at the cost of their moral credibility.” He shutters to think the Christian world may let the same thing happen again.

Flights of fancy

Michael Domb was nervous, alright. There, thousands of feet in the air, he took the controls of the small commuter airplane for the first time. The adrenaline rush was overwhelming as he guided the little Cesna 172 for what felt like an eternity. But he kept his cool, knowing that if he was ever to pilot one of Israel’s F-16s, he would have to acquit himself well right away.

Afterward, back on the ground, Michael buzzed with excitement as he waited for a ride home – from Mom and Dad. He was, after all, only 12 years old.

“It’s kind of weird that I can fly a plane but I can’t drive a car,” the unusually mature and exceedingly polite teen told The Jerusalem Post with a laugh. He still has more than two years to wait before hitting the highway on his own – even though he has earned his private pilot’s license, and will take his first solo flight next month when he turns 14. All before he has started high school.

Michael got his start when his uncle, also a pilot, let him tag along on flights.

“Mike would come home and say, ‘Hey, I got to take the controls!’ We didn’t believe it at first, but then we realized he was actually flying the plane,” said his mother, Liz, who is the music director at the Fieldstone Day School here Michael studies.

Soaring over the skies of Toronto, Domb said, was addicting. “Flying is something that hooks onto you and stays with you.”

After that maiden flight, Michael pleaded with his parents to let him study to be a pilot.

“At first it didn’t sound like the right thing for a 12-year-old to do,” said Michael’s father, Uriel, an Israeli-born aerospace expert. “He had gone sailing before and I thought that was fine, but flying seemed a little too high, a little too far and way too early. But he was persistent.”

“With certain kids, you just don’t bother saying no,” Liz explained. “Michael is like that. He was the kid on rollerblades at age three.”

Even so, said Uriel, “We thought he would give it up after one or two times. Instead, he only wanted to do it more.”

Ground school took about a year, Michael said, noting that he got some tutoring for the physics and some of the other studies. Upon graduating – he finished at the top of his class – he was initially assigned to fly out of Buttonville Municipal Airport, then was transferred to Markham Airport.

“The squadron at Markham is considered a high-ranking squadron,” he explained. “It mostly consists of older pilots working toward their commercial license. There are a lot of Indian pilots there and quite a few Israelis.”

The Israelis, he said, “have their own approach to flying. It’s a much smoother way, really; they fly better than most of the pilots training here. And their respect for safety is tremendous.”

Even better, Michael said, the IAF veterans “have been sharing a bunch of stories with me. They treat me as one of the gang. As long as you can fly well, you’re one of the gang. So I’m trying to get some ‘protektzia.’”

Maybe it’s working: On a visit to family here just before Pessah, Michael was invited to take a spin in one of the IAF’s training planes. (The flight was cancelled due to an alert in the North, but officers showed him around the Ramat David air force base.)

Domb has made other, deeper connections in Israel, too. While he was studying at a boarding school outside Binyamina last year, Michael spent a lot of time visiting the Stuckleman family in the Jezreel Valley yishuv of Timrat. The Stuckelmans’ son Gilad had grown close to the Dombs while traveling, working and teaching Hebrew in Canada following his military service. When Gilad returned to Israel for the Second Lebanon War and fell in battle, it strengthened Domb’s bond with the Stuckelmans.

“Michael really sees us as family,” said Gilad’s younger brother Yair, adding, “He’s very curious – he wants to learn about everything. He’s very interested in learning about Israel, especially. In fact, he knows more than most Israelis his age!”

Domb came to Israel for his bar mitzva, then stayed at the boarding school to sharpen his Hebrew skills and get used to everyday life here, hoping to prepare for his aliya after high school.

“Even though I’ve been to Israel many times throughout my childhood, when you move there, and actually get into your real life routine, it’s very different,” he said. “After staying at the school for a while, I didn’t like it, and returned to Canada. I got to a point where I wasn’t really learning more… and I realized that I really wanted to be at home.”

One of the difficulties, Michael said, was the forced break from flying.

“I talked to a lot of flying schools in Israel,” he said, “but by law, you can’t fly there until you’re 17.”

To fill that gap, he raced on the Haifa sailing team. Sailing, though, is just one of Michael’s hobbies, which also include snowboarding and playing the guitar.

“It’s hard to balance everything, but it does work out,” he said. “You just have to learn how to balance things and manage your time.”

And your finances, too.

“Flying is quite expensive,” Michael said, “about $200 an hour. I fly twice a month, which works out to about two hours a month, or $400-$500 a month. My parents weren’t going to pay for that, so I got a job fueling and dispatching aircraft at Markham. That brings in some money, plus I get a discount on my flight time.”

The bigger cost is the time involved. “For every hour in the air, I can spend up to five hours training and preparing on the ground. It’s a lot of time and a lot of work. I do it,” he said, “because I really love flying.”

And what he loves most about flying, he said, is aerobatics – “flying extremely fast, upside down, pulling 2 or 3 Gs.” (Yes, the kid has the lingo down pat.)

“Some people don’t like it,” Michael added. “I mean, I’ve seen lots of people come in for their first flights, and I can tell you that not everyone enjoys it. I understand that, too. It can be nauseating. You’re cramped into a very small space. You’re extremely close to the instructor in a cockpit that is very small.

“Also,” he continued, “There’s very little room for error. It takes a lot of time to build a feel for the airplane. You have to develop fine motor skills, learning how to make your hands and feet work together. You have to make everything work smoothly. It takes a lot of practice. You have to adjust your body to be able to work in tough conditions.”

Then there are the tough conditions that the planes face.

“Winter takes a toll on small planes especially,” Michael said, and all the more so in frigid Canada. “Recently we had ice build-up on our airplane and had to make an emergency landing.”

Michael spends a lot of time practicing spins, emergency procedures, takeoffs and landings. The highest he has flown has been 6,000 feet and, yes, he sometimes takes his friends for flights.

“Early on, I wouldn’t watch him fly,” said Liz. “It was only recently that I dared to watch. And the first time I saw him go up in the air, I thought I would die… Actually, his instructor jokes that he’s the one who should be getting the attention, as he’s the one who has to fly with a kid!”

Domb responds to the danger of flying by shrugging off fear and preparing thoroughly. Handling pressure and aiming high, though, seem to be family traits. His sister was accepted to Harvard at 16. His uncle, the pilot, was accepted to the prestigious Juliard School as a musical child prodigy, who later performed as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic symphony orchestra at the age of 15.

Domb’s father worked for NASA on the first lunar landing and on the Apollo missions before moving into satellite technology. Uriel helped Canada launch its first communications satellite and worked on Israel’s Ofek and Amos satellites, among others; “I’ve worked on probably 50% of the satellites launched around the world by now,” he said.

“Michael doesn’t seem to feel the pressure to be exceptional,” his mother said. “But he feels sense of obligation. I mean that not just in his desire to serve in the Israeli air force, but the sense that if he has a talent, he has to use it.”

Liz’s only concern is what challenge her son will pursue next. “He’s been talking about skydiving,” she noted with trepidation. “Flying, by contrast, doesn’t seem so bad.”

Durban II? Yawn…

For the record, I don’t care one whit about Durban II. What I do care about is Bushehr, Natanz and Isfahan. Everything else is just a sideshow, and a waste of time.

No ‘poultry’ matter

In Dubi Lang’s and Yudke Friedman’s ideal world, every red-blooded Israeli would be obsessed with breasts. Turkey breasts, that is.

Lang and Friedman are the chief economist and the chief veterinarian, respectively, for Ramit, part of the conglomerate that effectively controls 80 percent of the poultry market in Israel. And while the situation at Ramit isn’t nearly as bad, for example, as it is at Off Ha’emek – the chicken slaughterhouse in Galilee that has made headlines in recent days for teetering on the brink of collapse thanks to millions of shekels in debts that the faltering business can’t repay – they aren’t encouraging, either. The turkey industry in general, according to Ramit CEO Boaz Shkedy, is facing “an unprecedented crisis.”

The trouble is a combination of the global recession and the local factors that make the Israeli market unique.

For years, Israel has led the world in per-capita consumption of turkey meat. The contest hasn’t even been close. Whereas Israelis consume an average of more than 20 kg. of turkey meat per year, the next-highest consumers, Americans, eat just under 8 kg. per person. The same goes for turkey as a percentage of poultry consumed: Here, the figure is more than 20 percent, while in the US that figure stands at roughly 15%, and in Europe it is only about 5%.

That the US would rank so high is not surprising, given that North America is the turkey’s place of origin. The custom of serving a whole turkey for Thanksgiving (and, for some, on Christmas as well) also accounts for a significant amount of annual sales. No other country or region can match that demand.

So it is surprising that Israel outranks America, given that it is all but free of those winter holiday turkey-eating customs (except, of course, for the small number of American immigrants who preserve their Thanksgiving culinary tradition with special orders for whole turkeys) and the bird had to be imported to, well, take off here.

The explanation for the enigma is manifold. A dearth of grazing land relegates cattle raising to just a small business; the majority of beef consumed is raised and slaughtered overseas, mostly in South America. Fish is commonly consumed, but not as much as meat, by weight. And since pork consumption is extremely low in this Jewish and Muslim country, poultry dominates the meat-eater’s chart.

There’s something else, though, that makes our consumption of turkey meat peculiar: We eat the dark meat. Whereas elsewhere the part of the turkey most likely to find its way to the plate is the breast, here it is the fattier red meat portions that are most often consumed. It is also “hidden,” in the sense that it appears not as steaks or as strips, like chicken, but primarily as deli meat or as shwarma. The turkey business has soared here, then, thanks to pastrami sandwiches and the ubiquitous shwarma stands that dot every bus station and busy street.

“We eat turkey all the time, not just around holidays, but we’re also one of the few places in the world where we eat turkey in pieces,” Friedman explains. “Because we eat the dark meat to such a high degree, there is less of a premium on the white meat of the breast – which is why we export so much of the breasts. Generally speaking, we export the breasts to Europe. [Israel exported 3,000 tons of turkey breast meat to the EU in 2005.] So, now there is a crisis because the global economic downturn means less exporting.”

“And when the export falls, the price of breast meat domestically falls, because there’s more supply in the market. So the economic damage comes in both directions,” adds Lang.

SO, SINCE the Israeli market relies overwhelmingly on the red-meat parts of the bird, there is now too much “white” turkey meat in the domestic market. This drop in demand from Europe hits especially hard, too, because breast meat makes up the largest portion of the weight of turkey products that are consumed. And those turkey breasts are extra large.

“Because we don’t put a whole bird in the oven, our turkeys are larger than the average American turkey,” Friedman explains.

Turkeys have been bred to be so big that the males – some as massive as 30 kilos, Friedman says – can no longer mate successfully, and fertilization must be done in vitro. “In the wild,” the veterinarian notes, “male turkeys only grow to about 5 kilos. Here they are slaughtered at 17 kilos and beyond, well into the 20-kilo range.”

That time is quickly approaching for some 7,500 birds at David Hilman’s farm in Ein Irron, where he has been raising turkeys since 1993. At 16 weeks, the birds weigh about 17 kg each. Adding about a kilo a week, they’re close to the weight of 18-20 kilos they’ll reach before being sent to slaughter for a glatt kosher food company.

Ironically situated between a cemetery and the Nirvana plant nursery, Hilman’s turkeys congregate in their enclosure in a field of blossoming peach trees. He comes to check on them several times a day, making sure they’re getting enough food and water to keep growing apace.

Dressed in a white full-body jumpsuit and rubber boots, Hilman enters the enclosure and is greeted with a raucous round of “singing” from the birds. “Gobble, gobble” doesn’t do justice to the calls, which are more of an exuberant “gerugadurgle-durgle-durgle!” While the serenade is nice, Hilman’s focus is on checking the turkeys for signs of illness or injury.

“They’ll fight each other,” he says. “They’re cannibals, just like us!”

Hilman is counting on his diligence, and his luck, seeing him through this uncertain period. He has already had the good fortune that, when bird flu struck flocks here three years ago, his farm was outside the infection radius.

That was just one of two blows that smacked the poultry industry in 2006, with the bird flu outbreak costing the poultry industry more than NIS 10 million in losses due to forced culls. (”Actually, we were very fortunate to have gotten hold of that situation pretty quickly,” Lang says.) There was also a final decision in the High Court of Justice to enforce a ban on force-feeding geese, shutting down a NIS 150 million foie gras industry that was the third-largest in the world.

Israeli attempts to establish markets for more exotic birds, such as ostrich and quail, have met with only limited success, so the turkey is not alone in facing difficulties. More to the point, the broiler chicken continues to pull ahead as the undisputed poultry king, “and it’s like that all over the world,” Friedman says.

So what can turkey farmers do to ensure their product’s survival?

The Egg and Poultry Board is betting on better marketing, while farmers are aiming for greater efficiency.

TURKEY BREAST is hailed by health professionals because it is very low in sodium, fat and cholesterol, and high in protein. But as “chicken wars” in the supermarkets drive down prices for broilers, and as eating habits move away from frozen chicken and toward fresh chickens and prepared chicken products, fresh turkey meat is being overshadowed. There is also no long-standing tradition like chicken soup and chicken schnitzel to make turkey the staple that chicken is.

“Turkey’s nutritional benefits are widely acknowledged, but we need to emphasize that it can be as good to cook with as chicken. To that end, we are now distributing pamphlets with recipes and serving suggestions,” says Egg and Poultry Board spokeswoman Ruthy Pugatch.

“Even though turkey meat is consumed at a very high rate in Israel, it still suffers from certain stigmas that we are working to overcome. Until now we have counted on shwarma and exports, but now we realize that we need to develop a broader market than just pastramis and sausages.”

Farmers like Hilman, who earn roughly half a shekel for every kilo their turkeys weigh, are looking to maximize their return and minimize their costs. Automated feeding apparatuses keep Hilman’s birds fed and watered. He can monitor their growth simply by pressing a button on a panel attached to a massive plate under the four-dunam (one acre) enclosure; he can tell by the weight whether the birds are developing apace, and adjust their food and water accordingly.

“It’s quite advanced,” says Lang, who has been working with Hilman for years. “And this farm is actually considered outdated by current standards. Modern facilities are much bigger and much, much more hi-tech.”

Technology’s most significant application is in the feed supplied to farmers. Firstly, it has become so nutritious that birds grow much faster now than they used to. When Friedman made aliya from South Africa some 35 years ago, he says, chickens took nine weeks to reach their slaughtering weight of 1.5-2 kilos. Now it takes just six weeks, and similar improvements have been seen in turkeys.

More nutritious feed means shorter growth cycles, which means more birds sold. But it also means that less feed is needed, and that is another important saving. Whereas chickens require less than 2 kg. of feed for every kilo of meat sold, turkeys need close to 3 kg. – but that is much less of a disparity than was the case in the past, Friedman says. The bottom line is that farmers are now able to raise larger birds for less.

ADDITIONALLY, THE quality of feed is being improved and ensured through filtering and treatment processes that Friedman and Lang liken to the “clean room” facilities at microchip manufacturers. Next door to their offices stands a poultry feed “clean facility” – one of few like it in the world, they boast – that treats feed to keep it free of bacteria and disease that could decimate flocks.

“It’s a very strict biosecurity facility,” Friedman says, describing multiple layers of precautionary measures observed at the plant. “If we want to avoid problems like bird flu and other illnesses, we have to make sure the food is very, very, very clean. Because if the birds eat something contaminated, they will be contaminated.

“Biosecurity means protecting your investment. If a flock dies of an illness, that’s a lot of money lost.”

The final piece to the puzzle is a more sophisticated business model, including streamlining and integration.

“Thirty years ago,” says Lang on the way out of Hilman’s farm, “there were 1,200 turkey farmers in this country. Now, there are fewer than 100, and production is slightly higher than it was back then.

“Today it’s mostly large companies, using more efficient methods. And they’re all integrated. Tnuva, Tirat Zvi, everyone has a deal worked out to connect their businesses. The days of Farmer Brown tending his chicks are over.”

As long as the days of Farmer Hilman (and the big companies, too) aren’t over as well. Turkey meat is a NIS 500 million-a-year industry, and one that a slow economy can’t afford to lose. While Americans had the promise of “a chicken in every pot” during the Great Depression, Israeli farmers will be anxious to see whether “a turkey in every oven” – or at least a breast in every pita – is a slogan that will fly.

The pen is mightier…

Uh-oh. The ADL is hysterical about this political cartoon by Pat Oliphant that depicts Israeli soldiers as headless Zio-Nazis, rolling over innocent women and children in Gaza. Prepare for the usual “You can’t criticize Israel without being labelled an anti-Semite” nonsense.

The ADL is right, obviously. This cartoon is terrible. But I’ve seen this kind of thing in American newspapers, European newspapers and, of course, Arab newspapers too many times before to be shocked. In fact, I have to say, this particular cartoon is poorly drawn and rather uncreative. This has been done so many times before, and so much “better,” so to speak.

Regarding the content, it stems from this report in Haaretz, according to which veterans of Operation Cast Lead purposely shot at non-combatants. This story has caught on quickly and been embraced with the zeal you might expect from people who are all to eager to envision Israel’s army as being full of jack-booted, blood-thirsty automatons happy to carry out genocide against the poor, helpless, peace-loving innocents who struggle in their spiritual quest for Palestinian self-determination. (Am I laying it on too thick?)

The only problem is that the story is bogus. The soldiers who relayed these harrowing tales of cold-blooded war crimes didn’t actually witness them, it turns out, but were only reporting events they heard had taken place. Once confronted, they even admitted as much. And the head of the academy where these stories were first told is an extreme left-winger whose own writings show a distorted and biased belief that his own army is immoral; it has been suggested, in so many words, that the soldiers in attendance were goaded into telling these tales by this man, or offered them because they thought such reports would please him.

Nonetheless, the bottom line is that these atrocities never happened… but now that they have been immortalized by Oliphant, what does that matter? Those who wanted to believe that the IDF was evil before the cartoon will continue to believe it even after it has been shown to be a lie — probably because they will never bother to read the refutations, or to accept them if they do read them. Nor will they bother to read the accounts of soldiers sending letters of apology and money to Gazans whose homes they commandeered during the raid, or any number of other accounts that reveal an IDF much, much different than the one portrayed in Oliphant’s cartoon.

If Oliphant had any integrity, in fact, he would make some minor adjustments to his cartoon: This time, a headless cartoonist hoisting a pen rather than a sword would push, not a Star of David but whatever symbol represents the pro-Palestinian liberal agenda, steamrolling an Israeli soldier while he consults the strict code of conduct by which he must abide to determine his response to the incoming threat.

I’m not holding my breath.

One lie about two states

Countless times in the past few weeks, foreign reporters and commentators have stated, as fact, that Binyamin Netanyahu is not committed to the two-state solution. That’s bogus.

Here is an exerpt from the speech that Netanyahu delivered to Congress shortly after he won the prime ministership in 1996:

Perhaps our most demanding joint effort has been the endless quest to achieve peace and stability for Israel and its Arab neighbors. American presidents have joined successive Israeli governments in an untiring effort to attain this peace.

The first historic breakthrough was led by Prime Minister Begin and Presidents Carter and Sadat at Camp David. The most recent success was our pact with Jordan under the auspices of President Clinton. These efforts, I believe, are clear proof of our intentions and our direction. We want peace. We want peace with all our neighbors. We have no quarrel with them which cannot be resolved by peaceful means. Nor, I must say, do we have a quarrel with Islam. We reject the thesis of an inevitable clash of civilizations. We do not subscribe to the idea that Islam has replaced Communism as the new rival of the West, because our conflict is specific. It is with those militant fanatics who pervert the central tenets of a great faith towards violence and world domination. Our hand is stretched in peace to all who would grasp it. We don’t care about their religion. We don’t care about their national identity. We don’t care about their ideological belief. We care about peace, and our hand is stretched out to peace.

Every Israeli wants peace. I don’t think there is a people who has yearned, prayed and sacrificed more for peace than we have. There is not a family in Israel that has not suffered the unbearable agony of war and, directly or indirectly, the excruciating, ever-lasting pain of grief. The mandate we have received from the people of Israel is to continue the search for an end to wars and an end to grief. I promise you: We are going to live up to this mandate. We will continue the quest for peace, and, to this end, we are ready to resume negotiations with the Palestinian Authority on the implementation of our Interim Agreement.

I want to say something about agreements. Some of you speak Latin, or at least studied Latin. “Pacta sunt servanta” – we believe agreements are made to be kept. This is our policy, and we expect the Palestinian side to abide by its commitments. On this basis, we will be prepared to begin final status negotiations as well.

That was not the first time that he made such statements, and it was not the last. His remarks are not hidden, nor are they kept solely in Hebrew. Anyone willing to do 5 minutes of research can find them. Which means that anyone who says Netanyahu is not committed to the creation of a Palestinian state is either a fool, or a liar.