Shoot first… don’t ask questions later

In the latest confirmation of my report on the Egypt-Israel border situation, Egyptian border guards on Tuesday shot dead a Sudanese man trying to cross into Israel.

The AP report:

Egyptian border guards kill Sudanese migrant in Sinai

 

RAFAH, Egypt: An Egyptian health official says border guards have killed a Sudanese migrant who was allegedly trying to cross illegally into Israel. Imad Kharboush of El-Arish Hospital says 29-year-old Mohammed Tahir Mersal died in the hospital Tuesday of a gunshot wound.

 

Another Sudanese migrant, Al-Tayeb Adam, says the guards fired in the air as he, Mersal and three others were trying to cross into Israel. Adam says Mersal was shot when he continued to flee to the border fence. Adam says he and the other men surrendered and were later arrested at the hospital.

 

He says each migrant paid $500 to human traffickers for shelter in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and a ride to the Israeli border. He says they were seeking political asylum and jobs in Israel.

…Of course, no one will lodge a complaint with the UN over gross violations of human rights, as they would do if it had been Israelis who had shot the man.

Attention JMart shoppers…

In America, most major supermarkets these days urge you to register for a card that tracks your purchases, helping the store learn your shopping preferences so they can market various items directly to you. If your grocery cart is full of potato chips, for example, don’t be surprised to receive a coupon for snacks when you finish paying at the register.

 

In Israel, the supermarkets have this system only halfway figured out. Membership cards and credit cards offering discounts on purchases at this store or that are commonplace… but the direct marketing aspect is still a bit, well, indirect. For more than a year at one particular supermarket chain, for example, every shopper received a coupon upon checkout for a discount on a Pizza Hut order.

 

The coupon I received today, however, was the kind of thing you only see in Israel. It read:

 

To anyone who is interested:

A Chabad house has been opened above this store.

Mezuzot and tefillin checked for a minimal price

Bar mitzvah preparations

Help with any issue in Judaism

Open Sunday thru Thursday 1 p.m.-6 p.m.

Friday 10:30 a.m.-2 p.m.

 

…I couldn’t help but smile.

Tools for life

Friday, May 30, 2008

 

 

WEST BLOOMFIELD, Michigan – From the outside, the Friendship Circle building is impressive. From the inside, it’s an absolute marvel.

 

Nestled in a clearing in the woods of this Detroit suburb, the 2,000-square meter facility is the biggest draw in the area for children with special needs – and a dream come true for the Chabad hassidim who conceived of the groundbreaking building.

 

Friendship Circle is a wonderland for kids who have attention deficit disorders, autism, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy – anybody who feels awkward and “anybody,” says founder Bassie Shemtov, “who just needs a friend.”

 

What separates this project from the standard special needs care is not so much the karaoke, the martial arts classes, the laser tag parties or even the Hanukkah carnival. It is, first and foremost, the bond between the “guests,” as Shemtov calls them, and the young volunteers who offer them their friendship.

 

“I love to stand in the lobby when the kids come in and see how they and the volunteers react to each other,” she says. “I love to see the special needs kids just light up… and the joy in the volunteer’s eyes, to see how excited they are to be with their child. How could you not smile when you see someone who loves you so much?”

 

The kids interact in a state-of-the-art facility designed to wow them. There’s a room where they can play musical instruments or take dance classes; a computer room (with touch screens for kids with limited motor skills) with interactive games that encourage the children’s creativity; an art room; a tactile room, a gross motor skills room with therapeutic hanging swings, padded walls and floor and a rock climbing wall.

 

There is a water room featuring a variety of spigots, showerheads, sprinkler systems and taps provides water play for children – including a system that can imitate rain and the sound of thunder, to help anxious children overcome their fear of storms. A relaxation room based on the Scandinavian “snoezelen” model, featuring soothing multisensory stimulation (such as strings of fiber optic cables with multicolored lights, pillows and soft music), that helps those with special needs de-stress.

 

A gymnasium offers basketball courts, a large trampoline and a “cheese pit” of foam rubber chunks that practically demands kids jump into it. A mini apartment – with full-service kitchen – and a laundry room allow children to practice housekeeping skills they’ll need to function on their own. All the rooms have windows that allow parents and professional caregivers to keep tabs on the children.

When they arrive, the kids choose a room to go to with their buddy, typically spending about half an hour there. When they come back, they can choose any other room that is available.

 

One lounge caters to the teenage volunteers, with a pool table, video games and a slushee machine. Another lounge – more subdued, and featuring coffee instead of slushees – offers a quiet get-away for the adult volunteers and the parents of the special needs children.

 

DOWNSTAIRS IS LIFETOWN, a unique activity “village” that uses role play to help special needs kids develop life skills they need outside of protective environments. Leading a tour of the 450-square meter “indoor city,” Shemtov points out the various attractions that the children can visit.

 

There’s the bank, where children are given a few dollars to spend; the pet store, where they learn to care for animals; the “medical center,” where adult volunteers help the kids get accustomed to visiting the dentist and having a doctor weigh them, examine their eyesight, etc.; the movie theater, where they can catch a film while overcoming their fear of the dark; the hairstyling salon and beauty parlor, which specializes in helping children sensitive to touch become accustomed to the grooming services the rest of us take for granted; the arts and crafts workshop; the library, which lets them check out books; the corner store, and the always popular ice cream cart. All are sponsored by local businesses.

 

Kids can ride safety bicycles around a “street” that runs through the village – but they have to beware, because if they don’t obey the traffic signals, a volunteer “traffic cop” will give them a “ticket.”

 

“These are such important skills for kids to have,” Shemtov says, stopping under the huge tree at the center of the village that stretches up into the lobby, two stories above. “To them, of course, it’s just fun.”

 

While the activities up on the main floor are generally for kids coming to Friendship Circle after school, LifeTown caters to groups from area schools, some who come from more than an hour away.

 

“Every morning, this place is packed with 50 or 60 kids,” Shemtov says.

 

The building is certainly unique. But what makes it work, she says, is the enthusiasm of the more than 800 volunteers who keep it running – especially the teen volunteers. At first, interaction with the children is a shock for them, and each time a volunteer is bitten or drooled on by their “buddy,” Shemtov worries that they’ll never come back.

 

“But they do,” she says, a smile taking over her face. “It’s really amazing to see how volunteers get attached to their special friend. What starts out as something awkward and difficult turns into love and passion. These volunteers, who start out as typical teenagers, are transformed into really caring individuals.”

 

While Friendship Circle serves the entire community, and volunteering is open to anyone, Shemtov estimates that as many as 90 percent of the volunteers are Jewish. The youth volunteers typically come to Friendship Circle around bar/bat mitzvah age. Most keep it up through high school, and many continue into college, spending vacations at the Friendship Circle with the children with whom they have bonded.

 

Adult volunteers who help run the LifeTown skills village commit to coming twice per month. The teens commit to volunteering once a week. “But a lot of them come three times a week,” Shemtov says. “They just love being here.”

 

YOU CAN TELL the kind of impact that the Friendship Circle has had just by counting the number of purple Friendship Circle magnets adorning cars all over this area. Local businesses and major national corporations have thrown their support behind Friendship Circle, joining several donors in Detroit’s Jewish community in making the $5 million facility possible.

 

What is today a burgeoning program started 14 years ago with a much smaller, simpler idea. Bassie’s husband, Rabbi Levy Shemtov, had established Friendship House, a Jewish home for those struggling with addiction. Bassie felt that, aside from all the therapy and education that they receive, special needs children largely miss out on true friendship.

 

Bassie, a 6^th grade teacher with no special needs training, set out to fix that. At first she arranged visits to special needs children at their homes, expanding the Friendship Circle with outings and events at local attractions.

 

As that started to gather momentum, she convened a focus group of interested donors who talked about building an open-air park at a cost of around $100,000. When one of the donors noted that Michigan’s climate was not the most hospitable to open-air venues, that didn’t stop Bassie, whose plans only grew.

 

To round out her vision, Shemtov traveled the country, visiting special needs facilities and learning from the experience of experts in the field. At each turn, the project took on greater dimensions.

 

“When we were designing this facility,” says Levy, “we asked people at therapy centers across the country: ‘What do you like about your facility?’ and ‘What would your dream be?’ [Then] we incorporated every dream from every therapy center.”

 

Bassie, a slender dynamo now in her mid-30s, planned it out herself.

 

“I had to learn about how lighting affects special needs kids, how room size affects them – so many things that go into adapting a facility for them,” she recalls. Putting the plan together and making it work entailed a lot of risk taking. What she wanted to create hadn’t been done before, but the mother of six didn’t let that stop her.

 

“When we first opened up, we were petrified,” says Shemtov. “We had no idea whether this would work.

 

“A lot of it,” she says, “was just guts.”

 

Taking on the responsibility of a multi-million dollar facility was daunting, however. Sure, there would be activities for kids to do after school, but “What are we going to do with this facility during the day?” Levy wondered. So Bassie worked to organize visits for special needs schools.

 

In the early stages, they borrowed space where possible, and rented space when they had to. When the new building was completed three years ago, the program that had begun as “Friends at Home” had found a home of its own.

 

FOR SHEMTOV, the success of Friendship Circle is not as much in its physical expansion as in its spiritual influence, enriching volunteers at least as much as the members.

 

“Friendship Circle has made special needs kids cool,” she jokes. But it has done so, she adds, by “showing the world that special needs kids are not to be pitied.”

 

Friendship Circle’s insistence on not pitying the special needs children extends to the way the staff members treat the parents and the volunteers as well.

 

“We actually thank the families for letting us share time with their children,” Bassie says. “And we don’t constantly say to the volunteers things like, ‘Oh, you’re doing such a mitzva.’ The fact is, you get so much out of taking part in this. You come to Friendship House, and you’re happy.”

 

That happiness is spreading, too. There are now scores of Friendship Circles in North America, with several more abroad. It’s something of a franchise now, with a national office in New York issuing suggested guidelines for how to set up and run a Friendship Circle. Beyond a few rules, however, each “branch” is basically an independent organization. Almost all of them are affiliated with Chabad, though, and Shemtov believes that is the secret of their success.

 

“Sometimes people think it’s easier to do this than it is, and they have to shut down,” she says. “For us, this is our life. We’re never leaving.”

 

It is the model of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Bassie says, that guides the Shemtovs in their work. His teachings, which so influence the couple and their staff, are also prominent in Friendship Circle initiatives such as the new “imprint the world” campaign, which urges teens to actively cultivate awareness and tolerance of special needs through their actions.

 

“I’m very happy about what we have accomplished, and I’m very proud,” Bassie says. “But I know where it comes from.”

 

Friendship Circle’s programs now include summer camps and winter sleepovers, a special needs baseball league, a forum for siblings of special needs kids, and more. And the circle will only continue to widen, says Bassie: The Shemtovs want to expand the LifeTown village; they want to build more Friendship Houses, and they want to provide places for troubled teens to live when home is no longer a positive environment for them.

 

The biggest challenge ahead, however, may lie in developing programs for those with special needs who are in their 20s.

 

“Just yesterday,” Bassie says, “I received a very emotional e-mail from a mother who is very afraid about what will happen to her child when she dies.” Worrying about how their children will manage once they are gone is common for parents of special needs children. Now it’s on Bassie’s mind, too.

 

“As our members get older, we will have to grow our program to serve them. Because they’re our friends,” she says, “we never say goodbye.”

Between Olmert and Sharon

Both are corrupt. But one is loved, while the other is loathed. So what is the difference between Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert?

 

No doubt about it, the prime minister is an unpopular guy. His approval rating is in the single digits – and that was before the Talansky Affair broke, with stories of Olmert receiving envelopes stuffed with cash from American Jews apparently looking for influence.

 

Olmert is now embroiled in his umpteenth criminal probe, with suspicions of fiscal wrongdoing relating to his various real estate dealings still hovering overhead. Yet dirty money is only a small part of Israelis’ growing hatred for the former Jerusalem mayor.

 

And Sharon, too, had his share of financial improprieties. There was the Greek Island affair, in which Sharon was said to have intervened on the behalf of Dudi Appel for a major real estate deal. One son went to jail for breaking campaign financing laws o nhis father’s behalf, while the other son narrowly avoided a similar fate for what looks to every reasonable person like a cushy-job-for-favors deal.

 

Israelis ultimately overlooked Sharon’s transgressions, while Olmert’s misdeeds only compound his lowly image. Why?

 

Let’s look at the similarities, and the differences.

 

Sharon was responsible for Israeli soldiers in the hands of the enemy (Benny Avraham, Adi Avitan and Omar Sawayid, as well as Elhanan Tannenbaum), as is Olmert (Gilad Schalit, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev). But Sharon brought “his” captives home, while Olmert has thus far failed to do so.

 

Sharon turned over territory to the Palestinians (the Gaza Strip), and now Olmert is talking of surrendering territory (the Golan Heights) to the Syrians. Most Israelis supported leaving Gaza, while most Israelis do not support leaving the Golan. Both diplomatic moves can be derided as politically expedient acts, but one is seen as an ideologically motivated step in the interests of Israel, while the other is seen as simply a desperate maneuver in the interests of the prime minister.

 

Sharon fought Operation Defensive Shield, while Olmert fought the Second Lebanon War. The former was widely seen as a necessity, and its execution was an undeniable success. The latter was seen as an irresponsible escapade, and its execution a farce.

 

As a wartime leader, Sharon was respected. Both to the north and to the south, Israel’s enemies knew that “The Bulldozer” was one tough SOB. Sharon cut off all ties to Yasser Arafat and essentially put him in a prison in Ramallah; he ordered the assassinations of Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and its political leader, Abdel Aziz-Rantissi, in quick succession. Operation Defensive Shield was decisive and effective, shutting down the Second Intifada. Israelis felt a lot more secure at the end of Sharon’s term than they did at the beginning of it.

 

Olmert, on the other hand, is the battlefield equivalent of a wet noodle. He embraces Mahmoud Abbas like a life raft, and he is carrying out talks with the Gaza leaders of Hamas. Hizbullah may respect Israel’s air force and its firepower, but it clearly has no respect for Olmert.

 

In addition, there is a difference in the way the two approached responsibility. Sharon took the heat for his own controversial policies, while Olmert has blamed everyone but himself. Despite his apparent monetary misdeeds, Sharon managed to maintain a certain amount of integrity. Olmert has not.

Hagee, the Holocaust and Israel

There is something odd – and even harmful – about the reticence of Jewish groups that have carefully cultivated ties to Pastor John Hagee and the Evangelical community he represents to criticize him, or at least to criticize him too harshly, over the comments that have already caused John McCain to reject Hagee’s endorsement of him.

 

And it’s not the thing you’re thinking of.

 

First, let’s review Hagee’s reading of history: “Theodor Herzl is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said, ‘I want you to come and join me in the Land of Israel.’ So few went that Herzl went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the Holocaust.

 

“Then God sent a hunter… Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says – Jeremiah writing –‘They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,’ meaning there’s no place to hide… How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the Land of Israel.”

 

Now, some have taken offense at the notion that God had sent Hitler to punish Jews for their transgressions, while others have pointed out that certain rabbis have espoused just such a notion (although they disagree about the nature of those transgressions). Call that one a toss-up, if you like; I don’t think it benefits the Jewish community much to dither over such an esoteric theological subject.

 

Sure, someone ought to send a memo to Hagee explaining that blaming victims for their suffering – even if that blame is meant to be an excuse for the victims’ suffering rather than a justification for their tormentors – is a dangerous task. It’s a whole lot easier to pull off if, say, you’re a monumental Biblical prophet whose dire warnings have been proven in your lifetime, than if you’re a televangelist whose wisdom is being disseminated on Youtube and parsed in the blogosphere.

 

For the Jews, though, and for Israel, a more important issue is at stake. That is the false and dangerous claim that the founding of the Zionist state was a payment of sorts to the Jewish people for their suffering at the hands of the Nazis.

 

How is this claim, unintentionally rephrased in Hagee’s sermon, false? Recalling Hagee’s own words, Theodor Herzl got the ball rolling on Zionism fully four decades before Hitler rose to power. In 1922, the League of Nations granted the United Kingdom a mandate over Palestine for the express purpose of “placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.”

 

Far from being a modern phenomenon, Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel has been a constant fact for 3,000 years; the Jews have outlasted the Romans, the Byzantines, the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans and the British, to name a few.

 

Why is this claim dangerous? Because it feeds Arab propaganda that paints Jews as occupiers and colonialists in Israel, rather than rightful heirs to the Promised Land. On campuses across America, this propaganda is being foisted on a generation of students for whom the lie of Israel’s illegitimacy is fast becoming accepted history. And in mosques across the Middle East, it fuels poisonous plots to murder and maim women and children who have “usurped” the cafes of Jerusalem.

 

Hagee’s comments certainly put Jews and Israelis in an awkward position. Evangelical Christians are easily the best friends we have in America – ironically, in large part because of views such as these. John McCain has the good sense to recognize that Hagee’s words are harmful to his political ambitions; Jews and Israelis, too, ought to realize that this issue demands a response. Unfortunately, the response so far follows the familiar – and mistaken – pattern of taking offense at a preacher’s theology. This won’t work.

 

Rather than argue over God’s mysterious ways in yesterday’s Europe, the Jewish community and the Israeli government would be better served by pointing out the unintented consequences of Hagee’s comments on the debate over the Israeli-Arab conflict today. Doing so would allow Hagee to preserve his religious views, let him show off his pro-Israel credentials on a modern political topic as well. Most importantly, it would provide an invaluable opportunity to fight one of the most pernicious canards of our era.

Peace sells… but who’s buying?

Peace talks between Syria and Israel make perfect sense. If you’re Bashar Assad, that is.

Forget for a moment the glaringly obvious issue of political expediency that clouds these precedings. Assad is under pressure from the United States over his role in the destablization of Iraq, and he is under pressure from the United Nations for his regime’s apparent role in the assassinations of former Lebanese president Rafik Hariri and a dozen other anti-Syrian Lebanese officials. Ehud Olmert is under pressure domestically for botching the Second Lebanon War as well as the latest in a series of corruption scandals. The context for these negotiations is clear. What of the substance?

Were the idea to talk about peace for peace, these talks would be a good thing. But what Syria is asking for is a full return of the Golan Heights, and what it is offering in exchange is the mere promise to consider “normalization” of ties with Israel. (Note that this is not a full-blown peace that would include, for example, the opening of embassies in each other’s capitals.) That Olmert is reported to have accepted this – not merely as a possibility, but as a prerequisite for even starting negotiations with Assad – is stunning.

The Golan provides Israel with vital water resources, a tourism goldmine, and militarily strategic high ground. It is enormously popular with Israelis – far more so than the Gaza Strip, which the country gave up in 2005 with no small amount of heartache. Yet Syria wants it back.

What is it, exactly, that supposedly makes the Golan Heights, home to numerous remains of the ancient Israelites, a Syrian territory? Israel has already ruled the Golan for twice as long as Syria. (Syria gained its independence from France in 1944, so it only held the Golan for 23 years. Before the French mandate, the Ottoman Turks controlled the territory for 400 hundred years. Before them, the Mamluks had it for two and a half centuries.) And while Syria was in charge, it did little with the territory other than use it as a launching ground for mortar fire on Israeli kibbutzim and for Palestinian fedayeen to carry out cross-border raids into the Jewish state.

No one can argue, then, that controlling the Heights has harmed Israel’s security. What some have (foolishly) argued instead is that continuing to hold onto the Golan will only serve to antagonize Damascus and force it to demand the territory through war. To clarify that point, Syrian officials have said that the armed forces were preparing for war with the Zionists; major military exercises in recent months have led to high alerts in the IDF.

Is war with Syria a threat we should take seriously? Let us first ask why Syria has not tried a direct assault on Israel in nearly four decades. Is it because it thought that a diplomatic breakthrough was right around the corner, or because it feared a confrontation with the IDF?

The fact is, Israel has enjoyed a pretty cushy state of war with Syria ever since 1973. Since then, the qualitative gap between Israel’s military and Syria’s has been proven time and again, and it is not about to be bridged any time soon.

Rather than see this as an argument against the need to pacify Syria, however, some actually see it as an encouragement to do so. The nature of war is changing, they note; strategic depth is not as vital as it once was. So, while all agree that holding the Golan Heights has been good for Israel, there is sufficient disagreement amongst various military experts about whether it is necessary for Israel, to allow consideration of what benefit might come from parting with the valuable territory.

The pot of gold that is being presented now is the notion that, by relinquishing the Golan Heights, Israel will manage to wrench Syria way from three problems much thornier to Israel than Syria itself: the Damascus regime’s strong ties to and support of Iran, Hizbullah and Palestinian terrorist groups.

This would represent a much more significant boon to Israel than a simple land-for-peace deal like the ones Israel made with Egypt and Jordan. It is also, unfortunately, utter fantasy.

“Damascus rejects all preconditions concerning its relations with other countries and peoples,” the government daily Tishrin said on Saturday, referring to Iran, after an Israeli call for Syria to distance itself from Tehran.“Damascus will make no compromise on these relations,” an editorial said.

Similar statements from Iranian officials have been repeated several times in the past few months.

But let’s pretend that Assad were to swear off Iran. What next? With whom does he then ally himself?

The United States? No.

Israel? No.

Lebanon? No.

Turkey? No.

Jordan? No.

Iraq? No.

Egypt? No.

Saudi Arabia? No.

Who is left? No one, really.

So here we get to the painful truth: At this stage, an alliance with Iran is Syria’s only realistic play. Any deal that Assad strikes – even if it includes the pretense of peace – will ultimately only serve that alliance.

The road to perdition

May 15, 2008

Project Schmerling isn’t working. All along Route 10 signs bearing the name of the project, an initiative of the army’s Division 80 which is responsible for security in the area, use decidedly undiplomatic language in calling on drivers to exercise extreme caution. The so-called Philadelphi Route, running the length of the southern border, was not built for high speeds, they warn.

“If you exceed the recommended speeds,” one particularly ominous sign reads, “you will end up either crippled for life, or dead and buried. Be especially cautious in the curves, and even more so at night. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

Yet soldiers keep on getting killed or injured here, spilling over the sides of a narrow road that twists through the rocky brown cliffs that mark the intersection of the Negev and Sinai deserts. Recently, a female soldier became the latest casualty when the jeep she was driving flipped near Mount Harif.

“It happens all the time, man,” said Laurend, a Hummer driver in his compulsory military service who has been patrolling the same stretch of road for more than a year now. “I’ve seen soldiers get killed, soldiers get hurt. In one incident some months ago, an officer was crippled when his Hummer flipped over and crushed his abdomen.

“There are some nasty stories here, man,” Laurend said, dragging on a cigarette as he waited to head out on patrol. “You don’t want to know.”

Cautioning his troops on the dangers of the road, one battalion commander put it this way: “It’s very difficult to flip a Hummer. But in this area, we’ve done it several times. When you travel on this highway, realize that this is no joke.”

In truth, the term “highway” is an exaggeration for the road, which was built in 1982, as Israel completed its withdrawal from the Sinai. Although it is ostensibly two lanes wide, with vehicles traversing its length in both directions, the pale gray, unlit path is barely broad enough for the Hummers and semitrailers that make up most of its traffic. The pavement is cracked and scarred from the stress it endures, from the stretching in the heat of the day and the contracting during the chill of the night, as well as from the weight of the massive military vehicles that continuously travel the highway. There are gashes running through the middle of the road, and chunks of asphalt lie at its side like so many cookie crumbs. One gets the impression that if this road were an animal, it would be put down to end its suffering.

Success has many fathers, as the saying goes, but failure is an orphan. And so it is with Route 10. The Israel National Road Company claims it is and always has been the responsibility of the military. The Defense Ministry, in turn, claims the highway, like any other, is the responsibility of the company. So a road that was paved 26 years ago slowly disintegrates into the desert, with no plans for its upkeep or improvement, as soldiers who fail to heed the warning of Project Schmerling end up, as promised, either crippled for life or dead and buried.

THE POOR STATE of the highway has other costs, however, that combine with a series of failures to make the Egyptian border the worst guarded in the country.

Take the drug smugglers, for example.

“At night,” said a soldier standing guard outside the Shikma outpost near the Sayarim junction, “we see the Egyptian smugglers flashing their lights, signaling to the smugglers on our side of the border to come meet them. And we see the Israelis in their jeeps, waiting for an opening.

“If they see that we’re alert and on patrol, they slink away. If not… well, the next morning, we see their tracks in the tishtush” - the smoothed-over path running parallel to the border, making tracks and footprints of infiltrators apparent.

Twice in the past month, smugglers sneaked past the Shikma outpost, undetected until after they were long gone. Even had they been spotted in the middle of their crime, though, there is no guarantee they would have been caught.

“We are helpless against the smugglers,” complained Dror, a reserve officer recently stationed at the nearby Carmit outpost. “There’s no lighting, so we have to fire off a hundred flares any time we want to see 100 meters in front of us. And even when we can see them coming, we can’t stop them. It takes forever because you can’t drive fast enough, safely enough, to get there in time.”

There are hardly any police in this part of the Negev, which is made up almost entirely of seldom visited nature reserves and live ammunition firing zones for the army and the air force. So, once they have eluded the IDF patrols, smugglers are basically home free.

“In that whole area, I have only 300 men,” a police captain explained to the Knesset Committee for the War on Drugs in 2006. “You can drive for kilometers and not see a single security agent.”

The Egyptian border “is the No. 1 smuggling pipeline of drugs and prostitutes in all of Israel,” Moshe Karadi, then head of the Southern Police District, said in 2003, when police estimated that tons of marijuana and hashish, together with as many as 1,000 prostitutes and hundreds of illegal workers were being smuggled across the border each year.

Smugglers wouldn’t be able to make a living, though, were it not for the ease with which they obtain their goods. That is due to a border fence that, for the better part of its 240-kilometer stretch, poses no significant obstacle. Even at its most formidable, the fence stands little more than a meter high, and is comprised of looping coils of barbed wire stretched between thin metal poles. In many places the barbed wire has been folded to the ground; in others, the poles have fallen over. No great effort is required to pass drugs, weapons or other contraband over the fence.

“The problem with the smugglers is that the fence is very low… so they come with their camels and their sacks and they can pass their stuff right over the fence, with no effort,” said Dror. “So if in effect there’s no border, then our tishtush is the border. And that’s just not enough.”

OF LATE, THOUGH, the group exploiting the porous border the most is the mass of Africans seeking a decent life in Israel. The migration began slowly, in 2005, after Egyptian riot police fired indiscriminately into a crowd of Sudanese refugees demonstrating outside the Cairo office of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. At first, compelled by the moral weight of the Jewish people’s past suffering, Israel accepted the presence of a few hundred asylum seekers from Darfur. But that number has since multiplied many times, as close to 8,000 people from Sudan, Ghana, Eritrea and other African nations have entered the country via Sinai since the beginning of 2007.

Few, if any, have felt it necessary to cut the barbed wire fence. They simply climb over it and wander eastward until they are discovered by the IDF.

At a small lookout point near Mount Dela’at one recent morning, four reservists awoke to find seven gangling black men walking toward them from the early morning haze. One, who spoke a decent English, introduced himself and promptly asked if the soldiers could help him find work.

“Tell me,” said one of the soldiers, “Where are you from?”

“From Eritrea,” he answered.

“Wow, that’s a long way!” replied the soldier. “Who told you to come all the way to Israel?”

“My friend in Tel Aviv!” the Eritrean said excitedly. “He said there is plenty of work here.”

Such incidents are repeated every few days.

Once they are searched by soldiers, the Africans are driven to a military court at Mount Harif and then taken to large detention centers in the South - where they wait, either to be given jobs and shelter somewhere in the country, or to be deported to their home countries. Israel does not wish to return them to Egypt, where tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees are often abused, but their numbers are beginning to overwhelm the government.

“Wake up!” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared at a February meeting to discuss the issue. “We can no longer continue in this way, not stopping the border infiltrations.”

Olmert, who a year ago suggested allowing soldiers to fire on refugees trying to enter, is demanding that the army step up its efforts on the border. Without a more robust barrier, however, there isn’t much it can do.

Following a handful of attacks and attempted attacks on soldiers along the border, the defense establishment has repeatedly asked for a bigger, better fence to be built. “We are trying to prevent infiltrations and smuggling,” an officer involved in Division 80’s reinforcement plan for the border said at the end of 2006. “We would prefer a fence - but the government needs to decide to build one.”

Noting that the West Bank barrier and the fence surrounding the Gaza Strip have both been highly effective in frustrating terror activity, while the southern border is breached routinely, a Defense Ministry spokesman confirmed the ministry’s continued desire for a more formidable obstacle.

“It’s like what happens when a thief is looking for a car to steal,” he said. “If he has to choose between a car that has an alarm system and a car that doesn’t have an alarm system, he’s going to choose the one that doesn’t.”

The ministry has received preliminary approval for a more robust fence along the border, the spokesman said, but it would take “at least two years” to complete and would cost up to NIS 200 million. That money has not been allocated by the government, however - so the ministry is only in the planning stages of the project, and it will still need to win final approval for its plan to proceed.

Along Route 10, the soldiers who struggle to keep up with the pace of the smuggling and the infiltrations know not to expect a change any time soon.

“Everyone in this company has had something to say about the poor state of the border,” said Dror. “People who have been serving here for a year and more have said they’ve tried to bring it to the attention of the higher-ups. They told us, ‘Don’t even bother talking to us about the sorry state of affairs here. We’ve already complained about it a thousand times, to no avail.’

“The scary thing is, if smugglers, or terrorists, used their heads a little bit - just a little bit - no one here would even know they had infiltrated. Just the smallest bit of effort is all it takes, because our border consists of a pathetic fence for cattle and sheep.”

Shaking his head, he asked, “Can’t we at least make it a little more difficult for them?”

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1210668641344&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

The grass is no greener on the other side of the fence

May 15, 2008

The poor state of affairs on Israel’s side of the Egyptian border is only half the story. After all, the smuggling and infiltrations that bedevil the Jewish state are carried out under the noses of Egyptian policemen. Wouldn’t these activities decrease if they more effectively fulfilled their duties?

“There’s a tendency to blame the Egyptians for what’s going on at the border,” said Shmulik Bachar, research fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, “and the truth is that they don’t do much.”

The flow of Sudanese and Eritrean refugees, for example, could be stopped at Egypt’s southern border, a thousand kilometers from the Negev, if Cairo would move to seal the area. But Egypt maintains only a small military presence in the south, Bachar said, “because their military conception is based entirely on the Israeli threat, and because they’re concerned about Cairo’s survival, nothing else.”

Despite the fact that Sudan’s Islamist government is believed to have supported assassination attempts against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Bachar said, “Israel will always be considered more of a threat than any other Arab or Islamic state.”

Egyptian security along the Israeli border, meanwhile, is a study in incompetence and paralysis. The policemen stationed there do little - and what they do, they do harmfully. (Specifically, their sole method of intervention is to shoot the Africans trying to reach Israel; they have killed and maimed dozens, including women, sometimes within sight of IDF soldiers.) As per the peace accords with Israel, Egypt may not send soldiers to the border, nor even a large number of police. Add to this restriction the fact that Egyptian authorities choose to assign to the border a low caliber of personnel, and the problem intensifies.

Anyone who has listened to the Egyptian police screaming nonsensically into the night, or witnessed them firing their weapons simply to pass the time, can attest to the character of such men. Some have revealed, in their occasional conversations with Beduin trackers serving in the IDF, that they were convicts offered shortened prison sentences in exchange for being stationed on the remote outposts of the border. Others simply go mad from the loneliness, as for many the occasional sight of IDF patrols is the entire extent of their human interaction.

Why allow such a situation?

“Sinai has always been regarded as something of a foreign body in relation to the body politic of the Egypt that revolves around Cairo,” Bachar explained. “They don’t treat it with the same seriousness as the rest of the country.”

That is not to say that the government takes no interest in the goings-on in the peninsula, or that it doesn’t attempt to show that it is active there. Recently authorities announced that they had arrested leaders of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood, two Sinai Beduin and a Palestinian, charging them with plotting a terrorist attack with Hamas.

The Muslim Brotherhood members were alleged to have paid the equivalent of $3,600 to two Beduin to buy 30 jerry cans of fuel, spare parts and a remote control for an unmanned aircraft to be built by Hamas for an unspecified attack.

The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas immediately denounced the report as a fabrication. Bachar wouldn’t be surprised if that were so.

“Every so often Egypt announces it has caught terrorists. But it’s all propaganda,” he said. “There’s no strategic decision to treat this seriously.”

One expression of this failure to treat Sinai security seriously is the emergence of local Beduin as professional drug smugglers and gunrunners. In addition to growing marijuana in hard-to-reach valleys near the border, they are widely acknowledged as being responsible for the devastating bombings of prime tourism magnets on the peninsula in the past few years.

“When it comes to the involvement in terrorism of the Beduin of the northern Sinai,” Bachar said, “people often talk about the influence of radical Islam. Well, that’s bullshit. These are just tribes that are bitter about being abandoned by the government. They smuggle weapons for money, and to get back at the government for decades of neglect and mistreatment.”

A year ago, Egypt rushed hundreds of policemen to the border to fend off hordes of machine gun-wielding Beduin who were protesting mistreatment at the hands of the authorities in Cairo. The threat remains, Bachar said, because Cairo has not taken steps to better integrate the Sinai Beduin into Egyptian society or to share with them the benefits of the local tourism trade.

Worse, and more complex, is the threat emanating from Gaza. Hamas’s bombardment of the Rafah border earlier this year, and its threat to do so again, have brought the government to a much higher level of alert and concern than any other security incident in recent memory.

“They see the Gordian knot between the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas,” Bachar said, referring to the strong ideological bonds between Egypt’s largest opposition group and the Palestinian group that is its offshoot.

“The Brothers are really the true threat to the administration, so [Egypt] can’t be too harsh on the organization’s friends, Hamas. On the other hand, they see Hamas setting up a state inside Sinai. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.

“The government does understand the danger of Hamas infiltrating Sinai,” he continued. “But it has gone so far, that it’s hard to stop. The organization is smuggling tremendous amounts of weapons through and into the area; they’re traveling with and to members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. With only a small number of forces there, what can [the Egyptian police] do?”

Israel, Bachar suggested, “ought to seriously consider allowing Egypt to add more forces to the area… but the question is, once you allow that situation, how can it be undone?”

Yet he does not blame the Egyptians entirely for the lack of strenuous security at the border, saying that Israel could do more as well.

“A few years ago,” Bachar said, “when I was in the army and I would bring my soldiers to the border, they would see how bad the fence was and how few people were there to defend it, and they would ask me who was guarding the border. I’m sorry to say it, but I had to admit that the forces there were insufficient. And you know what? The situation hasn’t changed much for the better.”

Once guarded by a small number of soldiers and border police, the Israeli side of the border is now patrolled by a slightly larger number of forces. However, these are mostly reservists and standing army units like Karakal, which include a high percentage of women soldiers - a force structure that, despite its merits, cannot be compared with the more highly regarded troops of the infantry brigades.

If the issue of personnel is merely problematic in Bachar’s eyes, though, the issue of infrastructure is much more severe.

“Not until Israel wakes up and a serious fence is erected along the entire length of the border, something along the lines of the barrier being built in the West Bank, will we be able to control what goes on there,” he said. “We aren’t taking care of things on our end, yet we complain about the Egyptians. Let’s take care of our own responsibilities, and then worry about the Egyptians.”

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1210668641426&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

The weighting game

May 1, 2008

No one would mistake the weight room at the Hadar Yosef athletics stadium in North Tel Aviv for one of those trendy, expensive gyms across town. Hidden at the far corner of the building, under the sloping concrete slabs where spectators cheer on the country’s track and field stars, the weight room is exceedingly plain, littered with just a few pieces of rusty equipment and absolutely unknown to the aerobics-three-times-a-week crowd. Stair climbers and stationary bicycles? Nope. Elaborate machines that trim the inner thigh? Forget about it. Steam room? You’re kidding.

Pacing back and forth in front of the mirror that extends along the length of one wall are a handful of men in plain Lycra shorts and old T-shirts. There is no fancy apparel here, no expensive “power” drinks to sip during tae-bo classes. There are no look-at-me poses, no pretentiousness. There is only this: a bar on the floor, loaded with weight, and the challenge of whipping it overhead.

Stepping up to the bar is Ariel Barnetz, a solid but not overly muscled 17-year-old. Setting his feet under him he bends down, gripping the bar tightly. With a dip of his behind and a swift pull he heaves the bar up, squatting under it as his arms stabilize the weight in a broad V - a successfully executed snatch, in the parlance of Olympic weightlifting.

As Ariel drops the bar - the weights, called bumper plates, are coated with rubber, and a wooden platform absorbs their fall - and resets for another repetition, Amir Nahum, chairman of the Maccabi Tel Aviv weightlifting club which runs the weight room, shouts instructions.

“Ariel, you’re starting out too quickly!” says the wiry Nahum, a former competitive weightlifter who oversees the team’s development. “You have to start slowly - watch your back - yes… Now, snap! That’s it.”

Barnetz, a member of the national team’s youth squad, was a reluctant observer when he first arrived at the gym with some friends. They left; he stayed.

“I love the competitiveness, but also the family atmosphere,” he explains. “I spend more time here than I spend at home.”

He resets for another of what will be dozens of repetitions of the snatch, applying Nahum’s tips. “That was good, Ariel,” says the coach, “but keep your clinch closer to your body.”

Barnetz listens intently to Nahum’s instructions, eager to use what the 35-year-old has learned to advance his own progress. “I have high hopes,” he says matter-of-factly. “I know that if I stick with it, I’ll fulfill them.”

There are hopes, though, and there is reality. Barnetz is one of a small number of competitive weightlifters in Israel, and even the best among them has a long way to go before the winner’s podium becomes a possibility.

Contrary to Israel’s successes in diamonds and hi-tech, the country is no international powerhouse when it comes to weightlifting. In fact, the most famous episode for local weightlifting is, unfortunately, its darkest moment: the massacre of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich, Germany, in the summer of 1972. Three weightlifters - Yosef Romano, David Berger and Ze’ev Friedman - and weightlifting coach and judge Ya’akov Springer were among the victims of the Black September terrorists.

“We remember them always,” says Nahum, pointing to the plaque on the wall at the Hadar Yosef gym that commemorates the fallen athletes. Also named for the victims is the National Center for Weightlifting, dedicated earlier this year by the Israel Olympic Committee.

In 1974, before pressure from the Arab states forced the Jewish state out of Asian competition and into the more difficult European circuit, Shlomo Ben-Gal (who would later become head of the Israel Athletic Association) set an Asian record in the snatch for his weight class.

Since then, though, superior achievement has been exceedingly rare. Israeli athletes have competed in recent Olympic Games, for example, but they have never brought home a medal. Even in less prestigious competitions, accolades have been few.

Marina Ochman and Evgeny Koshenetz, two of ASA Beersheba’s brightest stars, took part in last month’s European Championships, held in Lignano Sabbiadoro, Italy. They performed admirably, both setting personal bests, yet gave no one cause to fear blue-and-white weightlifters in the near future.

Ochman, national champion for the past three years, broke three Israeli records in the 63 kg. weight class - hoisting 82 kg. in the snatch and 97 kg. in the clean and jerk, for a total of 179 kg. - on her way to 15th place (out of 20) in Europe, a whopping 56 kg. off the gold medal.

Koshenetz, who at 19 has dominated the cadets and youths divisions of local weightlifting for the past four years, finished in 20th place (out of 23) in the 69 kg. weight class with a 121 kg. snatch and 155 kg. clean and jerk. To be sure, Koshenetz’s combined total of 276 kg. is a lot of weight to lift - but it equals a mere warm-up for first-place finisher Tigran Martirosyan of Armenia, who lifted a combined 346 kg.

That’s a huge gap to close in a sport that demands years of training starting in early adolescence. The Israel Weightlifting Federation has set its sights on the 2012 Olympic Games in London, promising increased resources for athletes, coaches and facilities, with the goal of increasing both the number and the quality of those participating in the sport.

That won’t be easy, according to Nahum, who has struggled to recruit new athletes.

“There’s no exposure for our sport in this country,” he says - contrasting the low esteem for weightlifting here with the almost rabid appreciation for it in Eastern Europe. (It is no coincidence that of the few dozen dedicated Olympic-style weightlifters here, most are from the former Soviet Union, rich as it is in weightlifting tradition.) There’s no money in it, either.

“In the last Olympics, the sixth-place finisher’s score was the same as what my personal best was 12 years ago. But I quit competitive weightlifting at the age of 23,” Nahum says, “because I didn’t have enough money to put gas in my car.”

He switched to work as a personal trainer in commercial gyms, and took up industrial design; he donates his time to the Maccabi Tel Aviv weightlifters out of love for the sport.

“From the sports club we receive just enough money to maintain this humble gym and to give the competitive athletes a few shekels here and there,” he says. “But honestly? If not for the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team, we wouldn’t even exist.”

The difficulty in reaching potential recruits is compounded, he says, by the near impossibility of convincing schools to approve weightlifting classes.

“Principals have their ears closed to any suggestion of getting kids to lift weights,” Nahum says with a distinct sadness. “The effort it takes just to get my foot in the door at a school is like splitting the Red Sea. It’s bizarre: Everyone knows we have a problem of child obesity, yet I find myself tilting at windmills.”

A QUICK LOOK around the Hadar Yosef weight room reveals something missing, something usually quite common in fitness clubs: females.

“Unfortunately,” Nahum says by way of confession, “I haven’t been able to bring girls into the gym. I’ve had some come in and start to really develop - only to have their mothers intervene. I constantly have to fight the old wives’ tale about weightlifting stunting your growth. It’s nonsense, and it’s been disproved over and over again, but what can I do? Jewish mothers still think their kids will end up dwarfs if they lift weights.”

Those who, nonetheless, do come to see what the sport is all about rarely stick with it long enough to accomplish anything. Unlike bodybuilding exercises, which tend to isolate muscles and can be learned quickly, Olympic weightlifting’s snatch and clean and jerk exercises, and the movements that help develop power for them, require a high degree of coordination - and a whole lot of patience.

“One of the best exercises in the world is the deep squat,” Nahum continues. “It’s such a great combination of strength and flexibility. It’s great for your legs, for your back… it’s fantastic. But it requires a whole lot of very, very precise work.”

Teenagers rarely have the patience for such work - and they suffer for it, Nahum says. “I believe that, for adolescents, Olympic-style lifting is much healthier than the kind of exercise they do in regular gyms. It’s more athletic, and it teaches you how to use your entire body in unison. The problem is it takes a lot of time to teach someone how to do this correctly. There aren’t enough kids with the patience for it, and there aren’t enough trainers who know how to teach this the right way.”

Still, for some, there’s no cure for the lure of the iron. Tomer Bohadana, a soldier wounded in the Second Lebanon War who became famous for flashing a “V” sign while being evacuated to the hospital, has worked out in the Maccabi Tel Aviv gym for years, Nahum notes with pride. One of the most regular members is a 57-year-old lawyer who started coming to the gym three years ago, he adds; the lawyer had complained of terrible back pain that prevented him from exercising for years, Nahum relates, but since he’s been at the gym, his back pain has dissipated.

Members of the gym pay NIS 100 per month - a fraction of the rate charged at full-service fitness clubs - for the privilege of sharing the dank room with some 15 competitive lifters. One of them is Yuri Bagni, a 19-year-old who immigrated from Ukraine 10 years ago.

“You see that one over there?” says Nahum, pointing to Bagni, with massive thighs and upper back muscles, imposing except for his constant smile. “He’s the child of a single mom… in short, they’ve had it rough. There was a time when he used to beat up all the other kids in school. His teachers warned me not to even get involved with him. But look at him now - he’s proof that if you can succeed in sport, you can succeed in life.”

Bagni, now a national team member recognized as an outstanding athlete, receives special treatment from the army, working from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m. at the Sde Dov airfield, close to home, so he can maintain his five or six times per week training schedule.

He usually arrives at the gym around 3 p.m. and often stays until late at night.

“Whenever I’m on leave, I’m here,” he says. “I come here to train, but I hang around because of the friendships. This is like my second home.”

When Bagni first arrived at his base, he says, “no one really understood what I do or why I do it. But now they ask how my training is going… and, of course, every so often someone yells out, ‘Hey, weightlifter! Come over here, we have something heavy for you to carry!’”

Another success story, and another example of the weights’ transformative effect, Nahum says, is 15-year-old Matan Segelman. A year and a half ago, the skinny teen had gained weight after his parents’ divorce. Already having difficulty fitting in at school because of ADHD, Segelman was on an emotional roller-coaster and in need of something to ground him. He tried capoeira, and then volleyball, but dropped both.

“I was getting a belly. My father said, ‘You have to find a sport to do.’ So he started looking up different sports on-line, suggested all kinds of things. Eventually I just asked, ‘Well, what’s open today?’ He said, ‘Weightlifting.’ I said, ‘No way, I don’t want do that.’ But he insisted that I had to do something… so we came, and I fell in love with it.”

Segelman trains at Hadar Yosef four times per week, in addition to the push-ups, pull-ups and crunches that he does every day.

“In ninth grade, I was the kid that everyone picked on. Now I’m the strongest kid in my grade, and no one messes with me,” he says, gushing.

“A lot of guys in school are interested in going to the gym. I try to explain that bodybuilding is only part of it, that here we develop the body and develop strength… But they think weightlifting stunts your growth, so they’re afraid. Even my mother tried to discourage me, saying it would stunt my growth.”

Instead, weightlifting has helped Segelman grow - in confidence as well as in stature. He took fourth place in the 62 kg. weight class in the recent National Championships, and has his sights set on international glory.

Even his ADHD, Nahum says, has come under control.

“Every day,” the teen says with a grin on his way back to a loaded bar, “I thank my dad for making me come here.”

Making waves

April 17, 2008

It doesn’t look like much, this thing lying dormant in the grassy driveway of Shmuel Ovadia’s exceedingly modest offices in south Tel Aviv. Still, Ovadia insists, this bunch of plywood and rusting engines, bolted together in an old shipping crate, could save the planet.

The box of parts, and the large metal arm lying on top of it, is meant to be stationed a few kilometers away, just off the coast. There, in the surf that endlessly laps at the shore, a set of Ovadia’s buoys would exploit one of the world’s most reliable - and most potent - sources of energy.

The idea is fairly simple: Every wave on the ocean represents a significant amount of force; if even some of that tremendous energy could be harnessed, it could be turned into electricity.

“They say that just 1 percent of the energy in the oceans could power the entire world,” Ovadia says, with a raise of the eyebrows and a nod of the head, as if to stave off any “no way” reaction. It is, he assures, a viable goal.

The tricky part of realizing such potential is finding a way to capture as much of that energy as possible and turn it into electricity in a safe and cost-efficient manner. Until now, the dozens of contraptions that have been tried - although tantalizing and inspiring - have proven unable to meet that challenge.

Part of the problem lies in the sheer brute force of the sea. One apparatus, a 750-metric-ton device, was torn to shreds off the coast of Scotland as it was being put in place. And that was in relatively shallow water. Attempts to harvest the even more powerful currents farther out to sea and deeper down require complicated feats of engineering that make such efforts impractical in the near future.

The beauty of Ovadia’s system, he says, lies in its simplicity. Rather than try to channel the ocean’s power, Ovadia wants to go along for the ride. His buoys lie atop the water, at or just off the beach. As waves raise the buoys, attached hydraulic arms, contract - turning an alternator, creating electricity. The entire process is fully automatic, and requires not a drop of fuel.

“I don’t need smoke-belching towers, I don’t need turbines, I don’t need anything polluting,” Ovadia says. What’s more, he adds, his company’s zero-emissions, quiet power plants could produce commercial amounts of electricity while taking up just a 10th of the space required by coal-burning or natural gas-burning power plants. The lower infrastructure costs, combined with lower per-kilowatt production costs, mean that the original investment in an ocean wave power plant manufactured by his firm SDE would be repaid in five years - a fourth of the time that most conventional power plants need to “earn their keep.”

WITH ALL these advantages, you’d think potential
clients would be busting down Ovadia’s door. According
to him, they are - and they are hailing from some
unusual places. In addition to some general interest
from companies and governments in Chile, Argentina,
Spain, Cyprus, Monaco and other countries, SDE is in
very serious negotiations with the government of
Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state.

“We are very interested in this technology,” Dr.
Faizul Ishom of the State Ministry for Development of
Disadvantaged Areas told The Jerusalem Post. “We are
an island country with a lot of beaches, so it could
be very good for us, and for our environment too. We
want to apply this. I have already talked with power
companies about it.”

Ishom and other Indonesian officials have visited
SDE’s offices here, and they hope to return soon to
finalize a deal. Initially, Ishom said, his country is
looking to buy an ocean wave power plant capable of
producing 100 MW, at a cost of $650 million. If that
plant is successful, Indonesia would be interested in
another one on the scale of 500 MW.

Pakistan - the world’s only nuclear-armed Muslim state
and, like Indonesia, a nation that has no formal
diplomatic ties with Israel - is also eager to have
Ovadia’s company build a power plant for its citizens,
an official confirmed to the Post. Count India and Sri
Lanka among the countries in talks with SDE, as well.

Ovadia is focusing on Africa as a potential market,
too. The general manager of the Zanzibar Electricity
Corporation confirmed talks over a power plant between
10 MW and 100 MW in capacity. Tanzania, whose severely
unstable electricity supply has crippled its already
fragile economy, is eager to see a 500 MW plant
constructed as soon as possible. Gambia, in a similar
situation, paid for Ovadia to make a presentation in
the capital.

“One of our country’s biggest challenges is that we
have no reliable source of energy,” Ebrima Camara, of
the Office of the President, told the Post. “If we
had, we could increase our potential to attract
investors for industry and manufacturing. We really
want to be able to give our people the ability to be
self-reliant and productive, so if we can get a
technology like this, which would make electricity
cheaply and reliably, it would mean a lot for Gambia.”
Following what Camara described as “a very fruitful
meeting,” Gambia and SDE are negotiating over a 70 MW
power plant in a deal that would be worth millions of
dollars.

FOR ALL this attention from the rest of the world,
though, Ovadia lacks recognition here at home.

“I used to get research grants from the Industry and
Trade Ministry,” Ovadia says, noting that his funding
was cut in 2000, following a severe leg injury that
kept him out of work for two years and prevented him
from meeting deadlines that would have qualified him
for further support. “Now,” he says bitterly, “I’m
just a pest to the government.”

What Ovadia wants, he says, is not money, but
recognition.

“Israel has maybe 10,000 meters of breakwaters along
its shores. Those breakwaters could produce 10% of the
country’s electricity needs. If we could put our buoys
on the breakwaters, they would not only produce
electricity, but also act as a kind of shock absorber
and lengthen the life of the breakwaters,” he says,
getting excited.

“I can build a plant here, for example, that will
produce 100 MW of electricity. This is not meant to
answer all the country’s needs, but it can definitely
provide a good chunk. And with oil selling for more
than $100 per barrel, it’s definitely worth
considering.”

That there is very little consideration of the
potential in SDE’s system vexes Ovadia. The Israel
Electric Corporation “pretends to be interested in my
technology,” he says, “but in reality it sees us as a
threat.”

IEC did not respond to that claim, but acknowledged it
had no interest in SDE or ocean wave energy. A
spokesman for the Office of the Chief Scientist of the
Industry and Trade Ministry said the body was
continuing to invest in local research and development
of alternative energy options, but had no particular
interest in Ovadia’s ideas at this time.

Ovadia claims he is doomed by bureaucrats swayed by
lobbyists for conventional energy firms offering
kickbacks, payoffs and the promise of cushy “adviser”
jobs in the power industry upon leaving office.

“It’s no wonder that, when you ask officials about my
ideas, they come up with excuses like, ‘This isn’t the
time for this sort of thing,’ or ‘It isn’t convincing
enough,’ or ‘The technology isn’t ready yet.’ They
prefer to protect the interests of those who sell coal
or who operate coal-powered plants,” Ovadia says.
“Why? Those are deals worth billions. You think
someone would risk losing that by supporting my little
buoys?”

Ovadia doesn’t name names. Is he paranoid? Making
excuses for his failure to inspire his countrymen?
Either is possible, or both. Or, it may just be that
he is exhausted from the efforts of trying to infect
bureaucrats with the exuberance of a dreamer.

AT 56, with his hair dyed black and agitation
exaggerating the lines that middle age and frustration
have carved into his face, it is clear that it hasn’t
been easy for Ovadia, being told over and over again
for decades that his idea wouldn’t work.

It was as a soldier on leave, waiting outside the old
Yaron Cinema in South Tel Aviv, that he first
considered the potential of ocean waves. Sitting on
the railing as waves rolled toward his feet, Ovadia
was mesmerized. There must be a way, he figured, to
turn that hypnotic motion into something useful.

It took Ovadia, who pulls out forms detailing his 17
different patents, more than a decade to develop his
foggy notion into concrete reality. After completing
his service in the Engineering Corps, he worked in a
plant manufacturing motors, learning about pneumatics,
hydraulics and electricity. Eventually he struck upon
the idea of a way to put the waves’ own energy to use.
The theory behind wave energy exploitation goes back
ages; bringing theory to practice often takes ages. As
he brought SDE to life, Ovadia built and tested eight
different models of his system, starting with one so
small that it fit in his bathtub. He made each of the
models larger, until they required a shipping
container full of water, and eventually tested his
current system in the Jaffa Port.

Along the way there have been numerous
disappointments, including what he calls obstruction
from the Israeli establishment and what he vaguely
refers to as “some troubles with unscrupulous
partners.”

Then there are the nagging questions - about whether
the relatively gentle waves licking at the country’s
Mediterranean coast are strong enough to make this
technology worthwhile; about the ability of SDE’s
buoys to survive and operate in the brutal environment
of seawater, and about the environmental damage that
could result from installing a power plant of this
type on the shore.

Ovadia has heard these complaints, it seems, a
thousand times before. Yet he patiently addresses each
issue.

No matter where an ocean wave power plant is, Ovadia
explains, it would produce different levels of energy
during different times of the year, as waves are
higher during certain periods and lower during others.
Likewise, waves are higher and more powerful in some
parts of the world (coastal areas on the North Sea,
for example) than others (such as the calmer beaches
of the eastern Mediterranean, to our disadvantage).

True, he notes, the potential benefit in relation to
other methods of producing electricity would not be as
great here as in Britain or Spain, but it would still
be significant. And his power plants would be
economical to run even in areas where weaker waves
predominate.

“But I’ll tell you something,” he says. “Even in the
Kinneret, I can make energy.”

An SDE power plant, Ovadia continues, “can produce
electricity at a fraction of the cost of coal, a
fraction of the cost of solar and a fraction the cost
of wind. Run one six months to eight months per year,
and you still come out ahead.”

Further, he says, “When are waves the highest? In the
summer and in the winter. And when is the demand for
electricity highest? In the summer and in the winter.
It’s a perfect match.”

What about reliability? Compared to the other wave
energy systems being developed around the world,
Ovadia’s invention seems downright flimsy.

What his design has going for it, he says, is that the
buoys actually see less exposure to seawater than the
other systems. There is a built-in self-correcting
mechanism whereby, should a large wave overwhelm the
buoy, it would flip over and then “wait” for lower
tide to flip back. Unlike other systems deployed far
out to sea, the moving parts in his power plants are
easily replaceable. Also, the plants can be maintained
easily, and they can be run automatically. One person,
he says, could run five plants at a time, if
necessary.

Lastly, what of the environmental impact?

“Strictly speaking, the beach would be damaged
slightly if we installed these,” Ovadia says. “But on
the other hand, people die from the pollution caused
by power plants burning fossil fuels. Which would you
prefer?”

Besides, with such little interest here, he notes
wryly, “It isn’t as if we’re going to take over
Frishman Beach tomorrow.”

FORTUNATELY, OVADIA says, beaches needn’t be marred.
In his preferred scenario, a breakwater would be built
first, and the buoys attached to it. A place like the
Ashdod Port, where a 3,350 meter-long main breakwater
and a sea wall 800 meters long already exist, would be
an ideal location for SDE to prove its technology.

Just in the past few weeks - after years of fruitless
lobbying all over the country - Ovadia has won over
the Ashdod Municipality to the merits of such a plan.

“The mayor and the city engineer have looked over this
idea thoroughly, and it seems quite worthwhile to us,”
said David Hartum, deputy director-general of the
Ashdod Municipality. “We are suggesting building on
the breakwater in the port. We like the fact that it’s
ecological, as ocean waves do the job instead of oil,
and that it involves a one-time cost to produce
electricity. We are definitely interested.”

The only thing standing in the way of the country’s
first ocean wave power plant, then, is the Israel
Ports Authority, whose approval for the project is
required. A spokeswoman for Shlomo Breiman,
director-general of the Israel Ports Authority, said
he was looking into the idea, but would have to review
thorough studies on the potential environmental impact
on the port basin - and any potential impact on the
port’s operations, especially - before giving the
project a green light.

Should SDE win a contract to build a power plant in
Ashdod, it would certainly mean vindication for Ovadia
- proof that, where other concepts have failed, his,
like his buoys, has stayed afloat. But for the most
part he is looking to other markets, focusing on
underdeveloped and energy-poor countries in Africa and
Asia. It is there that he expects to see his first
power plant built - he estimates - within two or three
years.

“When I was in Gambia,” he recalls, “we went to visit
a little village. At one point our meeting was
interrupted by afternoon prayers… There I was, this
Israeli Jew, surrounded by Muslims praying intensely.

“These people,” Ovadia says, leaning forward as if to
reveal a secret, “are in desperate need of energy in
order to improve their lives. Well,” he says, leaning
back in his chair again, “I will be their messiah. I
will save them.”