The Anatomy of Israel's Survival by Hirsh Goodman

Author:Hirsh Goodman [Goodman, Hirsh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-357-7
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2011-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

It could be very different. In December 2010 Israel suffered a terrible fire on the Carmel hills close to Israel’s third-largest city, Haifa. Five million trees were destroyed and forty-four people died, and much of a kibbutz, Beit Oren, which had survived wars and terror attacks, was left in smoldering ruins. The fire was thought to have been started accidentally by a teenage boy who had gone off to a copse of trees near his home in the Druze village of Usifiya to secretly smoke a narghile, a water pipe. Though already early December, deep into what was supposed to be winter, the country had hardly seen a drop of rain and the forests so carefully and lovingly planted over the years were as dry as tinder. Most of the trees were pine, the wood used to make matches. This, together with strong, varying winds, resulted in an ecological disaster some estimate will take a generation to overcome.

Though Israel has one of the most sophisticated air forces in the world and has spent billions on home defenses in the form of shelters, warning systems, and emergency medical services, its ability to fight fires was woefully inept, with the country having one firefighter for every 8,500 people as opposed to four times the number of firefighters per capita in most parts of the civilized world. It also had no aerial firefighting capability, because the decision of which planes to buy was stuck in committee for over fifteen years while bureaucrats fought over which government ministry would foot the bill.

When the dimensions of the fire became clear, the prime minister, Netanyahu, sent out an urgent call for international help. The Bulgarians were the first to arrive, soon followed by the Cypriots and surprisingly the Turks, even though Israel and the Turkish government were on the brink of severing relations at the time. Within a day, aircraft from fourteen countries, including Russia, the UK, Switzerland, and Germany, and firefighters from Jordan and the Palestinian Authority were battling the flames. Suddenly it seemed as if the entire world was trying to save the country vilified in Durban and onward, flying hundreds of sorties with as many as forty aircraft in the air at one time, under the command of an Israeli air force unit set up in Haifa to coordinate the effort. When it was over, the crews, some of whom had not slept for three or four nights, celebrated together, a common enemy defeated and the rhetoric of hatred left in the past, for the time being, at least. More important, as a result of the incident, the countries involved decided to create a regional rapid-response team to deal with similar tragedies in the future. It took a fire in Israel to get Greece and Turkey to work together, and the lesson has been learned. Greece, Turkey, Israel, and other Mediterranean countries share the same problem; now they are part of the same solution. While Israel’s firefighting force was an embarrassment, some of

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