Rahamin

by Nidra Poller (March 2009)

July 2007

And I am on the warpath. My allies are other grandmothers, mothers, and young women who have yet to begin their fruitful multiplication. We are intrepid. Take no prisoners! Many of my accomplices need body guards, some are enclosed in fortresses, we fear for our children and grandchildren but cannot fear for ourselves.

Beating the war drums means sending young men and women into battle. The simple-minded argued, when we had virtually no political power, that life-giving women would not waste lives in war. Humph! Live and learn. Your local jihad cell presents the grandmother-shahida, ta ta ta ta, who bakes a cake before posing in her apology-for- crime video with green headscarf and Kalashnikov. Her heartless sacrifice touches a maudlin cord in hard hearts: look then how great is their suffering when grandmothers take off their aprons and strap on suicide belts. Pffft!

Where shall we go? Aliyah? The boys will go to war. No problem in the abstract. Then tighten the bolts and put it this way: my grandsons will go to war. Name the grandsons, each one by name, and every Israeli soldier wounded, maimed, kidnapped, captured, or killed is my grandson. Every civilian gashed, gouged, imploded, exploded is my own child. Marines on duty in Iraq, civilian contractors, sons and daughters of my friends in the U.S. are my grandchildren, my heart stops beating at the thought of the danger they face.

The affairs of this world spread out before me like a playroom at the end of the day. I know how to clean up that mess. Wised- up mothers, survivors of confrontations with two year-old tyrants who play on their tenderness and exploit their absolute refusal of capital punishment, have learned how to exert authority. No child would survive, no parent would breathe a single free breath, if we raised our children the way diplomats handle foreign affairs today. It is all so thin and flabby compared to the intense negotiations of everyday life. Why do men and women with power in powerful nations behave like limp rags? Their ultimatums dissolve like a lump of sugar in a hot cup of tea.

Is there any more highly concentrated force of determination than a small child? How do you handle conflict when you would never lift a hand, when the possibility of rupture is totally excluded, when you do not speak exactly the same language or exactly honor the same values, when you are simultaneously the educator, the boss, the guardian, and the victim of injustice? How do you deal with Ahmadinejad?

My friends need bodyguards. Some of my allies are in hiding. We are all targets. Our side is always on the defensive. Our leaders negotiate with the clean-shaven emissaries of garish killers, they look away when the evidence spells itself out in no uncertain terms, they prattle about political solutions and the primacy of diplomacy.

The long-awaited autumn rains had not yet fallen by that day in mid-December as we drove with S. and the children from Jerusalem to Efrat. Dust rose from the construction site. Fences, walls, tunnels like so many torn and tattered patched up garments. How did it come to this? They take potshots at us. And we just keep on constructing. Constructing an economy, a society, a fence, a barrier, an anti-missile shield and still we cannot draw the line, put up a stop sign, blow the whistle, and end that sick game for the sake of all concerned.

What should the mother have done, the mother in the death camp? She should have brought in her F-16s! Her commandos. Her intelligent missiles.

For Almog, balancing the force means no more cutting of ground forces and ground force commands, and training the infantry, armor and artillery to work together in large sweeping maneuvers, backed up by airpower, intelligence and logistics. And this, in turn, entails a readiness to conduct fast-moving, rolling warfare without holding back in the ‘post-heroic’ mode. ‘War is a test of the readiness of the nation to put life and limb on the line. In some cases, there is no substitute for ground battles with the attendant loss of life. When air power failed to stop the Katyushas, you needed a ground maneuver,’ he says.   Almog says he would make a special effort to train reserve officers, company, battalion and brigade commanders. And he would bring back some of the old-timers, the retired, experienced generals to help with the rebuilding…[1]

[1] Leslie Susser, Closing Ranks, the Jerusalem Report, January 8, 2007, posted on CIJR http://www.isranet.org/

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