Hesh Kestin - The Siege of Tel Aviv

He puts the razor to his throat, pauses for just a moment, then continues shaving in fluid, practiced strokes, careful as ever to avoid even the smallest nick, the tiniest drop of blood. Whatever else might happen, he has work to do.

WHEN THEY MOVED INTO the White House, the president cautioned his wife that it is unlucky for a new occupant to make changes to the décor. Jacqueline Kennedy had gone on a spending binge to renew the old place, and her husband had paid the ultimate price; Nancy Reagan, who did not go that far, saw her husband survive an assassination attempt. Perhaps worse in the eyes of the president, the White House had been seriously redecorated by his predecessor, at great cost to her popularity, which played a small but significant role in her defeat for a second term.

“Hon,” the president had told the first lady, “if they don’t kill you, they vote you out—and I ain’t about to lose a second term because of some gay son-bitch wielding a fine aesthetic and an unlimited expense account.”

With a sure sense of the American electorate, the president hardly requires an opinion poll to know the great unwashed was disgusted by the Franz Kline abstract in the Lincoln Bedroom and the Jackson Pollack in the Oval Office. His predecessor allowed presidential power to go to her head and in the process badly misjudged the tastes of the American people. Even her Democratic base looked upon the redecoration as a form of desecration when opposite a full-length Gilbert Stewart portrait of George Washington was hung a mobile in primary colors by Alexander Calder. One Fox Television personality termed the result “Washington crosses the nursery,” and spent a month—forever in air time—demanding the Calder be scrapped. Wall Street, the Hollywood elite, museum curators, writers, and gallery owners protested that removing the Calder (to say nothing of the Rothko, two de Koonings, and that very large Jackson Pollack) would be giving in to American mass culture, while the rest of America demanded that the White House continue looking like the White House. The president did not need more than a minute to weigh the issues. “Some of this stuff ain’t to my taste,” he announced at a press conference, making sure to sound down-home. “But I’m no expert. So I am appointing a commission to study this issue and make recommendations.”

Regarding the emerging situation in the Middle East, the president will be similarly decisive. In Washington, the appearance of action is better than action itself. Appearance rarely involves consequence.

AS AMBASSADOR OREN TAKES the podium, the General Assembly empties until only a scattering of delegates remain: the US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Guatemala, Holland, Italy, Panama, and Paraguay. It is as if a plague has entered the chamber in the form of one man.

The plague seems not to care.

“Mr. Chairman, distinguished members,” Ambassador Oren begins. “It is now one week since the sudden, bloody, and unprovoked attack on the State of Israel by four of its neighbors, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq, and by one distant self-declared mortal enemy, Iran. Their forces now illegally and brutally occupy over eighty percent of the State of Israel, the same State of Israel whose borders were affirmed in 1949 by this very body.

“In Israel’s ancient capital of Jerusalem, Jordanian and Iranian troops, through the widespread use of terror, including centrally organized mass rape and murder, have caused the greatest refugee crisis since the Roman expulsion of the Jews from their homeland two thousand years earlier. The political leadership of Israel has been wiped out, either assassinated or missing. This includes all but one member of Israel’s parliament. Israel today is leaderless. In Jerusalem alone, eleven thousand civilians are dead. The principal occupation of the population of Israel’s ancient capital is the digging of graves.

“Some four hundred synagogues have been destroyed, their holy scrolls burned in the streets. Not content with wiping out every trace of Jewish cultural life, the Muslim invaders also burned or desecrated at least sixty churches. Though some video has been smuggled out, the true scope of the carnage is as yet not known. As in other areas under control of the invading forces, hospitals are closed to Jews, including women in labor.

“Mass terror, organized, planned and executed, is the rule in every Israeli city but one. Tel Aviv has so far not felt the imprint of one Arab boot.

“For those of you who see in this some sudden burst of compassion, be not deceived. The Muslim master plan for Israel is now clear. Even as I speak, Jews from outlying areas are being herded into ghettos in the major centers of population. Haifa, once a city of 300,000, now holds a million Jews. Beersheba, a city of 150,000, now holds 400,000. Jerusalem, home to one million Jews, now contains two million. In every case, Jewish civilians have no access to water, food, or shelter. What they do have is access to transport.

“Fellow delegates, as I speak Israel’s national railroad, now in the hands of the so-called Islamic Liberation Force, is being used to funnel all of Israel’s Jews into what is being called Ghetto Tel Aviv. Here they are forced to live on the streets and the beaches, surviving on shrinking reserves of food. Some eat grass pulled from the ground in public parks. Since the invasion, no ships have been permitted to bring aid to the starving people of Tel Aviv. For two weeks, no milk, flour, fruit, or vegetables have entered the ghetto. Electricity is limited to two hours a day and is expected shortly to cease entirely as supplies of coal dwindle and simply run out. Tel Aviv’s hospitals have no medicine, and soon will have no power. By the time all of Israel’s Jews are concentrated within the borders of Ghetto Tel Aviv, some six million men, women, and children will be concentrated here to starve or die of disease. When the time comes, the Muslim invaders will doubtless wipe out these survivors house by house, their bodies burned on the beach.

“Fellow delegates, yet again six million Jews will be killed—infants, children, mothers, fathers, grandparents—to fulfill the hideous dream of Israel’s conquerors, to make of the Jewish State little more than a dismal memory and its population a mountain of bleached bones.

“Fellow delegates, when Israel turned to you for support in defending against this brutal, cowardly, and unprovoked attack, you paused, considered, pontificated, invited cease fires, and called for peace conferences, but did little other than to make the sympathetic noises whose words will redound to the shame of the human race for centuries. You remain sitting on your hands trembling that the price of oil might rise one cent more, frozen in fear that the Saudis and their colleagues in OPEC might make your lives a bit less comfortable. Despite the solemn treaties, the lessons of history, and the certain knowledge that your own non-Muslim countries too will soon fall victim to the same brutal aggression, you let it happen.

“Fellow delegates, I ask you to come to the aid of the State of Israel, now a city-state of the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, the hopeless, the dying and the dead. Send your ships. Bring us food. Drop it from airplanes, as you did during the Cold War to feed the people of West Berlin. Bring it by sea, as you did to support the people of the former Soviet Union in World War II.”

The ambassador seems now short of breath, or perhaps hope. He pauses, searching the faces of the few diplomats in the hall.

“And then begin the sad but necessary evacuation of the surviving population, six million wretched refugees belonging to a people whose contribution to the world has never been exceeded by any other people, large or small. The people of the State of Israel are prepared to help build your nations, your societies, your homelands. Step forward now as you did not in the previous century, when six million Jews were murdered. Please, I beg you, help save these six million.”