Hesh Kestin - The Siege of Tel Aviv

“Fuck words is right,” Cobi says, examining among the robes spread before him a kaffiyeh and the agal , the loop of woolen rope that keeps it on one’s head. “Abed, my Arabic consists of surrender, hands up, bread , and your mother’s cunt . I wouldn’t want to have to engage in an extended conversation on Sharia law.”

“Dress then in these and keep your mouth tightly shut,” the Bedouin says. “It will make for a pleasant change.”

THOUGH TEL AVIV IS spared mass destruction, IDF headquarters in the Kirya in the very center of the city is a leveled field, bombed intensely on the first day of the attack, and though the war rooms in hardened levels deep underground remain intact, there is no longer any communications infrastructure to connect the military leadership with units in the field. In point of fact, there are no units in the field.

The air force is wiped out. IAF pilots and navigators are now relegated to sitting around the lobby of a hotel on the beach that has neither electricity nor running water. These mission-oriented men and women of action find themselves with no mission and no action. A good many busy themselves playing poker and gin rummy, the most adept amassing thousands of shekels in play money that can buy nothing. Few have sufficient energy for beach volleyball or swimming, or even enough to argue politics, once the national pastime of a people who had not been permitted to govern themselves for over two thousand years. But of politics, like food and water, there is now none.

In the fishing port of Jaffa to the south of Tel Aviv, which had almost immediately been abandoned by its largely Arab population on strenuous warnings from the Islamic Liberation Force, whose aircraft snowed leaflets over the town, a division of infantry was cobbled together. But with little weaponry, less ammunition, and entirely no transport, its fighting men spend their time fishing. It is a useless pastime: Because every third resident of Tel Aviv tries his hand at angling for some sort of aquatic protein, the waters close to shore are quickly fished out. Many soldiers play chess or dominos or shesh-besh, a variety of backgammon. One enterprising platoon, having discovered the epicurean delights of seaweed, manages to harvest sufficient for a handful for almost every man and woman in the division. After several days, there is no more.

The navy is gone, sunk in port or destroyed by Egyptian gunships after running out of fuel at sea. A few fortunate sailors swim to shore, the shark-ravaged bodies of the rest eventually joining them, skeletal remains wrapped in shredded tan cloth.

Only an expanded brigade of some 160 tanks remains capable of action, but these and their support vehicles are strung out in a Maginot Line of dubious efficacy on the eastern edge of the city. With low reserves of fuel, this armor, once the mailed fist of an IDF capable of lightning offensive strength and tremendous maneuverability, now function as a static, if not simply symbolic, line of defense. Fixed in place like artillery, their commanders’ only hope is to discourage the approach of the first enemy tank. Once the next vehicles break through, there is nothing to stop them from entering the city. It will be over.

With little to command and no communications with which to do it, the chief of staff is reduced to traveling by jeep from group to group in a vain attempt to instill hope and a sense of military structure. An early attempt to restart training fails for lack of fuel, not merely for the armored corps but for its personnel. With next to nothing to eat, no one has the energy. Even basic morning calisthenics are abandoned, just as their chief of staff has abandoned all hope on his daily visits to the Hilton, where former low-level government functionaries go through the motions of pretending to administer a city-state of the damned. They have nothing to offer him in the way of resources, and he has nothing to offer them in the way of defense.

He is at the Hilton now, barely a mile away, when a column of civilian cars led by a red BMW pulls up to what is now IDF head-quarters, a collection of camouflaged tents that fills the once-pleasant park lining the south side of the Yarkon River from Ibn-Givrol to Dizengoff Street, in the recent past Israel’s thoroughfare of the young, the hip, the cool. Its bars and restaurants, broken into, now offer shelter from the sun to thousands of refugees. Pinky makes his visit to the Hilton every day at the same hour. It is no accident that the driver of the red BMW leading the column of civilian cars chose the same hour to visit what passes for military HQ.

Assembling his personnel, a collection of gangsters, miscreants, and triggermen from all over the country, Misha steps away from Yigal to speak his marching orders in terms that are as brief as they are chilling.

“Whatever happens,” he says, “we don’t kill our own.”

A Druze drug dealer in the front rank, whose people in the northern village of Daliyat-al-Carmel were wiped out by the invaders, man, woman, and child, for collaboration with the Jews, utters a quiet, “God forbid.” The Druze, an offshoot of Islam, have fought in the IDF for decades.

“Unless,” Misha says, “absolutely necessary.”

THE HEADS OF SIX Jewish organizations are seated like diplomats with the president and Flo Spier in the Oval Office, having first been treated to a group tour of the White House and then each photographed with the president, a print of which will no doubt take its place on an office wall full of similar souvenirs. All have been here before, guests of earlier presidents. Like earlier presidential advisors, Flo Spier counts them as necessary to electoral victory as the caciques of the Cuban exile community in Florida, the light-complexioned leaders of a dozen black organizations, the delegations of Hollywood stars lobbying for intervention in Africa, to say nothing of federal protection for the blue whale, support for the Dalai Lama, encouragement of wind power, and constitutional recognition of gay marriage. The president is already on good terms with almost every Pentecostal group; like the Jews, these too must be stroked. As must every other puzzle piece in America’s fractious demographic jigsaw: Mexican-American leaders pushing for immigration reform, delegations from Wall Street and Silicon Valley looking for tax breaks, politically powerful Roman Catholic bishops in states where many people still insist on eating fish on Friday. Though today’s delegation of grandees is aware that the Jewish vote is no longer concentrated in the northeast, Jewish money will be a factor in American politics for a long time. Fortunately, that money is now evenly divided in support for both parties. This offers leverage.

The president is not unaware. His guests have twenty minutes to make their case, or to feel they are making it. Egos are involved.

“Mr. President, Israel is an ally of the United States, a beacon of democracy in the Middle East.” This from the doyen of American rabbis, a tennis-playing Reform cleric, hatless, beardless and—according to his more traditional colleagues—shameless.

“Well, Rabbi Joe,” the president says. “I could be cynical here and say Israel is now not much of an ally of anyone. It’s the incredible shrinking country. Of course, under our treaty we will come to her defense should Israel be subject to nuclear attack.”

The representative of B’nai Brith, secular and centrist, has seen this coming. “But Mr. President, that’s not the problem. The problem is Iran so far has not had to use nuclear—”

“Warren, below nuclear my hands are tied. My predecessors tried to get involved with improving the situation in other places in the Middle East, which I’m sure you know, and it cost this country a fortune in the lives of our brave young soldiers, to say nothing of vast reserves of treasure that have left the US economy in a state from which it has yet to fully recover. Y’all are not looking at a man who believes America should entangle itself in the affairs of every nation around the globe, noble and sympathetic as that nation may be. As for democracy, the Israelian parliament—what they call it, Flo?”