Hesh Kestin - The Siege of Tel Aviv

General Hefty is about to lose it. “Mr. President, that is the most cynical sentence I have heard in Washington in my lifetime, and this is far from my first rodeo.”

The president considers another slice of cornbread. “Might well be, Arthur. But let me ask you this: What’s one pissant country compared to ensuring that we and our allies do not run out of the lifeblood of democracy and the American way of life?”

“Sir, my letter of resignation will be on your desk in the morning.” The president decides to go for the cornbread—he can swim it off in the morning. “Arthur, I like a man with ideals. But should we attack Eyeran, the US is at war with the whole Muslim world. Which means no oil. Zip. We’re not just talkin’ high-priced gas—our pumps will go as dry as a widow’s pussy.”

“In an election year,” Flo Spier adds, as if she must.

The president genuinely likes General Hefty, probably as much as he likes cornbread. Both have that gritty, down-home quality. “See, Arthur. Israel’s got holy sites and all that history, and brave people, real brave people. But what it doesn’t have is what we need.”

“It’s a fact of life, sir.”

“That’s right as rain, Felix. Now, Arthur, I sure am glad those Israelians didn’t take out the Arabs with their nukes, even if now it means Eyeran is going to take out Israel with theirs. Sometimes life just ain’t fair. Y’all want to pass the jam down this way?”

IN THE WARM WATERS of the Persian Gulf, an Israeli submarine rises to the surface, joined a half mile to the east by a second. In both, the same exercise is worked through step by step: confirmation of code, confirmation of source, confirmation of target, confirmation of onward orders. In each submarine, the captain opens the hatch to step out on deck to have a last look at the world before it is bent into a new shape, permanently altered, transmogrified.

After the missiles are launched, both vessels gently submerge beneath the waves for the long voyage home.

THE ISRAEL TO WHICH they return will be familiar, and not. Still fractious and almost ferociously opinionated, the Israeli in the street, like all survivors, is forever changed, but ultimately the same. Coming back from death’s door is for the individual Israeli a transcendent experience, but once it is shared this most personal of emotions becomes nationally affirmative.

The extent of the damage is unfathomable. Israel’s medical facilities, overburdened with caring for the sick and wounded, become an assembly line as thousands of Jewish women and girls, some as young as eleven, line up for abortions. Israel’s Chief Rabbinate, which otherwise condemns the practice, turns a blind eye.

No other people experiences so many funerals per capita in so short a period. Israel’s supply of rabbis qualified to lead prayers at gravesites proves to be insufficient. When it becomes clear how many dead are piled up like rotting logs in the former prisoner of war camps, rabbis from around the world are invited by the IDF Chief Rabbinate to fly in to help. They do so in droves, many for the first time putting aside their skepticism about a Jewish state that in their eyes is insufficiently religious.

Yet, as always, Jewish humor prevails, and as usual it is black. Television comedians quickly see the possibilities: the Muslim invaders have finally given Israel’s cities an opportunity for broad-scale urban renewal; the Knesset, with no members, has never been more efficient; the ultra-Orthodox, who before the war dedicated their lives to study, eschewing labor, have at last joined the workforce.

Jewish money pours in from abroad to finance the rebuilding, so much so that, as the comedians put it, the country’s second major import—after cash—is brass plaques to commemorate the donors.

With labor in short supply and no Palestinians to take up the slack, Christian fundamentalist and Jewish college students flock in to hammer nails, pour concrete, and repave roads.

The Knesset building is reconstructed in six months. Rebuilding the western wall of the Holy Temple takes longer: some of its stone building blocks weigh five hundred tons. Bulldozer after bulldozer breaks down in the effort; how the ancient Israelites brought them to the site and lifted them into place remains a mystery to this day.

BETTER TIMES ARE NOT slow in coming. The massive defeat of five Muslim armies and the Iranian theocrats who planned the war does not immediately turn the Muslim lion into a Jew-loving lamb. But the plan Yigal worked on while Pinky and his generals prepared the counterattack removes the lion’s claws, and teeth.

And balls.

To Yigal, a student of history, it might have appeared that charity following victory would accomplish more than brutal vengeance. The examples are classic, well known, and an article of faith in every Western doctoral course in international relations. After World War I, the victors so emasculated the vanquished enemy that Germany’s obsessive dedication to revenge brought forth a second, even more horrific world conflict. Learning from this, after the fall of the Axis powers in World War II, the West took a more humane tack, actively assisting Germany, Italy, and Japan to rebuild, in the process creating three long-lived democracies so opposed to war that their armies became mere miniatures of what they had been, purposeless by design and in posture merely defensive.

Yigal rejects this model.

As he tells Judy the night of the first day of the counterattack, “After the Second World War, the West was dealing with the West. The victors and the vanquished shared a common secular civilization, so compassion made sense. Here we are dealing with people whose worldview does not accommodate other religions, and who approach the secular as even worse.”

“They’re our neighbors.”

“Geographically,” Yigal says. “But if your neighbor’s very essence, his every urge, is to destroy you because you are different, then the only way to deal with this is to disarm him, reduce him to impotence, and then simply ignore him. For a thousand years, the Muslims stewed in their own enforced ignorance—this after centuries of being the light of the world. Do you know how many Western books were translated into Arabic from 900 AD to today? A thousand. It’s the same number Greece translates from other languages in one year. Our neighbors are intent that Islam rule the world, and they wish the world to look like them. That being the case, I don’t care what they wish for. I don’t care if my neighbor hates me. I care only to make sure he is disarmed. What is their weapon? Oil. With oil, we gave them strength.”

“But that’s geography again, isn’t it? You can’t take away their oil. They’re sitting on it.”

“Honey,” Yigal says, “just watch me.”

THE DAY AFTER THE counterattack, Israel begins repatriating the first of some 300,000 Muslim prisoners of war. The total may be significantly higher, but the IDF has better things to do than take names and numbers, or to build POW camps to house and feed the enemy. There is no sense in it: because the Muslim armies had removed no Israeli prisoners of war to their own countries, there are no prisoners to trade. Short of mass execution, exporting Arab captives is the only solution.

Only the day after her clean scoop, Connie Blunt loses her exclusive as hundreds of foreign correspondents arrive in Israel on the first planes to land at what is again Ben Gurion International. Like Blunt, they are doing their stand-ups on the low rise overlooking Allenby Bridge, where a seemingly endless line of Arab prisoners of war, tied neck to neck, marches into Jordan, some going home, others eventually to reach Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. No observer can determine their nationality by their dress. The prisoners are, to say the least, out of uniform.