Cataclysmic portents for David and Goliath

Maj Gen Raj Mehta (retd)

STOP! The woman’s piercing shout cut sabre-like through Fort Leavenworth’s ‘PX’ (post exchange), a US facility providing tax-free groceries to military personnel. In this case, they were officers attending the globally-sought-after Command and General Staff Course. Startled shoppers watched along with an Israeli Colonel’s wife as her playful toddler, left momentarily unguarded, tumbled down the escalator. However, seeing Col BM Kapur, her husband’s Indian peer rushing for rescue, she commanded: ‘BM, stop! He’s Israeli!’ The bruised but resilient child soon quietly walked back into his proud mom’s arms.

Later, in 2002, I coordinated the official visit of the Army Chief-designate Gen NC Vij to Israel. We travelled by helicopters/vehicles to watch men and women of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), with their cutting-edge technology, in the war-zone mode — in Lebanon, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, West Bank, Jerusalem, Wailing Wall, Al Aqsa mosque and Negev desert. Live weapon firing, state-of-the-art Merkava tanks, drones, sensors — we saw it all.

We saw how stringently the Lebanon border was being manned across the UN-designated Blue Line. In an underground bunker, IDF intelligence corps’ women officers sat opposite ‘electronic walls’ with active sectors lighting up, revealing Hezbollah defences/movement with astonishing clarity. The real-time dramatic encounter and IDF responses were tracked electronically till their conclusion.

Back on the ground, we moved opposite a Hezbollah post manned metres away by an alert, haughty, black salwar-kameez-clad sentry. Among combat soldiers, respect needs no preamble. IDF soldiers and Hezbollah are like that: commanding mutual respect with neither seeking nor giving any quarter.

The IDF members are pleasantly informal. They dress without any flourish. Few, if any, wear medals or other accoutrements, even as their berets are tucked under shoulder flaps. This looks cool, besides having a practical application: You don’t salute because doing so demands that you wear your beret! Such IDF informality makes obsequious ‘sirring’ nearly absent, with attendant freedom to disagree without getting familiar.

The cleverly engineered Operation Al Aqsa Deluge of Hamas found Israel unprepared or underprepared last month. It was a shocking redux of the Yom Kippur intel failure despite Israel’s ‘never again’ resolve. The attack has strengthened the combatants’ Armageddon outlook, even as innocents are suffering.

Popular Jewish actor/author and ex-IDF soldier Noa Tishby has said: ‘Hamas will remain nothing more than a footnote in history.’ Compare this aggression with the age-old Palestinian dream — ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ — and you see cataclysmic portents for both David and Goliath, unless peace returns 4,000 years after its catastrophic disappearance from West Asia.

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