Hi everyone,
Musing here in my office. Today is the anniversary of the 1967 "Six Day War". It is instructive to look back on the situation at that time. Egyptian forces were massed on the southern border of Israel , the Suez Canal was blockaded and Eilat was cut off. In the north the Syrians and Jordanians were preparing to strike. Prime Minister Levy Eshkol, no warrior himself, was scared enough to pee in his pants and most Israelis were not feeling any better. The sharks were circling. People were fleeing Israel , and there were jokes about the sign at the country's airport, "Will the last person to leave please turn off the lights?". In a nutshell, it didn't look too good.
How on earth we got the reputation of the martial sabras bulldozing the cowering Arabs is beyond me. Even we thought we were going to be massacred and nobody was more surprised by the victories in 1967 than the Israelis themselves. Shows what people can do when they are scared shitless, I guess. But credit must be given where it is due; the definitely civilian Eshkol did the legwork, holding back the military, and preparing Israel 's air force. In the first hours of June 5, the Israeli air force succeeded in wiping out the Egyptian air force in a surprise action, and the course of the war changed right there. He also switched leadership, putting Moshe Dayan in charge of the army and put Menachem Begin in the cabinet, thereby giving the necessary backbone to the leadership. The rest is history, and lots of books have been written about it.
Here I sit, in a house on land that was hotly contested in that war, and contested much more recently during the intafada. For all the problems that victory in 1967 caused, the alternative was the annihilation of Israel . All it takes is one lost war, and the country disappears. That was very, very close. And it could happen again.
There are always a few lessons to be learned looking back at history. This time, I was struck by the courage of Eshkol, who was scared stiff and having hysterics in Yiddish, stammering on the radio, just doing the next right thing even though he was about to collapse. (Actually he died in office of a heart attack two years later.) There must have been a lot of Jews like him in that war, scared to death, who didn't cut and run or collapse even though they came close to it.
The other thing that struck me was the homework that made survival and surprising victory possible. It took time and money to build up the air force so that it was prepared. Somebody had the foresight to do that and it paid off in spades. Had there been no war, it would have been decried as a waste of scarce resources. But the air force saved our collective asses that June 5, 41 years ago. People sometimes say that the Six Day War was a miracle. Maybe. But precisely the miracle seems to have been that Israelis, not a people given to planning anything, did the necessary careful planning, and that people who were scared stiff found the backbone to stick to their guns. Without that, I doubt very much that God could have played any hand in the outcome.
Take home message for me in my own work is the necessity for careful planning and to stick to my own guns. I'm responsible for data in my organization, which is finally waking up to the idea that data are rather important. I've kept my data systems afloat with spit, string and bailing wire for years in the hope that things will get better. Now there is awareness, but nobody is yet ready to do the necessary work to make a system that works properly. So I still have a long way to go. It is easy to get discouraged and just retreat into my own interests. But that won't get the essential job done. I basically know what has to be done, and just have to stiffen myself to do it, probably for several years to come. It's not exactly a war, but doing conservation properly is necessary for the welfare of Israel in the future, and I have my task to do in that field. If I get discouraged, my part of it will fail. So for today, I find Levi Eshkol rather inspirational.
Shabbat shalom,
Linda
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http://shabbat-shalom-jerusalem.blogspot.com/
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