It took only a few minutes of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s nauseatingly
self-congratulatory impromptu press conference on Saturday night to confirm what
we all knew too well – this country is in infinitely worse shape than we might
wish to admit. The prime minister had every right to list the many countries
he’d called upon for help, to exult in the number of planes that would soon be
joining the battle to snuff out the Carmel Forest flames, and to assure Israelis
that soon this country would soon have its very own airborne firefighting force,
just as real countries do.
It would have been nice, however, to have
heard some semblance of an admission that the government had failed its citizens
yet again, some acknowledgement that it’s been almost a decade since the IAF
said it could no longer fight fires with its helicopters. Everyone in power has
known for at least that long that we were dangerously unprotected against the
kind of inevitable catastrophe that finally struck last week.
But neither
the fire nor our inadequate response is the real issue. The real issue is that
just beneath the veneer of this startup nation with its hi-tech firms, its
glistening Tel Aviv glass and chrome towers and its luxury hotels lining the
beaches of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, this is a country plagued by
ailing and unsupervised infrastructure. We have a government that has long done
nothing about this, a government in which the public has lost virtually all
confidence.
The most honest moment of the entire Carmel Forest
catastrophe came Thursday evening, when a fire service spokesperson virtually
cried in an interview with Channel 2, saying that the country was completely out
of fire-fighting materials, that equipment wasn’t working, and that somehow the
fire had to be stopped, because “the State of Israel is at stake.”
Little
did he know how true that was.
OF THE three main stories of the past
week, two have already been forgotten. First, Cellcom’s entire network
collapsed, leaving 3.3 million customers – and many businesses – completely
incommunicado. Amos Shapira, Cellcom’s CEO, admirably took responsibility, but
he also had to admit: “We don’t know what happened” and “we don’t know when it
will be fixed.” Honest, but hardly comforting. Are our telecommunications really
so fragile? Does anyone know? Does anyone care? And then there was the
continuing saga of the appointment of the next police inspector-general – a
process sullied by the allegations of rape leveled at one of the (formerly) top
contenders. Is it any wonder that most Israelis have but muted disdain for the
police force, which they believe is wholly second rate? You could see the
disdain for the police when many citizens refused officers’ orders to leave
their homes due to the fire. Some, obviously, wanted to stay to protect their
homes. But many others simply didn’t trust the police to make a responsible
decision as to whether they could or could not stay, and still others were
appalled by the force that police used to get them to move. In Ein Hod,
residents actually boasted by showing television cameras about how easily they
were able to sneak by police lines and return to neighborhoods that were
supposedly off-limits.
So the cellphones are fragile, the police are
dismissed as hacks, or worse, and the country that collected millions of
quarters in blue JNF boxes over decades so that forests could be planted had
taken no steps to make sure they were protected. Five million incinerated trees
later, the familiar process has started – finger-pointing and recrimination
everywhere, investigative committees to be appointed and promises of six shiny
new fire-fighting airplanes with a Star of David on the wings.
But the
fundamental problem – that governments of all parties simply fail to plan for
the future – remains utterly unacknowledged and unaddressed. For citizens to
wish to remain in a country, to believe that it is worth spending their lives
here and raising their children to be devoted to Israel, they cannot believe
that the very government they elected considers their lives almost
worthless.
ISRAELIS NOW know that the powers that be have known for many
years that the county’s fire-fighting capacity was dangerously inadequate. They
suspect that someone high up made a terrible decision to send a bus into a
horrendously dangerous situation for which it was totally ill-suited. But do
they really believe anything will change? If they don’t, why should they stay?
Or if they have no choice but to stay, why should they be anything but cynical
about the country that taxes them heavily and drafts their sons and daughters
into dangerous military service? This country is eventually going to be hit by a
massive earthquake – scientists are virtually unanimous on that. Do we really
believe we are prepared? And for years now, authorities both here and outside
the country have been warning that Ben-Gurion Airport’s air traffic control
system is woefully inadequate. TLV is a disaster just waiting to happen. And
what’s been done? Virtually nothing.
But we’re about to have a spiffy new
airborne firefighting force, aren’t we? So there is, after all, cause for
comfort. Because we do learn from our mistakes.
One day, some months
after a 747 crashes at TLV, killing hundreds of people, when tourists are afraid
to fly here and numerous airlines have taken Israel off their destinations list,
we’re going to go out and buy ourselves a shiny new air traffic control system.
It’ll be the envy of airports across the globe, and the prime minister will
inaugurate it, looking into the camera and saying, oh so sonorously: “My
friends, look at our cutting-edge technology. Israel, once again, is the envy of
the world.”
The writer is the author of Saving Israel: How the Jewish
People Can Win a War That May Never End,
which received a 2009 National Jewish
Book Award. He blogs at http://danielgordis.org.