No, not that one. Kobi Katz. When we rolled into the Israeli
town of Metulla last Tuesday evening, the main streets were clogged
with last-minute campaigning, and anyone who didn’t defend himself
was quickly decorated with T-shirts and caps proclaiming the
virtues of Kobi or his opponent. We spent the evening with Kobi
Katz’s dad and some of his friends. The elder Katz, a former mayor
— and, by reputation at least, no Boss Daley — was overseeing his
boy’s campaign with pride. He and all the people of Metulla are
living happily, and determinedly, in a pretty tough place.
Metulla is Israel’s northernmost town, just yards from Lebanon.
Along the ridgeline overlooking the border is a string of Israeli
Defense Forces positions, with every sort of sensor, looking for
terrorists trying to slip across. The IDF refused us permission to
go up to the observation points because the bad guys had been
shooting across the border the day before we arrived. On the other
side of the border, within pistol shot, is a significant force of
the Hezbollah terrorists that Syria and Iran use as a proxy force
against Israel. The terrorists occasionally take a few shots at the
Israelis, or lob a couple of shells at Metulla or the more famously
shot up town of Qiryat Shimona. In the old days, the people of
Metulla educated their children underground. Now, there’s a
sandbagged elementary school.
The people of Metulla take politics as seriously as the Boston
Irish. Campaigns, elections, and all that go with them are pressed
on regardless. I had a pretty good steak, a really good beer and
some great conversations with the people of Metulla. One charming
expat British lady, the general secretary of the Israel Ice Skating
Federation, told me how frustrated the Israeli skaters were at the
lack of support from the Sharon government. Apparently, they get
less support from their government than the Jamaican bobsled team
gets from Jamaica. The lady’s complaint was not strident. She knows
Sharon has a lot on his mind these days.
I reached Metulla after a day-long ride north from Jerusalem.
Driving east out of the city, we spent hours traversing the West
Bank of the Jordan River. From the highway, you don’t see the
unending tension and terrorism of the West Bank. What you do see is
open hardscrabble country interrupted only by scattered towns and
farms. Biblical sites are almost a commonplace. And there is almost
nothing to protect against terrorist incursions. Most areas have an
old triple fence line of barbed wire. Though mine fields dot the
area, left behind by the Syrian army in 1973, the border is as open
as the border between California and Mexico, intolerable to any
people trying to protect themselves from terrorist
infiltrations.
The Israelis are now getting beaten up at the U.N. over their
construction of a fence through some of the Palestinian West Bank
areas and Israel proper. Strung along the so-called “Green line” —
a cease-fire line that has no international standing as a border—
the fence is an effective barrier to terrorists. The Israelis
already have one all around the Gaza Strip, and they say it has
reduced terrorist crossings from Gaza to zero. (Though that’s the
official line, one senior official told me that the homicide bomber
who blew up the Maxim Restaurant near Haifa had slipped through.)
The fence is a very sophisticated barrier, with radars, motion
sensors, cameras and such. With the “intifada” terrorist campaign
now in its fourth year, the Israelis would be nuts to not build the
fence. (Note to Rainbow Tom Ridge: serious people build serious
anti-infiltration barriers).
EVERY DISTANCE IS SMALL here. You could jump across the Jordan
River pretty easily at most places. The route we took runs along
the bottom of the valley, up and across the Golan Heights to a
point in Israel where Damascus, Syria, lies only 34 miles across
the plain. That’s less than three minutes at Mach 1. It’s an hour
or two —maybe less — if you’re driving an M1A1.
What you do see is mountains on both sides of a very narrow
stretch of land. To an Air Force jet jock, comfort can be found in
a long, well-paved runway. A few of our military and commercial
runways are 15,000 feet long. At some points on the other side of
the western mountains Israel is only about nine miles wide. That’s
the equivalent of about three good runways. If you took off in the
Jordan River valley and headed due west, you’d have passed over
Israel entirely and be out over the Mediterranean by the time you
had gained any altitude and formed up with the rest of your
flight.
On the eastern side of the river is Jordan, then Syria and the
Golan Heights where the Israelis took enormous losses against
Syrian and Iraqi forces in 1973. On the Israeli side, west of the
low mountains, is that narrow strip of Israel that crams about 60
percent of Israel’s population and most of its industry in an area
that’s so small and narrow, it appears indefensible. That’s why,
once the Israelis had pushed the Syrians back across the eastern
mountains in 1973, they decided to remain. The Israelis figured it
would be better to fight in the Jordan Valley — which means the
West Bank — than in their own most densely-populated areas. Kinda
hard to argue with. Unless you’re French.
Once you get to the northernmost point on the Golan Heights, you
turn left up the mountain roads for a while to Metulla. To the
right is Syria, ahead and to the left is Lebanon and Hezbollah.
Crowds were noisy, singing for their candidates at every corner.
It was a party night in Metulla, just as it could be in any small
town here. But there is no city in America that sits on a precipice
of terror like Metulla does. The people there, and everywhere else
in Israel, face a relentless terrorism and do their best to put a
veneer of normalcy on their lives. Local politics is one good way
to do it. But the enemies they face are relentless. And those
enemies are not just theirs, but ours as well.
We got to Metulla just a few days after the twentieth
anniversary of the Beirut Marine Barracks bombing in which
Hezbollah killed more than 200 Americans. Hezbollah has more
American blood on its hands than any terrorist organization except
al-Qaeda. The sad truth is that we let Hezbollah win that one,
withdrawing from Beirut in defeat. Israel, too, withdrew from
Lebanon and its friends in South Lebanon, most in the Lebanese army
there, were left behind. The lesson we taught Syria is a dangerous
one both for us and for Israel. And it is the one we cannot afford
to repeat.
In a week in Israel, in more than a dozen meetings with senior
intelligence, military and political people, there was only one
real fear common among them. For America to withdraw from Iraq as
we did in Lebanon would leave a vacuum that Hezbollah and its ilk
would fill quickly. It would be a disaster not just for Israel but
for the whole Middle East. I asked a few of the senior officials
which of the Democratic candidates they could be confident would
stay to finish the job, each had the same response. The shrug,
raised eyebrows and perplexed grin say it all. There’s no reason to
think any of the Dems would do anything but turn it over to the
untrustworthy U.N. and then cut and run.
By the way, Kobi Katz won the election with a 44% plurality.
Good luck, Mr. Mayor, to you and all who reside in that small,
exposed town.
Jed Babbin was a deputy undersecretary of defense in
the first Bush administration, and now appears frequently as a
talking warhead on MSNBC.
