|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Notes of a Professional Fund-Raiser for Israel Barry Farber How, now, will the Israeli armed forces, which routed the modern, Soviet-equipped armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in six days, do against the terrorists of Hezbollah and Hamas? OK, I think. (Read that: "Hope and pray!") For thirty-five years I was a professional fund-raiser for the state of Israel. By that I mean I pitched Bonds of Israel at meetings, rallies, synagogues and banquets from East Coast to West Coast and Canada to Puerto Rico, and I was paid. It's been over five years now since anybody from the Bonds of Israel office has called me and said anything like "Barry, can you make Orlando Thursday after next?" It's not that they fired me. Israel simply no longer needs the revenue from the sale of its bonds because Israel is no longer an economic basket case. Israel can get all the money it needs at lower interest rates on the international money market. I made 23 trips to Israel; and if you think that's a lot, you're not inside the worldwide Israel support system. I could easily double that number and still be far from the senior Israel-visitor at the table. So many stories from that era, like a rare vintage wine, get better and better with the recalling and the retelling. Lebanon, for instance, had a five-sided civil war raging in the late 1970s in which Israel was not involved. Thus began the story of the Good Fence. The human tragedy of that war gravitated southward and literally pressed their bodies against the little fence separating Lebanon from Israel.
Story Continues Below
In my talks I said: "The Israeli boys and girls guarding that fence couldn't stand it. They cut a hole in the fence and brought some of the starving Arab children and pregnant women and shot-up men over into Israel, where they were treated by Israeli medics and sent back to Lebanon in much better shape." Before it was over, on that border there were five holes in that fence and many thousands of Lebanese living a lot less miserably ever after. Once a gentleman at one of my talks came up to me afterward and suggested that I refer to the Israeli border guards as "men and women" instead of "boys and girls." He thought that more proper and politically correct.
"I'm sorry," I told him. "These WERE Israeli boys and girls. The men and women were needed on the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza. There was no problem with Lebanon at the time, so the younger Israelis took that duty." I learned the shocker that Israel's Ben Gurion Airport at Lod, the most heavily guarded airport on earth, was NOT guarded by Jews! That task went to the Druse, a Moslem group that separated from mainstream Islam in the 11th century. Talk about outsourcing! I was taken to Abu Ghosh, an Arab city between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, that sided with the new Jewish state during the 1948 War of Independence and has remained loyal to Israel ever since.
I learned the delicious secret that top Arab leaders from countries that vowed to wipe Israel off the map long before Iran's Ahmadinejad picked up the theme would occasionally arrange to be taken by ambulance across the Allenby Bridge connecting Israel and Jordan and then on to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem to be treated by some of the most expert doctors and surgeons in the world. Nobody ever knew. They came under assumed names from assumed countries and sometimes with assumed diseases. At no point did any of those Arab chieftains ever announce any gratitude to Israel for their treatment. Nor did Israel expect any. The Jewish state did it because they were religiously impelled to do it and maybe they also hoped for a little trickle-down good feeling. I went to the Israeli side of the Allenby Bridge before the peace with Jordan. It was too much of a Fellini film even for Fellini. The Jordanian vehicles allowed across had to be stripped down to their skeletons. You could see the engine, the drive shaft, the works. No trunk. No place to conceal weapons or explosives. They were all loaded with produce to be sold to the Palestinian population in the West Bank, and they all checked in at the huge Israeli customs house before they were allowed to proceed. And don't forget; the whole time Israel and Jordan were officially at war! I learned that a lot of people come to enjoy Israel without realizing it. Israel's southern post of Elath sits atop the Gulf of Aqaba, sqeezed in between Egypt and Jordan, with only enough Israel there to carry out what my ex-wife would consider a morning jog. I actually met a woman from Tel Aviv in Elath who intended to move back "up north" because she literally got headaches being wedged in so tightly between two countries that hated her. Elath is a scuba diver's paradise, and charter flights from all over northern Europe have no trouble filling up planes that fly straight to Elath. So, those pretty blonde teenagers from Scandinavia who look like Britney Spears and come to scuba never quite get around to knowing what country they're in. They're really not that interested in geography. All they know is it's cool to fly direct from Stockholm to Elath! The local Israeli authorities allow topless sunbathing to add to the lure of scuba diving. Once the Egyptian military commander was horrified to see his men doing border duty right next to Elath ogling and giggling at the half-naked female Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Germans – who cares? You could live a long life and never see anything like that in Alexandria, Port Said or Mersa Matruh. The indignant commander announced that, in protest, he was ordering his men to withdraw 500 meters deeper inside Egypt to avoid the further corruption of his troops. He thereby made history. There's no other record of a nation's military protesting a border incident by WITHDRAWING rather than ADVANCING. The most impressive moment in my "professional Jewish" life came a few months after the 6-Day War in 1967. My radio guest was Gen. Haim Herzog, who spent almost the entire war live on Israeli radio detailing every development for the Israeli population. I didn't have to spend one instant thinking: "Let's see. What can I ask him?" I'd been bursting with a question ever since hour number 37 of that war; Tuesday afternoon, June 6, 1967. When we woke up Monday morning in America, we turned on the TV and knew right away there was war, even before the inner ear had digested one word. You didn't see Barbara Walters on the "Today" show. Instead, you saw a nervous stagehand trying to tack a map of the Middle East up on an easel and an equally off-balance commentator saying: "That's all the news we have right now. When further word is forthcoming, we'll get it right to you without delay." The Egyptian communiques were bone-marrow-curdling. They said, "Two Egyptian tank columns are knifing through Israel's Negev." That sounded real. Egyptian President Nasser had earlier kicked the U.N. Peacekeeping force out of his way in the Sinai Peninsula and moved his tank army up to the one-inch line. Egyptian radio said, "Haifa is in flames!" That sounded real, too. There are a lot of oil storage tanks in Haifa. The strangest thing was that ISRAEL SAID NOTHING! There were absolutely no communiques of any kind coming out of Israel. This had never happened before. The first rule of warfare is, when war breaks out, both sides come out straightforwardly and lie about the whole thing. They minimize the damage they've suffered and exaggerate the damage they've inflicted on the enemy. Israel said nothing. There were Jews outside Israel who died of heart failure for fear there was no Israel left to say anything. So, when I finally got Gen. Haim Herzog on my show, I was ready for question number one. "General Herzog," I began, "you knew before we in America woke up Monday morning that you'd destroyed five Arab air forces on the ground. You'd pierced Egyptian defenses at Gaza. You'd taken Khan Yunis. You knew there was nothing to stop you between there and the Suez Canal. You knew you were saving Syria for Thursday. "It was late Tuesday afternoon before we knew you'd scored such a tremendous victory. Why did you let us who love Israel twist like that? Why didn't you say something?" I frequently, in my speeches, ran over – way over – the suggested 20 minutes. There's just so much good stuff to tell about Israel, and I couldn't help myself. But if I were ever gun-to-the-head told to shorten it, I could have given an effective fund-raising speech to a sympathetic audience in eight seconds. I would simply repeat Gen. Herzog's eight-second answer to the question "Why did Israel for the first time in military history try to conceal battlefield success?" "You see," replied Gen. Herzog, "we knew that as long as the world believed the Egyptians, as long as the world thought Israel was losing, THE UNITED NATIONS WOULD TAKE NO ACTION!"
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Page 
Forward Page 
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2009 NewsMax.Com |