The Siege of Tel Aviv

by Hesh Kestin

  “And did not your own people in the German war firebomb Dresden, also civilians? I believe you have seen the monument in London to the British air marshal who ordered those raids, one Bomber Harris. A statue, my dear friend. Though we Muslims do not erect statues because it is forbidden to make an image, you and I comprehend its significance. The Americans killed millions—unarmed men, women, and children—in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why were these acts permitted by Christian leaders who worship every Sunday in a church? In order to save the lives of their own soldiers. It is, in the end, as simple as that. The destruction of Tel Aviv is therefore an act of self-defense.”

  “Can we not wait a month—a week, even—for the foreign powers to agree a solution?”

  “Any such solution will be temporary. My dear Ticky, I promise you the Jews will come back. They always do.” For a moment, the monarch looks away. “Let any blame then fall upon my head. You may consider yourself absolved of all responsibility. You merely do my will. Let it be so, and let us forget this conversation.”

  For answer General Tawfik Ali, soon once again to be Twyford Oliver, and soon to collect his CBE, unsheathes the ceremonial dagger that was presented to him by this same king almost twenty years before, and lays it gently at the monarch’s feet.

  97

  IN THE SEASIDE VILLA in Herzliya that has become the de facto prime ministerial residence, Yigal draws diagrams on the whiteboard in his office. These are not military calculations. Yigal reviewed Pinky’s plans for the counterattack and accepted them without qualification. Now he is thinking of next steps, the days after, the future.

  Outside, the villa is ringed by troops, with two tanks on the beach to defend it from assault by sea. Pinky understands that the enemy’s main thrust will seek the destruction of Israel’s leadership, a lesson from the Nazi playbook, where the invasion of every country on the German march brought with it special forces to kidnap or murder its political, religious, and social leadership. After the fall of Berlin, when the list for the United Kingdom was discovered in the headquarters of the SS, its publication drew two kinds of reaction in Britain: relief from those on the list, and indignation from others that they had not been counted dangerous enough to assassinate. Thus the fortifications surrounding the prime minister’s villa. The State of Israel, such as it is, cannot again afford to be decapitated.

  Judy’s concern is more intimate: the health of her husband. It is nearly seven in the morning. Neither has slept. With luck, they can get an hour before the start of the prime ministerial day. “Yigal, please...”

  “Almost done,” he says. “If I’m right about this, you are going to really love me.”

  “I already do. Come to bed. I can’t sleep without you.”

  “A few minutes.” His eyes return to the whiteboard.

  “I want you to know I love you.”

  “Judy, my Judy.”

  “Tell me at least what this is.”

  “National secret.”

  Still, once back in bed, he tells her. Like all breakthrough ideas, it is as simple to explain as it will be difficult to implement.

  “No one thought of this?” she says. “Before?”

  “According to Pinky, such a concept does not now exist.” He pauses. “It’s the kind of plan you don’t consider until you are staring into your grave.”

  Perhaps it is his final phrase. She has been good about not causing her husband unnecessary grief; she knows he has other matters to deal with, matters of consequence. But there is only so much she can take without breaking down. She doesn’t want to, not in front of Yigal. But she must.

  As tears form, she says it. “I miss Cobi so much.”

  98

  BECAUSE THERE IS NO electric light, the work of the men and women called back to their jobs at Peri Military Industries is limited to the daylight hours—even candles disappeared the first week. When the afternoon sun falls behind the adjoining buildings, it becomes first difficult and then impossible to see. Experienced as they are in the delicate assembly of impact fuses, Alon Peri’s workers fall increasingly behind schedule. There is no way to lengthen the working day.

  Peri brings the problem to Yigal, who brings it to his cabinet, which consults professors of engineering, efficiency experts, specialists in workflow. Their analysis is always the same: either find a way to light the factory so that Peri’s experienced employees can work through the night, or bring in more of them.

  Unfortunately, these would require weeks of training before turning them loose on technology that could easily blow up in their faces, to say nothing of destroying the entire factory floor. Without Peri’s brass artillery-shell casings fitted with micro-fuses, fully assembled and in working order, the entirety of what is codenamed Operation Davidka will fail.

  Named for the original Davidka—Little David—a crudely assembled mortar that became a key weapon in Israel’s War of Independence, the technology is far from that of the homemade weapon of 1948. But the stakes are just as high, if not higher. At least 1200 functioning tubes are required. After three days of full-scale assembly, the total ready for deployment is ninety-seven. Somehow eleven hundred more must be manufactured in six days.

  While Pinky’s staff unsuccessfully struggles to devise a Plan B to provide the same results—the efficient transfer of 1200 Jordanian Challengers to Israel’s armored corps, whole, undamaged, fully fueled, and ready to roll—Misha turns up at Peri Military Industries to ask a simple question.

  “What exactly does it take to assemble these things?”

  Peri had been going twenty hours a day, and now must answer stupid questions from a gangster. But because he was once strapped to a chair on the gangster’s yacht, and certainly because Misha Shulman has proved himself as Minister of Police, he turns from the microscope he uses to examine each fuse before it is assembled in its brass tube, and answers the question with a minimum of visible impatience.

  “Weeks of training,” he says. “The assembler is not working with his eyes, because the parts are so tiny, but with his fingertips. He’s like a surgeon doing microsurgery without the benefit of computerized tools and a monitor showing him what he is doing. The best assemblers are not intellectuals, because this is not a job for thinkers. You think about what you are doing, it’s all over, because then you get totally confused. Once the sequence is learned, it’s all in the fingertips.”

  “So it can done in the dark?”

  “In theory. But most people are not comfortable working in the dark.”

  “Correct,” Misha says. “Let me tell you something from my past. As you may know, yours truly spent some time on enforced vacation in several camps in Siberia. At one of them was a special facility for assembling fine electronics. Amazing, in the middle of Siberia. But it turns out my Soviet masters were not entirely stupid.”

  “Is this going somewhere?”

  “Give me six hours and I’ll have your assemblers.”

  “Very good,” Peri says, turning back to his microscope. “I need three hundred of them, maybe four. Even so, it will be tight. And while you’re at it, I’d like a steak sandwich and a draft beer. Goldstar if you can get it, very cold. And lights, and air conditioning. And if you can part the Red Sea, I’ll have some of that.”

  Six hours later, Misha Shulman returns with four hundred and twenty-two men and women collected from every corner of Ghetto Tel Aviv, all willing, all sensitive in their fingertips.

  “Blind,” Misha tells Peri. “A whole camp in Siberia for political prisoners who were blind. Even then, it made me think: for every problem there is a solution.”

  Peri pulls his assemblers off their workbenches and turns them into instructors, each with ten students. “You know what Ben-Gurion said?”

  “The airport?”

  “The first prime minister of Israel, for which it was named.”

  “I knew he was something like that.”

  “In 1948, when the state was declared and eight Arab armies invaded, he said it. It
’s in every history book.”

  “Alon, please don’t make me regret I didn’t once upon a time break your legs.”

  “‘The difficult we do immediately,’ Peri quotes. “‘The impossible takes longer.’”

  99

  AN OLIVE-GREEN CADILLAC BEARING Egyptian military plates and flying a huge pair of white boxer shorts emblazoned with a schematic Israeli flag in red lipstick might have stopped traffic in Tel Aviv less than a month before, but in Ghetto Tel Aviv there is no traffic to stop. The city is eerily empty of cars and trucks, other than those still as roadside monuments for want of fuel.

  Cobi drives westward into the northern suburbs, passing on his right the bombed-out clifftop headquarters of the Mossad and on his left the towers of Ramat Aviv, once among the city’s most desirable neighborhoods. At the top of each high-rise the vegetation that adorned penthouse terraces is shriveled and brown, the streets below mostly deserted except for the ever-present tent camps shaded in the lee of buildings. It is already tortuously hot, the sun climbing up over the city like the angry muttering of a crazed neighbor, always there, always threatening.

  “This is bad,” Cobi says. He drives slowly, as though out of respect, the way people drive in a cemetery. Only weeks earlier, on this same road, he pushed his motorcycle, a present from his reluctant parents upon graduating high school, to ninety miles per hour, weaving through traffic with the casual athletic heedlessness of adolescent males everywhere. “So bad. I didn’t know.”

  “I thought I did,” Abed tells him. “There was talk. I thought, well, Tel Aviv. It’s Tel Aviv. A metropolis, thriving, a beehive. Now...” Abruptly he changes his tone, but not his topic. “Your father is Yigal Lev?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Google.”

  “A truck, a television, and a computer?”

  “Your condescension is underwhelming. Cobi, my wife has a blender. And a microwave. Also one of those devices that shoots water to clean between the teeth. At home there is no shortage of power.”

  “Not here.”

  “Cobi...”

  “Look at that. People living in the street. Every street.”

  “Cobi, are there a lot of Yigal Levs?”

  “It’s not an uncommon name.”

  “That run a company called Isracorp.”

  “Only one.”

  “My young friend, what I am about to tell you may come as a shock.”

  “After seeing this, I’d be surprised.”

  “Your father is the prime minister.”

  Cobi takes his eyes off the road. It is not dangerous. The two have not come across a vehicle since dropping Alex off with the captain and his squad, and that vehicle was some sort of bicycle rigged to pull a wagon. The wagon had a small plastic tank on it, like the water tanks over the outdoor sinks in temporary army encampments. “What do you mean, prime minister? Prime minister of what?”

  “The State of Israel.”

  “The prime minister of Israel is Shula Amit.”

  “Killed.” Abed considers. “Probably. Missing, anyway. They’re all missing. The whole government.”

  “That’s crazy. Who says so?”

  “The soldiers who rode with us.”

  “You’re saying my father is prime minister of the State of Israel?”

  “That’s what I’m told.”

  “Who elected him? He’s not a politician. He’s...”

  They pull up before the villa in which Cobi lived all his life. Sandbags are piled three feet high all over his mother’s flowerbeds. The lawn is gray. Military vehicles surround the house, and beyond these, on the beach, two Chariot tanks.

  “Stay in the car,” Abed says. “It may be that two Arabs approaching the prime minister’s house in a car with Egyptian military plates and flying these stupid boxer shorts may spook someone. But if I have to sing Jerusalem of Gold again, I’ll throw up. I don’t even like Jerusalem.” He pauses. “Too Jewish. But I used to love Tel Aviv.” Cobi stays. Abed has guided him safely this far. From the driver’s seat, he watches the Bedouin walk with exaggerated calm slowly down the path, his hands in the air, in one of them his Israel Defense Forces ID. Immediately three soldiers are on him. He watches the Bedouin point to the car, then to the house. One soldier checks Abed’s ID. The soldiers consult for a moment, then nod. There are smiles. One of the soldiers slaps Abed on the back. Even from where he sits, Cobi can see, or perhaps only imagine, a puff of dust rising from Abed’s robes. They have been on the road for almost a week.

  Accompanied by a major—paratroops, brown boots, red beret tucked in his left epaulet—Abed approaches the driver’s side window. “We are cordially invited,” Abed says.

  The rest happens quickly.

  Still in charge, Abed knocks at the door. There is a doorbell, but of course without electricity it is merely a button in the stucco wall. After a time a woman in a robe opens it, looks out at the two Bedouin, the one behind partly obscured by the first. Out of habit, Cobi’s face is partially shrouded by the filthy keffiyah that hangs down around his face like curtains in a slum window. The woman is middle-aged, still attractive, but tired, as if she has not slept in a long time.

  “Good morning, dear lady,” Abed says. “Good news. I bring you a gift.”

  Judy looks past the two Arabs to the major, who hangs back, grinning. “I don’t...”

  “Despite my attire, I am Staff Sergeant Abed Abu-Kassem.”

  “Yes?”

  “And this, I believe, belongs to you.” With flair, as though revealing a work of art, he uncovers Cobi’s face.

  She falls upon her son, engulfing him, staring at his face and then holding him again as though he is a small child who has wandered off, wandered off and been found. Suddenly she turns into the house.

  “Yigal, come down!” she shrieks “Yigal!”

  100

  PLANNING THE CONQUEST OF the State of Israel posed special problems for Iran’s theologians. Not since 1453, when the Ottoman sultans took Constantinople and converted wholesale its mostly Christian population, has Islam been compelled to come to terms with implementing its very raison d’etre, the conversion of an entire population and their absorption into the Muslim polity. Certainly Islam is no stranger to the role of conquerer: Mohammed brought all of Arabia to Allah; his descendants carried Muslim civilization from North Africa through southern Europe to India and the Far East. But those converts were pagans, induced to accept Islam by the opportunity to participate fully in a new world order, with all the rights and privileges thereof.

  Israel presents a different problem.

  Like Christians, throughout history Jews were afforded special status as protected peoples or dhimmi. But leaving in place six million insincere converts to Islam would be demographically untenable and politically impossible. A few mullahs insisted the Jews be offered the chance to live as Muslims, but this solution would still leave such new Muslims a majority in the holy city of al Kuds, which the Jews call Jerusalem, and in Tel Aviv and Haifa and throughout the land. The conflict was in Shar’ia law itself: these Jews must be permitted to live, but by force of numbers would remain a threat. Left in place, the clever Jews would win again. Thus principle warred with pragmatism.

  Pragmatism won.

  Having spent over fifty years decrying the evil of these sons of dogs and monkeys, that the holy warriors of Islam should be defeated by trickery could not be permitted. Thus, after years of debate and research—the reconquest of the Holy Land was hardly spur of the moment—the mullahs concluded the evil the Jews had wrought could not simply be wiped away by conversion, which most likely would be as superficial as their conversion to Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century.

  Let nature then take its course in Tel Aviv.

  If Allah willed the Jews life then the One God would provide them manna, as He had the Jews in the desert upon their exodus from Egypt. If Allah wished them life then clean water would spring from the ground. If Allah wished th
em to survive then Allah would come to their aid.

  In the absence of such divine intervention, it was only charitable to cut the Jews down so as to spare them suffering a slow death of thirst, starvation, and disease. In this, Islam would treat its enemies with humane generosity.

  101

  FRESHLY SHOWERED AND SHAVED and wearing white terry robes, Cobi and Abed sit at the kitchen table with Yigal. Ordinarily Judy would be hovering with food, as she always did when Cobi brought home friends from high school, or the occasional girl.

  “Cobi likes cold chicken sandwiches, with too much mayonnaise,” she says to Abed. “Or just hummus with olive oil floating over it and French bread to mop it up. MREs,” she points, “don’t make for much of a homecoming.”

  The two can barely take this seriously. They have been surviving on stale pita and dates, dates and stale pita, for the past five days. Once they descended from the highlands surrounding Jerusalem, there was orange and grapefruit, somewhat dry because there was no one to irrigate the plantations, but fruit nonetheless. Here and there was carob, also known as St. John’s Bread, which hangs dry in trees growing wild by the roadside as they have for thousands of years, the long pods, tough and fibrous and tasting of molasses, that kept them chewing for hours.

  So about the meal set before them they had no complaint.

  “Meals ready to eat are a sin against nature,” Judy says.

  “And a very welcome one,” Yigal counters. “Though if we don’t get resupplied we’re going to turn into cannibals ready to eat.” The bounty of the aid flotilla is limited. In a day or two, it will be gone. But in the meantime, the population is merely half starved, which is an improvement on starved completely.

  “It is very tasty, madam,” Abed says, attempting to read the English on the package. “What is a veghi burjer in barbessue sauke?” He looks up. “Not pig?”

  “Not pig,” Yigal says. “You are an honored guest, staff sergeant. We take care of our guests, just as you do.” He looks to his son, scrubbed clean, appearing to his father to be all of twelve years old. “Just as you did.”