by Hesh Kestin
The monarch gets the picture. “If true, it is an act of war.”
“Jesus, king. You folks don’t really want another one, do ya? If so, those Israelians gonna open up a can of kosher whup-ass. And they ain’t gonna stop until they visit whatever palace you plan to be sleepin’ in that night.”
“Mr. President, I hope I do not understand correctly that you approve this act of...of piracy.”
“Your kingship, how do I say this delicately? You people been flyin’ the skull and crossbones for eighty years. Anyhoo, to cut to the chase, we’re talking two bucks a gallon at the pump. Regular.”
The king needs no translators for this, nor mathematicians. Oil is now selling at over $150 a barrel. The new price would cut that by two-thirds. “My dear friend, that is simply not possible.”
“Yeah, well, then you can expect the Jews to blow up your oil, and you won’t have none at all.”
The king learned to play this game before the grossly smiling man on the other end of the telephone was born. “My dear Mr. President, neither will you. It is a...standoff, no?”
“Hmmm,” the president says. “Let me think on that.” He mimes thinking, the tip of his index finger to his lips, his face screwed up as if in intense cogitation. “Uh, actually, no. Number one, we made you king and we can unmake you. Number two, the US of A is not about to sit still until we get to the point where some damn Jew with a itchy trigger finger blows all that oil to kingdom come. Number three, let me put it to you direct. The price of oil is always going to be an internal political problem in my country. Your highness, Abdullah, whatever, oil goes up over two bucks there’ll be so many American military in your oilfields you’ll have to salute some nineteen-year-old corporal from Mississippi just to take a leak.” He signals for another Peroni.
“Mr. President!”
“And some of them military gonna be women. And by golly, by executive order I’m gonna make sure every goldarned one of them ladies be wearing short shorts!”
“Mr. President, I have never been addressed in this manner! By anyone!”
“And Abby, by the way,” the president says, “don’t ever be fuckin’ with a sitting American president in an election year.”
131
OVER THAT YEAR, MANY changes are to take place.
Connie Blunt is promoted to CNN anchor, replacing Damian Smith, who becomes presidential press secretary after Don Beadle moves on to the private sector. Smith has an easy job: with gasoline at $1.93 a gallon (regular), the president barely has to campaign at all. Blunt brings with her to CNN a certain IDF Special Forces colonel who commandeered a certain plane to Kuwait to be the network’s resident military analyst, on the side co-authoring a book on the operation with the Air Kuwait 717 captain who never lost his cool. The movie does $170 million in its first week. But only in North America.
In the rest of the world it bombs, reflecting a sociopolitical antipathy whose roots precede Islam and Christianity, and which date back at least to the time of the Pharaohs. Though cheering for the underdog is normally seen as instinctual, a curious reversal takes place as it becomes clear the oil weapon is now in Israeli hands, controlled by what many European newspapers and websites unabashedly term “malignant special interests.” These special interests, rumored to control the world economy, are said to be manipulating the price of oil in order to stimulate business, and thus generate even more wealth for themselves. Or something.
As though the near annihilation of a second six million Jews is little more than a fast-dissolving early-morning dream, the image of Israel returns to status quo ante. This is nowhere more evident than in the image of the Palestinians, who once again have taken their place in the front rank of international martyrdom. What is left of their leadership assiduously labors to present evidence to the West that the recent decimation of its people has occurred not by their fellow Muslims but at the hand of Israel.
The Palestinians demand a return to their native land, which—through the bloody efforts of their Muslim neighbors—is now by and large empty of Palestinians. The population of Israel’s own Arab citizens, slaughtered wholesale in retribution for decades of “collaboration” with their Jewish fellow citizens, declines from two million to one half of that—this genocide is also blamed on Israel. In the West Bank and Gaza, the death rate is even higher; the actual number will never be known because Palestinian spokesmen, once adept at exaggerating the population of living Palestinians, now invent similarly magical numbers for the dead, all ostensibly victims of Israel.
UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Administration, an international welfare office dedicated to preserving the refugee status of all Palestinians, living, dead, and fictional, quickly establishes new camps in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. (The king of Jordan refuses to offer Palestinians even temporary shelter.)
Armed with funds supplied by the same Western governments that ignored the Palestinians’ slaughter, UNRWA returns to its traditional policy of providing generously for its clientele, even to the point of publishing new textbooks demonstrating the continuing diabolical culpability of “the Zionist enterprise,” replete with caricatures of hook-nosed predatory Jews. These become standard in Palestinian schools.
Faced with the electoral clout of a flood of Muslim immigrants, most European democracies undertake what comes to be known as a policy of “progressive balance” with regard to the new reality of the Middle East. The sclerotic French left, ever opportunistic, presents the recent conflict as a war of self-defense by the five Islamic attackers, who struck first on evidence of Israel’s plans to attack them. To this upside-down version of the truth, a spoonful of anti-Americanism sweetens the pot: it is clear the US and Israel colluded in an anti-Muslim war. A new term, islamicide, becomes the rage among European leftists, and some in America as well. On university campuses, it is considered a fact that massive numbers of US troops were engaged on the ground on behalf of Washington’s neo-colonialist junior partner.
The Muslim governments of the Middle East play a double game. While continuing the Islamic propaganda campaign against Israel, they are careful about doing no more than making noise at the UN. With Israeli nuclear devices hidden in their own countries, a return to war is unthinkable. Nor may they raise the price of oil.
Depressed energy prices affect Russia as well. With little to sell but diamonds and petrochemicals, Russia’s economy is now shriveled to below that of the Communist era: churning out unexportable automobiles and nesting babushka dolls is hardly a solution. Russia remains a leading manufacturer of arms, but this trade is limited to those countries that have seen their weaponry destroyed or captured by Israel, and these are no longer bottomless pits of hard currency. In the short term, dumping diamonds on the world market might bring revenue, but eventually oversupply would undermine the price of gem-quality stones. At giveaway prices for crude oil and natural gas, The Economist notes, “Moscow has nothing to sell but rubles, and thus has nothing to sell.” As a result, Russia pulls back from attempts to disrupt the new international order.
Big oil is unfazed by the drop in petroleum prices. Able to sustain profitability at any price, the American petrochemical industry not only continues solidly in the black, but for the first time in decades benefits from an outpouring of public goodwill. Share prices for big oil rise to historic highs. At the same time, Detroit, so recently emasculated by its inability to offer cars economical on gas, roars back with a new generation of big-engine mega-mobiles, some with fins. The price of oil is so reasonable electric cars become a standing joke on late-night television. Not only is there a V8 in every American garage, V12s make their appearance as the standard of luxury. At these prices, Americans have oil to burn, and do.
As the price drops for industrial power and commercial transport, industrial America rebounds to such an extent that Wal-Mart, once almost exclusively the retail agent for 90% of Chinese consumer exports, moves to buy only American. As a result, the US develops a labor shortage: there a
re too few workers to man the new machinery. Congress acts quickly, creating a new visa classification under the Guest Labor Act—critics in organized labor call it the Gomez Labor Act. With the US-Mexican border open to a flood of documented obreros huespedes, American manufacturers abandon China en masse to establish factories in Mexico, as well as new facilities close enough to the border for documented day laborers to cross through turnstiles activated by electronic visa-card readers. Seemingly overnight, the US Border Patrol morphs from a police force to an employment agency.
Considering the almost universal benefits of low-cost energy, the rise in anti-Israel sentiment becomes a kind of litmus paper of illogic, but anti-semitism was never dictated by reason.
Once again missiles (this time supplied by Russia) begin raining down on Israel from Palestinian bases in Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, yet world public opinion persists in seeing Israel as the imperialist, if not racist, villain of the peace.
132
CONSIDERING THE HUMILIATING DEFEAT of the Islamic Liberation Force, surprisingly few heads roll.
General Niroomad is convicted of treason in a Tehran show trial in which a group of Iranian Jews are compelled to testify that the architect of the Muslim invasion was all along in the employ of the Mossad. The mullahs make sure the world sees in televised close-up that the faces of Niroomad’s Jewish co-conspirators show no signs of violence. Not shown are their families, who are promised a horrible fate if the accused Jews do not cooperate. When Niroomad is hanged in Tehran’s Azadi Square, these so-called “partners in treason” swing with him, each convinced he is giving his life to save his wife, his children, and his parents. The next day, the families of these martyrs, men, women, and children, even infants, are discreetly liquidated at a military base near Isfahan.
But Iran is exceptional.
In all the Arab nations taking part in the attack, the military high commands are forcibly retired, but in every case permitted to live out their lives in luxury as comfortably pensioned senior officers. As opposed to theocratic Iran, which considers failure in jihad a sin requiring capital punishment, the Arab reaction to failure within its ruling class is by tradition tolerant. Anything less would bring the existing power structure crashing down.
The search for scapegoats extends even to Israel, but is more subtle.
Because the government responsible for the intelligence failures leading to the near-termination of the State of Israel was itself terminated—there is no one to vote out of office; they are all dead—the country’s citizenry turns obscenely on the very individual who saved them. One columnist compares Yigal Lev to Churchill, noting that the British prime minister was recalled by his own traumatized nation after World War II, like Israel a nation yearning for better times. As with Churchill in Britain, the fickle Israeli electorate associates the name of Yigal Lev not with salvation but with hardship.
Ever hopeful for an idyllic rapprochement with the Jewish State’s eternal enemies, the resiliently optimistic Israeli left crafts a campaign that ruthlessly works both sides of a particularly nasty political street. One plank in its platform is meant to appeal to those for whom the thought of endless war is intolerable: in order to negotiate a lasting peace, Yigal Lev must go, because the Arab nations will never sign a peace treaty with the man responsible for their shameful defeat. The opposition’s other argument appeals to the emotional instability of the average Israeli: the discipline imposed on Ghetto Tel Aviv is angrily decried to have been needlessly authoritarian. In televised debates, Yigal is labeled to his face a Jewish fascist whose storm troopers went so far as to beat a man for urinating in the street.
Yigal’s measured response militates against him. He stresses the need for discipline in time of war, a principled defense but not one that arouses sympathy for the man compelled to make such decisions. Likewise, he is accused of seizing power from the lawful government at gunpoint. A business executive and not a politician, his response is as dry as it might be in describing the dismissal of an incompetent manager: “I learned early in business that the general good means more than the protection of some fool’s resume.”
Perhaps most damaging, Yigal is unable to go on the offensive regarding his opponent’s credibility—his own character questioned, he has no counterattack: the left-wing nominee spent the war as a prisoner of the Syrians in one of the most notorious POW camps, where he lost an arm to gangrene. The absence of this limb is on display before the nation. Yigal’s most cogent argument is a question: “In my place, what would you have done?” In reply, his opponent manages only partially to disguise a sneer: “I would have negotiated an honorable peace.”
After what can only be called a cataclysmic defeat, Yigal dedicates his energies to rebuilding Isracorp and to spending more time with Judy. They take a second honeymoon in Provence, under an assumed name renting a house overlooking a vineyard near Aix. The couple is so enamored of the peaceful setting they consider buying a second home in the area. But on a tour of available properties, they are interrupted by the arrival of three carloads of officers of la direction générale de la sécurité intérieure, the French equivalent of the FBI, who politely but firmly insist the couple must return to their villa and pack. Paris has learned that an Islamicist group centered in Marseilles has targeted them. The DGSI will provide protection until they return to Israel. After making a phone call to Jerusalem, Yigal tells them Israel will provide for their security. But this is not enough to satisfy Paris, which is less concerned about the lives of Yigal and Judy than the embarrassment of a violent incident in French territory—tourism remains the country’s main source of income.
In the private jet the DGSI provides for the flight from Nice to Ben Gurion, Yigal allows himself a moment of deep despondence in the knowledge that their life together will never return to what it was. But he says nothing: there is a good chance the two-person cabin crew serving them are French agents who speak Hebrew.
“Sweetheart,” Judy tells him. “Don’t be sad.”
“Arlingday, ethay abincay isway iredway.”
“Otay otequay Igalyay Evlay: Ifway ouyay esireday eacepay, eparepray orfay arway.”
“Ethay onnectioncay?”
“Ifway ouyay avehay otay otectpray ourselfyay, ependday onway ouryay ownway.”
He laughs. “Ethay Ionistzay anifestomay.”
“Iway ustjay antway otay ebay omehay.” She squeezes his hand. “Unnyfay, onlyway away ortshay ilewhay agoway Iway idnday’tay eelfay afesay inway Israelway oneway inutemay. Ownay Iway onday’tay eelfay afesay anywhereway elseway.”4
4 “Darling, the cabin is wired.”
“To quote Yigal Lev: If you desire peace, prepare for war.”
“The connection?”
“If you have to protect yourself, depend on your own.”
He laughs. “The Zionist manifesto.”
“I just want to be home.” She squeezes his hand. “Funny, only a short while ago I didn’t feel safe in Israel one minute. Now I don’t feel safe anywhere else.”
133
ON THEIR RETURN, JUDY establishes a foundation to benefit the families of those killed during the war, both civilian and military. It becomes Israel’s leading charity, and for good reason. The numbers are staggering. With so many men killed, widows with young children are compelled to find work, of which there is plenty, but the national childcare system—with government kindergartens for children from the age of four—now must be expanded to include even infants. The government is not up to the challenge.
Judy enlists Hadassah, the worldwide Zionist women’s organization. With an international structure already in place, Jewish women everywhere contribute money and time. In a matter of months, infant care centers are set up in the big cities; within a year, there is not a village without one. Calling on Yigal’s connections with Israeli business leaders, Judy insists large companies set up crèches at the worksite. Where this is not possible, mothers are welcomed into the labor force through innovative schemes that inc
lude telecommuting and even home assembly of electronic components.
Under Judy’s guidance, Hadassah sets up a nonprofit bank to offer loans to war widows starting small businesses of their own. When it becomes clear that war widowers with young children find themselves in a parallel situation, Hadassah enlarges its safety net to include benefits for men. The second most popular name for Israeli daughters becomes Hadasssah.
The first is Judy. No one is more proud than her husband, though he sees his beloved so little he calls himself an honorary war widower.
Discharged after the war, Cobi declines to re-enlist and, in the tradition of many young Israelis following their military service, travels abroad before beginning university and annual reserve duty that will last until he is forty-eight. In Nepal, he meets a red-haired girl, also Israeli, also recently discharged. It turns out she knows a thing or two about Stinger missiles. Via Skype, their engagement is announced from Fortaleza, Brazil.
Staff Sgt. Abed Abu-Kassem of the Ghawarna retires from the IDF to become a member of Knesset on a far-right ticket—like most Bedouin, he is a born reactionary. Bedouin despise change.
Abu-Yunis, the Christian barber and entrepreneur, opens a restaurant with a Jewish partner. The restaurant is called Cousins. Between Jewish visitors and Christian pilgrims, there is never a day when its parking lot is not full of tour buses.
Ticky Pasha returns to England, where he spends his days in country pursuits—fly-fishing is not an option in Jordan—and his evenings writing his memoirs. Suppressed under the Official Secrets Act, they are not published. He never returns to Jordan.
There would be no point. Two years after the war, the Jordanian monarch is assassinated by a Hamas suicide bomber. Civil war breaks out between Jordan’s Bedouin and Palestinian citizens. The latter, aided by Palestinians flooding in from neighboring countries, are victorious. The Hashemite royal family is deposed and the country renamed the Republic of Palestine. In emulation of Zionism, it opens its doors to Palestinians from all over the Arab world and from as far away as South America.