Dreaming of Bahrain
We have just over a month to go until we leave for our long-planned trek to Nepal to celebrate my 50th birthday and our youngest son’s bar mitzvah. There’s only one problem standing in our way: Bahrain.
The cheapest way to get to Asia for Israelis is via the Gulf – the price can be as low as $600 round trip from Amman vs. double that if you leave from Israel. Not wanting to be freiers and over-spend, we booked a Gulf Air flight from Jordan to Kathmandu via Bahrain. Our itinerary has an 11-hour layover, so we figured we leave the airport and take in the sights of Manama, the tiny country’s only real city.
And then, a few weeks ago, following the riots in Tunisia and Egypt, Bahrain erupted. Protesters took to the streets, occupying Pearl Square, and the government fought back, killing several and wounding many more.
That kind of scuttled our plans tour the capital.
Notice Iran smack dab in the middle
It didn’t make it any better that, in 2009, a commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards called Bahrain the Islamic Republic’s “14th province.” Not to mention that Gulf Air flies over Iran on its way to and from Kathmandu. I wonder what would happen if our plane, with its Israeli contingent on board, had to make an unexpected landing in Tehran?
Now, Bahrain has since calmed down, and there’s no knowing what will be by the time we leave. But if Egypt is any clue, if fighting flares up again, even flights could be suspended.
Given the dicey situation – and not a small amount of added stress while planning not only a trip, but an entire bar mitzvah – I quickly went online to find an alternate route. Everything cost an arm and a leg.
“We can’t afford it,” I complained to my wife.
“What’s more important – money or our safety?” she shot back. That’s a hard one to argue with.
Now, of course, canceling a flight has penalty fees. But our travel insurance should cover it, right? Isn’t that why we took out the policy in the first place? Nope, said Adam, the friendly English-speaking representative of the insurance company.
“We don’t cover cancellation due to political unrest,” he calmly explained after checking with his supervisor on my insistence. “However, if you get stuck in a place where violence breaks out, we’ll pay for your emergency airlift.” That seemed kind of backward – they’ll shell out big bucks to get you home in a pinch, but not the relatively small fees for avoiding the situation in the first place?
In the end, our travel agent found us a flight that is actually cheaper than our itinerary via Bahrain. It requires staying for Shabbat in Mumbai, India, but that actually sounds fun. And get this – it’s on El Al (usually the most expensive airline there is).
So, let me see if I’ve got this right: Gulf Air, riots, threat of kidnapping or El Al, surly flight attendants, but kosher food and a safe route.
Kathmandu, here we come!
Four years ’til tomorrow
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, News, Politics, War
We can party like it’s… 2014.
The outgoing head of the Mossad disclosed this week that he doesn’t believe that Iran will have the possibility of gaining nuclear capability before 2015.
That’s a big collective sigh of relief for Israelis, for whom the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran is enough to keep us awake at night.
In a summary given to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and reported widely on Thursday, Dagan said Iran was still far from being capable of producing nuclear weapons and that a series of malfunctions had put off its nuclear goal for several years.
Dagan handed over the job to his successor, Tamir Pardo, in the Prime Minister’s Bureau Thursday morning, after having parted from the ministers during last Sunday’s cabinet session.
The $64,000 question now is whether Pardo and the upper echelon of Israeli leadership will continue to hope that worldwide economic sanctions and pressure on Iran will thwart its goals, or whether sometime in the next four years, some more decisive action will have to be taken.
For us ordinary folks, with the new assessment replacing earlier estimates that Ahmadinejad might have his hand on the trigger as early as next year, we can cross this off our long ‘anxiety list for 2011. Or as Forrest Gump said, “One less thing to worry about.”
Iranian web: slavery rampant in Israel
Blurred image from an Iranian website of Tel Aviv mall installation
It was a clever and highly effective idea: shock the public into greater awareness of the tragedy of trafficking women in Israel by creating a window display of would-be prostitutes in the popular Dizengoff Center mall in central Tel Aviv.
The installation, created by the Working Group Against the Trafficking of Women, featured seven unkempt young women in a storefront window, each with a price tag, and a sign reading “women for sale according to personal taste.” Some of the women were made up to appear as if they had been beaten, according to an article in Haaretz.
The official aim was to gather signatures to push forward a bill that’s been stuck in the Knesset for two years that would criminalize johns who solicit prostitutes.
But that’s not how it was reported in Iran.
The Iranian news website Rajanews picked up the story but instead of putting it in context, titled the piece “Prostitution in Israel” with a caption for the included picture (picked up straight from the Haaretz website) reading “Slavery Mall in Israel.” The article then proceeded to “shed some light” on modern slavery in Israel, a “country which claims to be a democracy.”
The Iranian “misunderstanding” (if you want to be kind) was reported by Mohammad Memarian, an Iranian blogger on the Mideast Youth site, who chastised his fellow countrymen for both publishing the libel and not immediately rejecting its fabrication.
To its credit, Rajanews removed the article, but you can still see it on other websites such as this one (it’s in Persian). Note that any slips of Israeli skin are blurred out. Falsehoods can be reported but, God forbid, there should be any immodesty on the Iranian web.
There’s a worm in my myrtle
Nuclear power plant in Iran
Did Israel create the Stuxnet virus that has reportedly infected a significant number of computers related to Iran’s nuclear program and may be behind a significant drop in the country’s ability to produce the centrifuges needed to enrich uranium at the main Natanz plant? The security community is abuzz with speculation.
The virus – known more specifically as “malware” – apparently targets a specific type of industrial control computer made by the manufacturer Siemens that is used to manage oil pipelines, electrical power grids and many types of nuclear power plants, according to a report in The New York Times.
The virus is so sophisticated that it’s widely agreed it couldn’t be the creation of a rogue hacker working alone in a basement but must be a government-sponsored computer-coding endeavor.
Israel has long been known to be engaged in cyber warfare – the intelligence division’s 8200 unit is the largest in the IDF. The thinking is that, rather than rely solely on threats to bomb the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities, infecting the computer systems that run those plants might be just as effective.
But is Israel really behind the bug? The latest evidence seems to indicate so…or not. The New York Times is reporting that a file name in the virus is called “Myrtus” which in Hebrew is “Hadass.” The original name of Esther, the heroine of the Purim story, was “Hadassah.” Tellingly, Haman’s plot against the Jews took place in Persia – or modern-day Iran.
But the insertion of “Myrtus” into the malware might also be disinformation – a red herring – added into the code by a particularly literary programmer to point at Israel when the real creator resides elsewhere.
Many Israelis – myself included – would like to believe Stuxnet is a blue and white made-in-Israel product. Especially this week, with the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once again abusing the podium at the annual United Nations General Assembly, repeating his distorted insinuations and against the Jewish State and the West in general – a sophisticated means of keeping Israel safe that doesn’t involve an outright military attack would be a welcome and fresh approach – and one that would make us proud of our ingenuity and prowess.
There’s an even more recent parallel with Myrtus. We just finished the Sukkot holiday when Jews ritually shake the “four species.” One of the shakees is myrtle (or “hadass”). Did the creators of the code intend to digitally “shake things up” in Iran?
How Gaza’s playing in Middle America
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Politics, Travel, tv, War
Some of the items on board one of the ships bound for Gaza. The army said none of the supplies were lacking there (Photo: Jerusalem Post)
Not known for it’s propensity to get involved with Middle East issues, some residents of the coastal city evidently thought there were some human rights violations taking place on Israel’s side, enough so to make a public call to lift the blockade on Gaza at the city’s Monument Square the day after Memorial Day was observed there.
There was a downpour at the time of the planned protest, so I don’t know if anybody showed – it wasn’t in the local daily paper the next day. But later that day, meeting a couple of old (non-Jewish) friends for a beer, I got a hint as to the reaction that most Americans may be having to the international incident that took place off of Israel’s shores.
“I don’t know what everybody else thinks, but what I saw on TV was the Israeli navy commandos rappeling down onto the ship and being beaten like hell with bars and clubs by the supposedly peaceful passengers on the ship,” said Bill, an electrical foreman for most of his life. “If I had been there with a gun, there would have been a lot more than nine of them dead.”
Regardless of the tactical and conceptual errors that Israel may have made in regards to preventing the flotilla from reaching Gaza, it appears that any level headed person is going to be convinced that once the actual incident began – after Israel repeatedly offered to bring the supplies on board into Gaza via Ashdod port, and after Israel repeatedly warned the ship to not enter Israeli waters – that Israel’s actions were defensive – and that the only ones who think a ‘massacre’ took place are the ones aligning themselves with Hamas and Iran.
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