(Continued from p.6)
for our purposes is Greater Tel Aviv. It is comparable to a duel between two gunmen, each participating under a different set of rules. The first may shoot his adversary in the head or the heart, while the second may only deflect the bullet. This absurd situation leads to a long line of structural failures which together render the Arrow project as a weapons system essentially inappropriate to deal with the threat.One is the economic aspect: the cost of a Scud B or C missile is about 350-500,000 dollars. The cost of the Arrow will be about 2 million dollars. However, due to the margin of error, it will take 1.2 Arrow missiles to intercept each Scud. With this absurd ratio, for every 1,000 Scud missiles fired (equivalent to the profit accrued from pumping oil in Saudi Arabia for one or two days) 1,200 Arrow missiles will be required to intercept them at a cost equal to 25% of Israel's defense budget. Even this is an underestimate because the Scud possesses a long line of evasive and deceptive capabilities.
The Arrow is not a response which suits the threat, and the residents of Tel Aviv will be left to their own devices as they were in the winter of 1991 with one major difference: the 39 missiles of that period may become hundreds of missiles in the battlefield of the future, and as opposed to the conventional warheads launched in 1991, they can anticipate a cloud of poisonous gas (the anthrax will remain unmentioned).
The safest solution in the face of a gas attack on heavily populated areas is the large scale evacuation of the population to open scarcely populated areas adjacent to the big cities. Under those circumstances, passive defense could play a critical role in saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
The killing co-efficient of gases of mass destruction is contingent on the nature of gases which are, for the most part, heavier than air and therefore tend to sink and accumulate in the valleys. The canyons formed in the streets of the cities between the houses are natural collection areas for gases dropped on heavily populated regions.
Faced with this, it would be expected that the Jews, for whom the memory of the mass gassing of millions of their people is part of their national trauma, would address the situation. The evacuation of Greater Tel Aviv is possible only to the east and the topographic formation of Samaria makes it the perfect evacuation center as less than 20 kilometers from the coast an extensive range of hills, twice the area of Greater Tel Aviv, begins. Furthermore, for historical reasons, the Arab population in western Samaria is relatively scarce. It would be logical to expect that Israel would take extensive measures in preparing the infrastructure required to evacuate the population of Greater Tel Aviv eastward....For this purpose, Israel should have annexed and asserted its sovereignty over the territory, taking possession of state lands and transferring the negligible Arab population to alternative places ... However, nothing was done.
Judea and Samaria are the cradle of the Hebrew nation, and contain within them the true significance of the return to Zion. Today, in the face of a threat to our very lives, the Hebrew homeland offers refuge to her children. In an historical irony which receives macabre reinforcement from anticipated developments in the battlefield of the future, Jews are abandoning the rescue area located on their doorstep in order to crowd, of their own volition, into the death trap awaiting them in the ghetto called Greater Tel Aviv.
There is nothing new about the above analysis. These facts are known to anyone who has taken the trouble to learn them. It is an accepted fact that the defense budget is incapable of answering the needs of the Israel Defense Forces. "The equipment grows old, the ammunition stocks are insufficient, the condition of the reserve bases is catastrophic," says the State Comptroller's Report. It notes that the air force is aging rapidly and the army is unprepared for war.
All this represents a systems failure, both physical and spiritual, on the part both of decision-makers and the greater public. The unwillingness to confront it can only be described as a cognitive dissonance at the core of the national existence.
(The next, and last, section to be published in the October Outpost will deal with the pathological psychology of "the Israeli Death Wish.")
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fostering peace and understanding at the "grassroots," inadvertently it underscores how delusional are those who anticipate peaceful relations with the coming "Palestine." Arafat has approved the "Sukkat Shalom" (no doubt he sees it as a fine propaganda venture) and so the organizer assures those who sign up for the tripTranslation: if you are recognized as a Jew, and not protected by soldiers, the friendly grass roots will tear you apart limb from limb.
September 1999 - 7 - Outpost