Tuesday, January 25, 2011

What's this country's story?

Among all the events of the year 2010 in Israel, the forest fire on the Carmel Mountains at the beginning of December was one of the most striking events, because it displayed the country in an unusual position on the international scene: helplessness.


A pine forest in Northern Israel

What had started as a small fire in a pine forest on the Carmel Mountains had quickly turned into a raging and huge forest fire which soon was out of control. it cost the lives of 22 prison guards and one chief police officer, and destroyed the homes of 77 families. The Prime Minister was forced to call for help from neighboring countries; Greece, Cyprus and Turkey sent fire fighting airplanes, even the US sent a super sized fire fighting plane, and the Palestinian Authorities immediately sent their firemen to Haifa to back up their Israeli colleagues - a highly unusual opportunity to see who was ready to help.

A relative of mine in Europe asked me: "How is this possible? How can such a sophisticated country, spearhead of modern technology, be so unprepared and so ill equipped to deal with a simple forest fire? That's odd; I find that difficult to understand."
It was difficult to explain, actually. I asked friends in Israel about their views on this topic. These are some of the responses I obtained:

M. A., 63, a businessman of Belgian origin, has a very clear view of the problem: "Money." Lack of money, that is. In his view, almost ever since its foundation in 1948, the state treasury has been under the siege of the religious orthodox parties: "They have taken millions and millions for their Talmudic schools, so that leaves us with too little money for all the rest."

Vered, 51, an independent artist, has a very grim view about the situation: in her eyes, nothing ever functioned properly in this country.

Z., 57, a company owner, believes that this is the result of year long corruption and lack of attention.

Alina, 18, explains this by the fact that the two only items into which the country invests money are security and religion - because they have the strongest lobby.

Fact is that for all these years, ever since 1948, Israel has been living on the edge, in a state of siege. In that kind of state, priorities are defined according to whether or not something contributes to the survival of the country or not - and strangely enough, for the last 10-20 years, fire fighting is not perceived as a priority by the country's leadership, although various representatives of the Israel fire fighters and rescue services have made repeated attempts to call attention to the fire fighting system's extreme shortcomings, or, less nicely put, neglect.

Again, how can a country such as Israel, with so many smart and successful businessmen, scientists, security specialists reach such a level of neglect when it comes to fire security?  The reasons are manifold.

One of the reasons is that Israel is still a very small country surrounded by large countries, with a Muslim majority, most of them not having any official relationship with Israel, which basically means that they are at war with the "Zionist entity", as some of them call it. Obviously Israel's chief concern is to protect itself against attacks from the outside.

As to the inside situation, it is so complicated that it is difficult to find one's way through it. One of the major issues within the Israeli society is the religious divide between the secular population (a small majority, a little bit less than 50% , for further information, read the Wikipedia article: Religion in Israel). Ever since the early times of the Israeli state, one of the religious Orthodox (Haredi) political parties has been, as a rule, part of the government coalition.

The Haredi's political agenda is a very clear one: they need more and more funds for their Talmudic schools and yeshivas, subsidies for the yeshiva students to allow them to dedicate themselves to a life of studies and prayers - and they are adamant. Without them any government coalition crumbles down.

Between the enormous financial needs of the State Defense and the demands of the Orthodox Jews, most politicians seem to be too busy to sort out fire fighting infrastructure. Corruption just makes everything even worse. The end results are: profoundly dysfunctional fire fighting and rescue services.

People here can only hope that this is going to change in the near future.



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