Israel and the Limits of Toughness

When I heard that Helen Thomas, the famed but now former White House reporter, had said that the Jews in Israel should go back to, among other places, Poland and Germany, my thoughts immediately turned to the first Gulf War. I was in Israel, lugging around a gas mask, as was everyone else in the country, anticipating the arrival of Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles with poison-gas warheads. When the first attack commenced, eerily, in the middle of the night, I hustled into my hotel's designated safe room, put on my gas mask — and found myself surrounded by a most remarkable tableau: elderly Jews, Eastern European sorts, holocaust survivors undoubtedly, wearing gas masks, threatened by poison gas for the second time in their lives. It was at once heartbreaking and infuriating and infinitely moving. The Scuds, of course, bore no poison and fell relatively harmlessly. But these people — they could easily have been my grandparents — were the most powerful argument for Israel's existence; their safety from existential threat was why Israel had to remain strong and vigilant.