ARTICLES

A GRUELING PROCESS, OFTEN TAKING MONTHS OF SECURITY CHECKS AND TRAINING COURSES

Why School Shootings Don’t Happen in Israel
By Yael Shahar
October 7, 2015
Haaretz

Why is it that in Israel – a country surrounded by weapons of war – we don’t see the same gun violence as that which cost the lives of students in Oregon and little McKayla from Tennessee?

I spent most of last Wednesday renewing my gun license. Contrary to what many in the United States believe, owning a firearm in Israel is neither common nor easy. Applying for a license is a grueling process, often taking months of security checks and training courses. Keeping that license requires an investment of time, effort, and money.

In my case, the license was a legacy of many years as a volunteer in the Israel Police sniper unit and later in the Israel Defense Forces reserves. It had been years since I was actively involved in security work, aside from the occasional civil guard patrol. But, given the rather volatile security situation, its considered desirable that those who have the training keep up their proficiency and continue to carry.

And so, on Wednesday morning I drove into the nearest town to get the necessary forms signed by my family doctor, who certified that I’m not taking any medication that might impair my alertness, that I have no history of psychological disorders, and that I’m more or less in my right mind—at least most of the time.

And then it was off to the shooting range. Together with 15 others, I stood in line for half an hour to have my designated self-defense weapon examined, tested for any malfunctions that would endanger myself or passersby. The serial number was matched with the paperwork to make sure the weapon was legally mine and had not been put on any watch lists. Another 40-minute wait (part of it spent in the Sukkah outside the range chatting with an elderly veteran of four of Israel’s wars) and we were ushered into the range for our training session.

The session was conducted by someone whom I had known as an instructor back in my days in the police sniper unit. He went over changes to the laws of owning a firearm: If your weapon is stolen from your house and you cannot prove that a safe was broken open to get at the weapon, then you are a criminal and may do jail time.

And if we ever have to use a weapon in self-defense? You had better be certain that you had no other recourse, that you did what you could to warn the attacker, and that had you not taken action, at least one innocent life could have been lost. And you may still do jail time.

We spent about an hour at practice, refreshing our ability to deal with safety issues and malfunctions, honing our skills. One by one, we were certified as competent and sent out to collect our paperwork, duly stamped and fed into the computer, from which it would go into some government database. The process took up most of the day.

I thought of all this when I read of yet another (reportedly, the 294th this year) mass shooting in the United States—this time at a small community college in Oregon. Four firearms. An attention-seeking, imbalanced, suicidal young man walked into a classroom with four firearms. Police later found five pistols and one rifle at the college, and another three pistols, four rifles, and a shotgun at his home. All the weapons were purchased legally by the shooter or his family members.

And then Tuesday’s headlines tell us that an 11-year-old boy in Tennessee shot and killed an eight-year-old girl, his neighbor, when she refused to let him see her puppy. The boy retrieved his family’s 12-gauge shotgun from an unlocked closet, and fired at McKayla Dyer as she stood in her yard.

There is something seriously wrong about a system where a disturbed young man can acquire deadly weapons as easily as buying a new laptop. Where children can treat firearms as casually as toys.

I live in a country with wars raging on all sides, with failed states collapsing into a primordial stew of hatred and nihilism an hours drive north of me, with suicidal regimes seeking nuclear weapons in order to carry out their expressed goals of obliterating me, my family, and everyone with whom I interact on a daily basis. But for all this, I dont feel as if Im living in a war zone. We know about death and we know about weapons of war, but we don’t fetishize them.

And the United States? A country bounded by friendly regimes and by neutral water. Apparently a nation lacking natural enemies may simply become its own enemy.

MORAWIECKI IN MUNICH: “HE STARED AT ME AS IF HE WERE EXAMINING A NUISANCE”

In the name of my mother, the Holocaust survivor
By Ronen Bergman
Yediot Ahronot
February 20, 2018

It was all unexpected and unplanned. Two of the world’s youngest leaders were sitting on the stage at the main conference hall of Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich: Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. Both are eloquent, sharp and very self-confident speakers.

I listened to the Polish leader talk about economy, energy and other Polish-related issues. He spoke about everything, apart from the issue everyone wanted him to address: The legislation prescribing prison time and a fine for accusing Poland and the Poles of taking part in the Holocaust. This legislation, which has created a major global controversy and sparked a lot of anger in Israel, wasn’t important enough for Morawiecki.

During the question and answer session, I stood up to talk. I wanted to ask a general question about the law, but I was suddenly flooded with memories. My entire family, my late mother and my father and their families, experienced the Holocaust. Few survived. Most were killed. The Holocaust has been hanging over our heads as a big shadow our entire life.

We knew very little. Mother was a very modest person, but the few relatives who survived said she had been recognized as a prodigy at an early age. While in kindergarten, she had already received a special prize from the Polish education minister for “good Polish,” but that’s usually where the story ended. The relatives refused to say anything else, and mother kept silent too. “One day, I’ll tell you more,” she used to say to my sisters and me.

Throughout the years, mother made sure to serve as a separating buffer between the children and the memories from the horrors. All we knew was that grandmother and mother had escaped to the woods, joined the partisans and managed to survive the war. Grandfather, on the other hand, hid in sewage tunnels in his hometown and came out when the Gestapo had withdrawn.

And there was one more thing we always knew, that “the Poles were worse than the Nazis.” It’s something mother occasionally spoke about—the neighbors and parents of acquaintances from class, and the merchants, and those who worked for Jews.

From a historical perspective, I believe mother was wrong. Clearly, the Nazis were the ones who initiated the Holocaust, and they were the ones who built the death camps. But mother knew the Poles and this was her very personal and moral judgment of what had happened. There is no doubt that there were many Poles who risked their lives and saved many Jews. The names of some of them are engraved at the entrance to the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations at the entrance to Yad Vashem.

“They all betrayed us and turned us in to the Gestapo,” she said. She and other family members, she told us, had paid a Polish peasant money to hide in his farm. “We were constantly hungry. It was starvation to the brink of death,” she told me. “Although it was forbidden, one day I sneaked in to see if the landlords had anything to eat. They didn’t see me, and then I heard those horrible words. They said they would call the Gestapo the next day to take us too.”

Only years after she died, I found out that the story we knew about the sewage tunnels and the partisans and the meeting after the war was all true—apart from one detail: grandmother and grandfather didn’t know each other before the war.

My biological grandfather escaped with grandmother and mother to the woods. He caught pneumonia there—or was wounded by German fire, there are two versions—and mother and grandmother buried him in the snow with their own hands.

Mother and grandmother, and a few other relatives who survived, spent the rest of the war in the woods, with the partisans.

The man I knew as my grandfather met grandmother and mother after the war. Two lost people in a destroyed world, one of them carrying a little girl with sad eyes. The other, our “Grandpa Yaakov,” lost his entire family in one of the death camps. Two people who searched for comfort and found each other.

When grandmother met Yaakov, they decided to stick to each other. Together with mother, they decided to bury this secret in Europe. They immigrated to Israel in 1949 as one family unit, and told everyone how they had been forced to separate because of the Nazis and how they had met happily after the war.

Mother passed away in 1993, after battling cancer for 15 years. I believe that the horrors from back then, along with her stubborn attempt to serve as a buffer and not to tell us anything, to hold it all inside, not to talk, not to unload, were what eventually killed her.

Why didn’t she tell us she had buried her real father in the snow? “She didn’t want to be subject to anyone’s pity,” a relative of ours concluded when we learned the truth, years after mother’s passing.

While still in Europe, mother swore to never say another word in Polish. And she kept that promise. She was willing to speak German, but Polish? Absolutely not.

I gave a summary of this story on Saturday to the audience at the Munich Security Conference and to the Polish prime minister, who gave me a hollow and blood-curdling look.

“My mother was able to save much of her family because she heard during the night that the neighbors were going to tell that they have Jews in their vicinity to the SS the next morning. If I understand correctly, after this law is legislated, I will be considered a criminal in your country for saying this. What is the purpose? What is the message that you are trying to convey to the world?”

When I was done, everyone applauded. Later, I was approached by senior German officials from different government organizations, who thanked me for saying what they are unable to say. But the Polish prime minister was neither confused nor impressed, and didn’t even offer me any sympathy. He is faced by a man with a lump in his throat talking about how his family was exterminated in the Holocaust, and he stares as me at if he is examining some kind of nuisance.

“It’s extremely important to first understand that of course it’s not going to be punishable or seen as a crime to say that there were Polish perpetrators as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian and Ukrainian perpetrators, not only German perpetrators,” he replied.

“There were no Polish death camps, there were no Polish concentration camps. There were German Nazi death camps. The mere fact that we have to explain it today stems from our history. We cannot agree with mixing perpetrators with victims.”

These comments left me flabbergasted. My eyes were filled with tears of pain and rage. I was glad I had at least helped reveal his true colors with my question.

“I believe there is no better closure than what you did today for mother and the score she had to settle with the Poles. It’s a shame she didn’t get to see it,” my sister, Liora Houbara, wrote me after watching the broadcast from the conference.

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