Fredrik came to Israel for the first time nine years ago as a tourist. "It was love at first sight. I stepped out of the airplane, looked around and felt that this was a country I could die for." He returned to his small Swedish hometown, where his father serves as a pastor in the local Pentecostal church. "I always commit 100% to things that I do and I felt strongly that this is where God wanted me to be," he explains, so he wrapped up his own career as a youth pastor and moved to Israel. The love he felt for the land was uncompromising.

Soon after his arrival, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up along with 21 young Israelis in a discotheque in Tel Aviv. "Suddenly I realized that not everybody is nice," Fredrik says with a touch of irony. "When I was called up to do army service in Sweden, I had refused to carry a gun."

After having experienced terrorism up close he stopped being a pacifist. "I realized that there are situations when one needs to use weapons to defend oneself."

That insight led him to an IDF conscription office in the summer of 2001, where he explained that he wanted to join the IDF. He received a resounding no for an answer, since he was not an Israeli citizen, nor Jewish. He was not even a legal resident, only a tourist.

"That was when I first heard of Sar-El, an IDF volunteer program. You essentially become a jobnik." Between 2002 and 2005 Fredrik spent a total of a year and a half as a Sar-El volunteer, mostly as a tank mechanic. The rest of the time he worked odd jobs in Sweden to support himself in Israel. "Finally, after endless petitions, I got temporary residency." He immediately went back to the conscription office, but was told that he needed permanent residency to be eligible for the IDF.

Fredrik worked odd jobs in Israel for over two years, doing everything in his power to make his dream come true. "When it was time to renew my residency I felt that it was now or never. I wrote to everybody I knew and used all the contacts that I had made in Sar-El."

And finally, in the summer of 2007, he was granted permanent residency. "As soon as I had received my blue identity card I walked straight from the Ministry of Interior to the IDF conscription office." All those years of persistence finally payed off and Fredrik was admitted to Golani, the brigade he had aimed for all along. In March 2008 he started training.

The enthusiasm with which he was greeted can be gleaned from the fact that he was handpicked from the 51^st Infantry Battalion to the Egoz Reconnaissance Unit in Golani, the elite of the elite. "He possesses some very rare qualities," says one of the soldiers that went through basic training with Fredrik. "Any officer would do anything to have a soldier like that in his unit, someone who gives everything and never complains."

Fredrik received his beret in Egoz and trained with them for a few months before Israeli intelligence stepped in, curbed the enthusiasm and bumped him back down to the 51^st.

Fredrik is very humble about his feat. He just followed his conviction and doesn’t expect a special prize for it, but part of his motivation is to inspire people in Israel. He feels rewarded when he sees that reaction in people. "When Israelis hear my story they say kol hakavod [Good for you]. I want to be a source of inspiration for them and make them realize that they are not alone in the fight against terrorism," he explains.

The situation in Sweden is obviously very different. The anti-war demonstrations during Operation Cast Lead have on several occasions erupted into violent attacks on anything associated with Israel. Out of concern for the safety of his family in Sweden he does not want to reveal his real name or show his face on pictures in this article. "In Sweden there are some people that think that I am a fanatic, that I came here to kill Arabs, which is absolutely untrue."

He doesn’t want to discuss politics or the future borders of Israel. "That’s not for me to decide. I just believe that God wants the State of Israel to exist, and I am here to protect its existence."

God is ever-present when Fredrik explains what motivated him to leave Sweden and move to Israel. "God placed a love for this country in my heart and I want to spread that love. I want to express it in a practical way. That love is my purpose."

He explains it as if it were a very simple thing. He has always been completely honest about his Christian faith and says that it never has caused any problems or conflicts with his fellow soldiers. "I feel especially close to the religious Jews in my unit. They say that I have an interesting relationship with God," he says with a smile. "I think we challenge and inspire each other. They know a lot of Talmud, while I know more Bible. It triggers them to learn more, and their knowledge triggers me to learn more, but at the same time I respect their faith completely and they respect my faith completely. We are not trying to change each other. And there is a lot we have in common. On Saturday evenings when the guys gather to sing as Shabbath departs, I sing with them. We sing to God together, we sing our hearts out. I feel the Holy Spirit so strongly when I join them."

Fredrik suddenly stops himself. "Listen to me," he says and shakes his head. "I keep saying ‘them’ all the time, not ‘us.’"

I ask him how long he thinks he will keep doing that. "Probably as long as I live," he says, and for the first time I detect a certain sadness in his voice. "I will never completely be a part of this society and I don’t expect to be. I don’t say hayinu on Pessah: I was never a slave in Egypt." He shrugs his shoulders, at a loss for words. I don’t blame him, because how can one ever explain a love that doesn’t ask for anything in return?

(This article first appeared in the Jerusalem Post)

The post Son of A Preacher Man: A Swedish Christian in the IDF appeared first on Jewcy.

Palestinian reporters drew a parallell between the latest round of fighting in Gaza with what is known as "the Jenin Massacre" in Palestinian mythology. During an IDF operation in April, 2002 against terrorists hiding among civilians in the Jenin refugee camp, Palestinians claimed that close to 1,500 people had been killed. The correct figure ended up being 54, out of which 45 were armed men.

Some suggest that the Palestinians in general and Hamas in particular have everything to gain from the exagerated casualty figures, which might explain why the Palestinian Ministry of Health would try to sex up the toll. Their website does appear less than objective.

The IDF refutes the deflated bodycount, too, curiously enough. Or not so curiously: the 400-mark was passed on New Years Day, so if Mr. Cremonesi’s numbers are to be trusted, the IDF kept this war going for another 17 days, dropped more than 1,500 tons of bombs and invaded the Strip with a massive ground force, but still only managed to kill an average of 10 Hamasniks a day. So what were they doing there all that time?

On the other side of this weird equation we have the 10 IDF soldiers that were killed during the war, at least three of them by friendly fire. We know that the Israeli soldiers were better trained and equipped, but still… Two weeks of fighting on the ground and the Hamasniks only managed to take out seven Jews? These numbers are just not consistent with what one would expect from urban warfare. Either the Hamas combatants were major hacks and/or cowards, or the IDF really didn’t engage them. Or both. Kind of like Capoeira: looks like they are kicking each other in the head, but they are actually dancing.

What the Hamasniks did find time to do instead of fighting the Zionist enemy was to torture their fellow Palestinians. People in Gaza got their eyes poked out, kneecaps shot, and bones broken, sometimes for the "crime" of smiling in public, which was interpreted as joy over Israel’s success in the war (which they simultaneuosly denied, of course).

The fog of war has obviously not cleared yet. All we know for certain is that this operation was named after a dreidel. We can assume that it will continue to spin for another little while.

* The original sentence erroneously stated that this claim was based on conversations with several doctors and tours of several hospitals. Corriere Della Sera relied on multiple sources, but only one was a physician. And while the original Italian article referred to several hospitals in Gaza, it is unclear that the author toured them all.

The post The Gaza Death Toll Dispute appeared first on Jewcy.

I have always found davening to be more meaningful when things blow up in the background. The thrust of the words hit me again, after having been a rut for months. While it is still dark outside, I find my way to the central Ashkenazi shul in Sderot for morning prayers. Occasional bursts of heavy machine-gun fire are intermingled with explosions as the small minyan silently sways back and forth. Sometimes the ground shakes so violently that I wonder if the Tzeva Adom early warning system is functional this frigid morning.

At around 1 p.m. I find myself taking cover in a shelter together with a terrified woman that asks me and a Swedish colleague to describe her reality to the Swedish people. Like a lot of Israelis, she is convinced that "European media" is biased toward the Palestinians. Well, that is just not true, at least not in Sweden. The Palestinians seem to have decidedly over-milked the cow of their own suffering. Whatever huffing and puffing going on does not translate into action, and calm voices of reason are being heard, both among politicians and among influential journalists. For example: when Nizar Rayan was assassinated on January 1, 2009, along with his four wives and nine of his children, he got a phone call from the IAF in good time. Innocent lives could have been spared in that case, as in so many other cases, but this silly little man decided to stay put, instead cracking jokes with his kids about how he was too fat for the morgue freezer. That might boost morale among suicidal terrorists, but normal people around the world with a healthy sense of right and wrong are slowly realizing that the callousness of Nizar Rayan reveals the true and sick core of the death cult calling itself "Palestinian resistance."

From where I am sitting right now, I can see two Apache helicopters hovering in the air. Every once in a while there is a loud flushing sound when they fire missiles at targets in Gaza. The subsequent explosions are so powerful that the windows in the coffee shop shake: it sounds like kassam rockets striking two blocks away. The IAF has bombed and shelled thousands of targets in one of the most densely populated areas on the face of the planet non-stop for 12 days now, but even if we believe in the most generous figures from Gaza, only about 150 civilians have been killed (out of the 660 total). If the secret Israeli objective were to kill as many innocent Palestinians as possible, the IDF is obviously not doing a very good job. At last we might actually have found something that the Jews are not good at: genocide.

The post Live from Sderot appeared first on Jewcy.

As I write this, thousands of Israeli troops are waiting from the green light along the Gaza border. The Israeli Air Force has just about exhausted its target bank in Gaza after three days of intense bombing, unequaled since the Six Day War in 1967. Rumors have been circulating since mid-afternoon that the ground invasion has already started, but so far nothing has been confirmed. What can be said for sure is that morale is high, to the point where media has been forbidden access to the soldiers. Israel obviously does not want the polished rhetorical efforts of Peres, Livni, and Barak to be undone by gun-wielding 18-year-olds expressing their excitement about the prospects of killing people.

Operation Cast Lead, as it is called, is an attempt to set things straight after years of hodge-podge in lalaland. Nobody saw it coming: Defense Minister Ehud Barak was accused of treason in the Knesset as late as Friday for allowing a shipment of humanitarian aid into Gaza a day after 60 rockets and mortars pounded the south. The entire country has been under the impression that its leadership is indifferent and corrupt to the core, holding on to power with a white-knuckled grip with no regard to popular opinion or the unbearable reality of hundreds of thousands of Israelis living within range of the rockets that Hamas and other terrorist organizations in Gaza have been firing indiscriminately for over seven years now. And in just about five minutes around noon on Saturday, all that changed.

It turns out that Defense Minister Barak is sneaky bastard with integrity, allowing his own popularity to slump in the polls for the better good. People are elated in a way I have not seen since the early days of the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006, excited about fighting for a just cause. Everybody knows a combat soldier at the border, so of course there is also some worrying going on, but not enough to detract people from the clear sense that the time has come to clean up the mess in Gaza, once and for all.

A seasoned colleague of mine warns me that this field day will end as soon as the IDF screws up and blows up an orphanage by mistake ("It always happens"), but until that happens we can expect to see a determined IDF trying to secure its main objective: to completely change the rules of the game.

The post The Proverbial Chicken Is Coming Home to Roost appeared first on Jewcy.

When I discuss this with Mr. Zoughbi, he blames Israel. It’s the occupation, the checkpoints, the wall (a.k.a. the West Bank security barrier), and the settlements that make life in Bethlehem unbearable for Christians. As he utters every cliche about the suffering of the Palestinian people at the hands of the Jews, I gaze through his window at the settlement of Har Homa that towers on a neighboring hilltop. Yep, it must really suck to lose. 

Mr. Zoughbi scoffs when I try to interject with a question about Muslim persecution of Christians. "Such talk just plays into the hands of the Zionists." Obviously. "The occupation is like a cancer, while any tension between Muslims and Christians is comparable to a small cut in the finger," he says.

Let’s take a peek at that small cut: intimidation, beatings, land theft, firebombing of churches and other Christian institutions, denial of employment, economic boycotts, torture, kidnapping, forced marriage, sexual harassment, and extortion. In confidence Palestinian Christians tell me that they are not running away from an economy ruined by the Jews, but from the Palestinian Authority and the increasingly intolerant Muslim society that surrounds them. "You are not seeing any Muslims running away, are you?" one Christian man asks me with a bitter grin. Off the record, of course. One would imagine that Muslims would make up a considerable part of the Palestinians leaving Bethlehem if the economic situation were indeed so bad as everybody willing to go on record claims, but they are not. Even the Palestinian propagandists can’t get their head around this glaring fact, they start mumbling about Christians being more sensitive to economic pressure before changing the subject back to the occupation. 

If anything, the economy in Bethlehem is booming. This year has seen a 96.5% increase in tourism compared to last year, surpassing even the number of tourists that came before the Second Intifada. The average day wage among West Bank Palestinians has increased with 24% this year, and all the hotels in Bethlehem are fully booked over Christmas, allegedly a common problem in this shoddy little town.

After having spent three days in Bethlehem talking to Christians about the situation, any semblance of a Christmas spirit that I have tried to work up is gone. The people I talk to are either too terrified to go on record, or they lie to protect themselves and their families. As I approach the border terminal where Israeli soldiers routinely humiliate Palestinians for fun, I come across a black Hummer outside of a store selling Christmas ornaments. The owner brags that he payed 600,000 shekels for it. That equals $125,000. What a ripoff, I bet it was a Jew that made him pay twice of what it is worth.

The post Coping with Christmas in Bethlehem appeared first on Jewcy.

It turned out that this event actually was considered a news item, judging by the sizable pack of press photographers that covered it. I am sure there were more important things going on in Israel that day (just a hunch), yet the news crews acquiesced when they were diverted to the Western Wall.

The Government Press Office, which had sent out emails announcing the event, probably thought that it would reflect well on Israel: the Postal Authority going out of its way to find a creative solution to that growing pile of undeliverable mail and Rabbi Rabinovitz getting a chance to say a few words about how God accepts the prayers of all mankind, Jews and non-Jews alike. It kind of felt like Christmas, an illusion that was shattered when the rabbi recited Shir Lama’alot (Psalm 121) instead of singing Joy to the World with the Director-General.

It seems kind of cute, but think about it: leading officials of the Zionist Entity are finding the time to serve the whims of crazy people from around the globe that actually put stamps on envelopes that read, "To God, Jerusalem, Israel." Most journalists are probably too cynical to be outraged by these implications, so they file coy little articles about how it is surprising that people still depend on snail mail when they write to God now that it is so much more convenient to send an email, and besides, by now everybody should have learned that it is yeshiva students and not God who reads those little notes that you stick into the Kotel.

This and similar "news" items reinforces the image of Jerusalem (and Israel) as being a place that is detached from reality, which was probably not what the Government Press Office had intended. But this place obviously is set apart in a remarkable way, which is a difficult thing to convey to people that do not live here. A lot of things that make perfect sense here are considered outlandish or outright pathological in other parts of the world, which made this event both disturbing and comforting at the same time. Disturbing because, well, the whole thing was insane, and comforting because there was an order in the insanity, a place for it.

The post A Place for Prayer appeared first on Jewcy.

The post After the Truce appeared first on Jewcy.

These border crossings are a part of the unnatural umbilical chord that attaches Gaza to Israel. "When people in Gaza turn on a switch, it's our grid; when they turn on a faucet, it's our water," explains IDF Major Mike Vromen. Eighty percent of the population is completely dependent on the humanitarian aid that flows through Israel into Gaza. This is how it works: trucks with goods, funded primarily by USAID, arrive on the Israeli side of the crossing. They are checked by the IDF and then unloaded onto a 200 meter long conveyor belt, which transfers the goods across the border, where they are then reloaded onto Palestinian trucks and distributed to various parts of the Gaza Strip by a confusing array of actors on the ground: WFP, UNRWA, CHF, to name just a few. It is a multi-million dollar industry.

During a Q&A with IDF Colonel Nir Peretz later in the day, I ask what purpose the conveyor belt has. Why not just drive the trucks across the border? The colonel looks at me like I am a total idiot but sticks the knife in gently: "Gaza is run by Hamas, a terrorist organization. Do you know what they would do with our trucks if we just opened the gate and drove right through?" Well, yes, I have a pretty good idea: they would shoot at them and try to blow them up in the same way that they almost daily attack the border crossings. Case in point: the Erez crossing was blown to smithereens on May 22 when a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated 4 tons of explosives packed into his truck. So the conveyor belt does make sense, but that is also an instance of what is so disturbing, namely that an Israeli at some point came up with a practical solution of how to continue to transfer goods into Gaza even when the border crossings are constantly being attacked. The image that comes to mind is that scene from Jurassic Park where a T-Rex is being fed a live cow. What would it take for a basic sense of self-preservation to kick in here?

(Above: Scene from the Sufa border crossing; photography by Paul Widen)

The post Visual Dispatch: Gaza Before The Truce appeared first on Jewcy.

I recently heard an expansion of this interpretation by Rav Gedalyah, a senior member of my shul. The man must be in his eighties, but he still makes it to the second minyan every morning. As for myself, I attend the early minyan, and after we finish praying a few of us stick around and drink a cup of coffee and a shot of whiskey, the final preparations before facing the new day. Rav Gedalyah usually stops by where we schmooze and wishes us a good morning and peace upon the entire House of Israel. A few days ago, however, he came earlier than usual and sat down with us for a few minutes. With Israel's sixtieth anniversary celebrations still fresh in mind, he told us a story from the War of Independence.

Like so many other Holocaust survivors, Rav Gedalyah came to the British Mandate of Palestine with absolutely nothing. Here he was quickly put to work, and when the war started he became a soldier. He and his comrades received little training and had almost no equipment, yet faced an enemy many times stronger. His motley crew was sent to Latrun, where Jordanian snipers on the hill picked them off one by one. One day when it was time for afternoon prayers the Israeli soldiers were only sheltered by a tent. Jordanian mortar fire pounded the area when suddenly one of the soldiers stepped into a hole in the ground. When he pulled out his leg he discovered that the hole was in fact the opening to a cave. They all took shelter there and started praying. Five minutes later, a Jordanian mortar shell scored a direct hit on the tent where they had previously been standing.

"Rashi explains the singular by saying that the Children of Israel were 'as one man with one heart,' but how is such a unity achieved?" asked Rav Gedalyah. "The experience of that day made me think of what the text says a few verses later: 'Moses brought the people out toward God from the camp, and they stood at the bottom of the mountain.' Betachtit hahar: According to the Sages, this really means 'under the mountain.' That day at Latrun we were quite literally under the mountain, we were in a hole in the ground, and I can assure you that I have never experienced a stronger unity than I did that day. And that is how we defeated the Jordanians: not through might, but through unity."

(Above: The view from the mountain of Herodium south of Bethlehem. Photography by Paul Widen)

The post Visual Dispatch: What Shavuot Means For Israeli Unity appeared first on Jewcy.

This is what is left of the holiest site of Judaism: Not the place in itself, nor a ruin, but the ruin of the wall that once marked its perimeter. Standing there means being one significant step removed from the ideal: it means standing on the Outside in some sort of genuine sense.

As I was standing there, I was reminded of a discussion I had a while back with a secular Jewish woman. I remember saying that Judaism, to me, is a witness to the fact that something is fundamentally broken in the world, and that the Western Wall is a very graphic symbol for this. I did not suggest that any practical steps be taken at this point to change that fact, but this woman nevertheless felt it pertinent to exclaim, "May it remain broken! May it remain broken!"

This, to me, is a very curious position to take, and my failure to share this woman's defeatism probably explains why I fail in political moderation. Wishing for things to remain broken can only indicate that you live in a bubble where this brokenness means quaint Diaspora culture, not persecution and suffering. From this perspective, religious Zionism is perceived as a crude and dangerous idea, an obstacle to peace, and a violent and chauvinistic perversion of Jewish values.

The vast majority of the people that filled the Western Wall plaza as Yom Yerushalaim drew to an end adhered to this idea. Pushing and shoving they hastened to the wall, where the longing for complete redemption is so palpable that you can almost cut it with a knife. "May the Temple be rebuilt, the City of Zion replenished," they sang, as the Dome of the Rock towered over them in perfect serenity. Then came the piercing call of the Muezzin: Allahu akbar; Allaaaaahu akbar, suggesting that God, perhaps, is greater than all this.

Redemption is not a guarantee in Judaism, and the opportunity can be squandered in any number of ways. The real tragedy, however, comes when an unadulterated loyalty to the hope of complete redemption is branded as fanaticism, and when people settle for, even promote, the brokenness which has defined Judaism for 2000 years. Essentially these people still live in the Diaspora, despite the fact that they reside in the Land of Israel. It is never too late to lose the Six Day War, they claim: it would in fact be of great benefit to finally reverse that victory. It is, ironically, a very Jewish thing to say.

(Photography by Paul Widen)

The post Visual Dispatch: Jerusalem Day appeared first on Jewcy.