Israel's high rise buildings in Jerusalem are built out of Jerusalem stone, a beautiful natural building material that makes even the new city look gloriously resurrected from the very hills themselves. Obama is a Third World socialist, meaning that he sees everything through the lens of revenge against Western colonialism of the 19th century. Where Obama sees "settlements," Israelis see 900 units of beautiful high-rise buildings made out of the living rock of the land. Almost all Israelis serve in the army, and when you look at those stone buildings from a tactical viewpoint, as soldiers do, you see rank upon rank of defensive positions. Bullets don't penetrate those Jerusalem stone walls. Even radiation weapons only penetrate one or two ranks of buildings, allowing for defensive positions to be erected behind them. While nothing is impermeable to high explosives and powerful rockets, each row of high rises in Jerusalem can serve as a tactical fortification: a tank ditch, or a tactical position for a team of soldiers. Having seen a century of attacks from Arabs, the Israelis can't avoid thinking like that.
Fifty miles south, Hamas still fires rockets at surrounding Israeli villages every week. A hundred miles north, Hezbollah has now been resupplied with tens of thousands of fresh, long-range missiles from Tehran. So where Obama looks at Israel like the Dutch settlers of South Africa, the Israelis see the battle of Stalingrad: A place where Israel may take its last stand against another wave of tanks and RPGs, and still turn the tide.
The normally fractious Israelis have finally discovered a common enemy, and it's Obama. Politics in Israel is about as contentious as it gets without members of parliament coming to regular fisticuffs, Taiwanese-style. But now Obama has done the quarrelsome Israelis a favor, sort of. Ninety-six percent of the Israeli population believes that Obama is a threat to their survival. Israel is uniting against a common threat. Thank you, Mr. Obama.
