How did the fires break out? Under the prevailing climatic conditions, any little spark could have caused a major disaster. A campfire not properly extinguished, a burning cigarette thrown from a passing car, an overturned hookah.
But that is not dramatic enough for news media, and even less for politicians. Soon enough the country was full of accusations: The Arabs Did It. Of course. Who else? TV was full of people who had actually seen Arabs setting forests alight.
Then Binyamin Netanyahu appeared on screen. Clad in a fashionable battle-dress, surrounded by his minions, he declared that it was all the work of Arab terrorists. It was an "Intifada of Fire." Fortunately, Israel has a savior: he himself. He had taken control, summoned an American supertanker and several other foreign fire-fighting planes. Israelis could go back to sleep.
In reality, all this was nonsense. The brave fire-fighters and policemen had already done their job. Netanyahu's intervention was superfluous, indeed harmful.
DURING THE last great fire, six years ago, on the Carmel, Netanyahu had played the same role and summoned a giant American fire-fighting plane. It had done a good job over the forest. This time, near human neighborhoods, it could do nothing. In settled neighborhoods, the super-tanker was useless. Netanyahu summoned it, had himself photographed with it, and that was that.
The accusation of the Arab citizens as responsible for the catastrophe was much more serious. When Netanyahu raised it, he was widely believed.
The semi-fascist minister of education, Naftali Bennett, argued that the fire proved that the country belongs to the Jews, since the Arabs had set it on fire.
Many Arab citizens were rounded up and interrogated. Most were released. In the end it appeared that perhaps about 2 (two) percent of the fires were started by Arab youngsters as acts of revenge.
Haifa is a mixed city, with a large Arab population. Generally, relations between Arabs and Jews there are good, sometimes even cordial. The two communities faced the new danger together, Arab villages opened their homes to Jewish refugees from the fire. Mahmoud Abbas, the chief of the Palestinian Authority in the occupied territories, also sent his firefighters into Israel to help out.
Netanyahu's incendiary speeches, making wild (and quite unproven) accusations against the Arab citizens and against Arab workers from the occupied territories, did not catch on.
So this political fire, too, was suppressed before it could do too much damage. As the days pass, the accusations recede, but the damage they caused remains.
(When I served in the army, long ago, my company was awarded the honorary title "Samson's Foxes." Samson, the biblical hero, attached firebrands to the tails of foxes and sent them into the fields of the Philistines.)
THE FIRE should provide food for thought.
If Netanyahu and his minions are right and "the Arabs" are intent on throwing us out of the country by any means, including fire, what is the answer?
The easy answer is: Throw them out, instead.
Logical, but impracticable. There are now more than six and a half million Arab Palestinians in Greater Israel -- Israel proper, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and the Gaza Strip. The number of Jews is about the same. In today's world, you just cannot expel such numbers.
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