Israel Hayom..
13 November '13..
The announcement that no more gas masks will be manufactured and distributed -- simply because to the best of anyone's assessment the chemical threat from Syria has gone and vanished -- should have given us all with a sense of calm and relief. There are many defense and diplomatic officials, privy to both public and classified information, who believe that the decision is sound and just. So why does it make us, the commoners, raise an astonished eyebrow? It is for the same reason that the people of that village ignored the warnings of the shepherd, who bothered them for months with his incessant cries of ""Wolf! Wolf!"
The gas protection kits came into our lives on the eve of the First Gulf War, with the sealed rooms with the plastic sheets taped over every window to block the poisonous substances from entering, and the boxes of bottled water that then-Israel Defense Forces' spokesperson Nachman Shai instructed us to drink if we became exposed. In short, a type of joke that went right along with Purim, which coincided with the war's end.
Since then, our long affair with those alien-like rubber masks has known long stretches of normalcy with a few ups and downs. At first, until 2003, we would maintain their regular upkeep. Later on we would upgrade the kits, and make sure that the hundreds of thousands of new immigrants from the former Soviet Union also had them. In 2007 we saw a large campaign to collect all the kits and in 2010 another campaign to redistribute them on a mass scale.
The civil war in Syria, which began in 2011, made the distribution of gas protection kits in Israel extremely relevant. As the honorable Western world "looked on with concern" at the bloodbath in Syria which has led to millions of refugees, and did not bat an eyelash when the death toll crossed the 100,000 mark, we were ill at ease. Very much so. We all know that despots tend to divert attention from domestic strife by conjuring up a fight against an outside enemy, which in the Middle East means the "Zionist entity."
On August 6, 2013, the Knesset State Control Committee made it known that the funds allocated in 2013 for the purchase of gas masks would only last until March 2014 and only be enough for about 60 percent of the population. The cost of distribution to the remaining 40% was estimated at 1.3 billion shekels ($370 million). The cost of refreshing the existing kits already in circulation, some 300 million shekels ($85 million) per year, also did not coincide with the need to slash the budget.
The news from Syria, however, did not fit with the planned budget cuts. On August 21, when Syrian President Bashar Assad attacked his own people with chemical weapons, the elegantly reserved world decided to change its tone. The red line was crossed. U.S. President Barack Obama, with a discernible lack of desire, warned that if Assad had indeed used such weapons then America would go to war. We, in turn, immediately began to flood the gas mask distribution centers around the country. The media spared no effort in describing the panic and the endless lines. The gas mask manufacturers received their 15 minutes of fame on prime time television.
In September, Obama began to stutter, Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened and the U.N. Security Council decided to destroy Syria's chemical weapons arsenal within a year. This news came just as the annual debate was taking place over whether the defense budget should be cut or not, and about the billions of shekels tied up in companies that enjoy extensive tax benefits and intend to fire hundreds of employees.
Well, I conducted a random survey at the grocery store following the latest bit of news about ending the gas mask distribution. The first person told me: "Obviously it's because of financial considerations." A second woman answered: "We are being used as a means to pressure the world; they want us to scream." A third person said: "I'm one of those who don't have a kit, so what now?" And I replied: "I'll give you mine. I'll just put plastic over the windows and drink water." Everyone laughed.
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6327
Smadar Bat Adam is a freelance writer.
Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.
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