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Opinion: A Three-Hour Tour

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My first day in Israel I took a three-hour tour — by helicopter. To paraphrase what Daniel Webster said about Dartmouth: It’s a small country, yet there are those that love it. The main purpose of the ride was to show how small Israel is, and thus vulnerable it is to terrorism, and thus how necessary is the barrier separating it from the Palestinian territories.

It succeeded — in the first goal, anyway. You can see the hills of the West Bank, the Palestinian territories, from a few hundred feet above the Mediterranean coastline. “The narrow waist of Israel,” our guide kept calling it, with a mixture of concern and enthusiasm.

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Later we landed an army checkpoint in Gaza, where we climbed up a lookout post to get a better view of Israel’s vulnerability to terrorism. (Anyone else see a pattern here?) Palestinians in Gaza regularly lob low-tech Kassam rockets from Gaza into Israeli. Though they rarely cause loss of life, Israel retaliates with often disproportionate force.

It was a curious tour, designed to show both Israel’s strength and vulnerability, and never was it illustrated so well as when we meandered though the army checkpoint unchaperoned and seemingly unwatched. We were free to go where we pleased, said our guide. So long as we didn’t go where we weren’t supposed to.


Above: A lookout post near the northern border of Gaza. Rest assured, our guide told us, there are soldiers in there somewhere.

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