America-Israel Patent Law Blog

I write this as an update (since my last update) for colleagues and others. A lot has happened since them.

Things here in Rehovot specifically have been relatively quiet over the past week and a half – a few sirens, and there was a missile that landed in Rehovot last Friday afternoon (October 13), but again, for the most part the Iron Dome system has done its job – so well, in fact, that we often hear booms overhead without first hearing sirens because the interception happens over Rehovot but the missile was aimed north of here (Nes Tziona, Rishon Letzion, Tel Aviv) and so only those people in the vicinity of its calculated landing trajectory are warned to take cover.

There have been other areas that Hamas has targeted with rocket attacks, and the area close to Gaza remains dangerous for travel, but in general, after the initial attacks on October 7, things in Israel have been relatively quiet. (There was, of course, also the Big Lie, viz. an Islamic Jihad rocket that landed in the parking lot of a hospital in Gaza, which Hamas wasted no time in saying was (a) fired by Israel and (b) killed 500 people, a canard that those wonderful bastions of truth like the NYT picked up unhesitatingly.)

The big effort has been in mobilization – not just calling up hundreds of thousands of reserve soldiers, but the intense effort by the people here who were not called up to help acquire missing equipment for soldiers, and to provide basic necessities to the people who survived the attacks whose homes and communities were quite literally destroyed. To give one illustration:

What was the Whatapp group from my son’s unit when he was inducted in 2015 has been revived and expanded to include wives, girlfriends and siblings. When he was in training, there was one day that we were told at around 3 PM that there would be a dinner with our sons at a particular location at 7 PM. On those four hours’ notice – including travel time – there were parents who showed up with grills and meat and rolls for the unit; one family even brought what looked like a 50-gallon pot of soup. But that’s nothing compared to the effort to make sure our sons, now reservists, have everything they need. My wife has been coordinating the collection and disbursement of funds to buy equipment and other things; other parents and siblings have been dealing with the logistics of getting things to the unit, which has since relocated from Kibbutz Beeri along the Gaza border to the north and has been engaging in training exercises.

(The fact that the citizenry needs to step in to help equip the army is in some ways embarrassing, but in many ways, Israel is a country that has survived despite itself.)

There are also amazing stories of what people here have done for each other. And among the pain of losing all those people, there are heartwarming stories: I’ve seen at least a half dozen videos of weddings of couples for whom the guy getting called up was the catalyst to tie the knot, with the ceremony and celebration being held on a base or in the field. There was the fellow who answered the call-up on October 7, and a few days later watched his son’s brit milah via Zoom.

Then, of course, there were the visits from the Americans: first an aircraft carrier group, which is parked nearby; then the Secretary of State, then the Secretary of Defense, and then POTUS himself. I know that there are people in both the USA and Israel who were touched by some of the things Biden said, but I myself am circumspect, because talk is cheap, and his actions as well as his words, taken as a whole, have been inconsistent and even self-contradictory. Time will tell if the Americans are actually helping Israel or hindering it. Seeing as how Israel has had four major operations against Hamas over the years – Cast Lead in 2008-2009, Pillar of Fire in in 2012, Tzuk Eitan in 2014 and Guardian of the Walls in 2021 – the present war will not be a success unless at the end of it every last Hamas member and supporter is gone. My hope is that the US will allow Israel to do that, and will also help blow up Hizballah along the border with Lebanon. But again, it’s hard to read the tea leaves here.

One thing that’s not hard to read: telling Israel to restrain itself (said in Biden’s speech last night) – how condescending, and stupid, can you get? Israel has been restraining itself. The death toll is now up to over 1600, and I think fewer than half the bodies have been identified (and quite a few people are still unaccounted for.) We’ve been burying our kids, our parents, our siblings and our relatives for the past two weeks, and it’s not done yet. If two weeks ago Mexico did to the US what Hamas did to the Gaza border communities, Mexico would now be one huge tortilla. Instead, Israel has been, yet again, engaging in pinpoint strikes against selected targets, with the only difference from past campaigns being that Israel no longer warns the occupants of buildings that house Hamas operatives or arms that the building is about to get blown up. If we send in infantry – which is what “restraint” will entail – we’re going to have many more casualties. Why should we have to suffer that?

I don’t think people in the USA have an appreciation for how close this war is to home, in both the literal and figurative sense. Without traffic, I can normally drive from Rehovot to the Gaza border in about an hour, and a lot of that is on non-divided, two-way roads. To get to the border with Lebanon without traffic is maybe a three to three-and-a-half hour drive, again with part of the way being two-way roads.  It’s not a big country, the enemy is right here. Unlike the USA, which hasn’t faced an existential threat in over 200 years, we’re not sending our kids to another continent to fight. We’re fighting, in many cases quite literally from our homes, for our homes and our families.

And it also means that our soldiers are in many cases nearby. Our youngest daughter is serving on a base that’s only about 20 minutes from where we live, so tomorrow night she’ll have a brief break in which we’ll get to see her for the first time in two weeks. Our son-in-law, who won’t tell us his location, got a few hours off yesterday, but instead of driving home, he drove to our daughter’s – his wife’s – base to see her for the first time in nearly two weeks.

It's this proximity, coupled with Hamas’ barbarity and depravity, that gives Israel its drive right now, and it’s something I don’t think Biden gets. Because what I said above about eradicating Hamas is the overwhelming sentiment here. We cannot afford to compromise, as we’ve done repeatedly for the past 16 years. Settling for less than total victory is what led to the massacres of two weeks ago. I don’t think the USA has had this kind of drive – understanding that it’s facing down evil – since WWII, when Biden was in diapers.