A Letter from Zippori

This is an email I received today from an American Oleh who runs a Bed and Breakfast in the Galilee, in Moshav Zippori.

Dear friends,

Thanks to everyone who has written and expressed support and worried about us. We are fine! I'm sorry that I'm answering you back in a mass mail, but I figure this is the best way to let everyone know what is going on.
I came back yesterday after more than 2 weeks in reserve duty all over the north. I serve a spokesman to the foreign press, and was kept quite busy fighting off TV, radio and print journalists from all over the world. I've been taking journalists for many years on tours of the border with Hezbollah and I'm on record telling them all that when the war starts, the Hezb is going to rain thousands of missles all over the north and there isn't anything that we will be able to do to stop them. Still, no one failed to ask if we weren't surprised when it happened. We have been practicing a policy of restraint for years, hoping that the longer we put off the conflict, we might get lucky and history would catch up with the Hezbollah and they would disappear back down the hole they crawled out of. Unfortunately the Iranians never rose up to overthrow the facist towelheads that have been oppressing the Persian people since 1977. And the Lebanese, despite having an excellent chance fall in their laps, never took the opportunity to take their country back for themselves and instead chose to make a deal with Nassrullah.. The war was probably inevitable for a while now and it's outcome is also unavoidable.
Sorry to be pessimistic. I don't think it makes a difference whether we pound the shit out of Beirut or not, I hope we do because it will give Nasrullah something to fix when he starts running the place and something for the Iranians to piss money away on instead of new weapons. The loser of the whole mess is Lebanon and there isn't a people who deserve it more, they were stupid enough to dismantle their militias, which would have been their only defense against this bully. We had to go in there last time to throw out the PLO because they were too busy lying on the beach, and this time, why bother? Let the best and the brightest emigrate to South America and let the Iranians turn what's left into some kind of Shiite slum on the Mediteranean.
I'm sure we'll have no problem coming up with a mutual deterence pack with Hezbullah, we were never their real target to begin with and once Nassrullah is sitting in the palace in Ba'abda, he'll have bigger global jihad fish to fry.
The big question for us is what the Syrians will do. By the time anyone is reading this, we might be at war with Syria, it's that close. It all depends on what goes in that vast empty space between Bashar Assad's ears. Syria has no argument with Israel, the Golan Heights is bullshit, any Syrian leader prefers the IDF sitting up there instead of some ambitious Syrian General controlling a Division or two. For over 30 years we've been watching the back of the Father and the son, and it serves their strategic purposes that we stay there. No one in the Syrian govt gives a shit about "sacred Syrian soil" All they want is to perpetuate the regime and keep their heads attached to their necks. If they think that that it's a clever strategic decision getting their army destroyed for the sake of their buddy Nassrullah, wait till they see how it feels when the Iranians eat them for lunch.
Anyway, these are just some of what I feel like saying whenever I get asked "What do you think will happen next? I dunno, and I wouldn't express these thoughts in uniform, and I never went to the school where they taught strategic analysis. I can't even take credit for being a simple soldier. I saw plenty of real soldiers the last few weeks and they're big brave young guys who have a life in front of them that they plan to live. The Hezbollah takes the same type of kids and teaches them that dying is the best thing they could do for Allah and the kids swallow it whole. The truth be told, in Moslem shitholes like Lebanon and Iran, they wont have much of a life anyway.
I spent most of my days on the front line and got shelled regularly, twice it was close enough to knock me off my feet. And I learned a true thing they said in London during the V-1 bombings: If you heard it, that means that it missed, if you didn't hear it, then what difference does it make?
The B&B is pretty empty, it's not that we're close enought to get shelled (though at least 4 katyushas fell in this area) but no one is in the mood to go on vacation, we lost all our summer business and don't know how long it will be before things get better. But, thank God, we are all fine. The kids see it all as a big adventure and we watch the news every night and the boys have put up bumper stickers on their doors "WE WILL WIN" and "WE ARE STRONG' and I think we are. And with the experience that comes from getting this far, If we take it a day at a time, this too will pass, and things will return to be not much different from the way they were before, except of course, for the poor families of both soldiers and civilians who had the bad luck to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and soldiers who put themselves in between us and the bad guys.
Please remain in touch everybody, don't believe everything you read in the papers and have a good summer.

[Name Removed]
Moshav Zippori
www.zipori.com