Salon.com > Tel Aviv

Could Tehran be the next Hiroshima?

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:05:00 +0000

In those first minutes, they’ll be stunned. Eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare, nerve endings numbed. They’ll just stand there. Soon, you’ll notice that they are holding their arms out at a 45-degree angle. Your eyes will be drawn to their hands and you’ll think you mind is playing tricks. But it won’t be. Their fingers will start to resemble stalactites, seeming to melt toward the ground. And it won’t be long until the screaming begins. Shrieking. Moaning. Tens of thousands of victims at once. They’ll be standing amid a sea of shattered concrete and glass, a wasteland punctuated by the shells of buildings, orphaned walls, stairways leading nowhere.

This could be Tehran, or what’s left of it, just after an Israeli nuclear strike.

Iranian cities -- owing to geography, climate, building construction, and population densities -- are particularly vulnerable to nuclear attack, according to a new study, “Nuclear War Between Israel and Iran: Lethality Beyond the Pale,” published in the journal Conflict & Health by researchers from the University of Georgia and Harvard University. It is the first publicly released scientific assessment of what a nuclear attack in the Middle East might actually mean for people in the region.

Obama makes first trip to Israel as president

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:45:00 +0000

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — President Barack Obama is declaring common cause with Israel, highlighting the bonds between the United States and its Mideast ally. He says he has made Israel the first stop of the first trip of his second term to restate his commitment to Israel's security.

Obama arrived Wednesday in Tel Aviv, joking to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that he was "getting away from Congress."

Israeli President Shimon Peres welcomed Obama, declaring that "A world without America's leadership, without her moral voice, would be a darker world. A world without your friendship, would invite aggression against Israel."

Obama called the U.S. Israel's "strongest ally and your greatest friend."

Gaza: How did it come to this?

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 15:45:00 +0000

JABALIYA and GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — For the residents of the war-battered Gaza Strip, this is not the war to end all wars.

There was the ferocious Israeli assault in 2008-2009 that left more than a thousand dead. Then there was Operation Summer Rains, just two years before that, where 400 Palestinians and 11 Israelis were killed.

A negotiated cease-fire to the current battle — a week long, heavy exchange of fire between Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas fighters — will offer only a temporary respite from the decades of violence, they said.

Israeli officials have painted the offensive, which kicked-off on Nov. 14, as a mission to deter the Hamas-run government and other armed groups from firing rockets at Israeli towns.

But short-term gains from any Egypt-brokered truce, which is rumored to include a halt in attacks on both sides and a potential end to Israel’s Gaza blockade, will eventually be overshadowed by the chronic, unaddressed ills of the long-running conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Bus bomb rocks Tel Aviv

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 14:51:00 +0000

A bomb blast on a Tel Aviv bus has wounded at least 10 people and complicated efforts to negotiate a truce between Israel and Gaza's Hamas rulers.

The bus exploded at around noon Wednesday near military headquarters in central Tel Aviv, the Israeli commercial capital.

Israeli officials called it a terrorist attack, and said police have set up roadblocks in the area to find the person who planted the explosive device, Reuters reported.

"We strongly believe that this was a terror attack," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told the Associated Press.

The AP said that in Gaza, the bus bombing was praised from mosque loudspeakers.

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is in the region, working to help broker a deal to end the violence after eight days of Israeli air strikes and Hamas rocket attacks.

Israel’s enormous airstrike gamble

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 18:33:00 +0000

The rocket that landed in the Mediterranean Sea south of Tel Aviv yesterday represents yet another troubling escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not since the 1991 Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles fell on the city, has Tel Aviv come under similar missile attack. There are reports of more rockets fired at Tel Aviv this morning, and the world waits to see whether the 160,000 Israeli reservists called up today means a ground invasion of Gaza similar to 2008-2009’s Operation Cast Lead.

Israel’s refugee hypocrisy

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 22:46:00 +0000

Levinsky Park is where you meet a friend if you're an African refugee living in South Tel Aviv. One recent afternoon, I found around 50 Sudanese and Eritreans sitting on the small stretch of lawn in groups of two or four or five. Nearly all were men in their twenties or thirties. Most were remarkably thin. They wore faded jeans and T-shirts or polo shirts, and talked softly amid the traffic roar.

The park is across Levinsky Street from Tel Aviv's central bus station, the hulking gateway through which those who had to abandon their country entered the strange city. One man told me that he slept in the park for 10 nights after arriving at the bus station. Bedouin smugglers had brought him across Egypt's Sinai desert. Israeli soldiers picked him up just inside Israeli territory, questioned him and left him penniless on the street in the southern city of Beersheba. An Israeli gave him bus fare to reach Tel Aviv. Another refugee who came by the same route told me he slept in the park for a month.