Gainful Employment (August 2007)

For the next eight months I will be working at the Home Front base on the edge of Ramle. Ramle is – for want of a better word – grimy. It is a mixed working-class Jewish-Arab town, where relations are generally ok, but tensions are never far from the surface. A few months ago, some soldiers had stones thrown at them while walking to the bus station, housed in a municipal building with a style that is incongruous with its surroundings. There were also warnings of attempted kidnapping of soldiers in the area. As a result, all soldiers serving at the base were told they could only walk to the bus station in pairs. Note the absurdity: an army which forbids its soldiers from walking on its own sovereign turf.

The Israeli Home Front Command was created in February 1992 following the Scud missiles fired on Israel during the first Gulf War. It deals with the organisation of civil defence – search and rescue, bomb shelters, gas masks, chemical and biological attack – everything from forest fires to ‘mega’ terror attacks. In most other countries, the Home Front is a civilian organisation. Thus far, attempts to civilianise the Israeli Home Front have failed.

The Israeli Home Front Command is justly famous for being able to disproportionately pull its weight in the field of disaster response. Israel regularly sends teams abroad to assist in the case of tragedies, whether it is the tsunami in South-East Asia or forest fires in Cyprus. You may recall the offer of assistance to Iran following the Bam earthquake, which was predictably rebuffed. Israel has garnered a lot of expertise in the field, expertise which it is earnest to share with those who are willing. This is (and here I’m editorialising) partly a matter of public diplomacy, partly an extension of ‘light unto the nations’, and partly an extension of the ‘Alliance of the Periphery’, an early foreign policy doctrine.

But the unit’s reputation has taken a battering of late. It was not spared the ire of the various reports into failures during the Second Lebanon War, and its future direction is as uncertain as any other unit of the army. But domestic concerns are beyond my purview. I have been assigned to the External Relations unit. We organise trips from foreign delegations who wish to come and learn about the Israeli Home Front, as well as trips abroad by Israeli luminaries in the field.

So this week, after we had finished moving to a new air-conditioned office, I was given a thick file full of arduous bureaucratic Hebrew (surely Israel must be the only country with a dictionary which translates army terms into English but explains the concepts in Hebrew, implying that it is for native speakers) to prepare myself for the rigours ahead. Next week a new delegation arrives – to the base that some of my fellow Schlav Betniks will be learning to drive a tractor – and I plan to waltz in in triumph.

It’s still the army of course: I have to do guarding three times a month, and every week there is avodah rasa (I hope you’re getting the lingo by now), but it does look to be a promising job, with plenty to keep me occupied between 8 and 5.30 everyday. Now, I just need to fill in my extremely thick security questionnaire – apologies to anyone I’ve ever slept with – in the sense of sharing a flat – I am obligated to list your names. As for the enemy agents I’ve been in touch with, I’m sorry to you too. On Sunday I will be interviewed on what I write, which should be fun, although I only need to pass the lowest-level of security clearance that there is, so I doubt there will be anything to write home about. And if there was, I wouldn’t be allowed to anyway…