12

IN A LONG DRAINAGE ditch within sight of hundreds of IDF jets on the tarmac of the military field adjacent to Ben-Gurion Airport, sixty Hamas commandos crouch and wait. Though Shia Iran’s military planners see no future for Hamas, whose members are Sunni and Palestinian, and thus doubly irredeemable, these fighters will play a key role in the coming battle to liberate the holy land.

A day earlier, three trucks painted in IDF colors and bearing IDF license plates crossed beneath the sand dunes from Gaza, which Hamas controls, into Israel proper. The half mile of paved tunneling that permitted this took almost a year to construct. Working at night under the very eyes of the Israelis, Hamas removed tons of sand—a good deal of it in buckets—until they got earthmoving equipment into the tunnel to create a sub-rosa highway just big enough for Ford F-150 half-ton trucks. Though Iranian engineers planned and supervised the operation, there was no question in the eyes of the Hamas leadership that the terror organization would later be seen as key to the success of the entire war. They would be wrong. None of the states involved—Egypt, Syria, Jordan, nor Iran—turned out willing to see a Palestinian state emerge in what they were already calling “Former Israel.” In every detail of post-war planning was embedded the unspoken message “Fuck the Palestinians.”

But at this stage, the Palestinians are needed. No other fighting force can provide the Hebrew speakers necessary to get through a dozen roadblocks. Most members of this force are graduates of Israeli security prisons, some specially trained by diction coaches in the art of sounding like native-born Israelis (because there is no p in Arabic, the students are trained not to use words like papa, which would come out baba). Some have been trained to speak Hebrew with French or English or Russian accents, as would any group of IDF soldiers. A dozen, Circassians, are blond and blue-eyed. Their uniforms, down to the hand-painted slogans on their helmets and the mud on their brown paratrooper boots, are IDF issue, stolen by Bedouins from army bases in the Negev. For this one performance, they have been rehearsing six months, speaking only Hebrew. Should one unlucky commando fall out of a truck, he will not give the others away. Even the cigarettes in their placket pockets are Israeli. The bandages in their medics’ pouches are marked MADE IN ISRAEL. The orders their commanders carry are beautifully forged IDF documents. They are perfect replicas of Israeli paratroopers moving in perfect replicas of Israeli military trucks through a very real and very vulnerable Israel.

Having taken up position in the drainage ditches surrounding this Israel Air Force facility, like similar infiltrating forces in place at four other airfields, they appear to be IDF infantry in protective posture, their backs to the F-16s arrayed in ready formation.

At precisely 3:55 a.m., the darkest moment of the night, they turn around and train their weapons on the planes. A phalanx of TOW missiles sails through the air. At each airfield, the tarmac is a sheet of flames.

The Israel Air Force is no more.