Whew! Been an action-packed few days. Real quick post to fill you guys in (sorry about the radio silence), and then I won't have Internet for the rest of the week.
In-processing at Fort Knox was pretty damn boring, mostly just a lot of briefings. For that reason, and also because I'm not sure how much I'm actually allowed to say about it, I'll just skip over it and say that I spent a pretty nondescript few days in Kentucky, working out and living in a barracks. Real fun. Moving on.
Our flight was direct from Newark to Tel Aviv, so that was... fun. I sat next to this very Jewish-motherly-type woman, a former Hebrew professor, which was nice! She helped me brush up on Hebrew a bit, I taught her some Arabic, and we had a few surprisingly deep conversations. And also some shallow ones, like about how great Richard Gere was in An Officer and a Gentleman, which I watched on the flight (and which you should watch).
To stay on the safe side, I'll mainly be talking about the touristy stuff that we're doing in Israel, rather than the other stuff. I'm 99.999% sure that no one cares about the other stuff, and it's not like we're doing anything that would be particularly damaging to national security if it were to get out, but we got a couple briefings that really stressed operational security ("OPSEC"), so, you know, why take chances. In that vein, yesterday, our first full day here, we visited the Palmach museum. The Palmach were a branch of Haganah, a Jewish resistance group/militia that formed during the later years of British occupation of Israel and later became the foundation for the formation of the IDF. It was... moving. As a Jew, I forget sometimes that Israel doesn't have the intense personal meaning to others that it does to me, and that most people didn't focus on Israel nearly as much (or at all) in their education as I did. Even so, it was quite something to watch the struggle of the Palmach unfold as they fought for their right to a land, one tiny patch of land in the midst of hostility, where Jews would never have to fear for their safety. It's still amazing to me that, literally less than a day after establishing a Jewish state, those people fought for that state's very existence against six (conservatively, depending on how you classify irregular armies and coalition forces) enemy forces that wanted nothing less than the complete and utter destruction of Israel... and won. Say what you will about the Jews, but you don't get kicked around the globe by everyone under the sun for 4,000 years without learning a few tricks for fighting back.
Today, keeping with the Palmach, we toured the Ayalon Institute. The Ayalon Institute is a museum located at a kibbutz near Rehovot; the kibbutz hid an underground bullet factory for the Palmach from 1945 until 1949. Those kids were damn dedicated. Secret entrances under the laundromat and the bakery to mask the noise and steam, complete vow of secrecy even from fellow kibbutzniks, and hours of work underground every day churning out bullets to help defend Israel, first from the British and later from the Arab forces. It was especially sobering to realize that a lot of those workers, and indeed a lot of the Palmach and other similar groups, were my age or younger. These were high school graduates, pulling off a secret operation on a level of complexity that most adults couldn't. Makes you think, yeah?
