Apocalypse at the garage

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Moshe Shachal an experienced former minister, top class lawyer and wheeler and dealer in the Labour Party, said today that the Israel is in a crisis and is facing two strategic threats, the most dangerous since the Six Day War. The first is an internal collapse (lack of leadership/corruption) and the second is the external threat (Iran/ Hizbullah/ Hamas). He said that for the first time since 1967 the Arab world (on al Al Jazeera for example) is talking about the possibility of eliminating Israel.

I looked at the Al Jazeera website forum (albeit in English) on how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian problem
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/736515E4-37CE-4242-8A5F-854381D9DFEE.htm but failed to find the elimination of Israel proposed as a possible resolution. In any event Shachal might have been playing up the drama since he was also giving his backing to Ehud Barak’s bid to gain the leadership of the Labour Party (thereby replacing Amir Peretz (Olmert’s nemesis) as defence minister}. But still, it was pretty strong stuff.

Hard on the heels of this came the Sunday Times revelation that:

ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons.
Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources. [..]

“As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished,” said one of the sources.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2535310,00.html

Oh really?

The foreign ministry denied the report http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/810130.html but the PM’s office refused to comment.

Are things really this bad or is everyone out to frighten us all to hell?

In any event these apocalyptic scenarios fail to mesh with the routine reality of a rainy day in south Tel Aviv, driving home from my garage man Miko (that’s him above), through the clogged narrow roads.

An annual car service and a nuclear conflagration. These two concepts keep buzzing around in my mind without fusing into anything coherent.

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