Tel Aviv, Israel
By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Correspondent
TEL AVIV – She sounded subdued on the phone, sad even, and who wouldn’t be? All she had wanted was to give a nice surprise to her mother.
So Anat (not her real name), a Tel Aviv resident, threw out her mother’s ratty old mattress and bought her a lovely new one. After all, as people age, they need a firm mattress, not a lumpy old one.
But those lumps were not clumps of distorted wool or loose springs. They were dollar bills. A million’s worth.
Over the years, Anat’s mother had stashed away American dollars and Israeli shekels in her mattress, and now Anat had thrown away her life savings.
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By Paul Goldman, NBC News Producer
TEL AVIV – Israel is preparing for the possibility of war and it appears to be serious about it.
At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, sirens blasted the air, sending millions of citizens into the nearest bomb shelter in the country’s biggest-ever civil defense exercise. The drill is part of a five-day training code-named Turning Point III. It involves simulated rocket and missile attacks on Israeli cities and also preparations for a nonconventional strike.
Most of the kids from the Elharizi School in Tel Aviv were giggling in class as they waited for the siren. Their teacher was trying to get them to act seriously, but the loud siren did the job for her. You really can't stay too calm when you hear a blaring sound, wailing up and down, representing one thing: war.
The kids, all the way from grade one to seven, made their way in pairs to the neat and clean shelter. They were told beforehand that they could bring games to play with while they waited for the all-clear sign. So the packs of cards came out, and most of the kids seemed happy to miss class and play their favorite game.
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By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Correspondent
TEL AVIV – America has always related to Israel with the carrot, but now Israelis fear the stick will be President Barack Obama’s implement of choice. Maybe not right away, but soon.
As Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (also known as "Bibi") and Obama meet on Monday for the first time since each assumed office, Israel’s media, fed by government sources, are reaching a crescendo of hysteria: Is this the end of Israel’s special relationship with America?
One analyst hoped so – writing that the only American president who really helped Israel was, the now much reviled here, Jimmy Carter.
He helped cobbled together Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt by brow-beating then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin into giving up on his promises not to cede an inch of land. As a result of the Camp David Accords, Begin eventually gave up all of Sinai – winning a peace agreement with Egypt that stands firm today and is in no serious jeopardy.
So there are mixed feelings in Israel. On the one hand, nobody likes or wants to be bullied by America; while on the other many analysts accept that it is only by having its figurative head knocked together with the Palestinians’ that any progress towards peace is likely.
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By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Correspondent
TEL AVIV – Wafaa Younis is a woman whose heart is in the right place; she is an Israeli Arab who has made a real effort to help Palestinian children in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank.
She started with the boys; she wanted them to put down their stones and learn the violin, in the hope that they would not grow up and pick up a gun. I first met her three years ago when she finally persuaded the Israelis to allow the Palestinian children to leave the West Bank and go to her home in the Israeli town of Ara for violin lessons.
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| Tara Todras-Whitehall / AP file |
| Palestinian children from the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank play a concert for Holocaust survivors in Holon, Israel on March 25. |
She even took them on trips to the coast; even though they grew up 30 miles from the Mediterranean, they had never seen the sea. Her first attempts to teach a few boys the violin grew into a small orchestra of boys and girls. She even rented an apartment in Jenin so that she could teach them there, because it was easier for her to cross into the West Bank than it was for them to leave.
Then Younis had an idea; as part of Israel’s annual Good Deeds Week, she would arrange a little concert in Holon, near Tel Aviv. Her young musicians from the "Strings of Freedom" orchestra would entertain Holocaust survivors. They would play their favorite classics, and also some songs of peace; a way to bridge the divide between Palestinians and Israelis.
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By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Correspondent
TEL AVIV – Think a few hanging chads are a problem? Or the Electoral College, which has at times left the winner of the U.S. popular vote as the loser? Well, consider the
Israeli political system.
Thirty-three parties contested yesterday’s general election. One party emerges with the most seats, two parties claim victory and most analysts agree that the winner has only a slim chance of actually forming the next government.
Huh? How does that work?
No party has ever won an outright victory in Israel’s history, leading to a series of coalitions that rarely see out their full term. It seems that the tougher the problems facing Israel, the less power the government has to deal with them – and most things end up being a mushy compromise.
That’s why it took individuals with particular credibility to power key decisions (Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo peace accords, Ehud Barak ending Israel’s 22-year long occupation of Southern Lebanon, and Ariel Sharon withdrawing from Gaza).
Without such towering figures, the election process leaves Israel exposed at a time it faces critical challenges: Iran’s alleged race to build a nuclear bomb; increasing international hostility towards Israel’s methods of fighting terrorism (particularly the recent Gaza assault); and America’s expected tilt to a more even-handed approach to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. And that’s leaving out all the economic and social issues facing this nation.
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By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Correspondent
TEL AVIV, Israel – Apart from the usual horse race of an election – and this one is really down to the wire – tomorrow’s contest to decide the makeup of the Israeli parliament has proved to be a slightly zany mixture of predictable and polarizing politics..
Most apparent is that there is no major issue that the traditional parties – Likud, Kadima and Labor – disagree on in any substantial way. They all pretty much agree that the attack on Gaza was justified; the economy is in big trouble; Iran is the major foreign threat; relations with Washington must be maintained at almost any cost; the disadvantaged must be helped; education must improve; and there isn’t enough water.
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| Kobi Gideon / EPA |
| Right-wing Israeli politician Avigdor Lieberman, prays at the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site, on Monday. |
So instead, the choice among the major party leaders has become personal. Campaign commercials have become negative and personal, with the campaign focusing on the parties’ leaders rather than policy. In that regard, polls show Kadima’s Tzipi Livni catching up dramatically with Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, with Labor’s Ehud Barak trailing. In addition, analysis has focused on speculation about what combination of parties will likely form a coalition government.
However, the blandness of the campaign, and the lack of clear distinctions, however, has left the field open to the one candidate who is different, in substance and appearance – Avigdor Lieberman.
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A Nazi hunter questions the mysterious disappearance of Aribert Heim, better known as "Dr. Death," the mastermind behind some of the most sadistic crimes in Nazi concentration camps.
Watch NBC News' Martin Fletcher report in conjunction with the New York Times and Germany's ZDF television below. Read the complete New York Times story about Heim here: Uncovering Lost Path of the Most Wanted Nazi.
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By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Correspondent
"TEL AVIV, Israel – Danny Mahlouf, a 70-year-old Israeli plasterer from Ashkelon, has a message for Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, and it’s personal. "Tell Ismail Haniyeh to lose the beard, and stop making trouble!"
They go way back. In the late ‘80s, Haniyeh worked for five years as a plasterer in Ashkelon and Mahlouf was his boss. "We were close friends but we lost contact," Mahlouf said. "Then one day my son was watching TV and suddenly he shouted, Dad, come quickly, Ismail’s on TV. He’s prime minister!"
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| Hatem Moussa / AP file |
| Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh waves to supporters in Gaza City, Dec. 8. |
Their story tells much about the ties between Jews and Arabs that have been lost in the violence. The relationships between Israelis and Palestinians weren’t always full of the tension and hatred that often characterize them today, and that raises the possibility that one day, somehow, it could go back to the more peaceful days.
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Reporter's Notebook
By Lawahez Jabari, NBC News Producer
JERUSALEM – For 17 days I have been covering the Gaza conflict, working in several Israeli towns and cities – Sderot, Ashkelon, Beersheba – and also along the Israel-Gaza border.
For the first time I witnessed the effect that the al Qassam rockets fired from Gaza have on daily life in southern Israel. People would be on their way to work or school when all of a sudden, their morning would be interrupted by the wailing sirens warning everyone to rush to the shelter.
They displayed emotions ranging from annoyance to fright, but mostly life went on. Shops stayed open, people continued their errands in the street. Part of this is that, unfortunately, they have become accustomed to the barrages, but I thought how nerve-wracking it must be to wait for sirens, knowing that something like a missile could rain from the sky without warning.
Later, we went to the border, where sometimes we were joined by families, young and old, who came to see their army, the Israeli Defense Forces, at work.
As horrific as the Hamas rockets had been, the violence here was much worse. The F-16s, Apache helicopters and tanks were moving into Gaza – firing into the northernmost Gaza towns of Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun, and the refugee town of Jebalya. The explosions were terrifying and I’ll never forget the "jellyfish" – those missiles which would explode in mid-air, dropping more of their kind over the area.
I was working with Tom Aspell, as his producer, and every day we would do our live TV reports on how the operation in Gaza was going. The Israelis strictly restricted journalists’ access into the area, but every day I called people inside Gaza and spoke with local journalists there who would tell me how difficult it was to cover the story.
A different perspective
After 17 days of round-the-clock live-reports, I decided to take a day off and went home to Jerusalem.
For the first time I turned on an Arab channel, al-Jazeera, to get an update on what was going on. And then I knew it was impossible to give any equivalency between the situation in the Israeli towns in the south with the tragedy that was unfolding in Gaza.
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With one of the fiercest day of fighting in Gaza on Thursday, a small group of foreign reporters were allowed to join an official military embed with the Israeli Defense Forces to get a first-hand look at the fighting. NBC News' Martin Fletcher was part of the group and reports from the scene.
The New York Times' Ethan Bronner was also part of the
IDF's military embed in Gaza Thursday and discusses the 'limited glimpse' of Gaza the reporters were afforded with NBC's Martin Fletcher.
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