We could see the problem even before reaching the gate of Kfar Darom. There was a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of Arab vehicles moving south in the direction of Khan Yunis and Rafah. It was not normal at this time of day. I was in Kfar Darom in my capacity as coordinator for foreign agricultural workers from Thailand. In the car with me was my translator. We had just spent an hour with Oz Kadmon1 and his workers on his farm that was located at the original site of Kfar Darom from the time of Israel’s War of Independence, a five-minute drive from where we were now, the rebuilt Kfar Darom. I was parked just inside the entrance, waiting for traffic to begin moving again. Just then to my left Oz shot out from the security road and turned left and began driving on the wrong side of the road south towards the Gush Katif intersection. Without thinking twice, I followed him. I should have thought twice. He did not know that I was behind him. I sped up to catch him and finally did about three hundred yards into the drive. There, we were met with a truck that had seen us coming and decided to block our way. We stopped, deer in headlights, and then the rocks came flying. They were not golf-ball-sized rocks, rather, they were softball-sized rocks. These had to be heaved high in an arc, and they were heaved, all at once, and I insist to this day that there is a certain beauty in seeing those missiles fly through the sky. Before they land on the car, that is. At this stage, Oz was the main focus of their attention, as he was mine. This was his territory, and I intended to follow his lead.
Except that his lead led to a territory where I could not follow. I could only watch as he cut sharply with his four-wheel drive vehicle and entered the ditch by the side of the road before climbing the berm that was the remnant of the Haifa-El Kantara railroad. In an instant he was gone. Like me, the Arabs who had been focused on Oz stood quietly watching his unlikely, but successful escape. It took a few seconds, during which I checked my rear-view mirror to see if I could back out of this mess, only to discover that another truck about fifty yards back had blocked the road. I was pinned in on three sides by Arab trucks and Arabs with rocks in their hands who now had a single focus for their attention, and on the fourth side by an impassable ditch.
As if that were not enough, my translator and I were at the end of a long afternoon’s work, and I had in my possession close to one hundred thousand dollars in cash, the Thai worker’s salaries that we had collected to be sent home to their families. That was on my mind as the rocks made their way towards us. My translator had healthy instincts and had squirreled his way down under the dashboard. For my part, I did not plan to go down without a fight. I had my pistol stashed between the two front seats—big mistake—and as I was getting out of the car I reached for it and, under all the pressure, I raised it and pressed on the magazine release. I was still moving to exit the car, and I watched the magazine disappear somewhere under my translator. “Oh, just perfect,” I was thinking. I turned back into the car to go dig for the magazine, knowing that I had lost the initiative and that we were now in big trouble. To my surprise, the translator, without unravelling himself, shot out his hand behind his back holding the magazine. The relief I felt, as the rocks were impacting the car, was immense.
I didn’t have a plan except to not go down without a fight. The Arabs had reloaded with rocks, and I calmly aimed at the farthest one who was standing in front of me and pulled the trigger. At the very last second, he dove to the ground, and I moved to the next rock-thrower and pulled the trigger, and he too dove to the ground. I shot six more times, and six more rock-throwers dove to the ground. I stood there confounded. I was known as a crack shot, always the best on the practice range. And I had not hit a single target. Did my gun malfunction? That thought passed quickly, as I used the most reliable gun for working conditions in the world, a CZ 75. It was not the most expensive gun, but if you needed a gun that works after falling in the sand or mud, that Czech sidearm was the one. The sobering truth, immediately and horribly evident to me, was that expertise on the practice range did not translate into expertise in real time, when it counted.
With all this noise in my head I hadn’t noticed that the surrounding noise had subsided. Not only were rocks not impacting on my car anymore, but all the Arabs had run behind their trucks. And not only that, but the lead truck blocking me started to pull back. This was their way of letting me know that I was free to go. I jumped back into the car and hit the gas. After about fifty yards we were clear of the traffic jam. My translator must have sensed it because he began to sit up in his seat.
There was a soldier up ahead waving frantically at us to get away from the danger. Before I could begin to feel relief, I looked at the soldier’s firearm and my eyes bugged out of their sockets. It was a Kalashnikov. Of course it was. He was a member of the infamous “joint patrols,” another genius product of the Oslo mind-set. The idea was that there would be a shared responsibility for protecting citizens. It was a two-jeep patrol, one was of the Israeli Border Patrol, and the other was of the Palestinian Authority, i.e., terrorists in uniforms. The establishment of these patrols was the event that demarcated the final and absolute detachment of the Oslo Accords from reality. No one in their right mind could believe that these patrols could function in the real world. It was just a matter of time before one of the Arabs cocked his gun and kill his Jewish counterpart. The first time it happened, both sides rushed to explain that the Arab soldier had mental issues. As Mark Steyn famously said after the Charlie Hebdo murders: “If it’s between jihad and crazy, they’ll call it crazy every time.” The second time it happened it was obvious to everyone that the joint patrols could not continue. But they did, until the whole Oslo hallucination blew up in our faces.
At the time of this confrontation, I was the crazy one. For a moment I had thought that I was home free, then, looking at the Arab waving at me like an impatient traffic cop, I was seeing a trap. In a moment he was going to put me in his gunsight and shoot. I was back to my “not going down without a fight mode,” and held my gun at the ready. If he raised his, I would aim my car at him and shoot at him through the front windshield, aiming correctly for center-of-mass this time. My gun was cocked and I was cocked and my translator was back on the floor.
As it turned out, that terrorist-in-a-uniform was just waving me on. He understood that I had been in a dangerous situation. As I looked at him in my rear-view mirror, still expecting him to shoot me, I realized that by blocking the road in front of me, that Arab truck driver had hidden my shootout at the OK corral from this “policeman.” Had he seen me taking pot shots at his cousins, he might not have been so helpful in helping me get away.
Just like that, we found ourselves caught up in the middle of the reason for the traffic jam. It was a demonstration by the Jews of Gush Katif against the deteriorating security situation at the Gush Katif intersection. I could tell them about deteriorating security. As we crawled through the crowd some of my friends approached me to tell me where to park the car so that I could join the demonstration. I begged off, saying that my translator was tired, but I really didn’t want to be jostling around with 100 K in cash.
We finally got through the crowd, and all I could think on the way home was: “Something’s not right here.”
Worse was to come.
I called Oz before publishing this, double checking my facts. He remembered the occasion, but as I had surmised, he did not know that I had been tail-gating him. All these years, and I had never mentioned it to him. He apologized profusely for leaving me alone on the battlefield. That is Oz Kadmon. If he had known, he would have stood right there with me.
Exciting episode.
The disengagement in 2005 from Gaza was one of Israel’s worst mistakes