29 Nov 23
“‘Foolishness’ is more than just being stupid. It is that deadly combination of arrogance and ignorance”
Paul D Tripp
Left-Over Foolishness!
Israeli ambulance drivers, courageously doing their best to save the injured on 7 Oct 23, are shown in a recently-released video deploying in an active combat zone and retrieving the wounded.
What follows is not intended to diminish their personal bravery.
We see one deployed driver maneuvering a gurney while simultaneously carrying a rifle.
His partner is nearby providing security via a pistol (brand unknown). He is holding the pistol at eye-level in his strong hand, while pinching the rear of the slide with his left.
He obviously doesn’t already have a round chambered, because he is accustomed to carrying the pistol with the chamber empty.
Yet, even now he still has not chambered a round!
When he has to shoot, he obviously plans on first pulling the slide to the rear and releasing it quickly, then aiming and pressing the trigger.
Some history:
Under the daring military genius, Judas Maccabeus (called “The Hammerer,” he was the author of the famous Maccabian Rebellion against the Seleucids, celebrated by Jews to this day as “Hanukkah”), the world witnessed (for the first time since Southern Israel had been conquered by Babylonians in 586BC) an independent Jewish State emerge in Palestine and exist there for seventy-nine years, between 142BC and 63BC.
In 63BC, Judea, and all of Palestine, became a vassal state under Imperial Rome, as did all other regions in the vicinity of the Mediterranean. In fact, the entire Mediterranean became little more than a Roman lake!
A politically autonomous Jewish state would not reemerge for another 2011 years, when in 1948AD the modern State of Israel audaciously claimed its independence.
At that time, what would become “Israel” was a British protectorate, as frightened Jewish families from around the world flooded into the area in the wake of WWII and The Holocaust.
In 1948, the British were no more enthusiastic about the idea of armed citizens than they are today! The British Royal Family, along with nearly every other royal family in Europe, had been scared to death when they saw the entire Russian Romanov family (former Czar Nicholas II, his wife, and their five children) brutally murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918, just four months before WWI ended.
British King George VI and Russian Czar Nicholas II were cousins!
Ever since, the British have wanted to make sure only government officials have guns, and they strictly imposed that philosophy everywhere they had influence.
Thus, when Israel was preparing to break-away and become an independent nation, and local Islamics having every bit as much affection for Jews as they do today, Jews living in what would become The Nation of Israel began smuggling-in guns. All kinds of guns were smuggled-in with the assistance of Jewish families around the world!
In fact, so many different kinds of pistols ended-up in Israel (many in poor repair), despite efforts by the British to stop it, that it was unofficially decided by Israelis that pistols would be routinely carried with an empty chamber, in order to cut-down on UDs (at least theoretically).
Ever since, this practice has been known as “The Israeli Method”
Of course, shortly after Israel was officially recognized by the UN as an independent nation (and has been ever since), modern, factory-produced arms and ammunition could be legally imported as well as domestically manufactured, so most of the “old generation” of worn-out pistols were promptly retired.
So today, seventy-five years after “The Israeli Method” was rendered irrelevant and unnecessary, we still see it still blindly practiced by many in Israel, as we see.
We have mostly the British to thank for this ill-advised “cultural lag”
In addition, I believe that nostalgically clinging to historically significant, albeit obsolete, methods represents a way some naive Israelis attempt to honor their history and founding heroes.
I get it!
Yet, I don’t “honor” George Washington by carrying a flintlock!
George Washington’s period weapons now properly reside in museums, while modern Americans carry modern weapons, and adhere to modern weapon protocols.
Israelis need to catch-up!
Their (and our) “continued good health” depends on it!
/John
