What the U.S. Can Learn from Israel about Emergency Medical Response

When there is a terrorist attack, car accident, or any other emergency in Israel, often the first people to tend to the wounded are members of the volunteer paramedical group United Hatzalah. Mark Hemingway, noting that America suffers from a shortage of professional paramedics—a situation expected to worsen in the coming years—suggests copying Hatzalah’s successes:

United Hatzalah . . . provides medical training and supplies to over 4,000 volunteers across Israel. When emergencies are reported to the authorities, United Hatzalah is also made aware of the location and notifies nearby volunteers through its own communication network, often by text message. Volunteers are not obligated to respond but almost always do. United Hatzalah claims an impressive average response time of under three minutes; in some cities, the average response time is under 90 seconds.

The organization has made some pioneering innovations. The fast response times are often attributed to the “ambucycles” it supplies to volunteers. They are essentially motor scooters packed with a complete trauma kit and advanced medical devices such as defibrillators, blood-sugar monitors, and oxygen tanks. The scooters can bypass traffic jams, go around debris, ride on sidewalks, and otherwise avoid impediments that would stop an ambulance. . . .

[In the U.S.], one way to alleviate the strain on professional first responders would be to give emergency medical training to thousands of volunteers in all walks of American life. United Hatzalah has an American affiliate, United Rescue, that is in its infancy and currently working to import United Hatzalah’s model of training and deploying volunteers in a pilot program in Jersey City. However, there’s a very long way to go before United Rescue would make the same impact here as United Hatzalah in Israel. In terms of relative population, 4,000 volunteer responders in Israel would be the equivalent of adding 160,000 volunteers in America. Not helping matters . . . is quite a bit of union opposition from professional first responders to the idea of an army of volunteers.

Still, it’s hard to imagine Americans objecting to the thought of 100,000 new ambucycles patrolling the streets. And unlike, say, the debate over gun rights, emergency medical training is hardly controversial: voluntarism speaks to America’s Tocquevillean traditions, and such programs can even start in schools.

Read more at Weekly Standard

More about: Alexis de Tocqueville, Israel & Zionism, Medicine

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF