Saying Farewell to Zubin Mehta, Israel’s Legendary Conductor

July 17 2019

On Sunday, Zubin Mehta conducted the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra for what might be the last time, although his retirement does not become official until the fall. Benjamin Kerstein recounts Mehta’s career:

Mehta, the first non-Israeli citizen to win the Israel Prize and the conductor most widely identified with the Jewish state, was born in India in 1936. . . . By age twenty-five, Mehta had performed with several major European orchestras, but was at an impasse in his career. . . . In 1961, his association with Israel began when he received a telegram from the Palestinian Philharmonic Orchestra, the old name for the Israel Philharmonic, which for some reason had never been changed in official correspondence: a major conductor had fallen ill, and Mehta was recruited.

He instantly fell in love with Israel. What he called the “organized mess” he found in the country reminded him of his childhood home in Bombay. In Israel, he said, “People always speak at the same time, everyone gives advice, everyone has a firm opinion. When you open the window in Bombay, you see at the same time 5,000 people.” He said he felt, “at home.”

Mehta quickly put the orchestra through its paces, conducting a series of works that had never been performed in Israel before. . . . He was overseas when the Six-Day War broke out in 1967. Mehta canceled concerts in Paris and Budapest and flew to Tel Aviv with the help of the Israeli ambassador in Rome, who managed to get him onto an ammunition-laden cargo plane. Mehta made the journey, he said, to “stand by the state and my musicians.”

Read more at Algemeiner

More about: Classical music, Israel & Zionism, Israeli music, Six-Day War

Inside Israel’s Unprecedented Battle to Drive Hamas Out of Its Tunnels

When the IDF finally caught up with the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, he wasn’t deep inside a subterranean lair, as many had expected, but moving around the streets the Rafah. Israeli forces had driven him out of whatever tunnel he had been hiding in and he could only get to another tunnel via the surface. Likewise, Israel hasn’t returned to fight in northern Gaza because its previous operations failed, but because of its success in forcing Hamas out of the tunnels and onto the surface, where the IDF can attack it more easily. Thus maps of the progress of the fighting show only half the story, not accounting for the simultaneous battle belowground.

At the beginning of the war, various options were floated in the press and by military and political leaders about how to deal with the problem posed by the tunnels: destroying them from the air, cutting off electricity and supplies so that they became uninhabitable, flooding them, and even creating offensive tunnels from which to burrow into them. These tactics proved impracticable or insufficient, but the IDF eventually developed methods that worked.

John Spencer, America’s leading expert on urban warfare, explains how. First, he notes the unprecedented size and complexity of the underground network, which served both a strategic and tactical purpose:

The Hamas underground network, often called the “Gaza metro,” includes between 350 and 450 miles of tunnels and bunkers at depths ranging from just beneath apartment complexes, mosques, schools, hospitals, and other civilian structures to over 200 feet underground. . . . The tunnels gave Hamas the ability to control the initiative of most battles in Gaza.

One elite unit, commanded by Brigadier-General Dan Goldfus, led the way in devising countermeasures:

General Goldfus developed a plan to enter Hamas’s tunnels without Hamas knowing his soldiers were there. . . . General Goldfus’s division headquarters refined the ability to control forces moving underground with the tempo of the surface forces. Incrementally, the division refined its tactics to the point its soldiers were conducting raids with separate brigades attacking on the surface while more than one subterranean force maneuvered on the same enemy underground. . . . They had turned tunnels from obstacles controlled by the defending enemy into maneuver corridors for the attacker.

This operational approach, Spencer explains, is “unlike that of any other military in modern history.” Later, Goldfus’s division was moved north to take on the hundreds of miles of tunnels built by Hizballah. The U.S. will have much to learn from these exploits, as China, Iran, and North Korea have all developed underground defenses of their own.

Read more at Modern War Institute

More about: Gaza War 2023, IDF, Israeli Security