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Our friend, the bulldozer (that bears the name "Caterpillar) <br> <br>By Doron Rosenblum <br> <br>[Ha'aretz, 20 Sept 2002]: <br>There's no time like the holiday season for making goodwill gestures, <br>ruminating about life, tallying up assets and remembering the best of <br>friends. And is there any friend more deserving of a festive salute <br>than a certain loyal buddy - a longtime pal whose central place in <br>our life does not get the proper appreciation during the rest of the <br>year? <br><br>Ladies and gentlemen, please rise and with tumultuous applause <br>welcome a rusty, dusty holiday guest, now advancing to the front of <br>the stage with the creaking of roller tracks. Gaze at the sight and <br>pause to reflect for a moment: Is it possible to imagine what our <br>life would be like without our honored guest? <br><br>It's the bulldozer - the Zionist's best friend. <br><br>It often happens, as we travel in foreign countries, that we notice a <br>bulldozer sitting shyly by the roadside: a roller-track tractor, <br>equipped with scoop or blade, that has been condemned to a "civilian <br>role" that would mortify even a work elephant in the Punjab. True, it <br>is painted red or yellow and is groomed like a thoroughbred, but one <br>question immediately occurs to us - as Jews, as Zionists: What is the <br>life of this goy? What is the purpose of its existence? To widen a <br>highway? To level ground for a parking lot? To dig the foundations <br>for an old age home? <br><br>How dreary this life is, how uninspired! <br><br>Not so the Israeli bulldozer. Its life is filled with meaning, <br>tension, a sense of vocation and mission. <br><br>Ho, Hebrew bulldozer, who can recount your days! You are not alone, <br>you are in the front rank of doing, alongside your many brothers - <br>some in civilian life, some in the conscript army, some called up to <br>the reserves - hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands who fill the <br>land from end to end: Huge crawlers that build bypass roads; brave <br>Caterpillars that forge trenches or earth ramparts to block <br>improvised bypass-bypass roads; tough tractors that prepare the <br>ground for another outpost after leveling the home of a terrorist's <br>mother-in-law; loyal earthmovers that engage vigorously in the <br>nonbuilding of the security fence; not to mention the other veteran <br>Land of Israel faithful, the flatbacks and bulldozers that have <br>transported countless mobile homes and, with a mighty swoop of the <br>shovel, brushed away entire casbahs. <br><br>When did all this begin? When did we become a nation for which the <br>bulldozer is the symbol, the definer of its identity, the seal of its <br>borderlessness, the pillar of dust that goes before the camp? When <br>did the old, squat, green John Deere tractors - which plowed fields <br>in pastoral humility, as far as the border and back - give way to the <br>iron monsters that have seized control of our lives and dominate our <br>consciousness? Some say it all began in the Six-Day War, at the very <br>moment the borders were breached and the old familiar, demarcated <br>homelandscape was lost. <br><br>Indeed, hardly had a day gone by after the conquest of Sinai, the <br>West Bank and the Golan Heights when the land was filled and teeming <br>with myriad bulldozers and tractors and Caterpillars (some say they <br>were brought in an airlift, others insist that at night, in the <br>parking areas, they multiply like rabbits) and, as if with a supreme <br>command, as though hearing a primeval voice, the bulldozers raced <br>forward: To the earthworks! Into the breaches! To the ramparts! To <br>the moving jobs! And from that time to this, they have not stopped <br>for a second. <br><br>Since then, the ground below our feet has not been still. There is no <br>wall we have not itched to topple, no grove we have not yearned to <br>level, no hill we have not wished to assault and plunge the teeth of <br>our blade into its soft soil. <br><br>Before the tonsured monks at the Latrun monastery could say a word, <br>all the villages in the area had been razed flat. Immediately <br>afterward, the bulldozers set their sights on Jerusalem. First the <br>dividing walls went down. Then they charged the small neighborhood of <br>shacks opposite the Western Wall and flattened it into a huge plaza. <br>Then they mounted an offensive against all the hills around the city, <br>sheared their tops, furrowed their slopes, dug roads leading to <br>helter and prepared the ground for an endless skelter of <br>neighborhoods. From then on, there was no limit and no end to the <br>lust for movement, change and earth-baring. Our friends the <br>bulldozers never ceased to shape the territories like plasticene. <br>They built and demolished Yamit, Sharm el-Sheikh, the giant airfields <br>in Sinai, the mobile borders in Lebanon. Let it be recorded that from <br>the seventh day of the Six-Day War down to our time, the intoxicating <br>allure of the bulldozer has persisted unabated. <br><br>Truly, is there a military, tactical, strategic, demographic, <br>historiographic or even theological problem that cannot be resolved <br>with the help of our metallic buddy? <br><br>Are there hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of an entire city or <br>refugee camp who are a blot on the landscape and whom you would like <br>to disappear? No problem: We will build a bypass road, let it cost <br>what it will (and at the cost of whoever). Would you like to live in <br>a three-storey villa in the heart of the Gaza Strip or in Khartat al-<br>Nabout - the site of ancient Mafiboshet - and feel as though you are <br>in Savyon? No problem: We will build a vast earth rampart that will <br>be a buffer between your view from balcony or lawn and the <br>provocative refugee camp across the way that extends for kilometers. <br>Did the army blunder while occupying a city and engaging in combat in <br>a built-up area? No problem: We will send the lion of the bulldozer <br>family, the awesome D-9, to punish and grind and shatter all the <br>alleys in a fit of rage. Do you want to subordinate the facts on the <br>ground to your worldview? No problem: We will move the ground. Would <br>you like Rachel's Tomb to be in Jerusalem? Just say the world: We <br>will connect it with the help of earthworks. And how are these <br>miracles fomented? What is the driving force? <br><br>That's right: our friend, the bulldozer. <br><br>Is there any object, or even person, in our annals that has received <br>more mention and been reported more intensively than the bulldozer? A <br>glance at our friend's thick file of press clippings shows that not a <br>week - not a day! - goes by in which it's not in the <br>headlines: "Bulldozer demolishes home of suspect in terror <br>attack"; "IDF tractor destroys vineyards in Halhoul to build bypass <br>road"; "IDF bulldozers raze 18 structures in Rafah area"; "New <br>expansion project in north Bethlehem: Bulldozers are digging a wide <br>new road, flanked by trenches, in the city." <br><br>So it goes, day after day, year after year. And it's not just here <br>that our friend has become famous: the whole world knows the story. <br>The bulldozer has become synonymous with Israel. Log onto an Internet <br>search engine or glance at sites like the Encyclopedia Britannica and <br>you will see that nearly three-quarters of the citations <br>for "bulldozer" refer to Israel and its activity in the territories, <br>and about half of those refer to one very specific bulldozer - the <br>world's most famous human bulldozer, Ariel Sharon (there are no fewer <br>than 9,000 citations in which "Sharon" and "bulldozer" appear in the <br>same document, usually as person and "handle"!). <br><br>What did we do to deserve this, you will ask. <br><br>To understand the phenomenon, a brief historical interlude is <br>necessary. Initially, the term "bulldozer" referred only to the scoop <br>or the horizontal blade that was mounted on tractors with tracks. As <br>we learn from www.word-detective.com, the first bulldozers were not <br>machines, "but violent bullies. The root meaning of `to bulldoze' (or <br>as it appeared originally around 1876, `to bull-dose') was to beat <br>someone extremely brutally, inflicting the `dose' of flogging one <br>would give a bull. Some of the earliest `bull-dozers' were racist <br>thugs who terrorized African-Americans in the post-Civil War South, <br>conducting a campaign of terror that included brutal beatings and <br>murder. `Bulldozer' or `bull-doser' was also used to describe thugs <br>in general, and by about 1881, the term was being used as slang for a <br>very large pistol. <br><br>"Given the use of `to bulldoze' as a synonym for `to intimidate <br>through overwhelming force' and `bulldozer' as a label for anything <br>that `gets the job done,' it's not surprising that `to bulldoze' soon <br>took on the metaphorical meaning, still used today, of `push through' <br>or `overwhelm.' And when, in the early 20th century, a machine was <br>invented that could uproot, overturn, level or just overwhelm <br>anything in its path, it made perfect sense to call the contraption a <br>`bulldozer.'" <br><br>Nu? Need we say more to explain the secret of the charm of the Jewish <br>bulldozer? To understand why in Israel it has been transformed from <br>just a machine into a title that is coveted by many? Into the <br>greatest compliment one can pay a person? To understand why we have <br>become the first nation in the world that elected a bulldozer as <br>prime minister?<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br>
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