No More Room at the Inn |
Forget Domino’s Pizza orders. Look at the flight line at Ben Gurion Airport.
Israel is a small country of around 10 million people. Its major airport, Ben Gurion Airport, would be the equivalent of a sturdy regional airport in the U.S. In some ways, Israel is the U.S. in miniature. You have almost everything you have there, from beautiful nature sites to all of the most modern technological wonders. But in the end, Israel is tiny compared to the U.S. in terms of its landmass, wealth, and capabilities. The U.S. has dozens of dedicated bombers in the form of B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers. Israel has none. The U.S. has 600 flying tankers; Israel has seven.
As to the subject of those U.S. tankers, many of them are parked at Ben Gurion Airport. This is not some super-secret information, as Israel’s main highway passes right by the airport, and one cannot unsee the endless sea of gray birds taking up much of the tarmac. How many tankers are there? I don’t know the number, but I have read that 12 civilian airliners had to be shipped off to another location due to a lack of space. There was additionally a picture of El-Al planes on the runway on Saturday, when there was very little traffic, and El-Al does not fly. Flight radar generally shows around a half-dozen Tel Aviv-based US tankers in the air between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. It’s good to know that, like their ground-based equivalents, celestial gas stations are also open 24 hours a day.
The continued presence of the tankers, the suggestion by the Israeli Home Front to update their inbound missile warning app, and the cancellation of a planned overseas trip by Israel’s president all suggest that the shooting war is going to start up again soon. Just as my father told me that the neighbors used to sit around and predict when Hitler would get booted from German leadership, our parlor game is to try to figure out when Donald Trump will once........