WEATHER: Time-Out For Gaza

Gaza Kindergarten Graduation by Israel Defense Forces [CC BY-NC 2.0] via Flickr

It’s been a weekend. Last Friday's milder weather was interrupted with occasional showers, laden with plenty of desert dust. The dust and an approaching front set the stage for strong thunderstorms Friday night. On Shabbat, the dust and plenty of moisture combined for periodic thunderstorms and hail.

Heavy rain continued Sunday as an upper level low approached. Since temperatures at 500 mb were cooling off, the arrival of that storm brought another chance for thunderstorms Sunday night. This is a slow moving storm, meaning rain and showers could last into Tuesday. It's a storm to reckon with.

The good news for those who are looking forward to spring: the passage of the storm will be followed by steadily increasing temperatures. The warmer temperatures should last into early next week when possibly another storm should arrive.

Last week, there was a very unusual weather event in central Israel. A tornado leveled a house, and if not for the quick action of the family to seek shelter, a terrible tragedy would have occurred. Actually, the event wasn't weather related, unless you believe that missile attacks from Gaza is something — like the weather — that we can't do anything about.

I have a suggestion. I must first digress and mention that to receive a driving license in Israel, the new driver-to-be is required to take 28 lessons. Yet to get married and have children, no lessons are required at all! Moreover, for the religious who take a few lesson on mishpachat tahara (family purity), they leave out the most important information; for brides — that their husbands will be far too often m’atzben (annoying, irritating); for the grooms, they neglect to tell them that their wives — for the most part — will not mean what they say.

For new parents — family tradition or not — they forget to tell you that spanking your child doesn't lead to better behavior. Another solution is required for parents! In fact, the best book I ever read on how to raise well-behaved children is the book SOS For Parents. Instead of a spank, the child is placed in "time-out," a simple wind-up kitchen time clock tracks one minute for every year of age. I can tell that it works because I seen the results.

As I just pointed out, spanking doesn't work, and the big "spanking" the Israeli air-force gave to Hamas and allies will never stop the missile attacks. This latest was, in fact, just one of many “spankings” given over the last few years and by the way, one should note that not a single Gazan was killed in more than hundred pinpoint attacks.

The reason it doesn't work — outside of the obsession of Hamas et al. with killing every living Jew in the world — is that we're dealing with children (or children masquerading as adults). Just listen to them speak: “We will not give up our duty to the blood of the martyrs shed by the occupation, and we know how to respond to this dangerous escalation." This should be translated as: you hit me!

So, I'd like to suggest a possible response that might work. Every time a missile or mortar or infiltration occurs, we should send Gaza (in its entirety) into time-out. By this, we should simply stop the supply of electricity for a day; this is not collective punishment since we are under no obligation to provide electricity to another "country" and a people that wish our demise.

We should announce that we are calling a "time-out" from the insanity of providing the electricity that Hamas uses to build the missiles that fly — like clouds over the border — to destroy our homes. Perhaps such outages will trigger enough protests to either force the leadership to grow up or to find some real adults who are willing to accept true responsibility for governing the two million people who live in their playhouse.

Jerusalem forecast (click here for updated national forecasts):

Image credit: The Jerusalem Herald

Dr. Lynn is a lecturer at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Earth Sciences Department. He is also CEO of Weather It Is, LTD, a company that specializes in reducing weather risk. Click here to read more of this writer’s work in The Jerusalem Herald.