The hat trick

The “fasten your seat belt” sign is my cue to switch to overseas holiday mode.

After touchdown in Frankfurt we picked up our rental car and with the aid of its built-in GPS and our own maps we reached our hotel in Strasbourg after a brief stop-over in Heidelberg. Israel was out of sight and out of mind. The Arab Spring, events in Syria and Egypt were ostensibly forgotten. We were about to tour the wine routes in Baden-Württemberg and Alsace, to enjoy the breathtaking views from the Route des Crêtes, the northern Vosges mountains,  to see the picturesque villages along the route  des Potiers in Alsace and more mountain scenery on  the Black Forest High Road (Schwarzwaldhochstraße). We did, however, flick a few TV news channels in the hotel knowing that Israel was no longer newsworthy.

During the day we dedicated to touring Strasbourg we ignored the all-knowing GPS, took a wrong turn and ended up in Place Kléber, the city’s  largest square named in honour of one of its most illustrious sons Jean-Baptiste Kléber. He accompanied Napoleon on the ill-fated Egyptian campaign in 1798. Historians claim he was one of Napoleon’s most proficient generals.

I have mentioned him before and this time our encounter in Place Kléber momentarily linked us to Israel and the Jezreel Valley.

Commanding a small force of 1500 men Kléber   was sent to reconnoitre  the approaches to the rear flank of the main French forces besieging Acco.

His scouts discovered a 25,000 strong Ottoman army en route to Acco. He devised a daring pre-dawn attack on the Ottoman force camped in the Jezreel Valley. He sent a courier to inform Napoleon of the threat and his preemptive attack plan. The plan involved a descent from Nazareth under cover of darkness, traversing Mt. Tabor and surprising the Ottoman army before sunrise. In a sense it was reminiscent of the biblical Gideon’s attack on the Midianite camp. Knowing that Kléber didn’t have adequate topographical maps Napoleon feared the plan would fail. Gathering all the men he could spare Napoleon rushed to extricate Kléber’s force from certain defeat.  In the meantime Kléber and his men encountered difficulties traversing Mt. Tabor. There was no surprise pre-dawn attack . The French were detected and had to hastily form a defensive battle phalanx by the ruins of a Crusader fortress near Moshav Merhavia, close to Afula. .Of course neither Merhavia nor Afula existed then. Hopelessly outnumbered Kléber’s  men   tried to hold their position.

They were running out of ammunition and were forced to divide the phalanx in two . The arrival of Napoleon’s relief force heralded by two cannon shots encouraged Kléber’s men and panicked the combined Muslim army. A French  force numbering 4,000 men equipped with better muskets and only  two canons had routed the 25,000 strong Ottoman army. Later Napoleon chose to call the victory the Battle of Mount Tabor. Although the engagement took place near present day Afula, Mount Tabor was a recognised landmark in the Christian world..

The siege of Acco was futile. The walls of the town were impregnable and without their heavy cannons lost earlier at the Battle of the Nile the French artillery could only manage to lob a few light cannon shots over the walls.

The cannons were place on a rise outside Acco, marked on all maps as Napoleon’s hill. Descendants of the Arab residents of Acco at the time of the siege claim that Napoleon unable to set foot inside the town placed his hat on a cannon ball and fired it over the walls. Of course there is no substance to the story. Napoleon wore many bicornes replete with the traditional cockade.

Some are on display in a few museums around the world. There is no way he could have fired one of them into Acco, just the same, next time you visit Acco ask the locals about the bicorne. Nobody bothered to save it for posterity, but they still firmly believe the hat trick really happened.

Another hat trick made headlines this week. Al Jazeera published a report of laboratory tests conducted in Switzerland on items of clothing worn by former Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat. According to Al Jazeera the clothing including his fur hat provided by his widow ( presumably uncontaminated) was found to contain traces of Polonium 210. Conspiracy tales about the circumstances of Arafat’s death have cropped up over the  past eight years since his death. Now the widow has suddenly come forward with the crucial evidence and a clear accusation that Israel poisoned  her husband..

Mrs. Arafat has agreed to have Chairman Arafat’s body exhumed for analysis.

She is sure his bones still contain traces of Polonium.

Several years ago construction work on an industrial site near Acco was impeded by a small burial plot containing four graves. The plot was very old and the graves appeared to be Muslim graves. However, archeologists from the Israeli antiquities department sent to investigate the site suspected that graves weren’t authentic. On examination one grave contained a skeleton with a missing leg and arm. The discovery provided the answer to the mystery of the last resting place  of Louis-Marie-Joseph-Maximilian Caffarelli du Falga a French officer who served under Jean-Baptiste Kléber. Caffarelli lost his leg in an earlier battle but continued in the army and joined Kléber in the Egyptian campaign. At one of the assaults on Acco a musket ball shattered his right arm and the army surgeon had to amputate it. The wound was infected and gangrene set in. A few days later he died. Knowing that the Arabs were inclined to desecrate French military graves, Cafferelli and three other French soldiers were interred with Muslim style headstones.

The Israeli government traced descendents of the hapless Cafferelli and they were brought to a ceremony commemorating the death of their long dead ancestor.

Jean-Baptiste Kléber returned to Egypt with Napoleon and was appointed commander of the French forces in Egypt when Napoleon returned to France in 1800. Kléber went on to suppress an uprising in Egypt and to recapture Cairo. A few days after returning to Cairo a Syrian assassin stabbed him to death. His body was embalmed and returned to Strasbourg for burial.

The assassin suffered the full fury of the French military court. His hand, the hand that stabbed Kléber was incinerated and later he was impaled and left to die in agony.

We arrived home to discover that an old-new crisis was threatening Netanyahu’s broad coalition government. Many secular Israelis see the strength of Netanyahu’s coalition as a historic opportunity to change the long-standing agreement with the ultra-Orthodox ( Haredi)  sector and devise a way to share the national security burden with some kind of agreement where they can be enlisted in the Army or some other form of non-military national service. Netanyahu himself appointed a committee to try to resolve the thorny issue – only to dissolve it on Monday of this week – days before it was due to release its findings. The move sent political shockwaves through the Knesset. For the past month, Kadima party member Yohanan Plesner has taken on the role of trying to create a new groundbreaking structure that would fairly share the defence  burden. Plesner’s defunct committee sought a way  to enlist the ultra-religious, as well as Arab-Israelis.

Once again Prime Minister Netanyahu has chosen to appease the Haredi parties in the Knesset. Unless he finds a compromise he is liable to lose his new coalition partner –Kadima.

My guess is that he will prefer the men in the black hats.  

Have a good weekend.

Beni                                        6^th of July, 2012.