Stor katastrofövning i Israel

Idag klockan 11 ljöd sirenerna över hela Israel. Den största katastrofövningen någonsin pågår nämligen denhär veckan, och idag skulle även civila söka sig till skyddsrummen.
I övningen simulerar man en situation där Israel angrips med både konventionella och kemiska vapen från olika håll, plus att terrorister samtidigt attackerar. Ett scenario som man räknar med att kan komma att förverkligas inom några år.
Sirens sound in home front drill

Sirens sound across Israel in state's largest civilian drill

Ledaren i Jerusalem Post skriver om övningen,Welcome to our reality :
"Want to understand the Israeli psyche? Consider that when our country was born, those with whom we sought to share this land rejected our right to exist. Though we have created a technologically advanced, Western-oriented country, and made peace with Egypt and Jordan, our "normality" still demands that a high-school graduate head not to university or for a gap year, but to basic training.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s (when there were no settlements and no "occupation") our homeland was under attack anyway. A single example: On March 17, 1954, gunmen ambushed an Eilat-Tel Aviv commuter bus. First they murdered the driver, then they proceeded to shoot the passengers, one by one.
In the 1970s, we fought off a surprise attack on our most solemn holy day - after having withstood a war of attrition. In the 1980s, we fought bitter wars in Lebanon to fend off attacks against our northern border.
In the 1990s, we signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestinian leadership. And since then? More Israelis have been murdered by terrorists than ever before.
Efforts to reach an accommodation with a violently fragmented Palestinian polity have thus far proven fruitless. The "moderates" appear no less unyielding than the fanatics.
We caught the Syrians, to our north, building a clandestine nuclear facility under North Korean tutelage. They make no secret about hosting Hamas's politburo, pressuring it to resist even a tactical timeout in its anti-Israel belligerency.
Hizbullah dominates Lebanese affairs and provides Iran with shock-troops along our border.
Then there is Iran, which may have enriched enough uranium to manufacture a nuclear bomb by year's end. Even as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens our obliteration, he insists that the Nazis did not systematically destroy European Jewry. Yet he is feted at UN forums, while Europeans shamelessly subsidize trade with his country.
That is our reality. It's the one many of us will be contemplating at 11 a.m. today, when the siren sounds. "