Last month saw Rep. Rashida Tlaib continue her antisemitic quest against Israel by leading a failed attack on U.S. aid funding for the Israeli Iron Dome defensive system. Eight other members of the House joined with Tlaib in voting against aid: seven other members of “the Squad” and Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, the ideologically blinkered libertarian from Kentucky. (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who acted as the go-between for the Squad with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in opposing the vote, at the last minute cowardly switched her “no” vote on the funding to “present.”)
“We must stop enabling Israel’s human rights abuses and apartheid government,” Tlaib ludicrously wrote of the vote. Setting aside whether Israel constitutes an “apartheid government” as Tlaib claims (it doesn’t), her position that funding the Iron Dome somehow aids human rights abuses is moronic, backward, and demonstrably false. Instead, as our own Seth Mandel explained on Twitter, “The thing about Iron Dome is that as a purely defensive tool that Israel uses instead of a counteroffensive, it saves not only the lives of the kindergarten children targeted by Hamas but also of Palestinians in Gaza.”
Born of President Ronald Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, which Democrats at the time derided as the outlandish and impossible “Star Wars,” the Iron Dome missile defense system is just that, a defensive system. For a decade since its operational launch in 2011, the Iron Dome has intercepted thousands of rockets launched from terrorists in Gaza, the overwhelming majority of which were aimed at, and would have landed in, populated areas of Israel.
The Iron Dome functions by shooting its own projectiles into incoming artillery rockets and shells, detonating them in the air before they can hit populated targets. Though it is perhaps the most advanced of its kind, such ground- or sea-based anti-air defensive systems have been widely utilized since World War II. And for all the “Star Wars,” space-age technological development, the Iron Dome still serves the same defensive function as all defenses throughout history: protecting against enemy attack.
Before we had missiles shooting at missiles in the air, we had missiles shooting at walls on the ground. While geography and topography provided the earliest natural defenses — think bodies of water and elevation, such as mountains and hills — basically, the first human-made defensive fortification was the wall. Walled cities have existed since Uruk in ancient Sumer and Jericho in the biblical city of Canaan.
Walls were first built to keep armies (and migrants) out, but as technology and warfare progressed, they were soon built to protect against enemy artillery and firepower as well. A city’s defenses were often only as effective as its walls, and thus those cities with the greatest walls became famous for their impregnability. Cities such as Jericho, Troy, and Constantinople all had legendary walls in their time — and in ours. Of course, these cities all eventually became famous for their eventual defeat, as well.
While Joshua and the Israelites bested Jericho with their trumpets and the Greeks bested the Trojans’ wall with their wooden gift-horse, Mehmed II attacked the fabled walls of Constantinople through the much more conventional method of cannon artillery. Built in the fifth century by Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II, Constantinople’s walls had earned their reputation by protecting the city for 1,100 years. That is, until 1453, when the Ottoman sultan besieged the city with the largest concentration of cannons that the world had seen in one place, some 69 or 70. The centerpiece of that artillery was an immense, 27-foot cannon called the Basilica, nicknamed “the Bear,” which took dozens of oxen and hundreds of men to pull and shot cannonballs weighing half a ton. It was built by a Hungarian cannonsmith named Orban, and thanks to excessive firing, it eventually blew up in the Ottomans’ face, killing its creator and several of Mehmed’s soldiers and cannon crew.
Artillery has come quite a way since Orban’s cannon, and personally, I prefer the Iron Dome to the Bear. Not only does it have the better name, but it’s also much more humane, regardless of what some antisemites might tell you.
