The Migration

Then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Josh. 10: 12–13

I visited Yossi Leshem’s radar station at Latrun on my last day in Israel. I wanted to see it in operation, and I was pleased when Leshem himself offered to show me around. I shouldn’t have been surprised: it soon transpired that Leshem manages his PR as assiduously as every other task he undertakes. Weeks before we had met outside a hotel in Jerusalem and he had emailed me a folder of articles detailing the highlights of his career. As we drove down Highway One to Latrun, he kept grabbing a clipboard stowed behind the steering wheel and making notes of other items that he wanted to show me. By the time I left his office, I was equipped with a multimedia presentation of films, articles and photographs documenting his achievements.

Most of it has been concerned with bird migration. Leshem was born in Haifa in 1947, the eldest son of two German Jews who arrived in Palestine in the 1930s, and he was imbued with a love of nature from childhood. His mother wasn’t interested in wildlife but she liked hiking, and she used to take her sons into the mountains every week. In 1971, Leshem founded the first bird club in Jerusalem, which Amir Balaban attended as a boy, and for many years he worked for the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel.

In 1980, he was working on a survey of raptor migration when a pilot suggested they go up in a plane to see if there were more birds aloft than they could count from the ground. Leshem thought it might make a good research project and he went to the air force to request the use of an aircraft. While he was there, they showed him unpublished data on collisions between birds and aircraft: in the previous ten years, five aircraft had been destroyed, and every year at least three planes were seriously damaged.

Soon afterwards, a honey buzzard collided with a $5 million Skyhawk near Hebron and destroyed the plane. The pilot survived only because the because the bird came through the canopy and hit the ejector handle. The air force agreed to sponsor Leshem’s PhD and he started work at Tel Aviv University, where he now teaches a course on bird migration. At first, he hired teams of birdwatchers and used the radar at Ben-Gurion Airport to plot the birds’ paths, but he soon realized that there was one crucial detail neither could ascertain – the only way to gauge the height at which the birds were flying was by going up in a plane and flying with them.

Most of the planes he tried were too loud and disruptive, but eventually he settled on a motorized glider that allowed him to fly ‘wing tip to wing tip’ with the birds. In the next five years, he recorded a total 1,400 hours of flying time as he tracked the main paths of the migration. He established that the birds follow three routes through Israel and the West Bank – if they don’t go along the Rift Valley, they cut across the south-west corner through the Elat mountains, or fly parallel to the coast, exploiting the currents created by the offshore winds that are displaced upwards when they hit the slopes of the Judaean Hills.

In 1984, Leshem began producing the maps of the ‘bird plague zones’ that now hang in the briefing rooms of every squadron during the migration, and once the pilots knew the main routes the birds tend to follow, the collision rates fell dramatically. But the birds didn’t always behave as predicted. When Leshem finished his PhD in 1991, the air force asked him to build a radar system designed to supply additional ‘real-time information’ about their movements.

Leshem’s first and most important step was to enlist the help of a former Soviet general, who had emigrated to Israel in 1991 at the height of the mass exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union. Dr Leonid Dinevitch is an expert in weather forecasting, and he used to run a joint civilian–military project employing forty-seven radars and three aircraft that generated artificial rain. Leshem – the inveterate fixer and facilitator – found him a place at Tel Aviv University, and Dinevitch found him a cheap decommissioned radar in Moldova.

‘At that time,’ Leshem told me, ‘if you were connected, you could get anything you wanted.’

When the radar arrived in Israel, Leshem began looking for a place to put it. It didn’t take him long to settle on Latrun. It lies in the heart of Israel, halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, on one of the main routes of the migration. It also occupies a footnote in biblical history and a significant place in the history of modern Israel. The Ayalon Valley witnessed a legendary battle during the conquest of Canaan, when God prolonged the day to allow Joshua time to defeat the five Amorite kings, and it was also the site of several important battles during the War of Independence. When British rule in Palestine ended on May 15, 1948, the police fortress they had built at Latrun was left in the control of the Transjordanian Arab Legion.

David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of the state of Israel, which had come into existence the day before, believed it was essential to control the road to Jerusalem, and during the next two months, he ordered repeated attempts to capture Latrun. Ariel Sheinerman – later Ariel Sharon – was injured in the first assault, and the second and third were among the first occasions that the Israeli Army deployed tanks and armour. None of them succeeded – Latrun remained under Arab control until the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan and pushed back its de facto borders by occupying the West Bank and Gaza. For fifteen years, the strategic fortress at Latrun was no more than a stopping-off point on Highway One, but in 1982 the Armored Corps recognized its place in its importance by converting it into a ‘memorial museum’, Yad La’Shiryon, which now attracts 400,000 visitors a year.

Leshem had decided that he wanted to combine his radar with a ‘living museum’ documenting the coexistence of birds and aircraft, but he knew the migration alone wouldn’t generate the kind of audiences he wanted and so he approached the general of the Armored Corps. ‘You are telling the story of the bloodshed, the heritage, the conflict,’ he said. He is a big man with a mop of curley, grey hair, and he talks in a deep, hoarse voice, constantly discarding and revising his words as he searches for the right one. ‘This is the story of the past. And I am coming with the story of the future: bird migration, environment, high-tech, radar, Internet, satellites. Give me a piece of land, about eight acres, on your site, and I will build a museum, an auditorium and a scientific centre.’

We arrived at Latrun at eight in the morning, and as we drove round the edge of the museum grounds, we could see the radar, framed between the jutting gun barrel of the tanks that surround the fortress. It stands on the lip of the amphitheatre that the Armored Corps uses for presentations, and from a distance, the dark green metal ball looked like a giant fungus that had flowered unexpectedly overnight. The soldier at the gate waved us through, and as we drew up beneath the radar, Dinevitch appeared, apparently from nowhere, holding a metal board.

Exhibit one, in Leshem’s whistle-stop guide to Latrun, was an image of the radar at the height of the migration. The screen’s concentric rings were overlaid by a livid green splash running across the centre of the country, parallel to the coast. It marked the presence of a flock – 120 kilometres long – of migrating storks. Exhibit two demonstrated the threat they posed – Leshem had collected fragments of an F-15 Falcon destroyed over the Negev Desert in 1995 in a collision with three storks, and mounted them on the side of the radar itself.

Dinevitch had gone inside the hut attached to the radar and we followed him up. It was like stepping into the interior of a submarine: it was very dark and the walls were obscured with grey metal consoles and banks of dials and switches. A generator hummed in the background. Dinevitch was sitting silently in front of a monitor that translates the machine’s analogue signal into digital form.

For the time being, the screen was showing dark blue dots, indicating local birds, but Dinevitch called up a screen with a picture of the autumn migration – flocks of birds moving south on a bearing of 176 degrees, at an average velocity of 56.9 kilometres per hour. While another screen displayed the vertical distribution – most of the birds were below 1,000 metres, and only one or two were above 2,000 – Leshem stood behind me, reciting the radar’s triumphs. It has been so successful that the air force bought another for the Negev and another for the north and estimates that the system has saved $660 million worth of equipment, as well as the lives of several pilots.

Leshem adds that it has also saved thousands of birds, and made a minor contribution to regional cooperation: the information is relayed to the Royal Jordanian Air Force, and when it went into operation in 1997, Leshem and Imad Atrash developed schemes encouraging Palestinian and Israeli children to track the migration together.

The project was abandoned during the second intifada, but Leshem’s plans for Latrun have continued to develop. He has already built an educational centre with classrooms and dormitories for 244 people on the far side of the museum and he is building a $3 million visitor centre on the empty land beyond the radar. Visitors to Yad La’Shiryon will be able to watch the migration via satellite and, for seven months of the year, to look out for the birds passing overhead. Leshem also plans to turn the woods on the edge of the museum grounds into a bird sanctuary. It will be similar to the JBO, though like everything in Yossi Leshem’s world, it will be much bigger and better. ‘The site of Amir is one acre. This will be sixty acres. So it will be sixty times bigger.’

Amir Balaban wouldn’t have been surprised to have heard Leshem celebrating his defeat with such conspicuous glee. Leshem’s unselfconscious egotism makes him seem ridiculous at times, and yet it’s part of his undeniable charm and vigour. It was ten to nine and he had to get to Tel Aviv to start work – the two hours he had devoted to showing me Latrun were a prelude to his normal day. We had ten minutes to look round Yad La’Shiryon, and as I trailed around in Leshem’s wake, attempting to keep up with his rapid commentary, I found myself wondering about its real purpose. A wall listing the names of the 4,855 soldiers of the Armored Corps who have died in Israel’s many wars flanks the courtyard outside the bullet-scarred fortress, and yet the tone of dignified mourning seemed at odds with the presence of the great metal war machines drawn up around the building. Leshem informed me, with his characteristic emphasis on scale, that only Fort Knox has a bigger collection of tanks, and I couldn’t decide whether Yad La’Shiryon was a shrine to the dead, or a place devoted to the worship of the martial spirit.

The significance of Leshem’s Cold War radar and museum is even harder to understand.

‘It’s a strange combination, tanks and birds,’ he acknowledged as we got back into the car. ‘But believe me, it’s a big story for the Middle East.’

In his company, it’s almost possible to believe that nothing else matters and yet I wasn’t sure what to make of Latrun. Leshem has found a way of asserting the importance of the migratory birds that travel over Israel and the West Bank twice a year, and done valuable work to protect them. Does it matter that he had to harness the power of the Israeli Air Force and exploit the centrality of the army in the public’s affections in order to do so? Maybe not. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about Sami’s project. The separation barrier is the product of Israel’s determination to subdue every aspect of its environment in the name of security, and so is Leshem’s radar. Nothing, it seems, escapes the militarized nature of life in Israel – even the birds who traverse its skies fall within the invisible net of its security’s apparatus.