On the same day that President Mahmoud Abbas of the
Palestinian Authority came to meet President Barack Obama of the United States
at the White House, and when President
Valdimir Putin of Russia announced that as far as he is concerned the Crimea is no longer part of Ukraine, news
came out which excited the world of science and managed to get some attention even
from those who are not involved in physics.
The subtle observations of the
telescope mounted in the fresh Antarctic air had provided confirmation and
empirical proof for the hypothesis that about fourteen billion years ago our
universe was less than the size of a single atom, that it had exploded in a Big
Bang and began to expand and expand and expand and still continues expanding. "The confirmation of the theory
means that the universe which we can see, spanning over 14 billion light years with hundreds of
billions of galaxies, is only an infinitesimal corner in a far vaster cosmos whose
size, structure and ultimate fate are unfathomable" was how the scientific
editor of Ha’aretz tried to explain it.
To the Bedouin citizens of Israel who reside at a small
dot in the Negev desert called the village of El Arakib, the size and age of
the universe take a definite second place to the police and government
demolition teams which visit Arakib again and again. Next time, so they
threatened, they will also demolish the village cemetery, which hitherto remained
untouched.
Among the living beings known to us, the ants are the only
ones, except for human beings, who are in the habit of going to war. Not one against
one or two against two, but thousands and tens of thousands, whole armies of
ants going into battle and resorting to sophisticated tactics and strategies to
defeat the opposing nest 's army.
When I was ten or eleven, I and the other neighborhood kids
witnessed ants at war. The entire backyard was full of ants, thousands of ants engaged
in a life and death struggle. The modest backyard of our house on Philon Street
in the Old North of Tel Aviv, which a human could cross in one minute, was for the
ants Homeland and Fatherland and Promised Land and Holy Land and Occupied
Territory and Liberated Territory for whose sake it was definitely worthy to sacrifice
one’s life. Ilan, our neighbors’ son,
gathered some ten ants and dumped them in another corner of the yard. To our
eyes they all looked the same, but they could instantly recognize who is a
friend and who is a foe, and after a moment of confusion they renewed their battle.
When we went to sleep the ants’ battle was still going on intensively.
The next morning the yard was completely empty of them, not
a single ant anywhere in sight. After about a week, ants appeared again in the
yard - engaged in ordinary ant daily
life activities, gathering food and returning in a long convoy to the nest. Were
these the indigenous ants who had lived here long before and who had heroically
repelled the invaders of their country? Or were they conquerors and settlers taking
control of newly conquered territory? There was no way of knowing, to the eyes
of human beings all these ants looked the same.
