October 7, 2060

Israel launches a rescue mission when terrorists kidnap its citizens.

Israel is a self-sufficient planet. It looks like a metropolis of Star Wars. Flying cars, robots, and hybrid humans, part machine, part mortal dot the cityscapes. It produces various products, both artificial and natural, to keep its populace happy, driven, and satisfied. There’s plenty to go around and a lot that’s not needed. The nation maintains friendly relations with a host of nations, transferring technology, trading in goods, contributing to charitable causes, exchanging tourists, etc. Apart from its Jewish and Arab populations, it also hosts a limited number of Palestinians now.

Three and a half decades ago, there had been a war between Israelis and Palestinians. After much ado, the Palestinians were vanquished. It’s death cult of a ruling party was abolished. And the lot of the Palestinians was improved. Relations had been normal since then, though a lot of suspicion remained. With the age of space exploration and settlement, Israel became a planet from a nation. The Palestinians were taken in by a number of Arab planets: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and others. After a few years, they were kicked out of each. A small number of Palestinians were also taken in by Israel on a trial basis. Meanwhile, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in Space (UNRWAS) was formed.

Billions were donated to the Palestinian cause from all corners of the globe, and finally a planet was gifted to them. Palestine came to be, but the Palestinians in Israel did not leave. They professed their love for and contentment with Israel. They were unskilled, mostly working in the homes of Israelis, assisting them with odds and ends. Plans were underway to provide them education and integrate them better, plans that were moving sluggishly due to the lingering suspicion of a segment of the older folk. However, relations between the Israeli employers and their Palestinian employees were quite genial. These Israelis were staunchly in favor of integration and often clashed with those opposed, mostly verbally, sometimes physically.

The whole of Isarel was in for a rude awakening. On October 7, 2060, thousands of rockets started flying into Israel, rockets that were successfully exploded in the atmosphere by the Iron Dome. Thousands of men bearing arms and riding long-outdated bikes and pickups materialized near the Palestinian settlement and rode inward. They rode inward toward the Israeli houses where the Palestinians worked. The residents were deeply pained to see their erstwhile employees for whom they had fought for on multiple occasions bringing assailants to their houses. They shot women, men, and kids in front of each other, and burnt and threw grenades into the houses that were defended. Sexual crimes were committed manifold; children were ripped apart from women’s bellies and killed with knives.

They also happened to chance upon a music festival. Hundreds more were shot. There was complete pandemonium with people taking shelter wherever they could, keeping quiet even when seeing their loved ones shot. Cars fleeing the scene were riddled with bullets and left with the dead inside them. Women, men, and children were taken captives. Women were numbered according to where they were supposed to go. Then just as soon as they had come, they disappeared taking many hundreds of hostages with them.

When the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) appeared on the scene, they discovered roads, homes, and the music festival area ridden with dead bodies. Many of the women’s legs were splayed at unnatural angles and they were bleeding from their private parts. There were horrific mutilations redolent of the most barbaric of attacks in the history of mankind.

Among the Palestinian settlements, was found a teleportation port through which the assailants had materialized. The Palestinians of Israel were no more there. The port was destroyed. IDF engineers analyzed the port and repaired it swiftly. Soldiers went through the portal and materialized inside a wormhole (a tunnel through space-time).

Word is sent back. I get a call from the prime minister’s office that I am to lead IDF forces into the wormhole, bring back the captives, and destroy the enemy once and for all.

A host of spaceships are beamed through the port into the wormhole, and we travel at the speed of light to emerge near Palestine, the planet. Our spaceships appear over the planet. All manners of people start shooting a variety of weapons. We start firing plasma canons and disintegrate the attackers. We touch down on the planet. There’s absolute silence. I hear a mobile, a long-outdated communication device, playing a video clip. It shows the captives being brought onto the planet. The whole planet is rejoicing. People are kicking and hitting the captives. People are shouting, “Allahu Akbar and running wild in the streets.

The planet seems to be in a pretty bad shape. The buildings are dilapidated. The roads and vehicles are primitive. And we are being fired upon. We shoot back. The assailants scurry away like rats. What they don’t know is that I and my partner, a combat robot, have limbs which pump extraordinarily fast. We become a whir, jumping over buildings, running across walls, blasting through makeshift barricades, until we intercept the attackers.

They start abusing me as we hold them at gunpoint. My partner slaps one such that he goes flying and smashes against the wall. His head is a lot smaller than it had been a second ago. He doesn’t get up. The others are a lot more willing to talk after that. Many of them have UNRWAS ID cards. They tell me that the hostages are underground. We sit on the ground and feel the vibrations. My partner shoots in quick succession so that our attackers, who had surreptitiously picked up their guns and trained them on us, are dead. My partner has eyes at the back of his head, literally.

I take out discs-like gadgets from my sleeve and throw them on the ground. They rapidly transform into miniature drilling robots, which rapidly descend through the ground, emerging into the tunnels, transformed as bats. The cloaking on them is switched on, and they rapidly start doing reconnaissance of the tunnels. It’s a gargantuan underground complex choke full of armed militia. The miniature robots find out the locations of a couple of hostages. There’s a lot of area to cover.

I read about the history of Palestine, the planet in the meanwhile. The populace exceedingly voted for the Masrah party, which after coming into power, shot their opponents, banned elections, and created a dictatorial government that ruled with an iron fist and brooked no opposition. They instituted Sharia law, banned education for females, and mandated burqas, among many other regressive practices that they brought in. While going through the Masrah party members, I come across plenty of faces living in the underground tunnel complex.

The robots complete their mapping of the tunnels. We decide on multiple entry points to give us the best shot at rescuing the hostages. As we approach one of the points, we see a crowd of children coming toward us. Emerging from behind them are the Masrah militia men. We shoot precision-guided bullets, each bullet putting paid to one terrorist. They start firing indiscriminately, shooting many of the children. We clear the rea of them and provide what first aid we can to the kids. We take the more serious cases to a hospital in the locality. The doctors there tell us to wait and hastily retreat. Suddenly, we find ourselves being shot at from all directions. WE take refuge behind desks and beds and shoot back. The whole hospital is a Masrah terrorist base.

We clear wing after wing. The doctors and the personnel have all run away. When we reach the basement, we find a huge cache of rockets. The couple of children that we had brought in are dead. We carry out their dead bodies, provide for them what burial we can, and then incinerate the whole hospital with blasts from our spaceship. There’s a call coming from the prime minister’s office. I accept it mentally. I hear his voice, “They are saying on the new that you killed a hospital full of doctors, patients, and children.”

“Who is saying?”

“The news channels Al-Jazzera, BBC, and more.”

“I explain what happened.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “Bring them home.”

Slowly, we discover a pattern. All the hospitals, schools, TV channel headquarters, UNRWAS headquarters, and mosques are terrorist bases. We give warnings in Arabic, drop fliers, give plenty of time to clear out, and then bomb them. In primary schools, we find books teaching that Jews are the mortal enemy of Muslims. Books teach hate, primary combat techniques, and a history where the Jews are to blame for all the sufferings of the Palestinian people.

This is another pattern. There are television channel clips where female kids tell of their aspiration to give birth to a lot of children, all of whom serve as Mujahids or Islamic fighters against Israel. Children are showing playing games where they hold dummy AK-47s and kidnap other children, these ones playing Jews. They proudly wear the Masrah party uniform and proclaim their desire to become Mujaheeds when they grow up and kill Jews.

Slowly, we realize why what happened, happened. We enter terrorist homes to find rocket launchers and grenades kept next to the cribs of babies. We find the television sets playing international and Arabic news channels, most of whom are inveigling against the genocide perpetrated by Israel. The United Universe is passing a motion backed by Islamic planets, and Russia, and China to make Israel leave Palestine, immediately.

The planet of South Africa is filing a case of Apartheid in the Universal Court of Justice. Ireland, Spain, and Norway, our neighbors in the universe, come together to condemn the genocide perpetrated by Israel, and the prime minister of Israel is declared persona non grata on these planets after the ruling of the Universal Court presided by judges from Muslim Planets comes in declaring Israel guilty. Apparently, in Israel, a planet with a huge Arab population with equal right and opportunities, we are practicing Apartheid. Apparently, in Palestine, we are killing innocent men, women, and children by the thousands with an aim to depopulate.

The Houthis of the planet Yemen, Wahjah of the planet Lebanon, and groups from planets Syria and Iraq are all firing interplanetary rockets on Israel, proudly displaying their arsenal and marches on television and threatening to wipe out the Jewish enemy off the face of the universe. It’s coming to light, now, that all these groups, including the Masrah party, are backed by the Islamic Republic, which is also firing rockets incessantly on Israel.

There are other planets helping the aggressors against Israel, some hidden, some known, chief among which is Qatar, whose money is funding protests against Israel throughout the universe, especially in college campuses on the planet United Countries of America (UCA). College campuses in Colombia, Harvard, and MIT erupt in protest. Jewish students are threatened, manhandled, and barred from entry. The universities hire more and more anti-Israel and anti-West professors, they turn a blind eye to the indoctrination of the students at these hitherto reputed institutions, and they actively facilitate the students into turning campuses into miniature Palestines, in their dressing and habitation, competing with each other to show their devotion to the new good in fashion, a cause they understand little or nothing about. All their youthful idealism manipulated to serve the aims of planets that will throw their asses in jail at first notice just for who they are or shoot them dead. Of course, they still want the best foods that the West can offer.

Paradoxically, the interplanetary activists who, till yesterday, were bemoaning the danger to the universe by the creation of numerous wormholes, suddenly start protesting against the occupation of Palestine by Israel, going to the extent of launching a spaceship to Palestine to challenge its blockade of the planet, only to find themselves being shot at by the Palestinians. Their spaceship crashes. A murderous mob rushes toward them, intending to flay them. They are rescued, in the nick of time, by Israeli forces who are beseeched by their native planets, which were keeping watch on the whole scenario to document and prevent Israeli atrocities against their citizens.

I can’t let myself be distracted by what’s going on. There are hostages to be freed and an incorrigible foe to be vanquished, all the while trying to make sure innocent civilians don’t die and that we don’t die. We finally enter the tunnels at multiple points. We are hit from multiple sides by the enemy. A few of us die in the initial onslaught, but slowly, on the basis of our metal exoskeletons and precise firepower, we push them back everywhere. They realize they will not last long and suddenly disappear from hidden egresses.

I don’t know whether to be alarmed or relieved when the spy robots send a very disturbing image. Robot spiders rush toward us, running across the floor, roof, and walls. In a matter of seconds, we are going to be inundated. I quickly drop the spy robots among them. They start exploding in their midst knocking many out of action, confusing them as to who was attacking them, and turning them this way and that. In the precious minutes that we gain, we retreat to a chokepoint in the tunnel, stick spherical plasma bombs on the walls, retreat further, and collapse the roof just before us.

Drawn by the sound of the blast, the spider robots rush in, but the tunnel is blocked. They keep rushing in, getting on top of one another, covering the whole space till the roof, when the bombs go off disintegrating them. The ones that are left are quickly picked off by us. We stride inward swiftly shooting anybody who tries to block our way.

The leaders of Masrah are before us. But before them are many of the hostages and they have guns trained on them. We are gestured to put down our guns. We do. The terrorists raise their guns toward us to fire. Plasma bursts emerge from our chests and pierce their bodies. The terrorists start shooting at us, one even throws a stick. I switch on the camdera in my eye, say, “Smile, assholes,” and shoot them dead.

As we emerge topside with the hostages, a new enemy surrounds us. The Wahjah commandos of Lebanon have trained guns, rocket launchers, and rudimentary spaceship cannons on us. We are in a pickle. We shield the hostages with our bodies and raise our guns to fire, knowing that it was a good run. We go with no regrets except that of now being able to save the hostages.

The heads of the Wahjah terrorists start exploding all around us. I am getting a call. It’s the head of Mossad, Israel’s spy agency. “When the Wahjah came to upgrade their communication from mobile phones to neural messengers, guess who supplied the neural implants? A Chinese company. The said neural implants were intercepted by our agents and swapped with custom-made Israeli implants, a major upgrade for them.”

I say, “Thank you.”

He cuts the connection. We get onto our spaceships and head back. The hostages are given medical care, food, and water. Some of them are acutely emaciated, some are missing limbs, some are not all there mentally. Many of the hostages remain. We will shortly go back. A new president is in the White House on UCA. The professors who led the students astray are arrested, and the students are expelled. There is talk of investigating universities, cutting their funding, and dissolving some of them. The major news channels are losing their credibility. Smaller news channels and alternate sources of news like social media are gaining currency.
The Islamic Republic is next, the people who matter mutter. The Muslim and communist groups who sought to dismantle the West, taking advantage of the uproar are fleeing from one hidey-hole to another. The Muslim immigrants who attacked Jews across the world during the protests are being deported to their third-world planets. The snake of anti-Zionism, another term for Jew hate is being crushed underfoot in many planets, which recognize the inciters as those which don’t want to assimilate but bring down their host nations. It’s going to be a long war. Much of the world is for Israel. Much of the world is against Israel. To those who are for, I say thank you. To those who are against, I say that you are on the wrong side of history.