Israel’s Missile Site Burns; Now The Story Gets Weird

A mushroom cloud appears over Israel’s missile system, and somehow Iran is still the one we’re meant to panic about. Right, so a huge mushroom cloud has gone up over Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem, and the Israeli explanation is that everyone should calm down because this was a controlled test. Controlled. That is the word they have chosen for a night-time fireball big enough to send residents reaching for their phones, big enough to spread across social media before the official line could get its boots on, and big enough to make even Israeli journalists ask what on earth they were supposed to be looking at. The company involved is Tomer, an Israeli government-owned weapons company tied to rocket and missile systems, and Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster, reportedly placed the explosion inside Tomer itself. So this is not a random bang in a field, not somebody’s barbecue going full biblical and not a little flash on the horizon being inflated by nervous people online either. Tomer says the blast was part of a pre-planned and successful controlled test, carried out under the security establishment, but that wording is doing a lot of sweating. A controlled test can still be loud, and rocket motors are hardly scented candles, so nobody has to pretend that every weapons experiment happens with the delicacy of someone lighting a birthday cake. The problem is not even that a weapons company tested something and flames appeared. The problem is that a giant mushroom-cloud fireball rose at night near a populated area, residents were apparently not warned in advance, local officials reportedly said they had not been properly informed, and the explanation arrived after the fire in the sky had already done all the talking. If the control is only visible to the people behind the fence, while everyone outside the fence is left staring at a fireball and wondering whether the war has just come back over their heads, then the word controlled has been removed from public safety and reassigned to public relations. Beit Shemesh is a city that has already been heavily hit during the Iran war.