My 26 hours in Israel's southern conflict zone

By MICHAEL WEINER

article created on: 2009-02-01T00:00:00

There were several things that made my recent whirlwind trip to Israel unusual.

This was my first visit that did not include stops in Jerusalem including the Western Wall, the Great Synagogue and the Machane Yehuda Market. It was like traveling to Jordan and not seeing Petra, or flying to Argentina and not seeing Iguazu Falls—although I am guilty of the latter.

It was the first trip where I failed to eat any of my favorite Middle Eastern foods, settling instead for hotel meals and a boxed lunch in the back of a minivan.

It was also by far the quickest trip to Israel I have ever made, just 26 hours.

By accepting the invitation from the United Jewish Communities to join the Leadership Solidarity Mission meeting in Tel Aviv on Jan. 11, I committed to a close-up view of a war zone, the “conflict zone” in southern Israel, just north of Gaza. Although I have scant first-hand knowledge of war zones, this one felt different. This war, this conflict, felt more psychological than explosive, more chronic than acute.

Our group received training in minibus evacuation and protection from open-field rocket attack. It felt more surreal than real. Even after experiencing the tzeva adom, the red alert that sent our group of 30 scrambling into an Ashkelon bomb shelter, it felt more like the tornado drills I knew in Chicago in the 1950s than what Londoners experienced in the Blitz during World War II.

That reaction was too nonchalant, but I now understand it. I wanted something different from my peacetime visits to social service agencies. This time I wanted crisis, war stories, the Gaza context. I wanted to see missiles fly and land (without casualties, of course). I wanted to see emergency personnel. I wanted pictures to send home. I wanted excitement, thrills and danger.

Instead, I saw the hotels, shops and beaches of Tel Aviv looking normal, the transportation system running just fine, the countryside seemingly identical to the trip I completed a few months ago. Doesn’t Hamas know that I am here to amaze my friends and colleagues with my courage and to stare death in the face?

It was perhaps normal for an American visitor to be disappointed by the lack of adrenalin-pumping wartime ambience, but for the residents of Ashkelon, Sderot and Ashdod, where reaction time from the siren alert to the Kassam rocket’s impact is measured in mere seconds, the reality of war is every minute of every day, and it is internalized.

The purpose of the mission was not to send jet-lagged middle-aged Jewish lawyers, accountants and businesspeople into battle. Rather, it was, in a weird Israeli version of speed-dating, to learn from the people on the ground what life is like under unremitting physical and psychological attack. The “people on the ground” were the residents of southern Israel and the human embodiment of the social service agencies who have developed styles and techniques to cope with unimaginable pressures.

Those styles and techniques are in play every day in southern Israel. The Stress Center in Sderot treats residents with professional psychiatric care, both critical and follow-up and “without stigma,” we were told.

“Thirty people came here yesterday,” said the sleep-deprived psychiatrist on duty. “Today it is better and our job is to convince these people that they are experiencing a normal reaction to an abnormal situation, not the other way around.”

An ambulance arrived with a patient who had survived a rocket attack that hit her home moments earlier. She was outwardly unharmed, but clearly her psyche was shaken to the core. I had seen that rocket attack, or at least the smoke rising from the attack. But from 250 yards away and around a bend in the road, it might as well have been on television. For the woman, instinctively attempting to protect herself from a warhead filled with shrapnel of wire, nuts and bolts, it is not television, it is unrelenting horror which turns to unending stress.

Many of the techniques for treating that stress were learned during and after the second Lebanese war. They embody the entwined concepts of community and communication. I was astonished at the number of times we were told by various people that this or that technique, or methodology, civilian or military, came from the experience in Lebanon. Again and again we were told that the lessons learned in that war have been adopted by the civilian population in this new crisis.

For example, everyone at risk in the conflict area has a contact person. It’s not just a name. It’s a face at the front door every day, someone who will sit down and have tea and talk over the physical and emotional toll from the day’s attacks. He or she will counsel as best they can. They call it “supportive community.”

When the attacks are daily—dating back to just after the election of Hamas in Gaza—coping and defense become inevitabilities that change little from day to day.

We visited an elderly couple in a house near the center of Sderot. They were just semi-mobile. They cope with the daily attacks by walking slowly to the least-windowed room in their small house and pulling a thick woolen blanket over their heads until the all-clear is sounded. “Is that enough? Do you feel safe?” we ask. All we get in return are wan smiles. Of course it isn’t enough; of course it provides little safety, but they cope as best they can.

There is no ordinarly routine to life in the crisis zone. In Ashkelon, a woman explains that because the alerts number up to 20 a day, she can’t cook, she can’t do the wash; everything is subject to interruption.

The mayor of Sderot is late to our appointment because he has no routine except to assure the safety of the children of Sderot. Those children were attending school that day for the first time in two weeks because he determined that the stress of not having an educational routine was worse than the risk of sending them to and from school.

Incidentally, the rocket attacks peak during the times the children walk to and from school. That is not a coincidence and it is a war crime.

Because there are just 15 seconds between a red alert and a rocket’s impact, every child in Sderot has a physical range limited to front patio, back patio and a quick dash to school. Each child has a “trustee” who will serve as a surrogate parent when the parent is at work. The trustee is also a confidant even when the parents are at home. The damage to the children is immeasurable we are told. Most of these children have never experienced a day without stress and horror. Day trips to the north are arranged for them for respite.

“You get used to it,” a 9-year-old boy told us.

“Not true,” a visiting social worker later explained. “The wounds may last forever.”

In 2006, Ha’aretz reported that almost half the parents and one-third of the children of Sderot suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. It is undoubtedly far worse today. “Normal reaction to an abnormal situation” has its price.

Because of the lessons learned in Lebanon and the north, for purposes of psychological solace, the rocket-damaged windows are quickly repaired, the rubble is removed, the plaster is reworked. And until the numbers became overwhelming, all remnants of the Kassam and Grad rockets fired into Sderot were collected at the police station and put on display for newspaper and tourist photo opportunities—a token attempt at positive public relations. The display still exists but the quantity of recovered weapons is now but a symbolic fraction of the whole.

Time and again we were told that because of the lessons learned from the second Lebanese war, the military is better, the communication between social service agencies and municipalities is better, communication between municipalities and the regional governments is better, and communication between the regional and national governments is better. The localities are allowed to function with far-reaching autonomy, providing local services by local residents. The services provided are not only social in nature, but include also the granting of mind-bending only-in-Israel necessities such as the building of street-side emergency shelters from gigantic concrete sewage pipes, reinforcing roofs and safe rooms in residences, and making schools the safest places in the community.

While the conflict in southern Israel was one of ongoing terror, just a few miles farther south in the Gaza Strip the Israeli air and ground forces were engaged in a full-scale combat operation.

Our introduction to that part of the conflict was at an Israeli Defense Force air base southeast of Tel Aviv on the night of our arrival. There, a lieutenant colonel, a young American-educated Israeli F-15 pilot, walked the fine line between combat and politics; speaking for himself alone, not the military command, but always with an eye towards the intelligence officer in the back of the room.

He reiterated that the IDF was never in better shape, which he attributed to the lessons learned in the second Lebanese war. Facing tough questions about the ethics and morality of aerial combat in an urban setting, he became somewhat defensive and a little inarticulate. But he believed passionately that the IDF and military intelligence do—and have always done—everything possible to minimize civilian casualties. He showed us numerous cockpit films of Israeli pilots exercising restraint when faced with unexpected civilian presence.

A fighter, a pilot, a Jew, an Israeli—he passionately emphasized the recurring theme that Israelis and Jews are largely alone. “We can’t count on the Egyptians,” he said. “Look at the tunnels that supply Hamas from Iran through Egypt, our supposed ally.” He said it was our solemn and unwavering duty to assure the continuation of our people.

My 26 hours were almost up. There was time only for a panel discussion, a talk on Israeli philanthropy, dinner, debriefing and an opportunity to meet my elder daughter’s latest boyfriend (an Israeli just out of the army special forces—an apparent good guy). Then it was fly home and tell the story.

Unfortunately, it is a story without an end. As I write this, there is a tentative unilateral cease-fire in Gaza. May it last forever. I have little hope. May it last until next month and then we will deal with it month to month.

I also have little hope for world opinion, which seems, despite all logic, forever hardened against the Jewish state.

But I do find hope and comfort in the Israeli infrastructure, formed from within and supported from within and abroad, that cares for its people. I find hope in that which first puzzled me—the coping and outward ordinariness of life during times of extreme stress.

I find hope in the spirit of the people who are grounded in their own history, who fervently insist on defending their country and—despite great political differences among them—still look forward to a better tomorrow in an amazing land.

Michael Weiner is a co-chair of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland 2009 Annual Campaign.