Israelis are Resiliant

By Ilana Freedman

Thursday, September 14, 2006

From Israel – The news this past summer was largely dominated by reports from the front in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Much has been written about the damage done to Lebanese targets by Israeli bombs. Far less has been written about what happened to Israel during that conflict. I came with two of my colleagues to visit Israel to see for myself how the war affected the civilians on the Israeli side. As a specialist in counter-terrorism, I wanted to see for myself what the real impact of this war was on the Israelis who lived through it.

We went immediately to Israel's northern border, speaking to soldiers who stood on the front lines and policemen who came to assist after the attacks. We started our mission very close to where the war began, in the region that took the brunt of Hezbollah's rockets.

As we drove along the border, I was struck by how close the villages on either side really are. In some cases, the fields of one village abut the orchards of the other. There was a time when informal commerce was possible between them, but today they are separated by a pair of chain link fences topped with razor wire, and a daunting no-man's-land in between.

One of the towns most directly affected by the war was Kiryat Shmona. This little municipality was hit by over one thousand katyusha rockets in little over four weeks. As we drove through the town, looking for the signs of damage from the war, we wondered how any town could have withstood such an onslaught. Amazingly, we had to look hard to see any damage at all. If we had been expecting to see a town devastated by war and in despair, we would have been greatly disappointed. The houses that we had seen on television only a month ago, with their exterior walls ripped off, their rooms destroyed by rocket fire and exposed to the world, had all been rebuilt or repaired.

All that remains to show that a war took place here are the pock-marked walls of the buildings that received the full force of the ball bearings with which the rockets were packed. Some other obvious signs are the temporary, informal monuments to those who died in the shelling, occasional non-critical damage that has yet to be repaired, and the large stands of blackened eucalyptus trees that show us where the Katyushas fell and set the summer-dry vegetation on fire.

Meir and Eyal own a small restaurant in Kiryat Shmona. We asked them whether they had kept their restaurant open during the war. "No", they said, "but that was a mistake. Next time we will keep our restaurant open!"

So the second thing that struck me was the resilience of the Israelis living in the north, under the threat of rocket fire. Since the war, the residents of Kiryat Shmona have worked feverishly to repair their city, to eliminate the signs of war, and to bring back a normalcy to their lives. At least on the surface, they have largely succeeded.

In Kfar Giladi, a kibbutz just north of Kiryat Shmona, twelve soldiers were ripped apart by the force of a katyusha that landed only a few feet away from where they were resting under a tree while they waited for deployment. A policeman who was one of the first on the scene told me, "It was a terrible scene. I have seen a lot in my career and I can take just about anything. But something here nearly broke me. One of the soldiers had pictures of his children with a message written in a childish hand, saying, 'Come home safely, Daddy.'"

Israel is not a stranger to war, nor sadly, to terrorist attacks. There seems to be a feeling here that this war is not over, that another is inevitable, and that it will come sooner rather than later. It is a sad prediction, because the Israelis have been fighting this war, in one form or another, for 58 years.

Tomorrow we will drive along the northern border to the Mediterranean coast, and then down through Haifa, Israel's third largest city, where missiles, not rockets, caused extensive damage and took the lives of many civilians. Over a million Israelis were displaced by this war. But the overriding message so far is that Israelis are a tough breed, and a resilient one. They have returned and rebuilt, quickly and with resolve. There are many lessons to be learned here.

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