sraelis and tourists watch the sky on the beach during a rocket attack fired by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip on July 15, 2014 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Photo: Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images JERUSALEM — Two happy families on vacation — the moms in a Nissan Versa and the dads and two daughters in a Renault Fluence — are barrelling down the freeway south of Tel Aviv the other morning when the 5-year-old girl in the back seat of the Fluence starts throwing up all over herself.
We pull over to change the poor child’s sun dress just past a turnoff that points to the besieged town of Ashkelon, favoured target of a rattletrap but potentially murderous Hamas or Islamic Jihad projectile out of nearby Gaza every few minutes, day after day, year after year, war after pointless, fruitless, deadly, stupid war.
“Of all the places to vomit,” her father sighs, “she has to go and do it in the 30-seconds-warning zone.”
So begins a long-planned Holy Land holiday against the backdrop of sirens in the streets, thuds in the sky, and a weary, world-wise nonchalance in Israel’s cafés and on the beach. No one organizes a trip to Israel in the hopes of experiencing two weeks of random bombardments, half-hearted evacuations, and kindergarten nausea. But neither do you cancel your plans to come here just because it might rain rockets.
For the two families on the southbound freeway, this month’s hostilities are distinctly contrapuntal. The Abels fly in from Washington for sightseeing, souvenirs, and sunbathing; our hosts, whom I will call Julia and Levi, have a 20-year-old son very much in harm’s way, a skinny, boyish, rookie combat engineer in the Israeli Defence Force, deployed right on the Gaza border. (Julia and my wife grew up together in Moscow; the former emigrated to Israel twenty years ago.)
If Bibi Netanyahu gives the order to roll into the lion’s den, young “Dov” is going in first to cut the barbed wire.
The day before, we had been there at the family’s home in Herzliya for the lad’s hopefully-not-final goodbye.
“Are you worried about having to fight your way into Gaza?” I asked him.
“Piece of cake,” the khaki-clad string bean replied, shovelling in mom’s famous chicken and rice.
Then Dov shouldered his rifle — “cooooool!” my 9-year-old Lizzie cooed — and we went back to our hotel on the wave-kissed Mediterranean strand, only to be jolted out of bed at midnight by the first air-raid siren ever to blare so far from Gaza.
Nine-year-old Lizzie Abel with a young Israeli combat engineer before his deployment to the Gaza border last week. Allen Abel/Postmedia News
New at this game, we casually waited for the elevator to the hotel lobby, where we were shooed to the sub-basement and found ourselves joined by a few dozen other confused but certainly not panicked guests in a dusty and low-ceilinged storeroom cluttered with folding tables and baby cots.
Ten minutes later came the all-clear, the return ride to our room, a couple of hours’ sleep and a then a sharp, booming explosion seemingly right outside our window — Israel’s astonishing Iron Dome anti-missile missile system, plucking one of Hamas’s Iranian firecrackers right out of the air like Susan Nattrass shooting skeet.
So now it is the next morning and we are all hightailing it down toward Eilat on the Red Sea, a resort town hugged so tightly by Egypt and Jordan that it never (OK, almost never) is a target of the Gazan nimrods.
The 5-year-old is cleaned up and re-outfitted in record time, we escape the 30-seconds-warning zone without incident, and plunge into the lifeless Negev, checking Levi’s phone every few minutes for the latest updates from the Jerusalem Post:
“Three additional rockets fell in Eshkol Regional Council. Two of the rockets hit structures in a village. One of the structures was a chicken coop. No injuries were reported …
“Iron Dome intercepts rocket over Rehobot …
“The Iron Dome anti-rocket system intercepted one rocket over Beersheba, two others landed in open areas …
“Code Red sirens sound in Ashkelon … “
As we drive though the spectacular desert, plunging over cliffs, hurtling down switchbacks, and enduring an endless, giggly rock-paper-scissors tournament from the girls in the back seat, I learn that Levi is a third-generation Israeli, a former artilleryman in the First Lebanon War, and the brother of an Air Force reservist who has just received a call-up notice for service against Hamas. So his heart and mind are elsewhere.
The veteran professes that Iron Dome is a public-relations concoction more than it is an actual feat of technology. The Gazans’ “rockets,” he holds, are mostly duds. But whatever Iron Dome is, it works.
(To a Baby Boomer of my vintage, Israel in 2014 is like Colgate toothpaste, covered by Gardol’s Invisible Protective Shield, a Mighty Mouse against whom Mister Trouble has no chance, unless, of course, he can enlist the heftier ballistics of Hezbollah or, soon enough, the Ayatollah’s doomsday nukes.)
There is only one permanent solution to the Gaza/Hamas problem, Levi offers at one point: Announce that, at a certain hour, a certain block of the Strip will be bombed out of existence, and then fulfil that promise, to the second. And then select another street, and so on until surrender.
“They would just fill that street with children and old women,” I suggest.
“If that happened, I’d push the button myself,” Levi says.
In Eilat, the war — if this is a “war” — never is mentioned by a single soul we meet for four full days — not on the pebbly, shelly beach, not on the overpriced kiddie rides along the boardwalk, not at the Underwater Observatory, not at the groaning breakfast buffet, not at the indoor ice rink (a pleasant diversion when it is 45C outside), and not at the Dead Sea Cosmetics Outlet Mall. I see no one bent over a radio. I see no one watching anything on television beside highlights of the insufferable World Cup.
But every few hours comes a text or a call from Dov on the taut frontier. He has been working all night “preparing our equipment” … He is getting a break for a shower and a nap … They are going to take the soldiers’ phones away soon …
Through all this, the warrior’s mother betrays not a gram of outward fear. “What else should I do?” she asks at one point. I envision Lizzie in uniform at some forward outpost, facing some fanatic faction, a dozen years from now.
Not only this, but mom has left a 5-month-old baby back in Hamas’s crosshairs in Herzliya with the infant’s two grandmas, the better to enjoy her vacation sans souci.
Four days at the seaside pass in an idyll of swimming and Goldstar beer. Then, just a few hours after we leave town, some freelance Jew-hater in the Egyptian Sinai lobs a shell at downtown Eilat, wounding fifty-something people in a parking lot with shreds of shattered glass.
We split from the other couple when the four days are over and mount the luxury bus to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Also on board are half a dozen male and female soldiers with their ‘cooooool’ guns, and some Russians bound for the healing, stinging salts of the Dead Sea. The route will takes us through a tranche of the West Bank; a glimpse of occupied Palestine.
“Don’t worry, window is rock-proof,” chuckles the ticket seller, who used to live in Chicago. But not a stone is flung.
Then, jarringly, we are met in the Holy City by a deafening crescendo from the Muslim Quarter of what sounds like gunfire, heralding — I assume — the one-way ceasefire brokered by the generals in Cairo. But this turns out to be fireworks set off by Arab students to mark their high school graduation.
“War is money for Hamas, money for Netanyahu,” an Arab cabbie waxes wise, summing up his cockeyed world.
Otherwise, again, there is not the slightest evidence of extenuating circumstances. The black-hatted Jews hustle to shul, the American pilgrims trod down the Via Dolorosa in their pious bulk, the muezzin crackles from al-Aqsa, and a paper handed to me as we check into our hotel advises “in a case of a ‘red alert’ siren, please move to one of the protected areas as quickly as possible.”
We adjourn for dinner in the lovely garden restaurant of the YMCA Three Arches Hotel, consecrated in the 1930s to peace among the three great faiths that call this city theirs.
“What is the latest news of the war?” my wife asks our server.
“Oh, it’s not a war,” the waitress smiles. “It’s normal.”
No comments:
Post a Comment