20-Jul-06: Our coping mechanisms

We hosted friends last night in our Jerusalem home.

Susan lives in Carmiel, normally a pastoral community, but now on the front lines. She's staying with her daughter in Jerusalem while the missile attacks rage on. They'll be spending Shabbat with us. Should be an improvement over last Shabbat, most of which was spent in a public air-raid shelter. A. and D. live near us and had driven up north for the day to visit some shut-in friends who have been suffering through dozens of missile strikes.

Ten hours - six driving, four visiting. Kfar Vradim is a ghost town, few people in sight, no activity. At a restaurant we found open for lunch (our relatives were dying "to get out of the house for some air") I said jokingly "no smoking" (we were the only people there). The Arab waiter points - "this side im Katyushot, this side bli Katyushot." Haifa like Yom Kippur, minimal traffic, stores closed. During our hour at friends there were two sirens, the first we did in their closed room, heard nothing land; the second as we were driving out. We took cover against a big wall. Heard four booms, none nearby, got in the car and continued.

D. told us he thought having lived through the Iraq war has given Israeli society a sense of immunity from panic. He was careful to avoid minimizing the existential dangers faced hour by hour by our neighbours in the north of Israel. But there's no doubt being able to drive away and return to a "normal" routine makes it easier to cope - and that includes coping with Israel's crazy Israeli traffic.

Aviva and Ralph, our friends visiting from Melbourne, also made the journey north earlier in the week, to visit an aged family member. Hearing air-raid sirens through your open car window and not just via CNN shook them, as did the sights of Nahariya's war zone with its untended damage. (A woman was killed a couple of days earlier, sitting on her balcony and having her morning coffee.) But the thing that upset them the most, after completing the long drive up and then back, was encountering a head-on collision on the highway just before they reached the safety of Jerusalem. Some things just don't change.

In some ways, living in Israel has an unusual degree of congeniality, of functioning the way a large family might, when we're under attack. We remember the Jan-Feb 1991 Iraqi missile attacks on Israel when neighbours who would rarely give one another the time of day would stop, smile, ask how you're coping, share anecdotes. It's a little similar now.

One popular television program has been inviting people to send video clips of life in their "safe room" or bomb shelter - clearly tapping into a sense of communal empathy. Families in the center and south are asked to invite northerners to come and join them i.e. come and live in their homes. And the cell phone numbers of the inviting families are shown in a running marquee along the bottom of the TV screen. Where else but Israel?

Along with live coverage from the fronts, the talking-head programs on television go to air day and night. There's a significant range of viewpoints as to what Israel ought to do in the long term, but something close to wall-to-wall agreement about the immediate need for a tough and uncompromising response. The map above is why. People unfamiliar with the very small size of this country (think in terms of the size of Rhode Island) may not realize just how exposed we are. This is one of the factors behind the current reality that the "disproportionality of Israeli response" argument doesn't get you very far in conversation with most Israelis. Plainly stated, we're defending our lives.

Notwithstanding the political sophistry and media analysis that sows more confusion than it clarifies, sometimes an unprovoked existential attack is simply an unprovoked existential attack, and you need to respond accordingly.