‘It’s not a war. It’s normal,’ visitor hears
JERUSA LEM — 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-yearold 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 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 20 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 khakiclad 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.
New at this game, we casually waited for the elevator to the hotel lobby, where we were shooed to a dusty sub-basement storeroom — joined by a few dozen other confused but certainly not panicked guests.
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.
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 and we escape the 30-seconds-warning zone without incident 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 …
“Code Red sirens sound in Ashkelon … ”
As we drive though the spectacular Negev desert, hurtling down switchbacks, 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 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.)
There is only one permanent solution to the Gaza/ Hamas problem, Levi offers: 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.
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 indoor ice rink and not at the Dead Sea Cosmetics Outlet Mall.
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.
We split from the other couple after the four days and mount the luxury bus to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. The route 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. 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. But this turns out to be fireworks set off by Arab students to mark their high school graduation.
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.”