|Living in a Country at War Part I

*I had a conversation last week with two co workers, both out of the army just a few months. They spent most of their service on the northern border manning a lookout, watching Hezbollah with high powered binoculars. They told me that they saw with their own eyes how Hezbollah spent the last few years rearming and building bunkers and strengthening their positions and fortifications.

*Both cable children's channels are broadcasting 24 hours a day for all the tens of thousands of children stuck since the beginning of the war in bomb shelters and safe rooms. Hosts of Israeli children's shows broadcast from various bomb shelters across the north.

*Tonight on the news an old women is interviewed in the bomb shelter she has been staying in since the war started. She breaks down and starts crying saying how she can't take it anymore-the explosions, the air raid sirens. She just wants to go back to her apartment and live in peace. Holocaust survivors are interviewed in Haifa, many of them trapped in their apartments, too old and infirm to make it to the bomb shelters when the air raid sirens go off.

*Last week I called my friend Marcel. I had wanted to go visit him and his family for the afternoon, but he said he had received an emergency call up and was now with his reserve unit manning road blocks south of Hebron. They had replaced a front line unit which had been sent to the northern border. He hoped that he would be released by August 10. His unit wasn't supposed to have been called for reserve duty this year, but then Hezbollah attacked on July 12.

*I watch the terrible scenes from Kana, mourning the deaths of all of those innocents, wishing that it hadn't happened, wishing that, despite the fact that katushas were being fired from that village that the attack hadn't been ordered. That there had been some other way. I realize that we are fast losing any moral authority we have the more Lebanese civilian casualties mount. The world has already forgotten who started this war and what kind of organization we are fighting. The world doesn't care that Hezbollah has fired over 2000 missiles directly at our cities and towns. We are taking too long and killing too many civilians.

*Kibbutz Ketura is bursting at the seems with refugees from the north. Friends of ours are hosting a family from Acco and from Carmiel. Up to 10,000 children from the north are being hosted in various summer camps across central and southern Israel. Carmiel, Nahariya and other smaller towns and villages are emptying of residents. It is estimated that at least 250,000 residents of the north have fled out of range of the Katushas.

*Last Wednesday I guided a family tour from the States. They had arrived the Friday before, right in the middle of the war. Their itinerary had been duly changed so that they only visited the central and southern parts of the country. They all said that the hardest part about coming to Israel was talking to all of their friends and family who all thought that they were crazy for coming at this time.

Last week the Shiva (mourning period) for St. Sergeant Yaniv Bar On concluded. Just 19 1/2 years old, he was killed on the first day of fighting, July 12, when the tank he was driving hit a mine. Yaniv was part of the force that went into Lebanon in order to try and rescue the two Israeli reserve soldiers who were kidnapped by Hezbollah.

If this was a better world Yaniv would still be alive today. If we lived in "the best of all possible gardens," as Candide once said, he wouldn't have even have had to serve in the army. We can wish all we want. We can even wish that he had driven the tank a few meters to one side or the other; then he and the rest of his crew might still be alive today. However, the reality is that much more horrible. Yaniv, son of Asher and Karmalin, immigrants from South Africa and Canada, is gone. The Bar On family were members of the Masorti (Traditional) Synagogue that we belong to in Maccabim-Reut. I had only met them once or twice in the year since we moved to this area, but I didn't need to know them in order to be saddened and affected by the death of their son. During the Shiva, I went to their house several times to pray with them so that they could say Kadish. The parents' faces are shattered and a light has gone out. They seem diminished. Reality has crushed them. They have joined an exclusive club-that of bereaved parents. I hope I never have to join. I have spent the last week touching my children, especially my two boys, finding strength in that contact. I want them to be invincible and to live a long and happy life.

Yaniv at 19 should have been in college or working or hanging out with his friends and girlfriend. Instead he had to put on a uniform and give his life for his country.

It's funny, we Israelis, all we want is to live in peace; to live our lives and to be able to strengthen and continue to build our country, still young at only 58 years old. We dream of blending in to the family of nations and being ignored. Wasn't this one of Zionism's main tenants? once we got our own state, we would stop being unique? The Jewish problem would be solved because we would no longer be stateless. Boy, did we get it wrong.

We live in a crazy world. It almost sounds like a work of fiction. Imagine a country thousands of miles away, which we have no relationship with, which we want nothing from. This country has no political, recent cultural or historic ties with us (Ok, there was that incident 2,500 years ago when the Persians did conquer this area). They are not even an Arab country. However, there is one thing and that makes all the difference. This country, Iran, is a fundamentalist Muslim country and in Muslim eyes we Jews have committed an unforgivable affront. We have returned and reestablished our sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Once a territory is conquered by Muslims, it becomes forever a land that can only be ruled by Muslims. For fundamentalist Muslims, we are a religious challenge. We have defied Allah. This is unforgivable. Israel is an insult to Islam and must be wiped out. How else can this be defined? Why else would Iran make it their business to fund a terrorist (oh, excuse me militant resistance group) organization to the tune of around 100 million dollars per year, send them advanced missiles and weaponry and, with the aid of Syria, conduct a proxy war against Israel.

Syria, at least I can understand. There is the issue of the Golan Heights. They have lost every war they ever fought with Israel. And of course, there is the Muslim thing about us ruling Muslim land, which is part of the equation also. They also want to control Lebanon. What better way to create instability and weakness then to help support an organization which prevents Lebanon from creating a strong central government and, hey, what the hell, we can still fight the Zionist enemy using south Lebanon as the battlefield. Lebanese civilians die and not Syrian.

What will come of all this? Did Yaniv die for nothing? I hope that he did not. In the six years since Israel withdrew from Lebanon, since the international community recognized that we had fulfilled UN Resolution 425, Hezbollah has attacked Israel, not once, twice or even three or four times. Fall of 2000 they even did the same thing, attacking across the international border, kidnapping and eventually killing three Israeli soldiers. They have tried many times since. This latest attack into sovereign Israeli territory was just the latest. In the last six years they have ruled southern Lebanon as a state with in a state (something even the Lebanese prime minister admits), they have been armed to the teeth by Iran and Syria and they have continued their war against Israel with their occasional attacks. This time enough was enough. Yaniv died so that Israel will become free of the threat of Hezbollah, so that the 2 million Israelis who live in the north will never have to go into their bomb shelters again.

Yaniv was a history buff. Loved to talk about modern Israel's short history. He also loved airplanes. His room, I read in the newspaper, was covered with model airplanes. He dreamed of being a pilot. He wasn't accepted in the pilot's course and, in the end, went into the armored corp. At the funeral, his father also described him as very patriotic and filled with love for Israel. Every independence day he would plaster the house with Israeli flags.

We all wish that it hadn't ended this way. I heard his father say that Yaniv had had a happy life; that he enjoyed his childhood and that he made the most out of the army, trying to be the best soldier that he could be so that he could do what was expected of him. He fulfilled that but paid too high of a price.

So let's have a moment of silence for Yaniv. A brave young man who died before he should have; who died defending his country, his people. Let's have a moment of silence and hope that this war ends soon and that there will be no more victims or sacrifices.