War

Saturday

Our Shabbat away, near one of my favourite stretches of beach where Eli and Mor live, was postponed because their baby had a temperature, so we stayed in Jerusalem. Shabbat is the only day to catch up on zeds, or zees as Americans no doubt say, so sleep and eat is what we slouchily did to make up for the tiring rush of the week. Shabbat went out, we lit seven Channuka candles, and once the computer was switched on, we realised Israel had bombed Hamas's infrastructure in Gaza. It surprised us as much as it must have surprised the Palestinians - the day before Israel had issued 'it's strongest warning yet' to Hamas to stop firing rockets into the south , but still we didn't expect a war to start as we were snoozing, reading and having a long walk to the park with the frisky hound. I suppose reactions to this type of situation vary - there will be people who say, 'Good. Serves them right. Yal-la,' the ones who say, 'Oh, man! What did they do that for?' and the ones who silently gulp, like me, which may well be the majority grouping.

Times of war and intifada mean every Israeli home with a TV (and that's not everyone as religious Jews don't have TVs) has it on all the time, with the same recurring images and interviews repeating in an endless circle of drama and mayhem until some other gruesome event comes to oust the previous images. TV and media, being what they are, fuel the human elements of the situation, which means they try to pull on the heartstrings or disgust you by showing injured kids, and the bias is shocking. In Israel they show women hysterically crying, screaming and praying as the sirens go off and the rockets start raining around them (I saw that standing in the doorway of someone's house as I went to pick up daughter number two from her friend). And in England they never go to Israeli homes and interview people, rarely show the damage or the fear instilled on this side, but show instead the damage Israel has done, and that reeks of propoganda.





Sunday

The kids are still on Channuka holidays and we have plans to go to the Western Wall, or Cottel, with the Korn family from England who made Aliyah (emigrated to Israel) from sunny Pinner in the summer. I need to pick up my older son from a sleepover at his cousins' house as the Korn's son was in his class in London and it would be rude if my boy didn't join us, but I have to threaten him as he doesn't want to have anything to do with us once he's at his cousins' house, but this is expected and my threats are good. But I can't get to him as the road to his cousins' house is blocked by police and soldiers, and we all know what this means without having to ask the police girl smoking a fag and waving cars away. Next to where the cousins live is an Arab village, the village the tractor killer came from, and they've been rioting. Later on, coming back, we pass the entrance to the village, still blocked by police and soldiers but just the village and not the whole road this time, and we see a huge skip-like bin on fire, hundreds of rocks on the road that were thrown at the police and soldiers and some dark smoke further in where something is smoldering.









The Arab village below my house, Beit Zafafa, is closed as well. Police and soldiers block all the entrances and exits to the village. Later, on my way back from a wonderful class on Jewish philosophy, where we refuted the Big Bang, pretty much wiped science off the table and considered the timelessness and instancy of the act of creation, the whole road near Beit Zafafa was blocked and I had to go the long way around, to the Bethlehem road, hoping that wasn't closed as well, so I could recapture my child from the Russians. Nice Russians, but it sounds cold-war-ish and exciting, so I'm leaving it in.




(Rocket being fired from Gaza into southern Israel)

Monday

I'm not the kind of person who wakes up and reads the news on the internet, but this is war and it's on my doorstep. Israel has bombed more Hamas compounds overnight and the death toll is rising. It's the last day of the holidays, it's rainy and there are six kids in the house chasing the dog and playing on the Wii. I manage to blag a press pass to cover Project Interchange, a group of US campus editors with an anti-Israel stance, who are coming (with perfect timing) to assess what the situation is really like, go to security fences, have lunch with IDF soldiers, meet Palestinian media and have talks from eminent professors about strategic environments and problems with investment in the Middle East. I put myself forward as a blogger (blagger, more like) for The Independent (which is in the pipeline but I've had no official go ahead yet) and a freelance journalist, so I get a place on the bus, lunches and to interview and cover the events. Thing is, I can't go with them to the north as I have to work, cook and be a mother, or to the Dead Sea and Massada as they're doing that on Shabbat. So I'm squeezing myself in where I can. It's fun, being a war correspondent. Not that I have any idea what a war correspondent does and I haven't yet left my rainy house or written anything about the war. But the idea is exciting.





Tuesday

It's raining heavily in Jerusalem; we wake up and the breathtakingly beautiful panoramic view we have of the city is a breathtaking panoramic view of thick white cloud and fog. I can't see the houses in Beit Zafafa below my garden. I'm locking doors, telling the kids to ask who it is before they open it, and in school yesterday the teachers talked to each class about what was going on in the country they'll one day have to fight for in the army. It's a bizarre reality to grow up in. I remember during the intifada, when suicide bombings of teenagers waiting to go into clubs, bus bombings, Arab drivers driving their buses into whole crowds of soldiers and civilians standing at bus stops were incidents happening every day, a little girl of five came to play with my little girl, who was also then five. It was the day after an incident when a mother of three was lying on her bed with her children, sleeping, and gunmen burst into her house and she could only grab two of them and pull them under the bed with her, and I was raw with emotion, knowing that the other one, who was shot dead, was the one she couldn't get to and how she must have felt about that. I heard the girls playing in the sitting room, and then it clicked what they were saying. 'There's been an incident,' (piguah) said the visiting child, 'and Daddy's been killed. The ambulance is coming soon and we have to run away.' 'Woah, woah,' I said running to them, 'What happened to playing with your dollies?'



(Israeli man surveys the damage to his home after it was hit by a kassam rocket.)

Mum calls.
'It's kicking off there.'
'Yep.'
'Make sure all your passports are ready.'
'Ok.'
'I hate this.'
'I know, Ma.'

Her only two daughters and her six grandchildren - her entire family apart from her siblings - are here. I know she's panicking. I don't tell her a bomb fell in Be'er Sheva yesterday, 40kms away from Gaza, which is very close to our friends with the horses and donkeys. I must call them and see how they are. The 43 year old Dad, who is rather beefy these days but is most cool - he lived in Jamaica for two years when he was seventeen and dances like a black man, which is with winding hips and tiny smooth movements - got called up as a reserve to fight in Lebanon during the last war. Hope he doesn't get called up again. They have three kids, one isn't a year old yet.

War isn't fun. People are tense and stress levels are high. Fear of reprisals and renewed suicide attacks are hanging over us like the shadow of the grim reaper, and Australia suddenly seems a very good option as an emigration destination. But here we are, getting on with our day, justifying Israel's actions and our existence to the rest of the world and our friends and famiy, who get shown a one-sided viewpoint on TV, hoping they'd see it another way if they had to live like this, wondering if these 'defenseless' people, as they were called yesterday, will stop trying to wipe the country out. Meanwhile, we wipe theirs out.

Sigh.