It's really over -- at least for now
I drove along the Israeli-Lebanese border earlier this week -- something that's been impossible to do since all this began back on July 12. Watching a team of Israeli soldiers knitting together the fence that had been cut to allow their tanks to drive through five weeks ago, I finally started to believe that this is really over, at least for now.
But fixing the problem will require something more than building better fences. A wall of misunderstanding and misconception has been built that's far tougher to breach than any physical border. The politicians on both sides can tell you why this war was fought. Most of the people who lived through it will tell you what a bad idea it was.
The problem starts at the most basic level. Lebanese and Israelis both complain of having the worst neighbours in the world. But neither really knows, or cares, much about life on the other side of the fence.
For those who are in Lebanon, looking into Israel for the first time elicits a flurry of emotions that often spill into each other -- hate, envy and curiosity run together in a muddy river of pent-up feelings.
"Right over there is the Western world," said Dergham, the fast-talking Lebanese who drove the Boston Globe's Thanassis Cambanis and I to the perimeter. Dergham couldn't help but stare longingly at the red-roofed homes and neat farmers' plots across the way in the Israeli town of Metulla. It was a sharp contrast with the destroyed buildings and burned tobacco plantations on the Lebanese side. We were parked under a poster that marked the spot where a "martyr" named Abu Zainab had carried out a suicide bombing against an Israeli target in 1985.
"We don't even live in the Third World anymore," Dergham chattered on. After living 21 years in the United States, he likes to add "man," or "dude" or a random expletive at the end of each phrase. "We live in the Tenth World, man, or maybe the Twentieth."
Israel was barely a kilometre away, but Dergham and I both knew it was highly unlikely he’d ever go there. "I wish I could go," he said. "But if we step out of this car, we're dead."
He was likely right. The Lebanon-Israel border, for obvious reasons, is still very tense.
I had peered into Israel from a different hill a few days earlier, this time with my regular translator, Jamal. A Palestinian who was born in Lebanon but still refers to himself as being from Haifa, it was the first time he had seen the land he calls home.
Like Dergham, Jamal was taken aback by how physically attractive Israel is, and by how developed it seemed compared to the run-down suburb of Beirut that he and his family now live in.
Between soft promises that one day the Arab armies would conquer Israel (his first reaction), he told me that if he was offered Israeli citizenship, and a chance to move to his family’s historic home in Haifa, that would be enough for him. He said that as long as a Palestinian state was allowed to exist on the 1967 borders of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he would have no problem calling himself an Israeli, as many Arabs already do.
The reactions of Jamal and Dergham, especially their surprise at what the other side actually looked like, reminded me of a conversation I had two months ago with a security agent at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. My wife and I were heading to Beirut, via Athens, and he wanted to know why we were going to vacation in a country that most Israelis see as a terrorist haven.
Because it's a beautiful, friendly country, we told him. He grilled us for the next 20 minutes about who we knew in Beirut, sniffing for any suggestion that we might be up to something nefarious. Then he dropped his guard.
"Actually, I'd love to go to Beirut," he told us with a hint of embarrassment. "I hear it really is beautiful there."
That was the saddest thing about this war. If there are two countries in the Middle East that a Westerner might immediately feel something close to at home in, they are Lebanon and Israel. They are the two real democracies in the region, and each is as Mediterranean in nature as each is Middle Eastern. Both are nations of well-educated polyglots with multiple passports. Both continue to struggle to find a balance between holy and hedonistic.
If anyone would ever let them meet at the border for dinner, I think Jamal, Dergham and the Israeli security agent (I wish I'd asked his name) would get along just fine. They are next-door neighbours who have never been introduced.
If that dinner ever did happen, I think all three -– Palestinian, Lebanese and Israeli -– would be surprised to find out how alike they and their countries are. What I'm even more confident of is that they’d agree is that decades of war have accomplished little, and that maybe it's time to talk to the people on the other side of the fence, and to give something else a try.
On a road trip through the devastation
The road that runs through the Jordan Valley and into Galilee and beyond has become a kind of road map for the effects of more than a month of conflict.
Route 90 is a twisting, winding road of just two lanes for most of its length, which starts at Israel's southern tip near Eilat, runs north along the Dead Sea and through the West Bank, along the Jordanian border. Then it continues north to Tiberias at the foot of Lake Kinneret, better known as the Biblical Sea of Galilee, wraps around the lake, through the Galilean hills, through Kiryat Shmona and all the way up to Metulla and the Lebanese border.
The impact is felt as you approach Tiberias, where many of the tourist town's hotels have closed for lack of customers. The streets themselves are coming back to life -- Tiberias was not as badly hit by rockets as other northern towns, and has become a place of refuge for those living farther up. But the tourist attractions here have lost a month of business during the busy summer season.
Then the road climbs, along the glittering lake for some of the country's most spectacular scenery, and soon that view is broken by haze and a faint smell of smoke. For all the Katyushas that caused injury and loss of life, dozens of others landed in empty fields -- sparking fires in this Middle Eastern country's hottest season. Soon entire hillsides blackened by fire come into view.
By the time you're in Kiryat Shmona, there's a stronger odour in the air -- smoke mixed with a metallic scent, left by military machines and gunpowder. Here the physical damage also starts to become evident -- a hole in the road here, a house partially collapsed there, an apartment building with its windows entirely blown out. Traffic lights blink orange. There's not much need for traffic control when the few folks still in town are just trying to get where they need to go as fast as they can.
Past Kiryat Shmona, the evidence of war comes fully into focus. The pavement develops deep grooves as you near Metulla, left by the weight of hundreds of military vehicles; there are more telltale rocket craters. At some point, you know you're nearing the battle zone by the lines of television crews from around the world, setting up for the best shot of the hills and the Lebanese border. In an encampment of troops, hastily erected on a field, soldiers mill about, waiting to see if the ceasefire will hold.
Then, just over a hill, there is a battered "Welcome to Metulla" sign, leaning heavily to one side but still standing. Another sign points visitors to the Canada Centre, home of a swimming pool and Israel's only Olympic-sized hockey rink. And there are tanks: lined up along each side of the road, mixed in with armoured bulldozers, awaiting orders to pull back or move back in. The ridged pavement turns to dirt, torn up by heavy tracks, pounded down by army boots and army jeeps and heavy trucks.
It's a sad path for a part of the country that should right now be packed with tourists; the north, full of resilient kibbutzniks running get-back-to-nature retreats, is far more relaxed than religious Jerusalem or cosmopolitan Tel Aviv. In normal times, people are friendlier up here, and the pace of life slower. I stopped once to ask for directions and -- rather than the brushoff my pathetic Hebrew/English mix would get in Jerusalem -- the friendly driver of the pickup truck motioned for me to follow, then led me the kilometre or so to my destination.
But on my journey back down this same route this week, there was already hope of restoration. The drive slowed to a crawl in both directions, as cars made their way cautiously back up north, and the military machinery began moving back south, supply trucks and jeeps and tractor-trailers bearing enormous tanks making the treacherous climb back down through the hills.
I hope that soon, I'll be able to make a drive north that isn't connected to this conflict.
The road that runs through the Jordan Valley and into Galilee and beyond has become a kind of road map for the effects of more than a month of conflict.
Route 90 is a twisting, winding road of just two lanes for most of its length, which starts at Israel's southern tip near Eilat, runs north along the Dead Sea and through the West Bank, along the Jordanian border. Then it continues north to Tiberias at the foot of Lake Kinneret, better known as the Biblical Sea of Galilee, wraps around the lake, through the Galilean hills, through Kiryat Shmona and all the way up to Metulla and the Lebanese border.
The impact is felt as you approach Tiberias, where many of the tourist town's hotels have closed for lack of customers. The streets themselves are coming back to life -- Tiberias was not as badly hit by rockets as other northern towns, and has become a place of refuge for those living farther up. But the tourist attractions here have lost a month of business during the busy summer season.
Then the road climbs, along the glittering lake for some of the country's most spectacular scenery, and soon that view is broken by haze and a faint smell of smoke. For all the Katyushas that caused injury and loss of life, dozens of others landed in empty fields -- sparking fires in this Middle Eastern country's hottest season. Soon entire hillsides blackened by fire come into view.
By the time you're in Kiryat Shmona, there's a stronger odour in the air -- smoke mixed with a metallic scent, left by military machines and gunpowder. Here the physical damage also starts to become evident -- a hole in the road here, a house partially collapsed there, an apartment building with its windows entirely blown out. Traffic lights blink orange. There's not much need for traffic control when the few folks still in town are just trying to get where they need to go as fast as they can.
Past Kiryat Shmona, the evidence of war comes fully into focus. The pavement develops deep grooves as you near Metulla, left by the weight of hundreds of military vehicles; there are more telltale rocket craters. At some point, you know you're nearing the battle zone by the lines of television crews from around the world, setting up for the best shot of the hills and the Lebanese border. In an encampment of troops, hastily erected on a field, soldiers mill about, waiting to see if the ceasefire will hold.
Then, just over a hill, there is a battered "Welcome to Metulla" sign, leaning heavily to one side but still standing. Another sign points visitors to the Canada Centre, home of a swimming pool and Israel's only Olympic-sized hockey rink. And there are tanks: lined up along each side of the road, mixed in with armoured bulldozers, awaiting orders to pull back or move back in. The ridged pavement turns to dirt, torn up by heavy tracks, pounded down by army boots and army jeeps and heavy trucks.
It's a sad path for a part of the country that should right now be packed with tourists; the north, full of resilient kibbutzniks running get-back-to-nature retreats, is far more relaxed than religious Jerusalem or cosmopolitan Tel Aviv. In normal times, people are friendlier up here, and the pace of life slower. I stopped once to ask for directions and -- rather than the brushoff my pathetic Hebrew/English mix would get in Jerusalem -- the friendly driver of the pickup truck motioned for me to follow, then led me the kilometre or so to my destination.
But on my journey back down this same route this week, there was already hope of restoration. The drive slowed to a crawl in both directions, as cars made their way cautiously back up north, and the military machinery began moving back south, supply trucks and jeeps and tractor-trailers bearing enormous tanks making the treacherous climb back down through the hills.
I hope that soon, I'll be able to make a drive north that isn't connected to this conflict.
Dear Diary...
Dear Diary,
Sorry I’ve been remiss in writing these past few days. As you may have heard, peace – or something we hope is close to it – has broken out in south
We’ve only had five hours of electricity a day for the past little while here in
It’s not that I don’t care, Diary, I’ve just been busy. But I did mean to tell you about our trip down here.
I left
(Just fyi, I thought I had good reason for being a naysayer. I awoke at 6:18 a.m. that morning – 102 minutes before the ceasefire was supposed to begin – to the whistle of an Israeli naval shell that sounded, to my jolted-awake ears, like it had just cleared my hotel by a less-than-safe distance. We had gotten used to hearing bangs the past few weeks. They were okay, it meant the shell or missile had already landed. Whistles are far more unsettling.)
Anyway, we left the Commodore Hotel only at 10 a.m., two hours after the truce had taken hold. By then, we sensed it might be real. The problem is, a few hundred thousand refugees from south
Bruce and I jumped into a silver Mercedes, heading south in the company of our calm translator, Jamal, and our maniac driver, Ali Mahmoud. It was the beginning of a near nine-hour exodus.
Seeing the road was crammed with a slow-moving convoy of refugees with mattresses piled high on top of their cars, we decided to cut eastwards and upwards, taking a winding path through the
At
On the other side, we somehow secured a Maroon Oldsmobile 88 that looked sturdy despite the unblinking orange “Service Engine Soon” light on the dashboard. I asked Ali Mahmoud, who doesn’t read English, what he thought the light meant. He shrugged and accelerated around another batch of dawdling ex-refugees.
The south, like I said, is far from back to normal.
Still, it’s hard to find things like food and fuel down here. I’ve been living on candlelight meals of Happy Cow cheese, pita bread and Pepsi since I arrived. Gas for the car is $50 (
But compared to those who live in the towns around
I want to keep going, Diary, and to tell you about my day yesterday when I stood and watched – fighting hard not to cry or vomit – as Red Cross workers pulled 14 badly decomposed bodies from the rubble of a home in a place called Ainata. It was one of the most horrifying things I've ever witnessed.
I’m not sure I can, though. This time it’s me, not my computer, that lacks the energy.
So the cycle continues
I finally got the go-ahead from the Globe's driver Ashraf in Gaza – he of the seven children and hearty handshake – that ground military operations in part of the Strip seemed to have slowed, and so off I headed this week.
I didn't know quite what to expect, though I'd heard the devastation was great and the people more desperate than ever after nearly seven weeks of what Israel calls "Operation Summer Rains." I walked through the long, cavernous concrete tunnel at the Erez crossing into Gaza with my heart beating fast, wondering what I'd encounter on the other side, wondering if maybe I should have pulled that heavy flak jacket out of the back of the car after all. But as the little Globe team of three careened through Gaza's broken streets in Ashraf's trusty, aging Mercedes – press sign in the front, TV etched in masking tape on the back and missing its hood ornament after some kids in a refugee camp ripped it off – the skies stayed silent and the damage emerged.
What I found there shook me deeply. And it wasn't just the newly leveled buildings, the tank and bulldozer tracks and twisted bits of metal and torn cloth that remain of the greenhouses that were in their way, the extra donkey carts on the road because there's little fuel and less money to buy it, the sewer system on the brink of overflowing, the constant power outages, the teens in hospital wondering if they'll ever walk again. Nor was it just the fact that in a stretch of land with a population of 1.4 million, 1.04 million of them are living on UN handouts.
What is most frightening is the people themselves. Always before in Gaza, I've found people frustrated, but trusting that someday things have to get better -- "insh'allah" – God willing. But that belief is gone now. They're angry and desperate. They know that the return of young Gilad Shalit could stop the violence -- the Israelis have made that clear. Their children are dying. Their homes are being destroyed. Their cupboards are empty.
But they've already sunk so low that they have nothing left to lose. And they don't trust the West anymore, so they don't think Hamas should bend. So they're united almost to a person in saying that they should keep this 19-year-old until they get Palestinian women and children released from Israeli prisons. I talked to fathers and mothers, teenagers and old men, and they all said the same thing: They need to hold out to retain some shred of dignity.
And these aren't the hardline militants: They're regular people who go to the mosque on Friday, much as people in my hometown would go to church on Sunday; they try to put food on the table, improve their homes and raise their kids to be happy and productive adults. But they have completely run out of hope.
Like in Lebanon, where even ordinary average guys are now cheering on Hezbollah, in Gaza even those who once condemned the actions of militants are coming around. People need hope. And if there's no hope to be found in working and providing your family with a better life, because there is no work and no better life in sight and your kids scream at small noises and wet the bed at night, then people will turn to the only places they can find it. And in Gaza, right now the only hope they find is in the mosques, where the imams are preaching resistance, and in violence, no matter how futile it might be.
So the cycle continues. I no longer wonder if there will be peace here in my lifetime. I wonder if the same stories will be written generations from now instead.
My friends and their war
One of the great frustrations about covering any war is that it often becomes all about reporting the latest casualty figures and the latest faraway utterings from Condoleeza Rice. That’s the “news,” at least in a conventional sense.
For a change, I’d like to tell you the news about two friends of mine, and their war. What Ms. Rice has had to say has so far meant little to them other than prolonging what they’re going through.
Back when we started this blog (Three weeks ago? Four?), I introduced you to Musa, the 50-something chain-smoking father of seven who has been driving me around the country, keeping me safe in his battered brown Mercedes taxi.
His indefatigability, his sense of humour and his faith that some higher power is protecting him, his car and his passengers are contagious. We’ve kept each other’s spirits up on some long, dangerous drives. These days, however, it’s getting harder and harder to cheer him up.
Soon after the shooting started on July 12, Musa’s family home in the southern Lebanese town of Nabatiye was destroyed. Luckily, his relatives had already fled by then, and when they arrived in Beirut, they moved in with Musa. They were 23 people in a three-room apartment.
It was crowded, but it was safe. There were no bombs were falling on Shiyah, the packed neighbourhood on the outskirts of Beirut where Musa lived. Musa, as usual, just shrugged. “What can I do?” he told me with a shrug shortly after opening his home to so many people. “They are my family.”
Monday night, Musa’s apartment was badly damaged when an Israeli shell crashed into the building next door, annihilating the six-storey structure and killing 41 people.
Musa was fine, and none of his relatives were seriously hurt, but they’re on the move again. This time, they’ve moved in with some more relatives in another neighbourhood closer to central Beirut – four families to a five-room apartment. Musa’s still smiling, but the chain-smoking has hit a new level. His car is stuffed with empty packages of cigarettes.
Another friend and colleague is Hisham, a burly man in his late 30s who translates for me when I’m working in the besieged southern port of Tyre. When I left the city on Friday – deciding with my editors that I should pull back to Beirut to get the wider perspective for a few days – Hisham got depressed. “Mark, my friend,” he told me in his West African-accented English (he was born in Sierra Leone). “I have a feeling I’m not going to see you again.”
I promised him I’d be back Monday, three days ago, but then the Israelis destroyed the last link between Tyre and the north, a muddy trail through a banana patch. They’ve warned that any vehicle moving south of the Litani River – a shallow flow that is the natural boundary of south Lebanon – is liable to be targeted. Hisham tells me the threat seems to be a serious one, and has warned me against returning.
For the past few days, Hisham and I have kept in touch only by text messages we send between our mobile phones. He's single and usually, he likes to talk women and vodka first, war and politics a distant second.
These days, Hisham’s care-free side is gone, replaced by a creeping terror. The bombing of Tyre has been non-stop, he tells me, with shells falling closer and closer to his home. He too has pulled up stakes, and is now staying in the common area of the Rest House, one of two hotels still functioning in the city.
Like Musa, Hisham is a Shiite Muslim who had no love for Hezbollah when this war started. For Musa, it’s about not believing in politics or leaders anymore after men with big ideas destroyed this country during its long civil war. For Hisham, it’s simpler: radical Islam is simply anathema to the way he lives.
Both men now finds themselves cheering a bit when Hassan Nasrallah gives one of his speeches, or when they hear news that the Israeli army has lost soldiers fighting in the villages that surround Tyre.
Musa and Hisham think that Israel’s war on Hezbollah will end with the Islamic militia stronger and more influential than ever inside Lebanon. Both think that the country’s pro-Western leaders are now largely irrelevant.
"It's crazy here again tonight," Hisham wrote me in one recent message as bombs fell on Tyre. "When will this end?"
I wished I had an answer for him.
We are reminded daily how precious life is
A sample reconstruction of a typical phone conversation when partners in a marriage are on opposite ends of a major conflict:
"Hello?"
"Hello!"
"Hello?"
"Hi, can you hear me?"
"Hello?"
"It's ME! Hello? Can you hear me now?"
"Oh yeah. There you are. Hi! How is your day going?"
"Fine. Just back from up north. Noisy up there but it was OK. How are you doing? It looks pretty bad where you are."
"It was pretty bad last night. The Israelis were bombing the centre of the city again. Quieter now though. I just got back from a swim."
"You went swimming? In Tyre? Now, with the missiles falling and God knows what pollution in there? Ma-ark!"
"We figured it was the safest place to be!"
(Pause for sound of jets in the background. On his end, not mine, though the Israeli skies are also loud with warplanes heading to Lebanon and to Gaza to drop their missiles. My heart stops for a second. I pray there will be no explosion to deaden the line and leave me to my imagination).
"That sounds bad."
"No booms yet though. Hey, have you got the latest list from the army about where the Lebanese are being told to leave? Would be good to know when we're travelling in the villages tomorrow."
And so on, and so on, though the conversation is not so centred on work that the "I love you" at the end is forgotten.
In our travels abroad we have encountered many, many couples where both are journalists – probably because no one else could put up with our moodiness, our workaholic tendencies, our strange compulsions to see and report on things most people would stay away from.
These partnerships are not always easy. Anecdotally, at least, the divorce rate seems abnormally high. But such experiences also do much to wipe away the nagging and day-to-day annoyances that plague couples living more ordinary lives, because we are reminded daily how precious life is, how quickly everything a family has can be destroyed, how the only thing that matters, in the end, are the people you love.
And there is something incredibly reassuring about being able to talk to the one who knows you best about the strange and terrible things you've seen that day, and know that they understand -- even if it's over a crackly computer-to-mobile telephone line.
Will you tell people in Canada?
Beirut -- I took a bit of a down day today (don’t tell my editors), feeling that I needed a few hours of normalcy after what had been an exhausting stretch of travelling around first south Lebanon and then the Bekaa Valley in the east.
In the centre of Beirut, cafés and restaurants that were closed when I arrived here 23 days ago have re-opened, reflecting a growing confidence that neighbourhoods like this one are not targets of the Israeli war planes.
It was a bright, sunny afternoon, and I sat for a short while in my favourite sandwich joint and read newspapers, just like I used to when I was living and studying here. If not for the newspapers’ horrifying content – both the English-language The Daily Star and the French L’Orient Le Jour had front-page photos of dead children being pulled from the rubble of destroyed buildings – it could have been the Beirut that I used to know and love.
But even without the media, there’s no escaping the war anywhere here. After doing a few interviews and some errand-running, I returned to my hotel room to check my e-mail. Soon after I settled in, a tall, thin man with a neat goatee knocked at my door.
“Are you a journalist?” he asked, clearly shaken by something. It was a member of the cleaning staff whom I’d nodded at and said good morning to several times. I didn’t know him any better than that.
I told him yes and, unbidden, he started telling me his story.
“They destroyed my building two days ago,” he said, referring to Israeli war planes. The apartment block was in Harat Hreik, a once-populous Shiite Muslim suburb on the southern edge of Beirut that has been completely flattened by air strikes. When I visited there two weeks ago, the roads were covered in rubble. Even then, there were few buildings still standing.
“There were just 10 buildings left, and then they came back and bombed them too,” he said. His voice was flat, but his face wobbled to keep the pleasant hotel-staff smile in place. “The whole building just fell down.”
No one was hurt because everyone had long since evacuated, he said, which made Israel’s decision to attack it even more puzzling for him.
“We were all civilians in this building, nobody that had anything to do with this war. I lived on the fifth floor with my family. On the fourth floor there was a lawyer. On the third floor was a doctor, a surgical doctor. On the second floor was my cousins, even younger than me, and their families. They were living with their mother, an accountant. On the first floor was just an old man with his family.”
These days the 24-year-old university student lives where he works, staying in one of the empty rooms here at the Commodore Hotel, which just as it did during Lebanon’s long civil war has done an admirable job of staying open and serving its picky foreign guests despite the bombs, the power cuts and the mounting shortages.
The money he earns cleaning rooms helps pay for food for his father, who is living with other relatives, and for his mother and sister, who have fled to the safety of Jordan. When the war is over, he said, “we’ll have to start all over again.”
He had a favour to ask of me. “Will you write down what happened? Will you tell people in Canada?” he asked me. I promised him that I would.
He told me his name, but asked me not to print it because he didn’t want his cousins who live in Toronto to worry about him or feel sorry for him.
I won’t use his name, but I think his cousins should worry about him and his father anyway. And this country that is being dismantled by a war so few of its people want.
On the road with Hezbollah
Beirut – These days, you don’t find Hezbollah, they find you.
Even when travelling through the battlefield cities of southern Lebanon, you don’t see the well-armed Islamic militia that Israel is fighting. Just weaponless men on motorcycles who follow you at a distance.
Sometimes they pull up alongside you and ask you who you are and where you are going. They consult by walkie-talkie with someone you can’t see and then, usually, they let you go on your way. They do the interviewing, not you.
Sometimes, colleagues of mine have been told they can’t travel any further on a specific road. Some have been detained for short periods, something that has terrifying potential considering Hezbollah’s habit of kidnapping journalists during the latter stages of Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war.
It wasn’t always this way.
As it moved into politics after the civil war ended, Hezbollah set up a sophisticated media-relations department that was run out of an office in the southern suburbs of Beirut, a building that has now been reduced to rubble by an Israeli air strike.
Foreign journalists would be ushered into the building and be served tea under a giant portrait of Iran’s ayatollah Ruhollah Khomaini while we waited for meetings with Hezbollah’s politicians and spiritual leaders. As a colleague of mine once joked, it was far better than when they used to chain our lot to radiators.
But even then, reminders would surface of the kind of organization you were dealing with. Last year, while attending a Hezbollah rally in the now-flattened town of Bint Jbeil, I was asked to hand over my digital camera for inspection, since Hassan Nasrallah, the movement’s leader, was going to be speaking and security was tight. It was returned a short while later, and I initially thought nothing of it.
A few days later, in Cairo airport, I was pulled aside and interrogated by security staff about where my camera had been. It was covered in explosive dust, they told me, meaning that whoever had handled my camera in Bint Jbeil had also been engaged in bomb-making.
Even in times of relative peace, it seemed, the Party of God was getting ready for war.
Re-visiting a caravan town
I drove down to the idyllic shores of Nitzanim beach, a little north of Ashkelon on Israel's southern Mediterranean shores, this week. Sometime along the way I realized the last time I drove this exact route was just about one year ago.
Nitzanim beach, presently a holding ground for about 5,500 people who've fled rocket attacks in the north, is also home to Nitzan-2, the caravan town that would eventually become home to a few thousand of the Gaza settlers uprooted when Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlements from the Strip last summer.
At the time, the complaining was endless about this new little community: the caravans – essentially prefabricated houses, with tidy yellow paint and clay tile roofs – were too small. The yards were too small. Everyone was too close together. Of course, the problem really was that even though their Gaza settlements were illegal under international law, even though their homes and personal well-being were constantly threatened by the Palestinian militant groups around them and even though their children went to school in armoured vehicles with army escorts, they just didn't want to leave home. Particularly for those whose home was a sprawling ranch-style house with a view of the sea, built for cheap with seemingly endless tax breaks.
So, one year on, I took a short detour on my way down to the beach camp, just to see what had transpired since then. The construction is complete now; those roads that were not much more than hard-packed sand have been turned into smooth pavement. Streets are named; one neighbourhood is even re-named Neve Dekalim, after the largest of the Gaza settlements.
But what struck me most was those tidy yellow houses, which a year ago people were telling me were wrong in every possible way, have obviously been accepted as home, at least for the interim. People have built elaborate porches, created flower gardens and planted trees. Kids on bicycles pedal through the quiet neighbourhood streets; teenagers are hanging out, fiddling with their mobile phones and flirting. On the edge of town, a small crowd is looking to hitchhike to the beach, which is just a few hundred metres away over the sand dunes.
And while the occasional orange ribbon – the symbol of last summer's anti-withdrawal movement – is still visible, there are Israeli flags everywhere. A group of people that, one year ago, was cursing the state now appears to be very much behind it as the country takes on a new battle.
Caught in the crossfire
Tyre, Lebanon - This is what it’s like to still be in Tyre, the largest city in south Lebanon right now.
For hours on end, you listen to the high-pitched drone of Israeli spy planes above you. It’s inescapable. Whether you’re inside a building or outside on the street, the whine of unmanned aircraft is south Lebanon’s constant and irritating soundtrack right now.
Forced to listen, you wonder how the camera in the sky sees you. You hope you look benign. Sleep comes in broken chunks.
Every now and again, a thunderous explosion echoes though town as something that didn’t look benign enough is hit from above and disappears in a cloud of smoke.
Often, you wonder what there is left for the Israeli warplanes to target in this deserted port city. Eighty per cent of the pre-war population of 120,000 has already left.
This afternoon, we got a reminder of what brought the Israelis here. As I sat on the porch of a home I’m renting in the Christian quarter of Tyre along with Newsweek’s Babak Dehghanpisheh, we were startled by a closer-than-usual boom. We looked up to see four vapour trails streaking through the sky. As we watched, two more projectiles took off, likely Katyusha rockets heading for Israel.
As we braced for the response, which was predictably harsh, Babak and I were just two more civilians caught in the crossfire, as unable as any here to control our fates.
Witness: Mideast
Eyewitness: Middle East is a diary-style blog from the Globe's correspondents in the region that describes what they are seeing, hearing and experiencing during the current crisis. Are you in the region? Use the comment function on the blog to tell us what you are seeing. Some reader submissions may be posted as separate blog entries.
Blogroll
- MarketsBlog
- Nobody's Business
- Adam Radwanski
- Streetwise
- The Office
- Blogolitics
- Monday Manager
- Kapica's Cyberia
- Globe on Baseball
- Recommended Links
- Ingram 2.0
- IT Security
- L.A. Diary
- Reguly in Europe
- Globe on Hockey
- Inside Energy
Latest Blog Posts
- MarketsBlog
- Markets post 1 per cent gains at noon
- Nobody's Business
- New York Times goes dock-hopping in Ontario
- Adam Radwanski
- Doing his own dirty work
- Streetwise
- Stelco takeover boosts steelmaker's pension fund, lenders
- The Office
- A (fictional) battle for office supremacy
- Blogolitics
- Dept. Of Lawsuits: Acquittals & Appeals
- Monday Manager
- Marketing: Are you sure you're ready to extend your brand?
- Kapica's Cyberia
- The funny papers migrate
- Globe on Baseball
- MacLeod: Jays-A's finale
- Recommended Links
- Take a few lessons from Lindsay
