Realities of Mideast conflict hit home on visit to relatives

JERUSALEM – While traveling in Israel, it was impossible to miss the news last Wednesday that eight Israeli soldiers had been killed and two abducted. People talked about it everywhere, in hushed and shocked voices.

We had seen groups of soldiers around Jerusalem, many on educational tours. They looked painfully young – 18- and 19-year-old men and women, all in uniform and carrying guns. Mandatory military service means that the armed forces essentially consist of everyone’s children – they are the teenagers of this country. Virtually every family has someone serving, someone who has served or someone who will serve. So news about harm to soldiers is taken personally.

It would become even more personal as the conflict escalated. We were headed for Haifa, a bustling port, high-tech and university city on the northern coast. Haifa is Israel’s third-largest city and known as a place where Christians, Muslims and Jews long have lived side by side in peace. We looked forward to visiting relatives who are studying there this summer and seeing the sights, but things changed quickly. Already, Hezbollah militants in Lebanon had been firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel towns like Nasiriyah and Tsfat, and they were threatening to “bombard” Haifa.

Though there are community bomb shelters and every house built since 1991 has a “m’mahd,” or protected safe room, Haifa hasn’t had an air-raid alert in 30 years. But after just one night there, about 9 a.m. the air-raid sirens sounded. We had been warned that if they did, it meant there was one minute to get into a protected space. We rushed into the m’mahd – a cramped, hot storage closet in the center of my relatives’ home in Qiryat Tivon, a pleasant, leafy suburb just one hill back from Haifa city.

There we huddled, three rambunctious little boys and three adults, reading “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” aloud and listening to several loud, dull thumps and about five soundings of the air-raid siren.

We emerged after an hour, only to have another siren send us scurrying back in.

In the relative calm that followed, we all packed up and headed south after seeing the awful news on the Internet that eight people had been killed in Haifa.

Traffic was heavy, but still moving. We convoyed to Tel Aviv and stopped for lunch, and it seemed another world – busy city streets, carefree vacationers. We continued on to Jerusalem, back to where we had come from.

Today the newspaper is warning of possible strikes on Tel Aviv. This seems unlikely, but never before have Hezbollah rockets from the north penetrated as far into the country as Haifa. Since we left, more rockets have fallen there, and some farther south in Afula and Nazareth. Tourists have been ordered to evacuate the Sea of Galilee area, and rocket strikes have hit the ancient city of Tiberius.

People here say sadly that they don’t think this will end anytime soon.