Letter From Beersheva

Faye Bittker is a friend of mine, as she is a friend of my daughter's, both of whom work in the administration of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Faye has been a journalist and I asked her for impressions of the crisis that affects all Israeli families living within range of the prolonged rocket attacks by Hamas. She responded with this account:

There are those who would say "the first casualty of war is truth," and there are even those who would say that what Israel is currently undergoing is not a war.

Whatever the case, I am here in Beersheva -- on the "almost" frontlines of the conflict with Hamas -- to tell you the first thing to go when missiles start to fall nearby, is your diet. It could be the chemical high of the carbohydrates, or maybe the immediate kick of the sugar. It might even be the emotional pleasure of indulging in the chocolate in a guilt-free environment.

But my first-hand experience has proven that when sirens are screaming, particularly if it is the second or third alarm in less than an hour, there is nothing more calming than a bite of fudge-filled chocolate cookie. Particularly when shared with the random gathering of strangers in the nearest bomb shelter.

Maybe it is different for people who are alone with the families in their residential "safe room," but since I have spent most of the last two weeks at my office at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in the heart of Beersheva, I have studied the group dynamics of public shelters. All the more so as my office is on the ground floor, so each new alarm brings in a different collection of random passersby.

For even the toughest among us (and I am pretty tough), find it hard to maintain the stoic façade when faced with a child crying loudly in the arms of his panting father who has just done the 100 yard dash to the safe room, or the woman hunched in the corner with tears streaming down her face because she "heard the boom." I have found myself passing out chocolate and cookies, jokes and silly stories. Anything to distract us all from the brutal reality that someone really is trying to kill us.

And not just the immediate "us," but the hundreds of thousands of residents in the cities of Beersheva, Ashkelon and Ashdod, and towns like Sderot, Gedera and everyone else in between. Tens of Israelis have lost their lives or been injured with 20-25 rockets, sometimes 50 falling every day.

According to my understanding of the world, it shouldn't be this way. Israel left the Gaza Strip over three years ago, offering the Palestinians an opportunity to determine their own future. Unfortunately they chose Hamas, a party that advocates Islamic fundamentalism and a commitment to fight for the destruction of Israel. This agenda can only bring death and destruction as Israel is not going to go away. Nor will we average Israelis accept a reality where the Palestinians can shower a region with missiles and go unscathed.

The Home Front Command has closed all the local sports centers, closed the schools and canceled all afternoon activities. My children are now happily turning themselves into couch potatoes aware that no one will tell them to go outside and play. They are second-generation missile-dodgers: I met my husband in a sealed room during the first Gulf War.

Let me say loud and clear: my neighbors and I are willing to pack on a few pounds if it will mean the ultimate destruction of Hamas' ability to shoot missiles at us. We are willing to sit in our safe room until the threat of missiles has been eradicated once and for all.

Do not let the images on the news confuse you. Yes, there is genuine suffering in Gaza. And despite the early warning and humanitarian relief offered by the Israeli Army, many innocent civilians are suffering. But it was the Hamas movement that chose to smuggle in weapons and ammunition to the Gaza Strip when they could have been supplying food, education, and health care to their people, developing their economy and working towards building a future for themselves instead of towards our destruction.

But you don't have to worry about my diet: now that the news has gotten truly bad, with the unnecessary loss of lives of soldiers and innocent civilians and missiles that just keep coming - I am losing my appetite every time I watch the news. I hope this is all over before I develop an eating disorder!

Comments

[xxnounxx]

10:45 PM on 01/09/2009

oh i forgot to mention drinking our own unrine

[xxnounxx]

10:45 PM on 01/09/2009

look stay in your shelter and dont give up on the hot fudge or brownie your enjoying,if you want i can teill you in systematic details what it feels to be bombed let alone being close to it.
maybe you should have been inside gaza.or my home in south lebanon,sitting underground car parks with dead bodies,around you for a couple of days..i will tell you,the smell of those dead bodies with their guts and brains all over the place is nothing to wish on even your worst enemy.

[Donatella]

11:57 AM on 01/09/2009

“Israel left the Gaza Strip over three years ago, offering the Palestinians an opportunity to determine their own future. Unfortunately they chose Hamas, a party that advocates Islamic fundamentalism and a commitment to fight for the destruction of Israel.”

The self-serving delusion of this person is almost beyond belief. But I’m sure the Africaners in aparteid South Africa felt that the blacks should have been happy with their lot in life and the same for Germans regarding the people in the Warsaw Ghetto.

It seems that the Israelis drank the coolaid and now believe everything their government says. Israel never “left the Gaza Strip”, they are the jail keepers and continue their seige and assasinate any opposition. You are against Hamas because they support Islamic fundamentalism but that is total hypocracy because Israel’s policies are motivated by radical Jewish fundamentalism and exceptionalism.

[tdbk]

04:34 PM on 01/11/2009

This is what they call "the big lie". As Goebbels said: repeat a lie often enough and people will believe it. Radical Islamofascists have intentions identical to the Nazis: killing of Jews. To suggest otherwise is purely and simply a "big lie."

Israel has an active and vibrant free press - dissent is tolerated - in every part of its society. Including the several million Israeli Arabs who attend Israeli universities, vote in Israeli elections, serve in the Knesset ... Name a single Muslim society that tolerates dissent of any kind. So to suggest that Israelis blindly support their government is either naive or a big lie. Unfortunately for the Jew haters out there, whether they like it or not, the vast majority of Israelis and Jews do support the current Israeli government's actions. And when it comes down to it - don't care what the world thinks about it. They'd rather be safe and secure than popular.

The current situation in Gaza would be over in 3 seconds if Hamas would stop sending rockets into Israel. Unfortunately, Hamas and their supporters (Iran, Hizbullah, naive Western lefttists, Jew haters everywhere) don't love their own children as much as they hate Jews and Israel. Very sad for the people of Gaza ...

[chaos4700]

05:22 PM on 01/11/2009

Actually, last time I checked the Hamas charter, they only want to do away with the Israeli government. They say nothing about wanting to exterminate the Jews wholesale.

[doriath22]

11:30 AM on 01/09/2009

Gee, if only those oppressors inside the Gaza ghetto had safe rooms, or chocolate, or even a reliable source of water. Rough as it may be to be on the receiving end of those rockets, I'll bet any of the children getting bombed by the IDF would GLADLY switch places with yours

[courtb]

08:54 PM on 01/09/2009

Gee, if only those oppressors inside Gaza had a government that built them safe rooms or provided them with chocolates and safe water..oh wait, they squandered international money and smuggling tunnels on weapons! Just think, those 3,000 rockets that fell on Israel in 2008, how many people could that have fed in Gaza instead?

[cinemaven]

09:57 AM on 01/09/2009

It's hard to imagine the lives of people living on either side of this conflict so thank you for a detailed look at the life of an Israeli living in the war zone.

For contrast, there is an excellent blog by a Canadian in Gaza. She blogs each day and has dramatic photos and stories from her perspective. http://ingaza.wordpress.com/
Yesterday, she told the story (and posted pictures) of the Deeb family. The pictures show the front of their home destroyed and you can see the dough laid out ready for baking. The Deeb's home was their shelter and " When the missile struck, it killed her (Amal Deeb, in her 30's) and 9 others in the extended-family house, including 2 boys and 3 girls. Another 4 were injured, one having both legs amputated."

"Let me say loud and clear: my neighbors and I are willing to pack on a few pounds if it will mean the ultimate destruction of Hamas' ability to shoot missiles at us. We are willing to sit in our safe room until the threat of missiles has been eradicated once and for all."

I have such honest sympathy for you and your neighbors and the terror you must go through each time a siren goes off but your comment makes it clear that you have so little empathy for what is going on across your border. It's not missiles being eradicated....

[jotunloki]

08:59 PM on 01/10/2009

Hamas is not firing missiles at anyone in Gaza. If you are going to quote total fabrications, you might want to pay attention to facts at least a little. Israel is the only one killing anyone in Gaza.
P.S. I'm Jewish.

[jeffepops]

08:32 PM on 01/24/2009

What does your being Jewish have to do with anything?
And, if you really follow events in the MIddle East, you would know that many of the Hamas launched rockets have landed within Gaza; recently two young Palestinian girls were killed by one of them. It was reported widely. Also, infighting between Hamas and Fatah factions in Gaza have also been responsible for hundreds, if no thousands of casualties, including non-combatants.

[LillianB]

03:01 AM on 01/09/2009

I understand very well how this is a young woman living near the border's view. I wouldn't have wanted to switch lives with her for a minute, and I hope she will be leading a more peaceful life short time from now, free of fear. But I find it hard to sympathize for her diet. The contrast between flippantly overeating chocolate due to fear and to have hardly no food at all due to a three-year long blockade under the name of "withdrawal" is stark and telling. That she doesn't know (or care) about the living conditions her Gazan neighbors are living under is very telling too, it gives the rest of us a grand picture of how the Israeli media covers the situation, not just for now, but for years.

[cincyr]

12:37 AM on 01/09/2009

While I sympathize with the terror that Israelis are living with from the rockets, it does not justify the killing of hundreds of innocent women and children in Gaza who have no "safe room" and no chocolate to comfort them.

[LillianB]

05:09 AM on 01/09/2009

When I first read the quote leading to this article, "the first thing to go is your diet", I though it was about starvation and hunger, and that I had been wrong to think that only Palestinians were starving in the areas. I thought "Oh, dear, why isn't anyone telling us that the Israeli settlers starve too, and that their food supplies are also cut off due to the situation?". Then I read the blog itself, realizing it was about overeating.

Contrast is telling. Whereas no sane person would wish to live under the conditions of the woman telling her story, whereas I can sympathize with her fear and her wish for a better life for her children, the conditions her Gazan neighbors and their children are living under are so much worse. And not just for the last two weeks - food supplies have been cut off regularly during the three plus years since Israeli troops "withdrew" from the area.

[Lon]

04:38 PM on 01/09/2009

Good catch. You do kind of get the contrast from the fact that Gazans problem is not having enough to eat while the Israeli problem is eating too much chocolate.

And you get the sense of how people are glued into their own side and missing the other that someone could write that non-ironically while the Palestinians starve.

[Lon]

04:38 PM on 01/08/2009

What is described here is very sad. But, of course it is not as sad as the situation in Gaza for the last 3 years. The author being quoted thinks that people in her situation deserve the right to punish the people who create her situation. But she obviously does not feel the same about Palestinians in worse situations.

The worst bit of the column is her claim "Israel left the Gaza Strip over three years ago, offering the Palestinians an opportunity to determine their own future"

But no country can determine their own future when they have no control of their borders. While one is sympathetic to her situation, this is just idiocy. Israel did not pull out of Gaza to give the Palestinians an opportunity to determine their future. It pulled out of Gaza because it was too costly to stay and they could maintain a stranglehold on Gaza without having to maintain settlements inside of Gaza.

Does she really think that Palestinians in Gaza on hearing her situation would feel sympathy rather than envy?

[akhajawall]

03:54 PM on 01/08/2009

To all concerned

" All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is people, politicians, and political leaders around the world either stay mum or shift the blame onto oppressed, occupied, and tormented"
What Israel is doing in the name of security onto impoverished and victimized Palestinians is a solid and ultimate State Sponsored Terrorism and same is true about India who has turned divided Kashmir into massive concentration camp on the Top of World.
As a naturalized Kashmir born American Citizen, disabled American Veteran and Forensic psychiatrist, I plead to my current president, Hon. President Bush to stop all aid to Israel and freeze the any relationship with India.
I suggest to incoming president elect, Hon. Barrack Obama to appoint outgoing president as special envoy to permanently, peacefully and amicably solve Israel-Palestinian Conflict and Hon. former President Bill Clinton to erase the line of conflict [LOC] between the divided people of Kashmir.
Yours truly,
COL. A.M.Khajawall [Ret]
Las Vegas NV USA