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ISRAEL: UP CLOSE and PERSONAL  Israeli tanks in Palestinian village in earlier fighting |
The siege in Haifa creates
severe psychological erosion
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Columnist Kinney Littlefield has just returned from Israel, where she accompanied her life partner for a visit with his ailing mother. She wound up in the midst of the rising tide of violence there. This is her second report. |
By KINNEY LITTLEFIELD
of TheColumnists.com
HAIFA, ISRAEL
Suddenly, sirens--coming closer. Suddenly, silence in the crowded
office where my partner’s mother and I have gone to pay
her medical bills.
“It’s a bomb--they bombed a bus,” the man standing next to me says tensely in Hebrew. I can’t tell whether he knows or is guessing. A clerk behind the service counter bursts into tears.
The man is right. This is the day that 10 people die and many more are injured in the suicide bombing of a crowded city bus by a Palestinian sympathizer. Such a sick soul, this terrorist. Blow yourself to glory and take some Israelis with you, why not? How horribly facile his suicide seems.
Meanwhile Israeli missiles strafe Gaza and other parts of Palestinian-governed territory in retribution, heaping more rubble on an already ruined Palestinian infrastructure.
So goes my “vacation” in Israel, where I have gone with my significant other to be with his ailing mother.
But you know as well as I that there is no “vacation” in violence-wracked Israel these days.
As we stand in line in the medical office, rescue teams race and sirens moan. Almost immediately a reinforced gate blocks off part of the building, a security precaution since the bombing was only a few blocks away. We must now wait interminably to pay and have a prescription filled.
Suddenly, another jolt. Someone notices two gray plastic bags plopped by the building’s front entrance. A security guard is summoned. The bags turn out to be someone’s shopping--potatoes and oranges.
But you never know.
You don’t know if you will walk down the wrong street today. My partner’s niece avoids a bombing by five minutes. Miraculously, his mother’s cleaning woman still has a husband. On this same day the husband misses his usual bus, the one that is twisted and torn by the suicide bomb as if it were a child’s toy.
“So what will you take back with you?” a young man asks of my experience in Israel.
My skin prickles with grim sensations. In Haifa--where Jews, Muslim Arabs and Christian Arabs had lived closely and relatively safely until the recent terrorist attacks--life feels hunched and gray.
No one smiles on the street. Hope and the economy have gone sour. Tourists once bolstered Israel’s economy. Now, they do not come.
This is the price of waging war against terrorism in a scrappy country where land is everything. Where both Arabs and Jews have ancient blood claims and there is not enough land to go around. Where Israel’s government could be toppled if it tries to force Jewish settlers to give up Palestinian land annexed after the Six Day War.
“Oh, Israel is always like that,” Americans tell me disgustedly, sick of the endless headlines about Israeli tanks and Palestinian children throwing stones.
But no. Life is worse now. Random death is terrible enough but it is in the small things that the toll of terrorism is measured.
People do not linger on the crowded commercial streets of the upper section of Haifa called Hadar. No café-sitting. No talk of movies or shopping or books.
“There is no sense of aesthetics,” my partner says, of the land where he lived for 20 years.
Nice neighborhoods are not kept clean. It is celebration enough that social services and systems work.
Meanwhile crafty Palestinian Yassir Arafat, more soldier than statesman, and Israel’s hard-line leader Ariel Sharon play a terrible game of death that will only destroy both camps unless it is stopped. And whether Arafat has the clout and will to snuff Palestinian extremists--including followers of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Liberation Front--is dubious.
In Haifa I see the psychological erosion of the siege each day I walk out the door. I see it in the hard eyes of the baker who takes my money for bread, then drops the change on the table, staring disconnectedly.
I find little daily grace here, in a land whose terrain is so ruggedly magnificent. Land that Palestinians and Israelis alike must learn to share--or inevitable annihilation of the spirit will ensue.
© 2001 by Kinney Littlefield.
The Littlefield caricature is © 2001 by Jim Hummel.
You
can comment on this column or contact Kinney Littlefield with
an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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