the human picture

The foreign press, which has flooded the world with images of damage in Beirut, has largely sidelined pictures of war damage in Israel - despite the thousands of missiles and rockets that have rained down on northern Israel and caused massive damage to buildings, vehicles, and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of trees. As a tentative ceasefire appeared to take hold Monday morning, CNN reported on the "thousands of refugees (who) poured back into southern Lebanon, trying to return home." There was, however, no coverage given in the report to the hundreds of thousands of displaced Israelis in central and southern Israel, who are waiting to go back to their own homes in northern Israel - over 5,000 of which have been destroyed.

In the background, the radio, which has tried valiantly to distract us from what's happening, by telling us news… is interrupted every few minutes by civil defense announcements telling the residents of different cities in our dear country to go immediately to the bomb shelter. Oy vey, just now we hear that two soldiers were killed today. Bad news indeed, but that is war. Whatever program is on is interrupted by a very solemn announcer who reads the message, which usually includes a list of cities, 5,6,8, sometimes 10 names of different cities… and the residents there must immediately take shelter from the ketusha rockets. These are people we can relate to… people who seem very dear to us when we see them on tv… over a million people who have been stuck in bomb shelters for over a month. The pleasure is beginning to wear. Yesterday, another announcement of two people in Acre who were killed in a car when hit by a rocket was soon enlarged to include 7 people killed in the streets, and 3 soldiers dead. But that is just part of the story. There are also all the wounded, some of whom won't get back to normal for years. Just a couple of days ago I saw a musician who'd had his legs blown away. In the beginning they didn't broadcast each rocket warning; there were just the sirens that wailed through the specific cities, but then there were numerous occasions when people got hurt because they didn't hear the sirens because they had the windows closed and they were listening to the radio or something like that, and now they've started broadcasting rocket alerts by way of the radio too. It puts us all in the war mood. It is quite sad. It is quite sad to think that after three weeks of pounding them, the rockets are still falling. But that's the way it was for the British too in WWII .

Yesterday was the day when we mourn the destruction of the holy temple twice. And today is the anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Gush Katif last year, and I remember myself sitting in front of the TV set in horror for days and watching the Jews forced out of their homes, and getting on buses that would take them away, and afterwards the homes destroyed with bulldozers, and synagogues and libraries and schools. Now the whole country is suffering, just as we thought and warned because we knew that this would be a great encouragement for our enemy. The bleeding hearts among us, the leftist optimists told us that the Arabs would build sky scrapers where our brothers and sisters had evacuated and would continue to garden vegetables and flowers like the Jews had done. But it didn't work that way and soon they were using the now newly occupied villages to sent rockets at the innocent people in the Negev cities. It happened so fast.

The rockets are coming down. I haven't done any photography for about a month. In Hebrew, we say, the muses grow silent when the canon roars. It's like a giant depression. Some of us help others; some of us keep on with their work. But no matter what we do, the war creeps into our consciousness and weighs heavy on our hearts.

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From http://judeoscope.ca/article.php3?id_article=0429

In a letter to the editor of the Berlin left-wing daily Die Tageszeitung (TAZ) a Lebanese Shia explains how after Israel's withdrawal from South Lebanon, Hezbollah stored rockets in bunkers in his town and built a school and residence over it.

I lived until 2002 in a small southern village near Mardshajund that is inhabited by a majority of Shias like me. After Israel left Lebanon, it did not take long for Hezbollah to have its say in other towns. Received as successful resistance fighters and armed to the teeth, they stored rockets in bunkers in our town as well. The social work of the Party of God consisted of building a school and a residence over these bunkers! A local sheikh explained to me laughing that the Jews would lose in any event because the rockets would either be fired at them or if they attacked the rockets depots, they would be condemned by world opinion on account of the dead civilians. These people do not care about the Lebanese population, they use them as shields, and, once dead, as propaganda. As long as they continue existing there, there will be no tranquility and peace.

Dr. Mounir Herzallah

Berlin-Wedding

(translated from the German by David Ouellette)