Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Isreal and Lebanon have more in commmon than they would admit... they both have lost a lot
Israel: 'To Be or Not to Be'
For many Israelis, this was not the war they expected. But for six years, the writing has been on the wall, they say - it’s about their survival.
By Kevin Sites, Wed Aug 23, 5:16 PM ET
Note: To wrap up his coverage of the war between " type="hidden"> SEARCH
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The border
This, theoretically, is what this whole war is about: the border, the so-called blue line between Israel and Lebanon. It is, of course, not blue at all, but a double-thick chain link fence topped with concertina wire.
The fence, I learn later, is electric, but not electrified. It's an important distinction. Electrified means it will shock me if I touch it. Electric means it has electric sensors attached that will let monitors know when someone tries to climb it, cut it or blast through it.
I'm with my fixer, Haggit, a freelance Tel Aviv television producer. We both just stare at it. It is, we both seem to think, somewhat remarkable. On the side where we stand, in Metulla, Israel, there are groves of green apples and reddish nectarines.
On the Lebanese side there are some buildings and houses, including one that is now nothing more than a pile of rubble.
Hezbollah's flag flies just across the
border from Israel
Also, from several lampposts and buildings, flapping in a strong breeze, is the yellow and green flag of Hezbollah with its now-familiar logo of an outstretched Kalashnikov rifle. There is also a single Lebanese flag and several posters of Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.
Haggit has two brothers in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) — one who is active duty and fighting in Lebanon and another who is in a reserve artillery unit that was called up and is now based here in northern Israel.
"I'm really surprised," she says, "to see those flags flying right on the border."
It does seem strange to me too, that the IDF would leave them alone. But this spot, aside from the sound of Israeli artillery and Hezbollah rockets arcing overhead, seems almost completely abandoned.
We cannot stop staring as we walk along the fence line. I joke with Haggit that I'll climb over and get her one of the Hezbollah flags. But then we discover climbing won't be necessary. Here, in front of us, is a large gaping hole cut through both fences.
* * *
Ticket to Tel Aviv
I have traveled through Amman's Queen Alia International Airport dozens of times in transit to places of conflict. It was always my final stop before heading into the maelstrom of violence that was and, unfortunately, still is, " type="hidden"> SEARCH
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Most times the procedure is routine. This time, however, at least for me, it feels very different.
I've just returned from reporting from south Lebanon and now I'm heading to cover the other side of the story: Israel.
With so many Lebanese taking refuge in Jordan from the war, anti-Israeli emotions here are particularly high.
Jordan and Israel signed a peace deal in 1994. They have diplomatic relations and until recently, Israeli tourists traveled to Jordan to visit Petra or the Sinai in Egypt. But while Royal Jordanian Airlines still flies to Tel Aviv, few Israelis are making the trip, realizing they might be less than welcome.
We knew this process to take this short journey, a 45-minute flight, was going to be uncomfortable. Passing through the first security point, the guards, I know, always ask where you are going.
"Tel Aviv," I say softly, hoping not to arouse the attention of fellow passengers behind me. The guard just looks at my passport and raises his eyebrows before handing it back to me.
Because of all the technical equipment I carry, I'm always yellow-carded by airport security screeners who also ask me where I'm going. While one of the officers goes through my bag, I await the question and what I will assume will be a lengthy interrogation and dissection of my gear once I say, "Tel Aviv."
But after a cursory shuffling of items from one compartment to another he gets distracted and waves me through. A rare, small gift from the travel gods.
I still have to pick up my prepaid ticket at the Royal Jordanian ticket counter, though, and instead of saying my destination I simply hand the woman behind the glass partition my passport and confirmation numbers. After inputting the keystrokes on the computer, she prints out the ticket and finally looks at it.
"Tel Aviv?" she asks loudly. "Tel Aviv!" I just nod as she tosses the ticket onto the counter near my open hand.
There aren't any incidents at immigration and I walk to my gate and sit with the others waiting to board — a group of Korean Christians and young adult Israelis returning from a trip to Asia. But as I board the plane, the flight attendant looks at me scornfully and will not return my greeting.
After the flight, at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, I get flagged for additional questioning at immigration. I knew this would happen, as it usually does here. My American passport is filled with entry and exit visas to Iraq. Because of the mix of civilian and military flights I've taken there, the stamps don't always match.
The Israelis are quick to spot them, but after a short Q&A session with a more senior officer, I'm cleared to go.
* * *
Proportionality, asymmetry
Two words, common in diplomacy, have now entered the mainstream lexicon: proportionality and asymmetry.
This is their application in this war, first in the form of a commonly asked question: Is Israel's all-out offensive in response to Hezbollah's cross-border raid, kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and killing others, proportional? The second application is a concept. This is an asymmetrical conflict in which a state, Israel, is fighting a conventional war against a guerilla force, Hezbollah, armed and supplied by other states, " type="hidden"> SEARCH
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These words have particular significance as well, for news organizations covering this conflict. Is our coverage response proportional to this asymmetrical conflict?
Rockets batter Kiryat Shemona; Israeli firefighters battle blazes » View
Most large media companies have reporters on both sides of the border simultaneously, allowing their coverage to ping-pong back and forth from one front line to the other.
The Hot Zone has only me to cover both, so I must do them one at a time. And then the question becomes, how much time or how many stories for each side? While I was in Lebanon, many readers responded with seething e-mails about the "one-side reporting" from Lebanon. Why, they asked, weren't we showing the Israeli side? Similarly, as I begin reporting from Israel, readers ask me how I can cover a grass fire started by a Katyusha rocket in northern Israel when southern Lebanon was being turned into rubble.
Surely, there is no question that a civilian death is no more or less tragic when caused by Israeli air strikes than Hezbollah rockets. But the real dilemma for myself and other journalists is, how do we factor the numbers in?
Should Lebanon get more coverage because that is where the most deaths and injuries occurred, as well as the majority of structural damage? Or, in war, are all things equal as far coverage of opposing forces?
To me, the answer is elusive while its pursuit is dizzying.
It was extremely difficult to see the death and destruction caused on the Lebanese side by Israeli air strikes and artillery. To see children killed or maimed by the world's most high-tech weaponry is not a lasting image I would wish on anyone.
Also, Lebanon, as a nation, seemed to have turned a corner away from its history of conflict and was headed toward renewed peace and prosperity before the fighting started.
But now, here in Israel, it's just as easy to see the fear, death and injury caused by ball-bearing laden Hezbollah Katyusha rockets, fired haphazardly by the hundreds at civilian population centers, forcing people here, just like in Lebanon, to huddle in shelters or flee to safer ground.
This evening a Katyusha has struck a high school in the Israeli border city of Kiryat Shimona. It is, according to the school's principal, the third time the school has been hit, although no one has been injured there yet.
Proportional? Asymetrical? The terms mean little to the majority of Israelis, who according to most polls supported the offensive against Hezbollah, even though they didn't expect it to unfold like this.
"We are fighting for the survival of Israel," Sam Seidner, the father of a wounded Israeli soldier, tells me later at a hospital in Haifa. "When have the Jews ever felt secure?"
Indeed, it is a sentiment I hear over and over throughout Israel, whether talking to civilians, soldiers or those who, at this moment of conflict, happen to be both.
IDF reserve units must quickly switch from civilian to soldier» View
"Emergency Call Up Order 8 — this is a rare animal that is both particular and peculiar to Israeli society," says Lior Taylor, a major in the IDF reserves, referring to the summons that took him from his job and family and sent him to war in Lebanon for the second time.
"It's understood," he says, that Israel doesn't use the call up order "for superfluous reasons. If you get one, the gravity of it makes the switch (from civilian to soldier) for you."
For 38-year-old Taylor, that switch had to come fast. As an operations officer for his infantry battalion, he has had to fight Hezbollah guerrillas on the ground, not with air strikes or artillery.
His first experience in Lebanon was in 1986, just four years after Israel first invaded Lebanon to try and destroy " type="hidden"> SEARCH
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Taylor says the terrain is the same this time around, but Hezbollah has some of the best weaponry in the world, including American-made anti-tank TOW missiles.
He says Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has said Israel is like a cobweb — that it looks like a trap, but if you touch it, it falls apart.
Taylor says Israel can't afford to let that perception stand.
"It's not an easy moment," he says of being called up for this war. "It's a defining moment in your life. It will be the difference between the past, future and everything in between."
* * *
The common mythology of death
On a small hilltop under an elm tree at the Nachsolim Kibbutz, Ya-ar Ben Giat, a 19-year-old soldier, is being laid to rest.
He was killed in south Lebanon on August 12, along with 24 other IDF soldiers, in the worst single day of fatalities for Israel since the month-long offensive began.
Ironically, he is buried just one day before the cease-fire halting the 34-day conflict will take hold.
It is, despite the sadness of the occasion, a beautiful and serene place to be buried, only a few hundred yards from the gently breaking waves of the Mediterranean.
Mourning the fallen» View
From my fixer Haggit, I learn that there is an iconic dimension to the death of a young soldier in Israel. Countless films have been made romanticizing the sense of sacrifice and loss, as well as the concept of the young soldier now ageless for the rest of time.
I can't help but thinking how similar it is, in some ways, to the mythology I witnessed in Iran toward their own war martyrs, with their young images, frozen in time, carved into the stone slabs covering their graves.
* * *
The people suffer
In Haifa, after the cease-fire has gone into effect, I meet an Arab Israeli named Haj Assad in a park. Haj is a plumber and has brought his two daughters out to play after they've been cooped up inside for more than a month out of fear of Hezbollah's Katyusha rockets, which twice landed in their neighborhood.
I wonder if Assad has mixed feelings about the war, especially since, like many Israeli Arabs, he has family members who live Lebanon.
I ask him what the people in his neighborhood think of Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nassrallah. Considering the taut emotions resulting from this war, the wisdom and clarity of his answer take me a little by surprise.
"It's not about Sheik Nasrallah," he says. "He's a leader and like other leaders, like those in the Israeli government, make decisions away from the people, without really thinking about them. The people are only abstractions to them. But when you start a war it's really the people that suffer."
* * *
The rabbit hole
Back at the border, the hole in the fence is the rabbit hole I can't resist. It's not some kind of danger dilettante's thrill, but just the niggling concept that I had reported from the war on that side of the border only a few days earlier. Why did I have to be kept on some dividing line now?
Kevin Sites finds an area of the Israel-Lebanon border to be surprisingly desolate» View
Perhaps by crossing the border, entering this no-man's land, there might be a clue to finding that elusive sense of balance necessary to cover this conflict fairly and objectively.
As I crawl through, I begin to wonder if this is such a wise choice. Hezbollah could have easily left snipers in some of the surrounding buildings, or maybe an IDF patrol could mistake me for a guerrilla fighter carrying an rocket propelled grenade launcher rather than a digital camera.
I walk along the rubble feeling vulnerable, but also, for a moment, exactly in the middle, no longer bound by the physical constraints of being on one side or the other.
Honestly, in the short period of time in this no man's land, I didn't find much, except this:
On a wall next to the pile of rubble on the Lebanese side, a strange and fitting piece of graffiti is written in English with a missing vowel, "To Be or Not To B."
Regardless of the intent of the writer, it is, I realize later, the question that Lebanon and Israel both grapple with.
Will Lebanon's fragile, multi-faceted democracy survive the consequences of not being ready or able to disarm Hezbollah's militia?
It is also the question Israelis have had to consider while looking north toward this wall, knowing that behind it was a guerilla force aligned with Iran, a country whose president has called for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth.
So the balance might then be found at last in an equality of fear.
The question now becomes, will that mutual fear be a catalyst for more war, or for finally taking significant steps toward lasting peace?
