October 28, 2005

Alison on Aliyah:  A Hard Weekend

             Late yesterday, Thursday afternoon, I picked up my boyfriend from the airport, after three long weeks of being apart.  Mikhael had been in France visiting his family, and the separation had been fairly excruciating for both of us, given that our relationship is still relatively young and that we see each other for only eight days per month anyway, on a good month.  So needless to say, we were both very much looking forward to spending a long weekend together before he would have to report back to the army on Sunday morning.  When we woke up the next morning, however, before we could even get in the car to go to the shuk to buy our weekend’s worth of food, Mikhael got a call from his unit commander, requiring that he report to his base within hours.  Less than 24 hours after he had stepped off the plane, I had already dropped him off at the army base.

            He couldn’t tell me anything about what he had been called back in to do, only that it was a “big operation.”  Mikhael is consistently (and frustratingly) tight-lipped about his army duties and has never used any type of descriptor to detail his activities, so I knew that “big” must not even begin to cover what he was about to do.  As I called around to the other soldiers I know, I found out that everyone had been made to stay on their base this weekend, or had been let out in the morning but called back in before the afternoon was over.  I slowly began to realize that this was no small matter.  Indeed, one glance at the newspapers over the past couple of days would tip anyone off that this weekend represents a watershed moment in post-disengagement Israeli defense tactics and policy.  Since the bombing in Hadera a few days ago, Israel has responded with extreme force, targeting a multitude of individuals and terror cells linked to the bombing, as well as to the Qassam rocket attacks that have increased over the past week.

            Part of me feels a great deal of satisfaction at the severity of our response, knowing that Israel is doing significant damage to the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure and hoping that this will cause them to think twice about attacking us in the future.  Part of me feels justified in this satisfaction, knowing that a huge number of settlers were painfully extracted from their homes in the Gaza Strip so that this military reaction would be possible and, let’s face it, internationally sanctioned.  A lot of Israelis hoped that the disengagement would, at least and if nothing else, buy us the permission to respond with this kind of severity if the Palestinians continued to behave as they always have.  After all, we pulled out, unilaterally, with nothing close to a promise of peace from the other side.  And what was our reward?  Internal strife and more violence from the other side.  I believe it is high time for Israel to respond in this fashion; in fact, we are long, long overdue.

            Of course, the other part of me wishes my boyfriend didn’t have to be intimately involved with Israel’s military response to the Palestinian terrorists.  I mean, hey, we all make sacrifices, but I have to admit that I would prefer not to have to make this particular sacrifice.  It scares me that Mikhael is so deeply involved, and I spend long nights worrying whether or not he will come out of each “operation” unscathed.  I actually don’t believe there is an “unscathed” in what he is doing; I can see the emotional and psychological toll it takes on him.

            I forget sometimes that Israel really is in the middle of a war.  Civilians and soldiers are dying on both sides, no matter how superior our army is.  And before I began dating Mikhael, I’m not really sure how seriously I took all of it.  It all seemed so distant, and I was so removed from it in many ways.  Of course, the bombings inside the city centers affect all of us, but the military operations in towns and refugee camps I’ve never heard of, the news reports of an army unit whose name I don’t recognize capturing hundreds of people I’ll never know—these things were all very, very far away from me.

            But now it’s right in my face.  I worry that my boyfriend will get shot, or that my friends will have to serve in the middle of what amounts to a war zone.  When I look back on my “prior life” in America, sometimes I can barely believe how I’m living now.  If someone had told me, three years ago, that I would be washing my boyfriend’s army uniform every weekend and asking him to call me at 5:00am to tell me he made it home safely after each mission, I wouldn’t have believed it.  It’s so easy sometimes, to pretend that because I can speak English and buy Cheerios and call my family on my American phone line, that Israel is just like any other, “normal” country.  But it’s not.  We deal with things here that I never would have been able to predict that I would have to see and come to terms with.  What can I say—it’s been a hard weekend.