First Rocket Day

Although I have had school canceled in the past because of snow, hail, or excessive heat, today Ben Gurion University suspended classes for the rest of the week because of a Grad missile.

It happened like this: Just before 9 p.m., I was cooking eggplants and chickpeas on the stove when a long, loud siren went off. No one else was in the house, and I called a friend to see what to do with myself. "Go into the shower," he said.

This seemed stupid. I stayed in the kitchen, and eventually heard a muffled boom in the distance, followed by ambulance sirens.

Beer Sheva has never been hit before by Hamas's rockets. This was a Grad, which is smuggled into Gaza and has better range than a Kassam, which is a slapped-together weapon fired off at little cost.

Anyways, after the rocket fell I went to a friend's house for a group dinner. He was grilling chicken, a smoke-intensive process, and we asked him if the rocket fell in his kitchen. His neighbor, a Russian woman, stopped by to ask about the building's bomb shelter and said she was afraid. We ate the food over jokes about rockets improving our love lives (desperate, lonely neighbors) and made siren noises.

The rockets in Beer Sheva have showed me what it is like to live in Sderot and the other border towns that have been getting rocketed on and off for the last eight years. But it also brings into sharp focus the cost of not resolving unfinished business between Israel and Hamas - as well as the rest of the Palestinians. After the 2006 war in Lebanon, the consensus was that the fighting had paused, but would restart again sometime in the future. In other words, the war, the destruction in Beirut, the flattening of forests in northern Israel - accomplished nothing. I feel similarly about the current bombing in Gaza, and it seems like Israel's leadership has gone yet again for the military option because it's easy, it's there and it has been done before.

Meanwhile, the death toll in Gaza (more than 350 in five days) is shocking and yet predictable in a tiny strip of land whose borders have been closed by Israel on one side and Egypt on the other. For a cogent analysis, check out this South Jerusalem article.

And yet...in Beer Sheva, there are few students who agree. For the most part, people I talk to think the airstrikes against Gaza had to be done, that there is no way for people to live for eight years the way we lived for the last 24 hours. Suggesting that perhaps diplomacy would be a better, less violent alternative brings a touchy response. War really brings out the tribal streak in a country.

As a footnote, this New Years I'll be spending in my apartment in Beer Sheva; tomorrow I plan to go up to Tel Aviv to get away from the bombs and the empty city that was left when most of the students cleared out. There is a protest against the war outside the luxury apartment block where Defense Minister Ehud Barak lives, and a Critical Mass bike ride against the war. The Communist party has been using its Web site (in Hebrew) to cover Jewish protests against the war; party member Dov Khenin said the mainstream media is ignoring them. Human rights groups put up a joint blog about the effects of the war in Gaza. It's worth noting that most of these organizations are not based in the rocket-ridden South, but it may be that when you have kassams falling on your home, you don't think as straight as you would normally.