ISRAELI CITIZENS ARE TRAUMATISED

by Janine Roberts

The rockets being fired into Northern Israel are traumatising many Israelis. Although these rockets are inaccurate and have killed relatively few civilians, the low casuality rate is mostly because most of the inhabitants of Northern Israel are staying in bomb shelters - or fleeing to other parts of the country. Increasingly the rockets are more powerful and capable of severely damaging buildings. These rockets are for many Lebanese a symbol for them not having been defeated . But in themselves, because of their indiscriminate nature, they are illegal under international law - and are absolutely terrifying. Hezbolla said it will stop firing them instantly Israel ceases fire. It is notable that Hezbollah halted them during the two days Israel stopped bombing.

They bear no comparison in explosive power to the bombs that Israel is using by the tens of thousands on civilian areas in Lebanon - that are now killing hundreds and spreading terror throughout Lebanon. Lebanese authorities have reported that Israel has been using phosperous bombs - illegal under international law - and cluster bombs, widely also condemned.

The Israeli hospitals report that most people attending them after rocket attacks, are doing so for stress rather than for injury - in a ratio of about ten to one. Israeli TV is full of reports on the damage, stress and trauma caused by these rockets - with much less converage of the damage inside Lebanon. A Heeretz correspondent said that he had to tune into overseas TV channels to see this. But I think most Israelis simply do not want to know about it. For many of them it is justified - for they think no Arab force should be able to fire on them . They do not apply the same privilege to the Arab nations around them.

A large part of this trauma is based on the fear underlying much of Israeli society. Israel does not sit, like England, on a land that has long been theirs. Their country was set up within memory on lands from which the Arab inhabitants were driven in fear - and Israel was declared a Judaic state at a time when the great majority of inhabitants were in fact Islamic. All Israelis know this - and it is not just a historical reality. Today Israeli spokesmen have said they are trying to drive most of the Lebanese out of Southern Lebanon - by traumatising and terrorising them - just as happened in Galilee to its Arab inhabitants at Jewish hands around 1948. The big difference is that Israel knows it cannot permanently colonise these Lebanese lands and says it does not intend to. Instead it is hoping a foreign international force will do so for them.

There are other just solutions - but they may lead Israel towards becoming a mixed faith society and this Israel explicity does not want. Instead it sees its security in warfare - and in making other nations fear them.

Many Israelis have instead in fear demonised their opponents. Thus the very state of the Israeli/Lebanese border before this war broke out has been fictionised. It was in fact mostly very peaceful from when the Israeli army left Lebanon in 2000- but today Israeli spokesmen are saying that Hezbollah after this was frequently killing Israeli civilians on the border - which is simply a fiction invented to justify the war. As for the other front in the South, it seems no one noticed that on the very day this war broke out, Hamas agreed to work towards the recognistion of Israel and a peace deal at an important meeting with the Palestinian President.

Israeli society hides much of its fear - by beoming racist about the Arabs - just as many Arabs have done about Israelis. In practice, in Israel Arab lives are considered of much less importance than Israeli. They justify this by referring to the terrible suicide bombings of recent years - saying this shows human life is unimportant to Arabs - although such atrocities are at the moment remarkably absent.

Shockingly many Israelis justify the massacre at Quana. Israeli bloggers delete photos of dead Lebanese. Why were men not killed at Quana. Some Israelis said it was because the men had fled, leaving their wives and children. No, it was rather that the men were out in the fields fighting.

Some militant Arab groups reply in kind. They don't only label Israel on maps as "Occupied Palestine", they want to drive Israelis out and claim the land for Islam. This too is done with a false historical perspective. Under the Ottoman Empire Jewish and Islamic people lived alongside each other in Palestine for long periods in peace -as they also once did in Grenada in Spain.

Unreported by the West, in Israel thousands of Arab Israelis are demonstrating against this war. Their elected members of Parliament are denouncing as war crimes the actions of the Israeli army - but their voice is not being heard. It is as if they do not exist. They have been given many of the more menial jobs of Israeli society - and their relatives who fled from Jewish terror gangs in the 1940s are still not allowed to return. The very word anti-semetic originally meant "anti-arab" - but now Jewish society has taken it for itself. Arabs are now often said to be anti-semetic - which is a contradiction in terms. Israeli society is blind to its own Anti-Semitism.

Lebanon is today the home for thousands of the dispossessed Palestinians - who still very much resent the Israeli Law of Return - which gives far more rights to a Jewish person, no matter where they live in the world, to live in Israel, on ex-Palestinian land, than these dispossessed have. Yesterday a Israeli said that the country can never accept the Right of Return of these dispossess, for that would mean "the end of Israel" - he meant as a Judaic state. Instead it would have to become a multifaith state.

Surely that outcome would be vastly better than living in a State whose security is based on creating fear?

Sick, stressed and paralyzed in the North - Aug 2nd, published in Heeretz

By Ruth Sinai

The father is a psychiatric patient, the mother has asthma; their two children are developmentally disabled. The family wanted to evacuate their hometown of Safed and, as a solution, they were relocated to the Mitzpeh Ramon Field Study Center for one week. A Kiryat Shmona family seeking to leave town - with a disabled father and three children suffering from acute anxiety - was also sent to Mitzpeh Ramon.

These and other cases were taken from the July 31 report of the emergency headquarters of the Social Affairs Ministry. The report provides a shocking glimpse at the existence of the weakest of the weak. They are sick and poor. And now they are suffering paralyzing anxiety.

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Such is the case for the family in Safed whose home was hit by a missile. "The kids are in terrible anxiety," the report states. "They were found next to an abandoned car on the Jordan Valley road and picked up [by a resident of nearby Ma'aleh Ephraim]. They are seeking assistance in evacuation, money and disposable diapers."

N.M., 56, is another case. A resident of Afula, she is a double amputee with diabetes, whose foreign caregiver left the country out of fear. C.B. is a 50-year-old kidney transplant patient who has been told he should not be in a shelter for fear of infection. A 38-year-old Kiryat Shmona woman is a single mother of four-year-old twin girls, one of whom had a leg amputated following a hereditary illness. All three are suffering from stress.

These cases reveal not only the misery in the lives of the evacuees, but the miserable response of the state. Most cases are refered to non-profit associations; 250 have been sent to the Mitzpeh Ramon Field Study Center, which has been leased with money contributed by the Movement for Progressive Judaism.

According to Yehuda Fuchs, director of the northern district of the Social Affairs Ministry, the ministry's shelters can take in individuals who are physically or mentally disabled or elderly. But there are no solutions for families. A senior official in the Social Affairs Ministry said even these solutions were limited. "There is no budget. This whole war caught us by surprise."

Volunteers have stepped in, collecting food for those who remain in the north and evacuating others to the south. "The government has made it clear it does not want to help people who leave the north. If it does, everybody will leave," the senior official said.

Fuchs says a number of people who were evacuated temporarily have returned north and are now knocking on the doors of the region's 47 welfare offices, asking to be moved again. "People are crying, screaming. Fear makes their whole body tremble."

The report logged in numerous requests for volunteers. In one case, the a request came in for psychologists and lawyers who would go to the shelters in Carmiel and the north. The request was passed on to the volunteer coordinator, the report said. Another entry notes that a list of social work, psychology and education students willing to volunteer was passed on to Tiberias.

Rabbi Gilad Kariv of the Movement for Progressive Judaism which has funded NIS 600,000 in assistance to shelters, says welfare services have suffered serious blows in recent years and are not properly prepared for an emergency. "Despite significant improvement in their functioning recently, there are still big problems that can't be solved by private assistance. The assistance organizations has eased the distress, but they can't take the place of the authorities." Kariv said he hoped the cabinet would immediately appoint a social affairs minister to deal with the problems.

Long list of volunteers

Yoav Kraim, a leader of the disabled community, joined Kariv's call. His organization has so far dealt with some 600 cases of disabled people who wanted to leave the north.

The list of volunteers and organizations is long and impressive. The Community Centers Association and JDC-Israel began yesterday to send the elderly for a respite in central Israel. The Women's International Zionist Organization (WIZO) is hosting some 1,000 northern residents in its residential schools. The organization for developmentally disabled children, Akim, has brought some 300 developmentally disabled children and their parents for a week-long respite in the south. "Long stays in shelters are hard for anyone, all the more so for people who are developmentally or physically disabled," said Akim director Yossi Malka.

The head of the National Council for the Child, Dr. Itzhak Kadman, wrote Prime Minister Ehud Olmert after touring the north and speaking to welfare and educational authorities, that there was "much good will, but lack of solutions and planning, coordination, cooperation and policy." He also noted the "dependence on volunteers and lack of government presence."