It’s been a little more than a week since they returned home to a mostly quiet border. They’re back in their gardens, their kitchens, their places of work. The routine and the out of the ordinary are known to them. Muffled noises from beneath the ground very likely come from another tunnel from the Gaza Strip being built by Hamas. The pounding sound at night is the exchange of artillery fire between ISIS and the Egyptian army. A red alert means you have 15 seconds, or less, to seek shelter before a rocket launched from Gaza may land in your backyard, or worse.
“They” are eight women from the Eshkol Regional Council of Israel who spent two weeks in the New York metropolitan area and Washington, DC. The Eshkol district encompasses 32 communities housing 14,000 residents on 190,000 acres east of the southernmost 40 kilometers of the Gaza Strip and seven miles along the northern Sinai border with Egypt.
They came from kibbutzim and moshavim as guests of Shalom Yisrael, a Westchester, NY-based organization celebrating its 30th year of bridging connections between Israeli citizens and their American counterparts. During the first 23 years of its existence, Shalom Yisrael (then known as Zahal Shalom) sponsored wounded veterans and civilians. For the last seven years guests of the organization have been women who serve as trauma care first responders and security officials in their respective home towns.
How do you react when a door slams shut? If you’re like most people, you’re startled. You turn toward the sound, quickly ascertain the origin of the noise, and go on with your life.
If you lived in the Eshkol region, the bang of a sharply closed door might engage a condition we in the United States have come to recognize as PTSD. Post traumatic stress disorder. Years of rocket barrages from mortars and missiles launched from the adjacent Gaza Strip, coupled with almost nightly artillery clashes between the Egyptian army and ISIS in the nearby Sinai Peninsula trigger rapid heart beats and feelings of “we’ve been here before.”
“Before” means a time of war, last experienced full time two summers ago.
“In the first morning that I woke (in Westchester),” said Yehudit, a 46-yer-old responsible for the administration and security of her moshav, Yated, “I heard strange sounds, sounds that I had forgotten, sounds that I had forgotten from my past. And when I paid attention I understood that these were the sounds of the tree leaves and the sounds of birds. And I heard the sounds of silence and tranquility.
“Suddenly I was really frightened because I understood that I am already used to waking up to the sounds of explosions. And that’s a bad sign.”
Their everyday life has been transformed. Truck traffic has vastly increased on the region’s roads from deliveries of building material to Gaza, though the flow recently has been tightened because of Hamas’ tunnel building activity (http://nyti.ms/27J4IF6).
No one wants to be caught in an embarrassing situation in case of a rocket attack, so short showers are taken. Before entering the bathroom a towel and robe are laid out just in case a quick exit is required.
Nira’s 13-year-old son chooses to sleep in the family’s safe room rather than his own bedroom. Not every residence has a safe room. The government supplies a safe room for homes within four and a half kilometers of Gaza. Those living further away have safe rooms only if they pay for them on their own, at a cost of roughly $10,000. In those areas, the only government-provided security is a shelter for kindergarten children.
Safe rooms are needed because the heralded Iron Dome missile defense system, jointly developed by Israel and the United States, cannot protect them. They live too close to Gaza, so close, in fact, they can see Hamas training exercises.
They long for a return to a time when they interacted freely with the citizens of Gaza. They are convinced Gaza residents want to live in peace as well, but Hamas does not let them. Before Hamas took control of the strip, many Palestinians worked on their farms—60% of Israel’s produce is grown in the region. Israelis had their cars repaired in Gaza and bathed on its beaches.
Israelis have a reputation of being a stubborn people. Even during the 2014 conflict, when one-third of all the rockets that landed in Israel fell in the Eshkol region, elderly citizens in the district refused to abandon their homes. Instead, every day they came to the senior center.
The Shalom Yisrael guests displayed their own mettle.
“When I landed in New York two weeks ago,” said 58-year-old Yael of Kibbutz Urim, the head of occupational therapy at the senior center, “the weather was pretty cloudy, raining, and I thought to myself, if I can get used to missiles I can get used to rain.
“But to missiles and noise of war you never get used to, and you get used to rain because the rain grows a future, and noise of war destroys the future for peace.”
Wherever they went, from visiting high schools to meeting with U.S. Representatives Nita Lowey, Eliot Engel and Susan Davis, the same question kept surfacing: “Why do you continue to live there?”
The answer, Yehudit said on her last night in Westchester, could be found in a poem written by Ehud Manor:
I have no other country
even if my land is aflame
Just a word in Hebrew
pierces my vein and my soul—
With a painful body, with a hungry heart,
Here is my home.
