Kibbutz Kfar Giladi, near Kiryat Shmona, on Sunday August 6
As Davide and I drove into Kiryat Shmona on Sunday afternoon, the sirens were wailing; we could hear the thundering of outgoing tank artillery and explosions of incoming missiles. All the businesses were closed, the traffic lights blinked on amber (because who would stop for a red light when missiles were falling?) and there was no-one on the streets but soldiers - plus, incongruously, one large-bellied white-haired man with a slightly mad look in his eyes who wore shorts, a T-shirt and flip flops and stood at the entrance to an apartment building. Those who could afford to leave Kiryat Shmona had done so; the ones left behind were the poor, the sick and the elderly.
The nearly abandoned city reminded us of scenes in Hollywood movies set in Grozny - or Sarajevo, circa 1992. Brush fires set off by Hezbollah rockets blazed everywhere, creating a thick pall of smoke that dimmed the usually bright Levantine sunlight. Bits of ash floated about like snowflakes, the smell of smoke permeated the air and was absorbed in my clothes and hair. And the constant booms, explosions and sirens provided loud background music - a live, post-modern version of Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor for this long shot of Apocalypse Now: The Middle Eastern Version.
I took the photo above at the entrance to Kibbutz Kfar Giladi, on the outskirts of Kiryat Shmona, a few hours after Hezbollah missiles killed 12 reserve soldiers who had gathered there in response to their emergency mobilization notices (tzav 8). A group of young soldiers told us that we could not enter the kibbutz - and to be honest I didn't really want to, because it looked as though it was just one big inferno - so we stood near the Channel 2 reporter who was preparing to report live from in front of nearby Tel Hai Academic College. One of the Channel 2 sound guys was lying on the hood of their car, his back supported by the windshield and one leg crossed casually over the other, as he idly filmed the brush fires with his digital camera.
Channel 2 live news feed from the entrance of Kfar Giladi.
I greeted them, took a few photos and chatted a bit with the soldiers. Then the sound of incoming rockets became a little too loud for comfort, so Davide and I decided it was time to leave. We were going to stay in Metulla, just a couple of minutes' drive up the road. Unfortunately the only road to our destination took us right through an area that was frequently bombarded by Hezbollah. The fields on either side were ablaze from fallen missiles and the road was covered in thick smoke. Davide shifted to a higher gear, pressed down firmly on the accelerator and cursed in Italian as I took some photos through the window of the speeding car - like the one below.
Then we arrived in Metulla and stopped for a minute to look at the view. This is what Kibbutz Kfar Giladi looked like from Metulla.
Kibbutz Kfar Giladi aflame, as seen from Metulla.
A group of painfully young soldiers asked me what newspaper I worked for and whether I would take their photo and send them a copy by email. So I did.
And so we arrived in Metulla, which is actually closer to the border than Kiryat Shmona (read: on the border), although one can easily walk from one town to the next in just a few minutes. And yet, very few missiles had fallen on the picturesque little resort town, which was founded at the end of the nineteenth century. We heard a lot of booms and nearly all the town's residents had left, making it feel eerily empty, but there was absolutely no physical damage. The ironic explanation is that Metulla is actually too close to Lebanon - that if Hezbollah were to launch rockets on the town they'd basically be tossing missiles into their own back yard. There is no "no man's land" between Metulla and Lebanon, as I will describe below.
After we checked in I went to sit in the dining area of the hotel, which was occupied exclusively by various members of the press who'd come to cover the war. Quite a few had come from Baghdad, and one of them- a seasoned combat photojournalist - told us he was a lot more afraid in Kiryat Shmona than he'd ever been in Iraq. At least in Iraq you knew that you were safe in certain areas; in Kiryat Shmona the missiles fell everywhere and randomly, so it was impossible to take a calculated risk.
Everyone was hunched over a laptop - the photographers were uploading and sending their photos and the print journalists were filing their stories. Meanwhile the television mounted on the wall was tuned to Channel 10 news, which was broadcasting live coverage from Haifa's Wadi Nisnas neighbourhood, upon which several missiles had landed about an hour ealier.
Together with a young Arab (Israeli) woman, who was working as a translator for a major North American newspaper, I watched the scenes of rescue workers digging frantically through piles of rubble in an effort to extract the wounded. It was the same type of scene that had been broadcast frequently on both Israeli television and on LBC over the previous month. In fact, the scenes were pretty much interchangeable - collapsed buildings, frightened people, dusty, bleeding bodies, audible shouting, uniformed rescue workers, ambulances. The only difference this time was the location (Israel instead of Lebanon) and the language in which people were shouting - Hebrew and Arabic, instead of only Arabic.
I asked the young woman, who was working as a translator for a major North American newspaper, if she was from Haifa. No, she said, she was from a village in the Galilee. As we sat together and watched the news, exchanging the occasional comment in Hebrew, I was acutely aware of the many, many layers of irony and symbolism in that scene - and indeed in the events of that day.
In the morning 12 reserve soldiers - men who had been called away from their civilian lives to fight for their country - had been killed by a Hezbollah missile right near Tel Hai, the place where Joseph Trumpeldor, one of the heroes of the early Zionist movement, famously said, "It is good to die for our country"
(טוב למות בעד ארצינו), after he sustained a mortal wound during a battle with Arabs in 1920. And then in the evening of that same day Hezbollah missiles landed in Wadi Nisnas, the Haifa neighbourhood that is a symbol of peaceful Arab-Jewish co-existence, killing two Arabs and one Jew. As I mentioned in my previous post, the office of Al Ittihad (Unity) newspaper was also hit in that bombardment. For years, the editor of Al Ittihad was Emile Habibi, author of The Opsimist, proponent of co-existence and 1990 recipient of both the PLO's Al Quds Prize and the Israel Prize.
So there we were, the Jewish Israeli woman and the Arab Israeli woman, sitting in a hotel on the Lebanese border, both working for the foreign media, listening to the booming of Israeli artillery and Hezbollah rockets outside, watching as wounded and dead Jews and Arabs were pulled from the wreckage of their apartment buildings in Haifa. More symbolism: neither of us had grown up speaking Hebrew, but it was the language we had in common.
Amir Ben David wrote a very moving article about the symbolism of last Sunday's events for this week's Time Out Tel Aviv. If I have time, I'll translate and post some excerpts in the next day or two. (Hebrew speakers can find the article on page 23). He also took a wonderful photo in Wadi Nisnas: a portrait of Emil Habibi, with the damaged Al Ittihad building reflected in the glass that protects the author's sad, expressive face. It looks as though he is mourning the destruction of his dream.
The photo taken by Amir Ben David.
After Davide finished writing, we walked down the street and ate a huge steak dinner at HaTachana, a popular meat restaurant. Business was booming - the place was packed with journalists and IDF officers, plus a group of tough local farmers who informed me that one of them lived in the most northern house in Israel. "Do you want to see it?" they asked.
Then Jill called me on my mobile. "Where are you?" she asked. "Oh, about 150 metres from Lebanon," I answered airily. Pause. Davide grinned and Jill and I broke into laughter. "I couldn't resist the drama," I told her.
Back at the hotel, I fell asleep while watching a re-run of Law & Order: SVU, which was a bit hard to hear because it competed with the booms, then woke up at 5.30 and decided to see what was going on outside. I'd been told that the soldiers returned from Lebanon around dawn, and wanted to see if I could get some photos.
Unlike Kiryat Shmona, which is mostly a low-income development town, Metulla is a prosperous town, with an economy based on agriculture and tourism. It is famous for its beautiful guesthouses, natural vistas and fresh, clean mountain air. I walked down a street lined with guesthouses and stopped at an apple orchard that abutted the border fence with Lebanon. The fruit was ripe, but since most of the workers had fled the area there was no one to pick it. I plucked a few apples and put them in my bag, then walked over to the fence whilst munching on the really delicious fruit and stood there, looking up at Lebanon and wondering if there were any Hezbollah guys looking back at me. I wondered what would happen if I waved. At one point, just for the childish thrill, I stuck my foot under the fence and thought, "Wow, my foot's in Lebanon, I'm eating an apple in Israel and there's a war on. Weird."
The apple orchard
The fence at the edge of the orchard.
The view of Lebanon above the apple orchard (photographed with a regular camera, no telephoto lens)
As I walked around Metulla I saw many pretty, neat little homes, all empty and all clearly owned by house-proud types. Several times I saw wrought iron imported garden furniture on patios, the chairs carefully tipped forward to rest against the table so as to protect the seats from the morning dew.
A pretty, neat little Metulla house. The hills behind the house are in Lebanon.
The base was a few minutes' walk from the apple orchard. There were some soldiers sitting around outside, but they told me that the guys inside Lebanon wouldn't be back that morning. They'd walked the two kilometres inside the previous night, and they'd stay there until much later in the day. I didn't ask any more questions, just sat around with them for a few minutes and chatted. They told me they were sick of talking to foreign reporters and glad to hang out with what one guy called "one of us." One of them remarked that he bet the people of Congo would probably be thrilled to have a small percentage of the media attention Israel was getting.
They were reserve soldiers in their twenties and thirties and they were exhausted and quiet. Unlike the group of young soldiers I'd photographed the previous day, they were not at all enthusiastic about facing combat. They remembered the last time they'd been in Lebanon, before the 2000 withdrawal, and they did not want to go back. They wanted to go home. "What are you doing here?" asked one of the guys, in quiet wonderment. "I work with a foreign journalist," I told him. "But don't you know how dangerous it is here?" he asked. "I would never come to this place if I didn't have to be here."
One of the quietest guys was giving bottled water to one of the many pure-bred dogs that wandered around Metulla - pets that had been abandoned by their owners, who had fled south. The dogs seemed to have lost their sense of danger due to the constant booms: On several occasions I saw beautiful canines flopped on the middle of the road, completely oblivious to the approach of a noisy armoured vehicle or the driver's loud honking. Their ears didn't even twitch. The only way to move the dogs was to physically grab them by the scruff of the neck. Even then they reacted slowly and passively.
A reserve soldier giving bottled water to an abandoned dog in Metulla.
After awhile I started to wander slowly in the direction of my hotel. It was still early, but I wanted my coffee. The streets were very, very quiet and there was a slight breeze: all I could hear was the sound of chirping birds, the gentle creaking of tree branches and the humming from an electricity pylon. Ah yes, it was indeed the calm before the storm.
Boom! Crash! (shit). A middle aged woman who was mopping out the office used by the local famers' council (she told me she hadn't left Metulla because she had nowhere to go) poked her head out the door and said to me in a scolding tone, "Don't wander around! Those are incoming missiles! This is not a game!"
For a minute I dithered between taking cover on the spot and making a quick dash for my hotel, which was just around the corner. Hmmm. Coffee or death? Tough one, that. No, not really. Coffee won easily. Anyway, the barrage stopped before I even finished walking the short distance.
Directly across from my hotel there was a charming Ottoman-era stone house that had been converted into a guesthouse called Beit Shalom (House of Peace). I noticed it then for the first time because the owner had put a recording of Etta James on at full volume. "At last," Ms. James sang joyfully, "My love has come along/my lonely days are over/and life is like a song."
I figured that any man who played Etta James in the morning must have good coffee, so I headed over.
The owner's name was Chaimke. "Chaimke," I said. "Do you have good coffee?" He expanded his chest proudly and said, "I have the best coffee in Metulla!" "And do you have wireless internet access?" I asked, "Or is that too much to hope for?" "Not only do I have wifi," he answered, "But I increased the speed to 2.5 gHz for the journalists. You can sit in the garden and surf while you drink your coffee." "Chaimke," I said, "You are a prince among men. I would like a double espresso with hot milk on the side."
And so I sat myself down at one of the tables in the shaded garden, placed my laptop on the mosaic tile surface and checked my email while Chaimke brought my coffee. It was a beautiful garden. Water tinkled quietly in a carved stone fountain, the birds twittered, the leaves rustled gently in the breeze, the sun shone, Etta James continued to sing about love and the artillery boomed every few seconds. Tweet tweet tweet, sang the birds. "At last...." sang Etta. Tinkle tinkle tinkle, chattered the water. BOOM! answered the artillery. Such a lovely, pastoral scene in wartime northern Israel.
After awhile Davide joined me and we went inside for Chaimke's famous breakfast (he asked us to eat in the dining room because there was too much to carry out to the garden and all his wait staff had fled south).
Chaimke's famous breakfast.
As we ate I tried to discuss the morning newspapers with Davide, but it was hard going because Chaimke kept interrupting us. "Mix the salad dressing well," he instructed, "It's made from my own olive oil." or "Try the yogurt, it's the house specialty." "The cheese is all made on the premises - that's garlic flavoured, that's olive, that's onion..." or "Do you want to try some of my homemade pickled herring?" No, no, I demurred, patting my more-distended-than-usual stomach. "Oh but you must," he insisted. "It's really something special." Sigh. So I ate some pickled herring to
After awhile the booms became much louder and more frequent. Then instructions to head for the bomb shelters were issued via a scratchy PA system. I looked at Chaimke and asked where the shelter was. "Oh," he said calmly, "Don't worry, we never go down to the shelters around here."
Huh. Well, when in Rome...
We went back to our hotel across the street in order to check out, head down to Kiryat Shmona and from there to do a story in the Golan Heights. Problem was, the bombardment became really fierce at that point. The sirens kept wailing, over and over and over (shut up already!) and the sound of exploding incoming missiles sounded as if it were coming from right outside. After awhile my head started to hurt. Nobody else seemed the least perturbed, though - especially not the pretty red-headed Eastern European reporter who was deep in flirtatious conversation with a drop-dead gorgeous IDF officer. I was in the middle of an IM chat with the sandmonkey at the time (so glam, IM'ing a guy in Cairo while the missiles were falling in Metulla), and suddenly I couldn't type as accurately as usual. I felt totally off balance. After the seventh siren (I recorded the sixth one here), my friend Nir, an Israeli photojournalist who was staying at nearby Kibbutz Goshrim, sent me a text message: "Let's get the fuck out of here."
Ech. We had to meet Nir in Kiryat Shmona. Not a fun prospect. But there was no other way. So we put on our flak jackets and drove ever-so-speedily to meet him in the empty parking lot of the deserted Kiryat Shmona shopping mall. Except that Nir wasn't there - the bombardment had gotten so bad that he'd taken cover in the underground parking lot, where there was no mobile phone reception. We ended up waiting, crouched in a doorway, for a very, very long 10 minutes. Lots of booms, shall we say, and mighty close.
As soon as there was a break in the barrage Nir showed up and we drove off to the Golan Heights. Within five minutes we were in a different world. We drove into a Druze town and saw groups of men sitting on plastic chairs outside a cafe, smoking nargilehs and drinking coffee. Everything looked normal and quiet; the booms sounded like faint, distant thunder.
Then we were out in the open countryside, and it was so beautiful.
Golan Heights.
Golan Heights.
How ironic, remarked Davide, that we're safer in occupied territory than we are inside Israel proper.
Then he took out his mobile phone and started to dial a number with one hand while holding the steering wheel with the other. "Davide!" I said in a scolding tone, "Please don't make calls from your mobile phone while you're driving. It's dangerous!"
