A Surreal Experience

August 10, 2006 - 9:18 AM by Allison

Gilly in Jerusalem writes of the current dissonance in Israel between life in the north and life in the south:

This evening, after several attempts, we finally managed to speak with Mrs G’s younger brother who is currently serving his compulsory service in a commando unit. He couldn’t really tell us much other than that he’s about 500 meters from the Lebanese border and that after a week and a half of battle rations, he had finally got his hands on a hamburger donated by the local kosher McDonalds today.

Mrs G’s twin brother, who was released from a different commando unit after 3 years of service in March, only to be called back with a Tzav 8 emergency call up, is spending the night in Jenin, where his unit will most probably be putting themselves in harms way, rounding up Hamas operatives.

Meanwhile, Mrs G and I spent this evening at a restaurant on Emek Refaim Street, with my cousins from England where I enjoyed an excellent rare entrecote and a decent Merlot.

Last week, D and A, received call up notices. Monday nights usually see them playing soccer with us in Jerusalem; this week, whilst we were chasing a ball round the field, they were both somewhere in Lebanon.

On Sunday, whilst Mrs G and I wandered around the Boboli Gardens in Florence, Italy on the last day of a long awaited holiday, an old acquaintance from my time on Kibbutz, took a few steps aside from his vehicle to light a cigarette. His nicotine addiction saved his life; seconds later a Katyusha landed where he had been sitting, killing 12 of his comrades.

Living in Israel can frequently be a somewhat surreal experience; in the decade since I made Aliyah from England, there really hasn’t ever been a prolonged period of complete quiet but this last month has been the most difficult to deal with for me; whilst a good proportion of our population is hunkering down in their bunkers, tourists in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem could easily be forgiven for thinking that nothing unusual was going on; we may dig deep to send packages to our soldiers and the residents of the North, listen to the news with a greater frequency and our phone bills may record a few more calls to family and friends with an 04 area code than usual, but otherwise anyone to the south of an imaginary line is getting up to go to work, doing brunch and sitting on the beach in the same way as they have always done.

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